so your argument is that Solaris created IPS because they wanted to
steal a rpm of ksh93?
I'm not here to argue one way or another.
It is well documented that at IPS creation time, Solaris userspace was in a terrible
state, both terribly incomplete and (for the bits that were present) in various states of
disarray and obsolescence. You could visit any (former) SUN customer and they would all
tell you "thanks god Linux is solid enough I no longer need to bother with the
horrible Solaris userspace". SUN was surviving on its kernel and its hardware, and
then (after the Txxxx clusterfuck and Solaris x86 cancellation) not at all.
SUN was begging for customers to wait for IPS that would solve all this. However a package
manager does not make a distribution by itself, as this list should know. Part of the
catch up was massive import of Linux (usually RHEL/Fedora) spec files. (Another was to
make Java package-friendly, which should finally bear fruits in Java 9).
It's not "stealing" when it is explicitly authorized by the license.
But, I don't care enough about SUN or Solaris to dig up all the public SUN statements
in internet archives. Continue to think package generation is spontaneous once you've
coded the package manager if you like.
--
Nicolas Mailhot