Linked by Thom Holwerda on Mon 20th Aug 2007 21:07 UTC, submitted by Kishe
Bruno Souza, the NetBeans Community Manager for Sun, wrote: "As you all know, we are working hard for the release of NetBeans 6.0. The new release will bring exciting technical features and this is a great time to consider what else can we do to empower the NetBeans Community. As a result of requests from the comunity, we are considering the potential adoption of a new license model. We are considering releasing a future early access version of NetBeans 6.0 under a dual licensing scheme of CDDL and GPL v2 with Classpath exception. A move like this would be well received by many of the NetBeans contributors, and will benefit the community at large."
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RE[4]: And OpenSolaris is going to follow?
by Touvan on Tue 21st Aug 2007 19:53
in reply to "RE[3]: And OpenSolaris is going to follow?"
Member since:2006-09-01
There's even a wrapper layer that allows straight Windows network drivers to be used in Linux!
OT: If only you had said, "There's even a wrapper layer that allows straight Windows D3D drivers to be used in a native Linux D3D layer, as well as through Wine!"
Maybe one day. :-) Sorry to be OT.
Member since:
2006-01-03
""
OpenSolaris could not simply *use* Linux drivers as they are fundamentally different
""
Maybe not *simply*, but it really would not be that much work. The glue layer between raw hardware manipulation and the OS would have to be reworked, but the most difficult part would be done. See how nVidia and ATI drivers for Windows and Linux share most of the code, and those two operating systems are vastly more different than Linux and Solaris. There's even a wrapper layer that allows straight Windows network drivers to be used in Linux!
And most of the higher level code that would be different between Solaris and Linux would be very similar for Solaris drivers of the same family (say all network cards, or scsi cards, or sound hardware or whatever).
I think both Solaris and Linux would technically benefit from the code sharing that the GPL would permit. As for market penetration, though, I'm not sure about who would benefit the most in the long term. It could well be that Solaris was stripped of its advantages and then dumped as an equally competent but less mainstream OS, or it could also happen that it turned into a much more formidable opponent to Linux and Windows.