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

Todd Hawley celticdm at gmail.com
Thu Oct 25 21:57:25 PDT 2018


>
> > 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).
>

Thanks Rick for posting that history of Solaris. I worked at Sun on
contract gigs 3 or 4
times back in the 90s (at their huge Milpitas campus right along 880, their
Mtn View
campus right in back of Shoreline Marshland and Menlo Park, next to 101). I
even got
to take their Intro to Unix and System Administration classes they offered
back
then (my then employer paid for me to take them). I used to love using
Solaris. I seem
to recall being able to easily change the background and foreground colors
on the terminal
client, so I'd have black text with orange background, orange & purple, red
and green and
so on. My co-workers thought I was nuts, but funny how they started doing
the same
thing on their terminal clients. :p I thought Solaris was dead (and
technically it is), but it's
good to know that it lives on in other forms.

-th
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://linuxmafia.com/pipermail/sf-lug/attachments/20181025/025f4ca1/attachment.html>


More information about the sf-lug mailing list