Solaris engineer Eric Boutilier has been running a series entitled “Unix from Scratch”. What’s at the end of the road Eric’s heading down is “GNU/Solaris”; a distro that does what Linux does, but has the Solaris kernel and management goodies; see his posts here and here. If I understand things correctly, once OpenSolaris ships, anyone with the energy and skill can just go and build that distro, no permissions required. I think Sun should do it, and then support it. Obviously, we can’t weaken Solaris Classic because our customers depend on it and furthermore we make money supporting it; but GNU/Solaris would be a darn nice product, and a nice new line of business.
