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8 Comments
- libervisco, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3Many GNU/Linux distros don't have professional support enlisted and are yet quite popular. Many community oriented distributions are like that. Even those that have companies behind them for professional payed support are still used by people who get their support from the community because they don't need payed support.
The key point here is the community. By releasing Solaris under GPL, which is a license of much greater reputation than CDDL, they may attract a larger community to Solaris than they did so far. In FOSS world, having a big community often translates to business opportunity as well.
Hmm, something tells me I'm stating the obvious.. - geminitojanus, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2"By releasing Solaris under GPL, which is a license of much greater reputation than CDDL, they may attract a larger community to Solaris than they did so far."
Believe it or not, the biggest part of the community they will attract is the community focused on bringing some of Solaris's innovations to Linux. Things like D-Trace, and ZFS are the obvious immediate ports to Linux (Mac OS X did this exact same "land rush" thanks to its more liberal BSD/commercial hybrid licensing as compared to Linux), with other parts to follow.
Not that I'm saying this is good or bad, but it definitely makes sense. Linux has the momentium and the developers, and there's even a hint that Sun thinks this is the way to go (seeing as they're working with Ubuntu to make it the Linux for Sun's SPARC chips). The GPL will just speed up the transition (and lessen the need for boilerplates and adapters to get around licensing requirements). - technerdy, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2I dont think Sun picking GPL for Solaris will make much of a difference because:
1) GCC on Solaris is still a beast, and opensource projects like OpenSSL, Apache, etc. still dont compile well and run from source.
Hence without proper support for popular open source apps, it will be hard for Solaris to gain momentum just because its now GPL.
2) Solaris has been free for a few month now. That didn't help much either, I dont think many users didn't try it because it was free, but not GPL.
3) Even with GPL Sun still expects users to pay for support. Solaris GPL still wont have free updates.
4) Many companies pick Solaris and pay a lot of money for it, not because of any reasons such as GPL/no GPL, but merely because they have hardware contracts / investment in Sun hardware, Or more likely they have software that only runs well on Solaris (compiled with Solaris CC)
I think sun will remain a high end niche OS even on GPL. - libervisco, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1raynevandunem: Maybe Gentoo just didn't have the right business model. It is a pure source based distro after all, which is hardly anything that can make it "mainstream". It is by the geeks for the geeks, and geeks don't need no support contracts to support themselves. ;)
As for Debian, it is another long standing community project, something it has been from the start. Maybe the dunc-tank project just didn't fit in the culture that developed within Debian for all these years. Besides, why should some Debian developers be payed and others not? Or.. if you want to pay them all, where is the money to do it?
It probably wont ever work for those two projects because they are simply not the kinds of projects to make a business out of. They're more like bases for other businesses, possibly started by people involved in the project. An example is Ian Murdock (a founder of Debian) who based his commercially supported distro "Progeny" on Debian.
We can't just point to failures of certain projects to successfully commercialize as proofs of failure of the whole Free Software economic model. They didn't do it right, or weren't fit for doing it at all and that's just it. Others have, like RedHat, SuSE, even Mandriva etc. - raynevandunem, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1Yet, the company that *does* back them has to make money for the future of the distro without charging directly for the software. In fact, even for the community distros, very little money is made.
Daniel Robbins of Gentoo fame is a perfect example. He formed Gentoo Foundation and stepped down as Chief Architect precisely because he failed in his endeavour to make Gentoo a commercially-successful distro.
Ask Debian, which ran into a snag in the release of Etch because some of the developers *weren't getting paid enough*.
For such large community projects, footing the bill for development and hosting seems to be one of the trickiest, and most-nagging, parts of the job.
Maybe the Mozilla project was right in setting up both the Mozilla Foundation (non-profit) and Mozilla Corporation (for-profit). - schestowitz, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1That's more like a Paul Murphy fantasy. Besides, Sun doesn't need GNU. They have other complementary tools already. Can't recall the name..
- raynevandunem, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1"3) Even with GPL Sun still expects users to pay for support. Solaris GPL still wont have free updates."
Doesn't Red Hat make its money off of that model as well? - JOOH8R, on 10/12/2007, -2/+0i wish everyone had the clarity you do
heil technerdy
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