Since Sun made the source code of Solaris available as OpenSolaris, it has come a long way. Some months ago, some OpenSolaris developpers talked to some of the Ubuntu people, and the consensus was that a Debian based system running on top of the OpenSolaris kernel would be one hell of a system, which is something I wholeheartly confirm.


So, in the next monts, Nexenta was born : a system which tried to glue Debian and OpenSolaris together. However, the Nexenta developers got off to a bit of a bad start by announcing its existence while putting its entire web site behind a password gate. Browsing the source code wasn't the easiest thing also, and there remains the fact of the two different licenses : the Debian code is licensed under the well-known GPL, whereas the OpenSolaris code (kernel and userland binaries linked to the Solaris libc libraries) was licensed under the CDDL. How these two licensed are to be united still remains a problem.


The licensing issues are real, and need to be worked out. But many of the people involved in the debate appear to have lost track of the fact that the Nexenta project, while perhaps being occasionally arrogant and ignorant of how Debian does things, is trying to make a contribution to the free software world. It is a free software project. Anthony Towns has been almost the lone voice in calling for a higher degree of cooperation with Nexenta.