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After seeing the lackluster response to opensolaris, I've come to the conclusion that there are more then enough free unix variants out there already.
linux/bsd(s)/minix/opensolaris/darwin ...
For devs who do this kind of work.. likely they already are apart of one of these projects... if thats the kind of thing their into.
Doubtless it would be cool to have irix running on new hardware but getting a new mips workstation might not be so easy, porting irix to X86 is possible but would need a big dedicated effort I'd expect.
On the otherhand - the userland may be able to be ported to other OS's but at this point Im not sure what the benifit would be really.
My guess is the people who own IRIX (rackspace?) know this and the cost of going over a huge codebase and getting permissions from various copyright owners is too prohibitive to be worth the effort.
He's talking about the Indigo Magic desktop environment, not IRIX itself.
That said, the reason OpenSolaris failed miserably has more to do with the braindead decisions with licensing and general lack of support from Sun/Oracle than the OS itself. I'm sure if they'd gone GPL or BSD style licensing there would've been a great deal more interest.




Member since:
2008-07-01
Isn't it right time for this: http://www.change.org/petitions/silicon-graphics-international-corp... ?