[wellylug] Debian: Ian Murdock’s Weblog » Joining Sun

[Rob Giltrap]

Jim Cheetham wrote:
> On 09/08/2007, Adam Bogacki <afb at paradise.net.nz> wrote:
>   
>> For those who missed it (including myself ) - one of Debian's founders
>> joining SUN.
>>
>> We might get a bit of convergence ..
>>     
>
> We are ... it's called Project Indiana :-)
>
> http://www.opensolaris.org/os/project/indiana/
>   
It's been interesting to watch. Sun founded OpenSolaris two years ago 
and it has been a slow but steady progression of:
- disencumbering code
- developing a community
- establishing demarcation between internal Sun process and OpenSolaris 
community processes
- addressing issues around Sun owned trademarks
- establishing a constitution
- electing an independent governing board

Now with Project Indiana all of that effort is coming to fruition with a 
binary release that should dramatically lower the barrier of adoption.

One of the main purposes of Indiana as Adam stated is 'convergence'. The 
single biggest driver for it is to close the knowledge gap between using 
Linux & using OpenSolaris. This has been happening for ages as Solaris 
integrated Gnome, Firefox, OpenOffice providing a familiar user 
interface between OS's. SunStudio compilers have been updated to 
natively support more GCC features (like inline assembly) and work has 
been done on the OpenSolaris kernel to ensure it compiles well with GCC 
as well as SunStudio. This will take it one big step further.

With a bit of luck both communities will move to GPL v3 so that the code 
can then start to flow freely between the two, until then 90+% of the 
code on an OpenSolaris binary distro will be the same as a Linux distro 
(Gnome, Firefox, OpenOffice et al) anyway so it's win win all around.