[advocacy-discuss] A review of OpenSolaris 2008.05 on The Register

[Jim Grisanzio]

Alan Coopersmith wrote:
> Qingye Jiang (John) wrote:
>   
>> Two weeks ago I had the opportunity to 
>> speak with Richard Stallman, and he is very happy about the fact that 
>> more and more GNU packages are being integrated into OpenSolaris -- 
>> although he still claimed that OpenSolaris 2008.05 was not free software 
>> because their is something free as lunch in there.
>>     
>
> Right - for his definition of "free", we'd have to finish the Emancipation
> project so you could build a completely open source version of Solaris, with
> no closed binaries in irreplaceable things like libc.   Then you could have
> a "Free (as defined by FSF)" version of OpenSolaris, by not including the
> optional closed binaries like the nvidia graphics driver, but we're not
> likely to ever have the mainstream distro be completely "Free" out of the box.
>   

Interesting. I met Stallman when he came to Sun to talk to the Java 
engineering organization a long time ago (probably 2000 or 2001) in 
Cupertino. I really enjoyed his talk. Never actually spoke to him, 
though. But he did chime in on an opensolaris-discuss conversation in 
2005 http://opensolaris.org/jive/thread.jspa?messageID=9797&#9797 about 
CDDL & GPL where he said, "The current license of Solaris is a free 
software license, which means it is basically ethical." I love the 
"basically" bit.

Jim

-- 
http://blogs.sun.com/jimgris/

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