[rescue] [geeks] Solaris being discontinued? Rumors flying

[Bob Pasken]

On 12/ 6/16 07:04 PM, Liam Proven wrote:
> On 6 December 2016 at 19:54, Dave McGuire <mcguire at neurotica.com> wrote:
>
>>    The five or six people who don't think Unity sucks will still have it
>> if they want it, because the source code is out there.
> It is indeed, but no other distro offers a current version. Arch and
> Fedora had ports but they are long dead. That worries me, I must
> confess.
>
>> I doubt that'll
>> be the case for Solaris, unless someone values history and their field
>> over their job and leaks it before they leave.  That really needs to
> happen.
>
> But the source is _already_ out there -- it's the basis of Illumos and
> all the other spinoffs. No, it's not the current release, but I think
> it's only 1 behind, isn't it?
>
> I don't know WTF Oracle was thinking when it took it closed-source
> again. That seemed suicidal to me. There was considerable community
> interest and involvement and still is.
>
> I have never used SunOS or Solaris in anger, though, or any other
> commercial Unix since SCO Xenix/Unix. (Not counting Mac OS X, which I
> have only ever used as a desktop OS.)
>
> What do folk think of the FOSS versions?
>
> There seem to be quite a few, many with the GNU userland:
>
> http://wiki.illumos.org/display/illumos/Distributions
>
> Dyson sounds quite interesting to me -- basically Debian but with the
> Solaris kernel and SMF as the init system. (How that works under the
> covers I have no idea. Does SMF work with the GNU libc and userland,
> or are there really both Solaris libc and GNU libc?_
>
> The GNU userland plus Solaris kernel sounds like the best of both
> worlds to me. TBH the Linux userland is the only one I really know
> well, and I find myself disoriented at the OS X shell prompt and lost
> at the FreeBSD one. And I suspect many people are the same -- I've not
> really worked with commercial Unix at all since about 1990, but quite
> a lot of Linux in the last 20y or so.
>
> --
> Liam Proven b" Profile: https://about.me/liamproven
> Email: lproven at cix.co.uk b" Google Mail/Talk/Plus: lproven at gmail.com
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