[ug-bosug] OpenSolaris Binary Licence

[Moinak Ghosh]

One point to note ...

>>Some of it is actually a  bit silly. Things like "od" (Octal
>>Dump)  are closed  source because  they contain  source code
>>derived from Microsoft's Xenix! Now  how much effort does it
>>take to  rewrite od  ? Probably the  community can  help out
>>with this.
>>    
>>
>
>Why not rm -rf xenix_od ? The GNU od is pretty good. This used
>to  be a  portion of  textutils before.  Presently, textutils,
>fileutils and  shellutils have  been clubbed together  under a
>single package 'coreutils'. It may not be 'od' per se which is
>the  issue, but  the  other  stuff of  coreutils  are used  by
>virtually every script. Just accepting GNU coreutils would get
>rid of any xenix related problems for a lot of crucial stuff.
>  
>
   It is easy to replace OpenSolaris userland utilities with GNU 
coreutils/binutils however
   we need to consider the implications. One of the driving principiles 
of Solaris and now
   OpenSolaris has been strict compliance to standards like, SVR4, SVID 
(System V
   Interface Definition), POSIX, SUSv3 (Single Unix Specification). 
Unfortunately GNU
   utilities do not always adhere to these standards and are not fully 
compatible with their
   UNIX counterparts.

   One of the aims of BeleniX is to retain as much compatibility with 
Solaris as possible
   while still coming up with new innovations. This is quite possible. 
However simply
   replacing OpenSolaris utilities with GNU stuff will break binary 
compatibility with Solaris.

   There was a long discussion on the OpenSolaris discussion list about 
the various distros
   and the need to have binary compatibility between them. When Linux 
started evolving
   such standards did not exist for Linux and the existing UNIX 
standards were not fully
   followed which led to the proliferation of incompatible Linux 
distros.  The Linux Standard
   Base is a recent effort in the right direction but few distros comply 
to it as yet.

   Since OpenSolaris already has a well defined Filesystem Hierarchy and 
well defined
   Interface Specifications lets not break things. It is entirely 
acceptable to enhance utilities
   with non-standard extensions - Solaris does so and hey it is your 
value proposition that
   sets you apart. But breaking compliance with the base standard is not 
the right direction
   to go.

   Having said all this I really like the enhancements in GNU utilities, 
the long options and the
   extensive built-in help. For many cases the manpage is not required 
at all. So that is where
   the OpenSolaris utilites can be enhanced.

   And for the closed source stuff they are few and most can be easily 
implemented while
   adhering to the specifications in the manpage. These are:

   kill, alias, bg, cd, od, pax, read, sed, tail, test, type, ulimit, 
wait, tr, unalias, umask, printf,
   jobs

Regards,
Moinak.

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