[advocacy-discuss] Is opensolaris 100% opensource?

[Joerg Schilling]

Angad Singh <angad at angadsingh.in> wrote:

> I am posting this question here as I am a sun campus ambassador and this more or less falls into advocacy of opensolaris. I have had a recent encounter where I am having problems proving opensolaris is completely open source to a group of people.
>
> Here is the question I have been confronted with:
>
> "Is there any way that today I can get an OpenSolaris system installed,
> booted, running and doing common tasks (e.g. desktop, browsing, office,
> mail) without any proprietary binaries at all?  A simple yes or no will
> suffice.
>
> If the answer is yes, then yes, OpenSolaris is FOSS.
>
> If the answer is no, then I'm sorry, it's not FOSS (yet).  It may be
> getting there, but I personally wouldn't touch it with a barge pole."

The answer depends on what you really intend with qour question.

Linux on the XO laptop (One Laptop Per Child) is not "free" as the hardware
includes TPM chips that prevent to boot code that is not signed by the 
initiating company.

The first SchillX (OpenSolaris) release on June 17th 2005 was made from more 
than 99% free and open Sources and needed only a few closed binaries. The number
of these closed binaries is smaller than in June 2005 but still > 0.

Jörg

-- 
 EMail:joerg at schily.isdn.cs.tu-berlin.de (home) Jörg Schilling D-13353 Berlin
       js at cs.tu-berlin.de                (uni)  
       schilling at fokus.fraunhofer.de     (work) Blog: http://schily.blogspot.com/
 URL:  http://cdrecord.berlios.de/old/private/ ftp://ftp.berlios.de/pub/schily