Date: Tue, 18 May 1999 01:05:44 -0400 (EDT)
From: Evan Leibovitch <evan@telly.org>
To: Caldera Users Mailing List <users@lists.calderasystems.com>
Subject: A very interesting development...


While I'm not shy (as many of you know), I also don't go out of my way to
flog things I'm involved in (unless someone wants to get into an argument
over certification :-).

But this one has been in the making for weeks, and I'm more than a little
proud of it. It appears that my company has been able to actually help
free a piece of genuine proprietary Unix(r) source code -- I believe this
is the first time ever this has been done.

It's a small start, but a start nonetheless. SCO will be releasing the
'sar' System V performance-monitoring suite under the Mozilla Public
License, and Starnix will be overseeing and maintaining the development of
'osar' -- an OS-independant implementation of 'sar' and related programs.
The intention is to have (at least) implementations of 'sar' for Linux,
the two SCO OSs, FreeBSD, and BeOS. Osar is to be a fully-opened "bazaar"
project once the bits of the existing code that are proprietary (not owned
by SCO so they can't release it) are cleaned out.

Given all the hoopla regarding Linux performance and tuning, it would
appear that the announcement of a free version of 'sar' comes at a very
good time...

Look for the announcement of 'osar' at a Freshmeat mirror near you...

(For those who are not familiar with 'sar', a small introduction is
offered at http://www.itlibrary.com/library/0672304023/unx19.htm#I40)

- Evan