Oracle Releases Solaris 11.4 Public Beta With GNOME 3 Desktop, Secure UEFI Boot

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Oracle Releases Solaris 11.4 Public Beta With GNOME 3 Desktop, Secure UEFI Boot

After all the Oracle/Solaris controversies last year, it's good to see Oracle today releasing their first public beta of Solaris 11.4 as an update to the Solaris 11 operating system...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Solaris-11.4-Beta-Released

[Xaero_Vincent]

What is the status of OpenIndiana / Illumos distributions supporting GNOME 3.x?

[EarthMind]

"Forbids benchmarking"? Say whut? I didn't know such a thing existed in this already magical world

[stalkerg]

What about Spectre / Meltdown?

[ThoreauHD]

That OS is a doornail. Just let them die in peace.

[Snaipersky]

"Forbids benchmarking"? Say whut? I didn't know such a thing existed in this already magical world

http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/contracts/terms-oracle-solaris-170415.pdf

Bottom of page 1.

[doublez13]

I guess this never occurred to me, but how does Oracle get away with distributing an operating system that has CDDL and GPL software mixed?

If they won't let their CDDL software be distributed with Linux distros, how can they include GPL software in their OS?

[lkundrak]

I guess this never occurred to me, but how does Oracle get away with distributing an operating system that has CDDL and GPL software mixed?

They do "mere aggregation" as understood by GPL.

If they won't let their CDDL software be distributed with Linux distros, how can they include GPL software in their OS?

The CDDL licensed software is okay for Linux distros. See [1].

[1] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Licen...ood_Licenses_2

The only reason why they don't ship more CDDL stuff is that the license doesn't seem to be used by that many projects:

# dnf repoquery -a --qf '%{license}\n' |grep CDDL |grep -v 'or GPL' |wc -l
14

My guess is that you were referring to ZFS in particular. In that particular case, combining it with Linux is not considered a mere aggregation, it would need to be linked to the kernel.

[Guest]

"Forbids benchmarking"? Say whut? I didn't know such a thing existed in this already magical world

Yes! Slowlaris is dead, bloated cow, so they don't want anyone to benchmark it against enterprise class operating systems like Linux.

[Delgarde]

I guess this never occurred to me, but how does Oracle get away with distributing an operating system that has CDDL and GPL software mixed?

Because there's nothing wrong with doing so... the same reason Microsoft can distribute GPL software as part of WSL, and AIX can provide various GNU utilities. The GPL says nothing about bundling GPL software as part of a distribution, other than the requirement to provide source for the GPL parts.

Basically, the GPL covers derivative works, whether forking a GPL-licensed piece of code, or incorporating that code into a different piece. But that's not as open-ended as you think, because it essentially just covers the case where you're combining code into a single executable, whether that's an application built around a library, an in-process plugin for an application, or something like a module loaded into a kernel.

So as Ikundrak says, that's a problem for something like ZFS, because linking a bunch of CDDL code into a GPL kernel is definitely forbidden. But simply distributing a CDDL application in a GPL-heavy Linux distro (or GPL applications and libraries in a CDDL Solaris system) doesn't break any rules, because that's just bundling a bunch of applications together (an aggregate work, rather than a derivative one). That said, they do still have to abide by the terms of both licenses, so the Solaris distribution would need to make source code available for the GPL components as required by the GPL.

(Note, I'm simplifying a lot here, because these are legal documents where the details are complex. But I've covered the basic ideas).