> On 30 Apr 1997, stephen farrell wrote:
>
> > otoh, what worries me about it, however, is i think this makes solaris
> > look like a joke to the microsoft people. NT source code is highly
> > protected, and it is an easy assumption that there is a direct
> > relationship between protection of code and value of said code (albeit
> > largely wrong).
>
> It's available for education license (has been for many years), just like
> Solaris now is.
This is really off-topic but it's important to get these things right.
It's true that some universities have NT source licenses (Cornell is one,
for example)--but it's also true that some other universities were
sufficiently unhappy with the licensing terms offered by Microsoft that
they passed. (I don't know whether places like Cornell that have the
source got better deals, or didn't care about the same issues, or what.)
The sense I have had from people who looked at doing OS work on NT in
years past is that Microsoft was miles away from the Unix vendors in
flexibility wrt source access. I've heard that Microsoft may be better
about this now than it once was.
Of course, it appears that Solaris is now going to be really easy to get,
which is a good thing all around.
Michael