[ug-bosug] Some thoughts on Simon Phipps defense against Novell

[Sriram Narayanan]

Hi:

http://www.itbusinessedge.com/blogs/osb/?p=357

Just a nit pick: Simon says that "We ship a completely free piece of
software that anyone can download and use without any restrictions.".
I think that SXDE/SXDE/Solaris is free for download and use, but that
depending upon which particular download one takes, all the source and
the distro assembling code and resources may not be free or even
available.

Such source and resources would include: the encumbered bits, the
logo, and other such minor things.

I think Indiana is a good step toward ensuring that everything is
free, and that Belenix/Schillix/Nexenta are a good step toward showing
that Sun in open to others putting together distros based on the
opensolaris code base.

>From a technology perspective, I'd consider all of this to be
completed FOSS only if the tool chain to build and assemble all this
together is itself FOSS. So until Sun Studio is FOSS and/or gcc based
Belenix is a reality, I'd say that the opensolaris ecosystem is not
strictly FOSS itself.

-- Sriram