Re: Solaris 10, questen for Peter Korn

[Bill Haneman <Bill Haneman Sun COM>]

Petra/Peter:

The text you found in the registration process just means that you won't 
receive an official right-to-use document if you don't provide a valid 
email address to send it to. 

Solaris 10 has recently been made available as open source;  a few small 
pieces that Sun doesn't own the 'intellectual property' rights to are 
not open-sourced so far, but the vast majority of Solaris is open 
sourced now.  So there is now something called "OpenSolaris" which is 
almost identical which you can download, or build, modify and 
redistribute, under a fully free software license.  (There are probably 
some additional requirements on the download page because of US export 
law, but nothing onerous from a free software perspective to the best of 
my knowledge).  The latest version of Solaris with the latest fixes is 
available to registered OpenSolaris users as "Solaris Express, Community 
Edition".  This is all free of charge (unless you want technical support 
or a service contract, of course, which is not free).

I expect that in the very near future this will be the easiest and best 
way to get pre-tested gnopernicus, gok, and AT-SPI in a free distro, if 
it isn't already.  I'll try and do some more research to find out 
whether the accessibility test suite (which Sun uses internally for its 
Solaris 10 and Solaris.next "Nevada" builds) can be added to the 
community OpenSolaris test suite.

I would also very much like to see other distros testing the 
accessibility stack, since some folks will of course still wish to run 
Linux instead of Solaris and the whole idea is "universality" of our 
work.  We're trying to work with Ubuntu to get a working liveCD version, 
but it seems from the recent omission of atk-bridge from Ubuntu that 
they aren't testing accessibility yet.

best regards,

Bill

Peter Korn wrote:

> Hi Petra,
>
> > In the Licensing Information for Solaris 10 I fund the following
> > Pharagraph.
> >
> > The registration process to receive an Entitlement Document is part 
> > of the Solaris 10 download process, with the Entitlement Document 
> > being returned to
> > you via e-mail. For this reason, YOU MUST PROVIDE A WORKING E-MAIL 
> > ADDRESS AS PART OF YOUR SUN DOWNLOAD CENTER ACCOUNT. If you fail to 
> > do so, you will
> > not receive an Entitlement Document and will only have the right to 
> > evaluate the Solaris 10 OS for 90 days.
> >
> > Are there any limitations in function (including accessebility) 
> > during this 90 days evalation
> > piriord?
> >
> > Could I in fact evaluate Gnopernicus using Solaris 10?
>
>
> Hmmm... I am unfamiliar with this License document.  What we ship in 
> Solaris 10 is an unmodified version of Gnopernicus.  No 
> trial/evaluation code is running that cause the application to stop 
> running after a certain number of minutes or days.  You can definitely 
> evaluate Gnopernicus using Solaris 10. Please note though, the word of 
> open source moves fairly fast, and Solaris 10 was built in January, 
> 2005.  Gnopernicus and GNOME and FreeTTS and various other 
> accessibility bits were frozen in November/December 2004.  There have 
> been many bug fixes in the entire GNOME and accessibility software 
> stack, in the accessibility implementations of programs like Mozilla 
> and Evolution, since that time.  One particularly annoying bug affects 
> the FreeTTS speech synthesizer when used by Gnopernicus - under stress 
> it can go silent, and the Solaris 10 edition of Gnopernicus won't 
> re-start it (that's been fixed).
>
> Sun releases periodic updates to Solaris.  Solaris 10 Update 1 will 
> contain a number of very important accessibility fixes (as well as a 
> number of important fixes having nothing to do with accessibility) - 
> the speech issue I mentione above is one such fix.  I'll send out an 
> announcement when it is available.
>
>
> Regards,
>
> Peter Korn
> Sun Accessibility team
>
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