Date: Wed, 12 Aug 1998 23:01:32 +0000 (GMT) From: Terry Lambert <tlambert@primenet.com> To: joerg@krdl.org.sg (Joerg Micheel) Cc: jgrosch@mooseriver.com, marcs@znep.com, imp@village.org, jbryant@unix.tfs.net, freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: solaris is free. Message-ID: <199808122301.QAA11514@usr05.primenet.com> In-Reply-To: <19980812171259.39906@krdl.org.sg> from "Joerg Micheel" at Aug 12, 98 05:12:59 pm
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> > My guess is that Sun is beginning to feel the heat from FreeBSD and > > Linux. Last time I looked very few people we running Solaris on X86. Mayby > > they are starting to worry about all those older Sparc's running NetBSD. If they were selling SunOS for $10 instead of Solaris, then you might have a point. I think there is a lot of Sun hardware running NetBSD because people are nostalgic for the feel of the old SunOS. > But too late. There was a proposal by Larry Wall back at the beginning > of the 1990's to free SunOS source to prevent splitting of the R&D > community into all these niches, but in vain. > > Still interesting reading, from a historical point of view. I need to see > whether I still have the copy around somewhere. I think you mean Larry McVoy, back in 1994. He tried to get Sun to release SunOS 4.x source code under GPL. I think Larry believes he got burned by Sun when they killed SunOS in favor of Solaris, and mistakenly believes that GPL would have somehow prevented that (ignoring the fact that Sun gets most of its revenue from software, not hardware, and that SunOS, being derived from UCB licensed code, can't be licensed under GPL because of the GPL's "no other restrictions" clause conflicting with the UCB "calim credit" clause). Others have commented that Larry's perceived GPL fanatacism has colored his outlook in a number of areas, perhps including the LMBench microbenchmark suite favoring GPL'ed OS's over non-GPL'ed OS's... Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
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