Linked by Thom Holwerda on Thu 9th Aug 2007 17:28 UTC, submitted by vondur
"Don't expect to see key features of OpenSolaris showing up in the Linux kernel," said a top Linux maintainer. At his LinuxWorld opening keynote, Andrew Morton made it very clear that the appointment of former OSDL CTO and Debian co-founder Ian Murdock to Sun's OS platforms organization will not translate into a merging between the open source version of Solaris Unix with Linux. He didn't mince words. "It's a great shame that OpenSolaris still exists. They should have killed it," said Morton, addressing one attendee's question about the possibility of Solaris' most notable features being integrated into the kernel. "It's a disappointment and a mistake by Sun." Morton said none of those features - Zones, ZFS, DTrace - will end up in the Linux kernel because Sun refuses to adopt the GPL.
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Member since:
2005-07-20
Yes, but it is a shame that Linux and OpenSolaris can't share code. License fragmentation is the bane of free software, and it's not in the best interest of the users of either platform. I had hoped that Sun and the Linux community would have had more serious conversations about license compatibility. I had hoped that the parties would have had a mutual appreciation for the value of sharing code.
It's a shame we're not working together. That's all that Andrew really meant.
Why should he blame Sun for that, though? They are fully compatible with FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, MacOS X, and easily a great many more. Likely you could use their code with just about any non-GPL operating system.
Meanwhile, had they already gone with GPL, 2 or 3, whichever, they would now be compatible with... erm... Linux? How is that better? Just because you could use it in that case?
Why isn't he up in arms to make Linux switch to a license compatible with the rest of the world?