[advocacy-discuss] Is opensolaris 100% opensource?

[Shawn Walker]

2008/6/25 Laurent Blume <laurent at opensolaris.org>:
> Shawn Walker a écrit :
>> I don't mean to belittle those who believe this, but it only matters
>> to some individuals.
>>
>> There are greatly differing views even among "FOSS enthusiasts" as to
>> what is acceptably FOSS and what is not.
>>
>> That's why distributions such as "Gnewsense" exist.
>>
>> The important thing to remember here is that there are very few
>> components that don't have the source code available, and it is
>> completely within the community's power to solve these issues.
>
> I mostly agree.
> I think the matter is only for Sun to be entirely clear about which
> licensing apply where, and duly respect the constraints of all licenses
> (which I think they do, though maybe some more clarity is needed).

It's pretty clear what licensing applies where. Though I agree that
information could be better consolidate into a single place.

> However, I'm not sure how the community can fix issues specific to
> OpenSolaris the distro, which is under Sun control AFAICT, and which was
> the main topic of the discussion. The choices made there (such as the

By participating in the community. Jason King, as a community member,
volunteered to replace the SPARC disassembler. John Sonnenschein, as a
community member, volunteered to help replace parts of libc.

There is a list of exactly which components are closed and members of
the community can volunteer to replace them in almost every case.

> integration of the nVidia drivers) are not made by the community, right?

Right, but Ubuntu and many other distributions do the same thing.

> If they decide to keep those bits in for the sake of user-friendliness
> (and that's a very good reason in my eyes), then OpenSolaris the distro
> won't ever be considered FOSS, and we'll have to contend again and again
> with those discussions.

It's the same thing every other GNU/Linux distribution has to contend
with. I personally don't feel like its an issue worth addressing.

If someone wants to create a "Gnewsense" -like distribution for
OpenSolaris, more power to them.

However, I'm more interested in providing a great experience than
licensing quibbles.

-- 
Shawn Walker