SchilliX 0.6, a non-graphical distribution featuring the latest OpenSolaris technologies, has been released. What's new? "Updated to use OpenSolaris Nevada Build 80; now using a non-DEBUG build of the OS; new keyboard layout recognition and setup method, if you do not use a German keyboard, boot one of....

Linus does not stop giving interviews on Solaris 10. The last I realized is at:

http://news.com.com/Torvalds+a+Solaris+skeptic/2008-1082_3-5498799.html?tag=nefd.lede

Among several, Linus slams on Solaris:

"Solaris/x86 is a joke, last I heard."

It is interesting to see that Linus only fetches his knowledge from other (doubtles biased) people instead of trying it himself and judging himself.

It seems that Linus cannot escape his "I only watch my own belly button" mentality and even promises not to check Solaris after is has been finally announced and released as Open Source Software.

So let us ask: Why is Linus constantly attacking Solaris?

If Solaris was really on the declining branch and dying, why the hell Linus needs to attack it? If Linus was right, he could just recline relax and wait for it's death...

It seems that Linus is in big fear of Solaris and the kind of openness it will offer once OpenSolaris is available to more people than only the participants of the OpenSolaris pilot.

For me, Solaris is not a joke. I use it as my preferred development platform for many reasons. It comes with free and useful debuggers, it offers me stable and reliable interfaces and (important for my SCSI tools) it returns SCSI error codes from the drives correctly to applications.

James Dickens did create a list of OpenSolaris Boggers.

The list can be found here.

OSI (the Open Source Initiative http://www.opensource.org)
defines rules for Open Source licenses. Licenses that like to call
themselves OSI compliant need to match these rules and get an approval
from OSI. Do these rules still serve the demands of the OpenSource
community of today?

The most important issue in the OpenSource community of today is
collaboration. In order to support collaboration, people need to be
able to combine code from different authors which today often means
code that has been published under different licenses. So a real
Open Source license should allow the covered code to be used together
with code from other OSI compliant licenses.

Taking a closer look at the licenses listed at OSI, results in some licenses
that are compatible to each other in a way that allows to include code
covered under license a) in a project covered by license b) and vice versa.
There are other licenses that do not allow this. Wouldn't it then be a
good idea to call the licenses that are compatible to each other "first class
OSI compliant" and the others "second class OSI compliant"?

Let me give an example: I frequently read that code covered by the GPL and
code covered by the BSD license are compatible to be used together within a
single project. Is this really true?

The GPL requires all projects that include code covered by the GPL to be licensed
under the GPL.

There is no problem with including a small part of BSD code inside a bigger
project licensed under the GPL. This is not because both licenses are
compatible but only because this kind of usage is tolerated by the authors
of the code covered by the BSD license. However, you cannot include a small
part of GPLd code into a bigger project licensed under the BSD license without
losing the freedom of the BSD project.

What the GPL tries to to is to try to change the license of other people's code.
It is questionable whether this is compliant with the European Copyright law.

How can this problem be avoided?

The first step would be that OSI would list the licenses that are compatible
to each others in both directions in a separate list.

The second step would be to change the incompatible licenses. If e.g. the GPL
would not require the whole project to be put under the GPL but just require
that the whole project must not use code that is not under a OSI compliant
license, the primary intention of the GPL would not be given up but the
GPL would become compatible to most other OSI licenses.

SchilliX is an OpenSolaris-based live CD and distribution that
is intended to help people discover OpenSolaris. When installed
on a hard drive, it also allows developers to develop and compile
code in a pure OpenSolaris environment.

After 4 months of hard work, the first OpenSolaris based
UNIX distribution is ready for download at schillix.berlios.de.

Well, I should mention that the project started in December 2003
with the first discussions with Sun about a Solaris Live CD.
Then in September 2004, there was a OpenSolaris summit in
Santa Clara and the OpenSolaris Piolot started with a growing
number of people (at last ~150) talking about the background.
We needed to find a License and Sun did make a great job
with cheking more than 9 million lines of code for encumberences.

Let me describe what OpenSolaris is and what the differences
to Schillix are. OpenSoplaris is currently the Sun O/N Source
tree for Solaris. This source tree is much more than a kernel
but a few things are missing in order to allow a boot to the
multi user mode. The following pieces of code are missing:

Libm
The source is part of the Sun Compiler suite but Sun
did OpenSource a 1993 version for BSD-4.4Lite.
The effort to port a recent FreeBSD version was 5 days.

bzip2/gzip
These programs are free software and needed for Solaris, so
they need to be added

The Netscape LDAP libs
They are needed for PAM and must be compiled from sources...

LibXml2
This lib is a major prerequisite for SMF and needs to be
compiled from sources.

Some of the SMF tools
are part of the Suninstall sources and needed to be replaced.

Some small programs
needed to be devloped to make a CD boot with few RAM possible.

libz
is of couse also needed

The NIC drivers from Masayuki Murayama
are nice to have and have been added

Unzip
is nice to have and has been added

Wget
is nice to have and has been added

/opt/schily/bin/*
is nice to have and even needed for some of the
Sun Replacements. As /usr/ccs/bin/make is part
of the Sun Compiler Sources, it had to be replaced
by my 'smake' that is _the_ OpenSource "make"
implementation that is closest to Sun Make.

The main goal was to implement as much source/binary
compatibility to Sun Solaris as possible. Something
that was not simple, giving the fact of the missing
libm.

Load SchilliX from Berlios and enjoy
SchilliX. If you like it and if you like to help
bus as a volunteer, please send me a mail...

Since yesterday, smf/greenline is up and running and we are
close before getting to a real single user mode. Only one
single service description is still inconsistent and needs
to be fixed.

The network is up and running but still needs manual configuration. Once the issue with ifconfig -a plumb has been
fixed, we will be able to autostart with dhcp from any
supported nic card.

As OpenSolaris goes public next month, I am sure we will be
able to publish the SchilliX version in July.

The Free Software Foundation speaks about Free Software but the GPL gives less freedom to authors and users of the code than e.g. the BSD license does. Why is the GPL more successful in the eyes of many people than the BSD license?

One important reason of course is marketing. There is better marketing for the GPL as a result of the success of Linux.

The other reason is the value of the software from the FSF in the 1980s. The GCC is of great value to people and the fact that it is of great value caused people to accept the license even though it does not give as much freedom as the BSDL gives.

This acceptance has not been present from the beginning. In the beginning, the whole GCC has been published under the GPL and thus could not be used to compile software that itself has not been published under the GPL. For this reason, there has been an excited discussion about the usability of GCC.

Later, the LGPL has been created and parts of the GCC (libgcc) has been put under LGPL.

As we see, people are willing to accept a reduced freedom if the value of the software gives a compensation.

Now, what happened to GPLd software in the past few years? The Free Software Foundation heavily reduced the effort in extending Free Software and instead started a campaign to _talk_ about Free Software instead. Other software meanwhile did improve or become Open Source.

It seems that these ideas help to understand why Linux people did start a campaign against Open Solaris and the CDDL....

The BSD operating systems (although they give more freedom than Linux) don't look like a real threat for Linux as there is not enough marketing for BSD based operating systems.

OpenSolaris however _is_ a real threat for Linux. OpenSolaris gives more freedom than Linux, it gives new impressing features and there is marketing.

It seems that the reason for the FUD against OpenSolaris published by Linux people is caused by the fact that product of value and freedom found in Linux is smaller than the product of value and freedom available with OpenSolaris.

A proof that OpenSolaris is on the right way?
In the long term, real freedom always wins....

Today, I have been able to boot from a disk that was empty before I did install a self compiled OpenSolaris on it.

So we now reached a certain limit that makes it possible to start with creating a OpenSolaris based x86 distribution at BerliOS.