From: ldo@nz.invalid

On Fri, 10 Oct 2025 20:13 +0100 (BST), John Dallman wrote:

> Those guys came back after over a year with a huge pile of changes
> to the Solaris kernel that made it capable of running a RHEL3.0 x86
> 32-bit userland. But only that, not any other distro.

Maybe not so surprising, given the prevailing mentality that a market
must be dominated by one vendor -- which was true in the proprietary
world, but didn’t carry over to the open-source world. Red Hat were
perhaps the most visible Linux company at the time, and more than one
party was guilty of assuming that “Linux” was going to become
synonymous with “Red Hat”.

> The Solaris kernel people weren't willing to take on a load of
> changes that weren't done to their standards, and after a lot of
> arguing, the whole job was abandoned.

Respect to them for *having* standards. ;)

> Open Solaris seemed to be based on the idea that Linux people would
> prefer to work on Solaris, which is a terrible failure in
> understanding their motivations.

OpenSolaris is an open-source project. Like any open-source project,
it doesn’t depend for its success on attracting large numbers of
people who will simply passively use it but not contribute anything
back. The project lives and dies by the level of active contributions
from the community.

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