[conspire] More distro politics: Mandriva to Mageia. OpenIndiana.

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Tony Godshall (tony at of.net):

> Hmmm.  Project Indiana was "taking the lesson that Linux has brought
> to the operating system and providing that for Solaris" (wikipedia).
> 
> Maybe there'll be a unification of OpenSolaris and Debian coming
> (subsuming or building on Nexenta?) ... as I recall there are
> technical issues relating to Solaris' Zones technology that are not
> supported by apt/deb packaging.

The use of apt/deb instead of pkgmk / pkgadd / pkginfo / etc. (as in
Nexenta) would seem a natural generally, and Solaris already (finally)
has GNU userspace in _addition_ to the legacy SysV one.  I don't believe
there are conflicts with Zones:  Nexenta has had that feature integrated
with dpkg/apt-get since Nexenta 1.0.

> I suppose there will be licensing issues.  :-/

Well, I believe Murdoch's initiative was not to literally borrow
software and architecture from Debian, but rather to build an external
community around Solaris that would, he hoped, make it more Debian-like
in that sense.  It was a good idea, but ran directly onto the rocks of
Sun Microsystems's fixation on maintaining total internal control and
ignoring everything from outside.

> You sure he resigned?   http://ianmurdock.com/about/ still says "I’m
> vice president of emerging platforms at Sun, ..." the link in
> wikipedia that purports to support the claim is a dead link.  His site
> seems to be stale.. but the last entry, nearly a year ago, is
> interesting- the "Linux family tree"- a map of Linux distros.

I'm pretty sure he's touched nothing on his personal site for a long
time, and that, yes, he quit the firm.