[sf-lug] The LUG list is back and just in time...

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Bobbie Sellers (bliss-sf4ever at dslextreme.com):

>     Is Open Indiana a Linux distribution?

No.  Interesting story about that.


So, you know there has for a very long time been a proprietary Unix
named Solaris, right?  It was from Sun Microsystems.

Before there was Solaris, Sun Microsystems had SunOS.  In 1982, there
was a project at Stanford to create a community standard for networked
computing called 'Stanford University Network' (SUN).  A grad student 
created a prototype workstation called the SUN workstation based on a
Motorola m68k CPU, started making them from spare parts as a cottage
industry, and made the design publicly available.

Several grad students (including that one guy, Andy Bechtolsheim, 
went into business (Sun Microsystems) to commercialise the design,
selling a slightly improved version of the prototype, as their first
hardware product, the Sun-1.  Its operating system was their m68k 
port of BSD, which they dubbed SunOS.  Starting 1987, they moved from
m68k to their own RISC design, SPARC.  Later, they also added x86_64
support.

Time passed by, and Sun bought into the rapprochement between the
Berkeley Unix and AT&T Unix System V camps.  As part of a joint venture
with AT&T, they produced SysV-based Solaris at the end of the 1980s as a
replacement for SunOS.  (There was some name chicanery that I will
skip.)  More time passed.  Solaris remained as the strongest proprietary
Unix even as most competitors got eaten by Linux.  But Sun Microsystems
had increasing business problems.

Before the 2009 acquisition of Sun by Oracle, a project within Sun
Microsytems called Project Indiana had succeed in clarifying rights to code
within Solaris so that almost all of Solaris was open source.  
Project Indiana was headed by Linux-community engineer Ian Murdock:
https://www.cnet.com/news/sun-opens-indiana-chapter-of-opensolaris/
Its code release was named 'OpenSolaris', which was not fully open 
source but getting close to it.  (There were still third-party 
code inclusions that were proprietary.)

Then the Oracle aquisition happened, and there was confusion and unhappy
Solaris technical people for quite a few years.  Oracle terminated the
OpenSolaris project and tried to move Solaris towards tighter corporate
control.  

Several external projects continued and extended the Project Indiana
work, producing _fully_ open source variants.  Because of trademark
conflict with Oracle (which lately is calling its proprietary Unix
"Oracle Solaris', but its naming has changed a bit over the years), they
cannot be named too close to the marks 'Solaris' or 'OpenSolaris',
because Oracle owns those.  The leading outside, open source community
project is called illumos, and OpenIndiana is a project based closely on
illumos.

Anyway, what you're running there is a fully open source Solaris with
the serial numbers filed off (so that Larry Ellison can't getcha).


I know you're a fan (as I am) of Distrowatch, so have a look here:
https://distrowatch.com/search.php?ostype=Solaris&category=All&origin=All&basedon=All&notbasedon=None&desktop=All&architecture=All&package=All&rolling=All&isosize=All&netinstall=All&language=All&defaultinit=All&status=Active#simple

Distrowatch doesn't _just_ track Linux distributions.  They have four
families they track (under the name 'OS Type'):  BSD, Linux, Solaris,
and 'Other OS'.  See for yourself, here:
https://distrowatch.com/search.php