https://retrobsd.ddns.net/s2dwt9.htm
Following the recent release of of Solaris 11.4 CBE (Common Build
Environment) for open source developers and non-production personal
use, it is now possible -again- to run Solaris for free as a private
user and still get updates and bugfixes, rather than being being stuck
*in prograssively more outdated and vulnerable 11.4.0, unusable in any *
practical setting. I say ‘again’ because this used to be the norm under
Sun. …
I remember the first Solaris… a bit of a shock when you’re used to SunOS.
Nice to see it’s still going.
Does Solaris still include things like CDE and display Postscript, or is it solely Gnome nowadays?
(Licensing hasn’t been really an issue with personal editions of older versions of Solaris, but it’s somewhat interesting. But I guess, these have been stripped anyways.)
I liked Solaris if not for any other reasons for it being a SysV environment, me being a software portability nut. Their C compiler was also delightfully strict.
I’ve a feeling in the SunOS days the compiler used to be included, and at some later point it became a costly extra - at which point GCC and the rest of the GNU utilities started to look like essentials.
Yes, that is exactly what happened. Which promptly lead to very few people paying for the proprietary one any more.
At my undergraduate university, by the late 90s we had the Solaris compiler suite available, but the classes all used gcc. I remember using the Sun compiler for other things and it being fine, but sure some reason it was not the preferred compiler.
I am fairly confident the compiler suite was a purchased product at that time.