Comment by Fnoord | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Fnoord | Hacker News Reader

This was just part of Sun's JDS (Java Desktop System). The motivation behind it I can only speculate: to get attention for Sun's JDS, demo Java + 3D while at the same time differentiate from default Linux desktop, and to demo the successor of CDE; basically it all boils down to stock price of SUNW/JAVA.

Remember, Sun didn't do well after the dotcom boom and Sun wasn't cheap but Sun did invest a lot in desktop UNIX (Gnome HIG, documentation, internationalisation, and a major contributor with LOC). Sun GPLed this and many other things (among which Java itself and Solaris) right before they were sold out (to Oracle). We can only thank Jonathan Schwartz & Co for that because Oracle would've kept it proprietary (speculation though).

It isn't very innovative. It was one of the many window managers which did this. 3dwm, 3d desktop [1] [2] (from around 2002 IIRC), Beryl, Compiz, and Enlightenment (E17 & onward) are some other examples though not all of these were 3D accelerated.

As you said, the problem with this is its gimmicky; not productive. In gaming nice 3D effects can add something to the experience (immersion) but on a desktop it shouldn't be very noisy or abundant. So after the initial wow-effect was over these effects didn't get a long lasting stay in products.

[1] http://linuxreviews.org/features/3ddesktop/

[2] http://desk3d.sourceforge.net/

Thanks for the info and I agree - it was a pretty doomed UX to begin with and definitely not the first time 3d made an appearance on the desktop. The keynote definitely had a wow effect to it though, and it came from an unusual “competitor”.

> As you said, the problem with this is its gimmicky; not productive.

Things like that being gimmicky is not the major problem. The major problem is they rely on 3D hardware which (or its drivers probably) is always more or less quirky. I have not seen a single PC on which Compiz would perform reliably without occasional crashes and/or artifacts and I can see no practical reason for a window manager to use hardware 3D as window decorations are not that hard to render, alt+tab task-switching 3D cube is hardly useful and wobbly windows effect is not just useless but also annoying. I believe there should be a category of "wow! cool!" window managers with all kinds of Hollywood effects for fancy demos, cool kids, drivers debugging and concept experimentation but no serous distro should rely on them the way Canonical did cementing a Compiz into Unity.

At the same time I would love to try a WM like the one by the link running in a VR environment and controlled with old-school cyberpunk VR gloves or something.

Just a small nitpick: Solaris wasn't GPLed, but remains CDDL

The source was reclosed back in 2010 when Oracle bought Sun.

This is only partially accurate. Parts of Solaris continued to be published under the CDDL and other licenses after that. But yes, the kernel and parts of the system libraries were no longer published. Remember that unlike Linux, Solaris is more than just a kernel.

I wonder if after that, the copies that were distributed under GPL could still be distributed as such. Are the GPL kernel and system library sources still available to download from somewhere (like archive.org or maybe a Solaris fan's website)?

Yes, they could, but no significant part of OpenSolaris was GPL -- it was all, as much as possible, CDDL. When Oracle killed OpenSolaris that did not cause the previously CDDL'ed code to be no-longer open source, and indeed, there was a fork: Illumos.

Looking at their source code dump for 11.4, nearly everything that isn't GPL is missing. It's less open than macos.

Then you're probably looking in the wrong place for the non-GPL items. Those are typically on github, for example:

https://github.com/oracle/solaris-ips

That's the only Solaris item on Oracle's github, and it's just the package manager. Where's the rest of the OS?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com