Sun's use of GPL and/or debian source

[Michael Alan Dorman]

Alan DuBoff <maestro@softorchestra.com> writes:

> Recentely I was working a short contract for a client using Solaris
> x86. They had me setup a Linux system to compare against. While
> doing so I noticed that Sun now ships a Companion CD with various
> GPL tools that install in /opt/sfw/ on a Solaris system (x86 or
> SPARC).

the /opt/sfw stuff implies this that is a product of sunfreeware.org
(or is it .com), and that Sun's probably just throwing this disk in
because they're nice guys and know their tools often suck in
comparison. :-)

> Something I noticed that was kinda odd was that there was debian
> directories within the /opt/sfw/src/ directories where all of the
> source code was.

The sfw stuff isn't nearly as heavily audited as Debian (for instance)
is.  There's probably someone outthere who's taking Debian sources
because we often apply patches or something that doesn't make it
upstream.

Heaven knows, whenever I'm faced with building a package of any size
on a non-Debian box, the first thing I do is go look at the Debian
package to see what our clever maintainer did.

> They obviously started from the debian source for at least some of
> those tools, but not all of them had a debian directory in them,
> only some.

As I said before, sloppiness.  And it's not Sun, either.

Mike.
-- 
"One does not write satire anymore; one merely tries to stay half a
step ahead of reality." -- Jon Carroll