[advocacy-discuss] Is opensolaris 100% opensource?

[Angad Singh]

Well, some people disagree, despite the facts mentioned above about
the task of emancipation of the 1% binary code being taking place.

http://www.mail-archive.com/ilugd@lists.linux-delhi.org/msg21599.html

I agree on a point in that thread that we should not bring in linux
into the matter for comparison and should stick to providing facts for
the reasons OpenSolaris is FOSS and open source.

I quote from the above thread:

"c) At present, the OpenSolaris source base is not enough to bootstrap an
 entire system (http://www.opensolaris.org/os/about/faq/general_faq/#whatis)
d) A part of the OS is still distributed under a binary licence - code,
 not firmware blobs.

At present, Opensolaris is a+b+c which none of the Linux distros are.

http://www.opensolaris.org/os/about/no_source/ mentions the following
which are currently not available as source (some which are not even
planned to be made available as source):
* Xsun server
* TrueType font engine for Xorg server
* Man pages

I leaving out some which are evidently not owned by Sun.

Some of us believe that a+b+c is not enough to call the distro as a FOSS
distro (it is on the way there, but not yet there)."

It is a serious matter that OpenSolaris is not FOSS, and it subjects
us to withdraw from advocating it in FOSS lists, where majority of the
potential enthusiasts live, and where we could spread love for
opensolaris.

Angad Singh
http://angadsingh.in
http://blogs.sun.com/angad
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