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AS OF 12/3/2008 11:55PM EST

Last Year's Penguin
By Systems Management News Team

July 15, 2008 — If I may quibble with Mr. Hess regarding his column (“Last Year’s Penguin: Is OpenSolaris the New Linux?”), OpenSolaris offers a reasonable Unix solution with an actual brand identity. For the sorts of CIOs who routinely issue edicts based on the latest quasi-technical article they read, this is the only way to pry them away from their often irresponsibly chosen Windows solutions.

As for licensing, that is more important than it appears to be. The license determines who can participate in the development-by-horde that is the open-source community [1]. This in turn is a predictor of mass appeal, support and developer interest. In other words, the right license is a soft prerequisite to begin the concentrated development you implied was necessary for OpenSolaris to go hand-to-hand in the OS wars.

Endnote:
[1] ...if the term “community” is appropriate for the distributed roil of self-aggrandizing, competitive, smug mathematicians and programmers that make the software installed in my home laboratory so much fun.

Dimitry Dukhovny
San Francisco

Related Search Term(s): Open source, OpenSolaris

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