SPARC and Open source :)
Posted on 19th January 2006 by Taggy
Opensource giant SUN is releasing its ULTRA SPARC design under Opensource (GPL) . While releasing almost every software of its under opensource .It will be interesting to see what happens with JAVA or Solaris !.
I had the oppurtunity to try out SOLARIS. The visit also saw the BETA release of BELENIX the Liev Boot frm CD of SOlaris developed by 4 bangalore engineering students.
Coming to the SPARC its not a secret that every move to opensource softwares is usually a reply to Microsofts products.
The Openoffice.org project was to combat the huge popularity and application of MS-Office. To match msoffice in short period of time it had no other option but to opensource the project so that a large pool of developers from all over could work on it.
As it can be seen Openffice has more than 3 million lines of source code and its source is nice 3GB . Whats also seen is the fact that SUN has its own Office (STAR OFFICE) in its OS and its not a secret these two r simply similar .
In the end who has gained much ? the end user for having a free software ? the opensource community as such with developers ? or the SUN considering it has managed to develop such huge applications in a relatively small period of time ?
Well everyone stands to win in this case SUN for it money :) user for the same ( he doesnthav to shell for Openoffice and doenthav to look at the back of CD for serial scratch them and so onn… jus a download will do ) .
What do you people think ?
whos the beneficiary ?
End user ?
SUN ?
or the OSS community as such ! (developers)
ULTRASPARC design is not released under GPL.
Note: GPL is a OpenSource license but OpenSource License is not GPL :)
I feel GPL is not a strict opensource license. I feel FreeBSD license is the best of the lot. I don’t know what license ULTRASPARC is released, but surely not GPL. Solaris is released under CDDL. CDDL is fairly better than GPL.
Also BeleniX is developed by 4 Sun India center Engineers, but not by engineering college students. Once more :) …Solaris is not OpenSolaris. OpenSolaris is a Source code project.
There is a user group in Bangalore called Bangalore OpenSolaris User Group. You can subscribe to it to know more.
I personally feel, End User is beneficiary, because Solaris is techinically more advanced than any other OS and we can now re-use that peice of code.
Not sure how SUN is going to benefit, but anyway SUN never sold Solaris. So I feel it doesn’t make much difference to them.
and yeah thanx for the lot o info ! will surely join the group :D
what way is Opensolaris different from solaris ??
