OpenBSD Journal

Sun, Linux, OpenBSD, licensing and docs

Contributed by deanna on from the whole lotta talk dept.

There's been a lot of talk on lists and blogs about an exchange between Linus Torvalds, Jonathan Schwartz and Theo de Raadt regarding licensing and documentation. It all started with a "cynical" message from Linus about Sun's motivation with regard to Open Source. Jonathan Schwartz responded by extending Linus a dinner invitation. What?

The romance was briefly interrupted by a message from Theo pointing out the doublespeak (reproduced below).

Jonathan, I wish the above was true. 15 years ago I was the biggest Sun fan. Today I speak as the project leader for another set of open source projects -- OpenBSD and OpenSSH. OpenSSH will be better known to your audience, as it is what they use daily to connect securely to and from their Solaris (or Linux) machines. OpenSSH killed telnet and rlogin, for those who still remember those mechanisms. We give our software completely freely to the world, without even the standard encumberances people see in the GPL or CDDL. Yet when we turn around and ask Sun to give us documentation for the chips on their machines -- chips Sun themselves designed, not via contractors -- Sun drags their feet.

Recently we tried to reopen these 10-year-old repeated requests, and once again nothing positive happened. You may remember, because you and David Yen were in an email conversation with us. Lots of nice open words were exchanged, but no action. However, let me give an example of the duplicity of Sun. (I wish I could use a lighter word). Two operating systems run on Sun's latest PCI-e based (smallish) Ultrasparc-III machines, the v215/v245 -- Solaris and OpenBSD. The latter system runs on those machines because the code to support the non-processor chips on the board had to be written after painstaking reverse engineering, because Sun refuses to make available documentation for how these chips are programmed. Now we will readily admit that not every programmer in the world needs to know how to program these chips. But does every programmer in the world need to know how to program every little detail on Sun's processors, in system mode?

Sun gets great press out of UltraSPARC being all "open", but what use is supervisor-mode documentation when the rest of the chips that the supervisor-mode code has to communicate with are entirely undocumented??? The press does not spot this problem, but Jonathan, you should clearly understand this is a fallacy. There are two operating systems which surprisingly do not run on the Sun v215/v245 -- Linux and OpenSolaris. OpenSolaris?? Yes -- Sun isn't even open enough to give the OpenSolaris community enough documentation to support their new machines. So I think that Linus is right, and Sun has a long road ahead.

(Comments are closed)


Comments
  1. By Aapo Lehtinen (m90) aapo.lehtinen@kotikone.fi on

    Well it's great to see that OS-community has at least two big names addressing this issue, and on the same side. I hope Linus understands the meaning of documentation required and has guts to demand for them.
    This might well draw intrest of other vendors holding on their papers.

  2. By Venture37 (venture37) venture37<A>hotmail.com on www.geeklan.co.uk

    <quote>Sun isn't even open enough to give the OpenSolaris community enough documentation to support their new machines</quote>

    Oh dear!

  3. By Evan (63.225.59.125) Evan.Farrer@gmail.com on http://www.cs.utah.edu/~farrer/

    The things that Theo will say just to weasel a free dinner. ;)

    By the way Mr. Schwartz I don't think that Sun is very open either. My dinner schedule is open next week so let me know what day works for you.

  4. By Anonymous Coward (80.171.115.53) on

    If you'd really be so cool, no matter if you came from some Linux, *BSD or whatnot camp, you'd get your act together, wouldn't whine about some vendors not publishing their specifications and create your own instead. But that is not going to happen. Because it is complex. Like real life. Like Politics. So just shut up and get a grip on reality.
    Or why else projects like OpenCores, Open Graphics, Open/Free/Linux-Bios vegetate in a state of oblivion? Why else Joe User has no other choice for his general computing needs than some Intel or derivative of that? You say some PowerPC? Maybe ARM? Laughable. Why Joe User should invest that much? And what is it about that mindset which tries to micromanage all aspects in a shizophrenic way? Do you control every ignition sparc in your car? You fight so many useless battles against the ever turning wings of windmills.

    .........

    Comments
    1. By Anonymous Coward (83.5.254.254) on

      > So just shut up and get a grip on reality.


      My oh my, it's getting warmer under rocks by the minute. Then again I really like the spark/sparc pun, too bad the best humour is often unintentional...

    2. By Anonymous Coward (145.253.2.22) on

      > [...] Do you control every ignition sparc in your car? You fight so many useless battles against the ever turning wings of windmills.
      >

      You miss the point, sorry. The OpenBSD developers are not car drivers (who do of course not need to know the inner workings of the car), but they are an independent car repair shop, which does not want to pay the licensing fees the car factory demands to allow them to repair the car (or tune it, e.g.).

      There are battles worth fighting.

      Comments
      1. By Anonymous Coward (85.176.54.98) on

        > > [...] Do you control every ignition sparc in your car? You fight so many useless battles against the ever turning wings of windmills.
        > >
        >
        > You miss the point, sorry. The OpenBSD developers are not car drivers (who do of course not need to know the inner workings of the car), but they are an independent car repair shop, which does not want to pay the licensing fees the car factory demands to allow them to repair the car (or tune it, e.g.).
        >
        > There are battles worth fighting.

        Why voluntarily repairing cars which intentionally break because of vendor interests when knowledge and technology is "out there" to escape the cycle of pseudoprogress? Why reinventing the wheel all over again in a purely reactive way? Are there really battles worth fighting? Because the (nerd)herd says so? And the herder said "divide et impera"?

        Comments
        1. By Anonymous Coward (81.165.220.56) on

          First of all, I'm an openbsd fan and I appreciate every bit of code that gets written by any openbsd dev out there.

          But sometimes I think of it this way. I buy cd's and t-shirts so people can reverse engineer undocumented Sun crap instead of making the code better. I don't care about Sun or about UltraSPARC. If sun wants openbsd support they should donate hardware and give the documentation period. Now openbsd is just leaking resources because of them. That makes me sad.

          Comments
          1. By sthen (85.158.44.149) on

            > I don't care about Sun or about UltraSPARC. If sun wants openbsd support they should donate hardware and give the documentation period.

            I don't think Sun care too much about that. Having OpenBSD run on sparc64 hardware is useful though; not just in itself, but also because it results in software bugs being found and can bring about performance improvements, helping other machine architectures too.

        2. By Steven Schneider (198.166.227.91) on

          > > > [...] Do you control every ignition sparc in your car? You fight so many useless battles against the ever turning wings of windmills.
          > > >
          > >
          > > You miss the point, sorry. The OpenBSD developers are not car drivers (who do of course not need to know the inner workings of the car), but they are an independent car repair shop, which does not want to pay the licensing fees the car factory demands to allow them to repair the car (or tune it, e.g.).
          > >
          >
          > Why voluntarily repairing cars which intentionally break because of vendor interests when knowledge and technology is "out there" to escape the cycle of pseudoprogress? Why reinventing the wheel all over again in a purely reactive way? Are there really battles worth fighting? Because the (nerd)herd says so? And the herder said "divide et impera"?

          Okay, I think you're missing the point again. You've now gone from saying that OBSD devs are like drivers, to OBSD devs are like car manufacturers. The previous poster made it simple for you, but you don't seem to get it, the OBSD devs are _like_ the mechanics in a repair shop (remember, this is an analogy).

          The OBSD deves don't want to produce new hardware, and they don't want to just use it. They want to use the hardware the way _they_ want to use it. Think of the vendor released hardware + vendor software as the "stock" model, and the hardware + OBSD as the "modified" model.

          Personally, I applaud and support Theo and the OBSD devs in this persuit.

          Comments
          1. By Anonymous Coward (85.176.43.149) on

            > Personally, I applaud and support Theo and the OBSD devs in this pursuit.

            // beginrant

            O.K. Here do i stand in my cloak of anonymous cowardice and say: i perfectly got what you said. You didn't get what I meant. Maybe it was too short, maybe it came over too trollish, maybe it even was intended as a mild troll out of some frustration. To make the analogy a little more general and fitting into the surroundings we have nowadays: Even IF you produce something from the ground up for yourself, depending on what it is and laws which are not under your control, you can't use it the way you want to or intended to. That's a reality, a fact. To change that seems whishful thinking and denial of reality to me. To get back to topic and current events, there are so many parties which try since decades to establish some sort of free software environment under different licenses which i am not competent to judge. Despite the partly astonishing results, to which degree? What i feel competent to judge, from a longtime user perspective, all these alternatives, no matter how good they are from a technical point of view or how good they fill their respective niches, leave something to be desired. The other thing is the eternal bitching around and accusation of doublespeak, be it another community, or some commercial entity.
            In my opinion it will stay like this for ever without getting any meaningful results, until some more communities will gather, overcome their differences, and produce their OWN platform with their own specifications, which does not lag behind the commercial offers too much and is not too expensive either.
            I think there is enough brainpower to facilitate this. As long as these communities, which includes yours, bitch and bite themselves, and beg commercial entities, this whole thing will stay reactive and dependant. For commercial entities you are either a source of cheap labor or hobbyists which are not that important, despite the current hype about more or less free and/or open software. Back to reality. This whole thing is just one small aspect of life, doublespeak is very common in it. Do you really think you can change that? One could go even so far as to say, the whole (developed, so called 1st) world as it is now, is not only based on doublespeak, but thieving, killing, fighting, raping, and whatever negative thing you can imagine. So, either you arrange in a smart way with that, or vanish, sooner or later. Accusing others publicly of doublespeak is not that smart.

            // endrant

            Comments
            1. By dingo (68.30.9.248) on

              > // endrant

              Take your medicine

    3. By Anonymous Coward (85.178.66.88) on

      > If you'd really be so cool, no matter if you came from some Linux, *BSD or whatnot camp, you'd get your act together, wouldn't whine about some vendors not publishing their specifications and create your own instead. But that is not going to happen. Because it is complex. Like real life. Like Politics. So just shut up and get a grip on reality.
      > Or why else projects like OpenCores, Open Graphics, Open/Free/Linux-Bios vegetate in a state of oblivion? Why else Joe User has no other choice for his general computing needs than some Intel or derivative of that? You say some PowerPC? Maybe ARM? Laughable. Why Joe User should invest that much? And what is it about that mindset which tries to micromanage all aspects in a shizophrenic way? Do you control every ignition sparc in your car? You fight so many useless battles against the ever turning wings of windmills.
      >
      > .........

      Imagine a car wich you can just drive in California but not in Las Vegas because the fuel isn`t compatible or the roads are not compatible or hwatever.

      Would you buy such a car? Propably not....
      But why do you buy Hardware wich works like this?
      A Wireless NIC wich has Windows Drivers and no free documentation is like the Car wich can just drive in California....

    4. By Anonymous Coward (203.65.245.11) on

      Beats writing useless posts on message boards voicing moronic opinions no-one cares about.

  5. By Noryungi (Noryungi) noryungi@yahoo.com on

    Unfortunately, not just yet.

    Some of the companies I worked for still used Telnet and rlogin, and probably still are.

    Other than that, I hope Sun is finally listening, and will open their documentations soon.

    Comments
    1. By Chas (147.154.235.53) on

      I don't think there is a high-quality SSH implementation for VAX VMS, and because of that, my users still use a lot of telnet to my HP-UX and RedHat systems.

      This actually came in pretty handy when I was building a clone of our production network behind a firewall. When users telnet to the firewall, they get a menu asking which interior system they want a session on; this is done with the tn-gw program from the fwtk collection. I don't think that something so simple and elegant would be possible with ssh (it would have to ignore ~/known_hosts completely, and it would be slower, and it wouldn't talk to my VAX).

      There's life in the old protocols yet; sometimes they are really useful.

      Comments
      1. By Anonymous Coward (69.122.151.233) on

        > I don't think there is a high-quality SSH implementation for VAX VMS
        Process Software has SSHv2 clients in both Multinet & TCPWare that are pretty good AND available to hobbyists. I'm not sure about their 'SSH for OpenVMS' product (only used the ssh in Multinet & TCPWare), but, per their documentation, you can use pubkey to & from OpenVMS ssh servers. HP seems to have an ssh implementation as well, although I've only used Process Software's stuff.

        Comments
        1. By Anonymous Coward (66.158.132.32) on

          > > I don't think there is a high-quality SSH implementation for VAX VMS
          > Process Software has SSHv2 clients in both Multinet & TCPWare that are pretty good AND available to hobbyists. I'm not sure about their 'SSH for OpenVMS' product (only used the ssh in Multinet & TCPWare), but, per their documentation, you can use pubkey to & from OpenVMS ssh servers. HP seems to have an ssh implementation as well, although I've only used Process Software's stuff.
          >
          >

          HP-UX have it own port of the OpenSSH distributed by HP. Reponse time is OK on 11i or more recent since /dev/random has been implemented. On older release, login time could be very long and force the sysadmin to play with the configuration file regarding the 'prng' generator. The file usally reside in /opt/ssh/etc/

      2. By Matthias Wolf (212.139.107.118) on

        > This actually came in pretty handy when I was building a clone of our production network behind a firewall. When users telnet to the firewall, they get a menu asking which interior system they want a session on; this is done with the tn-gw program from the fwtk collection. I don't think that something so simple and elegant would be possible with ssh (it would have to ignore ~/known_hosts completely, and it would be slower, and it wouldn't talk to my VAX).

        Here at the University of York they have got such a system for ssh access where you ssh to a machine that asks you to which internal one you want to connect (and which protocol (mostly ssh) probably, it's been a while) - dunno about performance and implementation, it seems pretty usable to me.

      3. By Anonymous Coward (59.167.20.49) on

        > I don't think there is a high-quality SSH implementation for VAX VMS, and because of that, my users still use a lot of telnet to my HP-UX and RedHat systems.
        >
        > This actually came in pretty handy when I was building a clone of our production network behind a firewall. When users telnet to the firewall, they get a menu asking which interior system they want a session on; this is done with the tn-gw program from the fwtk collection. I don't think that something so simple and elegant would be possible with ssh (it would have to ignore ~/known_hosts completely, and it would be slower, and it wouldn't talk to my VAX).
        >
        > There's life in the old protocols yet; sometimes they are really useful.

        It is quite easy to do with SSH, use a login script. Using telnet to a firewall? You may as well not even have a firewall there.

      4. By Anonymous Coward (201.17.37.77) on

        > I don't think there is a high-quality SSH implementation for VAX VMS, and because of that, my users still use a lot of telnet to my HP-UX and RedHat systems.
        >
        > This actually came in pretty handy when I was building a clone of our production network behind a firewall. When users telnet to the firewall, they get a menu asking which interior system they want a session on; this is done with the tn-gw program from the fwtk collection. I don't think that something so simple and elegant would be possible with ssh (it would have to ignore ~/known_hosts completely, and it would be slower, and it wouldn't talk to my VAX).
        >
        > There's life in the old protocols yet; sometimes they are really useful.

        and we truly hope security is not your business.

        Comments
        1. By Anonymous Coward (12.217.82.49) on

          > and we truly hope security is not your business.

          The firewall is not there to protect the interior systems from attackers... conversely, it exists to protect the exterior systems from their clones.

          The interior systems have the same IP addresses as the production systems, and if unrestricted traffic were to be exchanged between the two networks, all hell would break loose.

          Since the exterior systems, many of which I do not control, already use telnet, ftp, and a host of other insecure protocols, then using those protocols behind a firewall costs me nothing.

          I probably should have explained this before the flamefest, but hey, you guys seem to enjoy the hell out of it, so carry on.

    2. By Paladdin (213.97.233.52) on

      > Unfortunately, not just yet.
      >
      > Some of the companies I worked for still used Telnet and rlogin, and probably still are.
      >
      > Other than that, I hope Sun is finally listening, and will open their documentations soon.

      Sure they are still used. Just today I fought an brand new Alvarion wireless link config using nothing more than telnet. Over wireless! Ummm... An unpleasant experience, I must say :)

  6. By Anonymous Coward (71.193.182.184) on

    http://blogs.sun.com/webmink/entry/hardware_archaeology

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