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

[Bobbie Sellers]

Thanks to everyone who replied on the list and off the list.
I am not running Open Indiana anywhere but was unsure
with that Illumos kernel reference.  I did not want to bring
a Unix to a Linux meeting.  We have enough fun with the
GNU/Linux/and all the other FOSS developers.

     Bobbie

On 10/25/18 4:46 PM, Rick Moen wrote:
> Quoting Bobbie Sellers (bliss-sf4ever at dslextreme.com):
>
>>       Is Open Indiana a Linux distribution?
> No.  Interesting story about that.
Thanks too for the story.

     b.
>
> 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
>
>