Sun Says OpenSolaris Will Challenge Linux 405
E5Rebel writes "Sun Microsystems has ambitious plans for the commercial and open source versions of its Solaris operating system. The company hopes to achieve for Solaris the kind of widespread uptake already enjoyed by Java. This means challenging Linux. 'There's an enormous momentum building behind Solaris,' according to Ian Murdock, chief operating platforms officer at Sun, who was chief technology officer of the Linux Foundation and creator of the Debian Linux distribution. Isn't it all a bit late?"
OpenSolaris (Score:5, Funny)
Won't a new one tear us,
Unless they first
Have Ballmer chair us,
Great documentation--
Now that could scare us.
Burma Shave
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This is probably correct. With a "--".
I recently had to try to read the spagetty which is the OpenSolaris TCP implementation and frankly it felt exactly like this "--". Great documentation--; for very line, through the entire monolythic single multimegabyte
No thanks, compared to that I will actually take BSD any day. That is actually documented. Both outside the code and inside it.
It is quite entertaining to see Murdock making such claims. He actually forgets that the greatest
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Re:OpenSolaris (Score:4, Interesting)
To be honest, I think it's all a good thing. Lots of free operating systems give guys like me more cud to chew, more options to bring to our bosses and/or clients.
Re:OpenSolaris (Score:5, Informative)
What? [opensolaris.org] I'm not exactly sure what you mean, but it seems pretty good code to me. It's big, and there are some gotos, but it's all well explained. It definitely doesn't seem as bad as you make out.
If one of my developers turned in code like that.. (Score:3, Insightful)
I see absolutely nothing wrong with that code, other than you have to be a decent programmer to hack on it...and understand many details about TCP implementation.
Which is totally reasonable, considering what it does! It's a not a recipe database, it's a freakin' protocol stack!
Re:OpenSolaris (Score:4, Insightful)
What? Are you on crack? Code is NOT documentation. You HAVE to add a manual somewhere, else it's "just a program". And that's the biggest problem with Linux. Documentation. There's a million things you can do and very few of them are documented. So you have to google everything. You'll have to end up at some obscure list server (which WILL be offline when you click on it, so pray that web.archive.org has a copy).
The other day I had this situation: A SCSI drive failed and md was degraded (raid-1). The drive was unaccessible, I didn't know that. So I went ahead and installed a new kernel. LILO was bitching about not being able to find
I had to boot Debian Rescue, mount my drive (it's a LVM on MD). I figured, what I had to do was just very simple:
boot
mount the partition
lilo and read the config file from the partition... that didn't work, the files weren't there
ok, so I chroot into the directory. lilo. didn't work either, something about
ls
I would love to see a newbie doing all that guesswork just to recover a fucked MBR.
Regarding to the "high end enterprise bells and whistles": ZFS alone made me switch my Linux server to Solaris. I lost, completely lost, 320GB of data due to the piece of shit Truecrypt for Linux, supposedly "stable". Now I have a zpool with iscsi-exported zvols, that took like 2 minutes to make.
The great about solaris is that it WORKS. Right there and then: it just works. If it doesn't work, that's it. They don't pretend that it works only to have it hang at the worst moment (or worse: fuck 320GB of your data). I think that's another problem with Linux: version numbers. Serious programmers put 0.0.1-pre-alpha on their versions, so you kind of know what you can expect. Others just go and version 1.0 (and when you try to run that program, you realize that this isn't a 1.0 version). I don't think corporate folks like beta software, and that's what keeps Linux off the enterprise too.
Linux makes a great LAMP server, Asterisk server, etc. But that's because of the support behind those products. Asterisk, PHP, etc are backed by serious companies.
And don't let me get started on the stupid fights about the scheduler, while this isn't an issue on Solaris (http://blogs.sun.com/darren/entry/new_linux_sche
Re:OpenSolaris (Score:5, Interesting)
As someone who has had to recover Solaris software raid out of f*** state on multiple occasions I can ensure you that it did not use to be any better. In fact it was worse. Booting, repopulating devices, devices missing, having your MBT f**** up. Yep. Been there seen that. An all of the great three - linux, bsd and solaris. All of them suck equally bad so I will not recommend a newbie doing any software raid in the first place. Disclaimer - I have not tried opensolaris for this though
I lost, completely lost, 320GB of data due to the piece of shit Truecrypt for Linux, supposedly "stable". If you have 320GB of data, if you are brave enough to play with LVM and software RAID and you also smack TrueCrypt on it. Well... You are expected to have enough clue to have backups... If you do not...
The great about solaris is that it WORKS. Right there and then: it just works. May I suggest that you run a couple of hundred of servers with it in an Internet facing environment first. I have suffered from it and I have seen the lot. F*** up filesystems, MBR cockups, software raid bloopers, applications managing to make the kernel through the Sparc equivalent of GPF from the depth of the scheduler (something linux has not done for a very long time), the lot. Granted it has been a while, and most of it was not under OpenSolaris which has supposedly been "improved". Though as people say, once you get burned you stay away from it.
the scheduler, while this isn't an issue on Solaris. Now do not get me started here either. Since the day of 2.5 every Solaris release has been released with a scheduler that has been heralded as the best and above the rest. In every f*** release the marketing droids has screamed that Solaris is right, everyone else is wrong everyone's else scheduler sucks and Solaris is the best. After that they accepted "everyone else" scheduler concepts in the next release. Sorry mate, people here have not forgotten the abomination of lightweight threads. People have not forgotten the screams of Solaris marketing droids about the greatness of the N:M model. There are also people who have had to program the actual scheduler internal priority tables and retune it for job loads different from default. All of this just to find out that the next release completely fucks it up to move to different semantics from the ground up. Rinse, repeat...
Do you like it or not scheduler is always a flamewar because every scheduler sucks. Just it sucks differently for different people so there will always be one to flame away (especially after failing a testcase miserably).
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ZFS sounds great, but I don't think it's fair to compare TrueCrypt (which is not included with the kernel, and doesn't have too many users testing it) with ZFS (which is one of Solaris 10's most valuable feature
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back in the day, the people using this stuff were programmers, so the code made for good docs ( kinda ) because it was new, untested, and really just a toy. Today, it is a big player in real world applications and systems. Most people just hang on to what we said over 10 years ago. It's starting to sound like a broken record. The Linux zealots keep yelling the same thing. I write drivers, port drivers and all that crap, and I'm sorry to say Linux needs to come up with
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We have some servers with multiple NIC's in the same subnet due to limitations of our hosting provider. On Linux, if a request comes in on NIC 1, the response may go out on NIC 1, 2, or 3. This causes no end of havoc as the server claims the response went fine, but any firewalls between the client and server will fai
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What is the platform? (Score:4, Insightful)
Sun's interest in pushing two separate platforms is baffling.
Re:What is the platform? (Score:5, Insightful)
I encourage more competition for Linux. A free market is built on competition. Now that Microsoft is becoming a competitor rather than an oppressive regime, it'll be naturally selected out and increasingly powerful Unix systems will dominate the market. A Linux monopoly is not a good thing either, and whether BSDs or Solaris share the market, we all stand to benefit.
It'd be even better if we had some license consolidation, but hey, that's a pipe dream. I'd rather have license-incompatible code than no code at all because people refuse to use GPLvX.
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thanks but we don't a wanted a Big Bloated Java Kernel. we want a lean c one...
Re:What is the platform? (Score:4, Funny)
Dr Tanenbaum, please come back.. all is forgiven [minix3.org]
Re:What is the platform? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:What is the platform? (Score:5, Insightful)
A monopoly-style OSS project would lead to more innovation, in fact, because with more users wanting more features, the project will have both a larger pool of ideas to choose from as well as a larger pool of developers to implement and grow the project. Growth encourages growth, at least as far as OSS is concerned.
Competition, OTOH, draws finite resources away from the developer pool. While ideas may be freely shared, developer time cannot be, so a project that gets X number of hours of work will have monopolized that time for that project. Sometimes this work can be easily shared among other projects, but most of the time it cannot be shared without significant porting and adaptation. Competition fragments the development effort of all OSS projects.
The only competition that truly exists in OSS is the competition of ideas. The actual implementation of code is where this is fought. If idea A has more support than idea B, it will be idea A that gets implemented. In this way, in democratic fashion, the best ideas (alternatively, the most popular ideas) get turned into reality. When the small group of idea B supporters break away from the main project to proceed with implementing their idea, only time will be able to tell whether idea A or idea B was the right way to go. But it is an unnecessary competition and draws resources away from the improvement of the platform.
Competition against Microsoft or Sun is not the reason Linux improves over time. Rather, it is because users who want to use Linux implement the features that they want so that the platform grows to fit them. As it grows to fit them, it also grows to fit everyone. The additive nature of OSS sees to it that the best ideas stick around and the lousy ones get tossed away. That's not to say that Linux isn't stuck in the Unix rut, because it is. It's that if there were no Linux, there would be something else.
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Be sure that your definition of "input" extends to cold, hard cash, and "users" also includes companies.
A variety of companies in one market, say, CPUs and motherboards, might avoid significant cost by sponsoring a consortium to write a kernel that scales across architectures and configurations. Linux is an example. The trick is to find an HMFIC with enough technical skill and managerial talent to keep the wheels on the bus.
Re:What is the platform? (Score:5, Interesting)
Linux has Linus as the benevolent dictator. Linux is freakin' awesome, but other projects do things differently, and can often justify them one way or another. If these projects are allowed to bring those ideas into reality, and demonstrate their value, Linux could copy the ideas.
Look at BSD's kqueue, spawned in FreeBSD. It's really good. Around the time it was spawned, Linux still had poll, and then later epoll, but epoll isn't that great. Now Linux is getting new event notification systems, of varying sanity, because kqueue has shown it can be done much better, even if the Linux guys don't quite agree with it in its entirety.
For all we know, Linux might end up re-architecturing to have natural SSI like DragonFly plans to have. DragonFly can be a great proof of concept. And if, a few years from now, the market situation is such that implementing drivers, software support, etc. is easy, the developer resources can focus on making a competitive, usable product instead of playing catchup with basic hardware support. We'll see an explosion of useful, interoperable operating systems, that would have otherwise died just trying to be runnable at all. *Especially* with virtualization platforms reducing the amount of code necessary to get a live kernel, and improving debuggability, deployment flexibility, etc. The mere anticipation floors me.
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Re:What is the platform? (Score:5, Insightful)
If 90% of people used a particular open-source program, I'd dare to call that program a winner. And if nobody used a particular open-source program, I'd dare to call that program a loser. The rest is idealistic crap.
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Monopolies are rarely a good thing - either closed/proprietary or free/open.
Re:What is the platform? (Score:5, Insightful)
Your faith in Microsoft being 'naturally selected out' is.... amusing. Considering, after years of barely adequate products, they still have 90% plus marketshare of desktops, and last I checked, they were still oppressing various standards bodies, hardware manufacturers, small software houses, etc., I think the corpse is still walking around, talking FUD, and otherwise making a nuisance of itself. The Linux Monopoly you fear is... a bit far-fetched just yet, IMHO. When I start seeing KDE desktops in some of the small offices I walk into, then I'll believe it.
Of course, this move by Sun is to try and make that happen; many non-computer people like 'simplicity', in the sense of getting everything from one computer vendor with minimum fuss on their part, assuming that things will work together more smoothly then. So, Sun offers a machine running OpenSolaris, with StarOffice preinstalled, as well as a really fast JVM. Worth a shot...
Re:What is the platform? (Score:5, Insightful)
Gradually the government switches, corporations switch, and finally users switch. The numbers indicate it's happening anyway, and the format war is just going to nail the coffin on Microsoft's monopoly. They never even had a monopoly on servers, gaming technology, etc. so the office is their last stand, and in a matter of days it will be confirmed that they have lost that too.
And of course, as the demand for Linux installations grows, and more vendors sell pre-packaged Linux, then hardware contracts will also require useful drivers or even documentation, and the hardware situation will be largely solved too. Sit back and relax, freedom has won and the liberation continues as planned.
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Yep - I think that just the awareness of alternatives caused by Apple is good; once you look at one alternative, it's easier to look
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The OS is just a bootloader for the Java VM.
Not even close. the JVM does not implement a filesystem, or a network stack, or virtual memory management system, or any device drivers, or threading, or low-level graphics operations, or ...
Java is fine, but don't confuse it with an entire modern operating system.
Solaris (Score:4, Insightful)
level. There are a lot of Sun Servers out there so they'd like to increase
that further in companies who want cheaper hardware than the sparcs.
From a TCO point of view, add Solaris X86 to your existing Sparcs isn't
that big of a deal and Sun has made pretty good progress in making Solaris
10 much more on equal footing with Sparc based Solaris so now you only
need admins who are expert at one OS, you've got easier compatibility
with your software etc. Then from there I see a push to companies who
don't use Sparc hardware.
Re:This is basic Business 101 stuff.. (Score:5, Interesting)
"Isn't it all a bit late?" (Score:5, Funny)
It's rarely ever too late (Score:5, Interesting)
MS Word vs WordPerfect 5.1
What about Linux, itself was probably considered "too late" or such at the time "Everything's been invented/done".
What about when Redhat was top dog - who'd have thought that Ubuntu would come along and change a lot of things.
The point is, it's [almost] never too late, just sometimes you have a harder job ahead of you.
Re:It's rarely ever too late (Score:5, Interesting)
If zfs is not ported to linux due to license problems, Ill install solaris on my home file/backup server.
Re:It's rarely ever too late (Score:4, Insightful)
However, a stable kernel ABI - which Linux doesn't have - is FAR more important, as it means hardware manufacturers are far more likely to release drivers for your platform that can just be installed with the hardware. If Solaris on the desktop started outnumbering Linux on the desktop, my bets would be it would have everything to do with hardware manufacturers being able to ship a driver for $random_hardware, and little to do with ZFS.
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No it doesn't. I run Linux/PPC and I *never* see hardware manufacturers releasing drivers for their hardware on it. Heck, it's hard enough to get decent drivers for Linux/x86-64 from them. I don't see them doing decent drivers for a other chipsets that run on systems that use standard hardware interfaces (PCI, etc...) either. They're just not interested.
The only way to get a decent driver for Linux (Not Lin
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I would love th
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Exactly.
Windows fans, and Microsoft themselves, always blame any instability that Windows has on the device drive
Linux/*BSD: not beholden to Sun for a reason. (Score:2)
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unix, funny name (Score:2)
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What can Sun bring to the table? (Score:4, Insightful)
XFS (Score:2)
bash-3.2$ df
Filesystem kbytes used avail capacity Mounted on
zpool1 17193093120 39 17193092990 1%
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Sure, XFS (Score:4, Interesting)
$df -h .
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
$df -k .
Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
I just ran this on my laptop (an 'average' system, though I assume your system with 16 TB of storage is not really 'average'. I too can have big block devices with a single filesystem, big deal. Go commercial, ala GPFS and you can do bigger (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_file_
ZFS's power is not the filesystem size. It unifies a lot of things historically in different layers. I.e. software raid, storage pools, dynamic new filesystems, long term snapshotting. Most of these can be done without ZFS, but the creating filesystems and long-term snapshotting can be done with such ease and efficiency when all the 'layers' work together, and that is what ZFS brings to the table. I will say ext3cow would give me the single feature that most appeals to me about ZFS, and the rest I can do using LVM and such.
In the end, ZFS is the single point that tempts me in general about Solaris, but I'm not about to jump platforms when I know enough 'tricks' to get 'good enough' out of my existing platform.
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So does everybody that use Windows.
Eivind.
How can we lose? (Score:3, Interesting)
But on second thought, I can think of one bad scenario: OpenSolaris and Linux end up with different groups of users, where-as they previously would have mostly used Linux. This makes it harder for *either* open-source OS to get enough market share to attract ISVs, manufacturers writing device drivers, etc.
I guess the best of both worlds is if Linux and OpenSolaris kind of merge, resulting in a single OS with the strengths of both (for example, the goodness of getting dtrace into Linux).
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It has some interesting potential for consolidation; you can pull a hard drive from a Linux server, plug it into a BSD or Solaris machine, and with a tiny bit of tweaking have the system run as a virtual server.
No, I don't think it's too late at all (Score:3, Insightful)
No, I don't think it's too late at all. If it's a decent operating system and has certain advantages over Linux (regardless as to whether or not Linux in turn has certain other advantages over it), then it will eventually catch on. In the world of software, it's never too late to introduce competing technologies.
Sure it is fscking late ! (Score:5, Interesting)
this chance was missed a few times. The last one was when Nexenta was treated like a mother-in-law.
If SUN wanted acceptance instead of l33t, GPL(v3) would have been the order of the day.
As long as they dangle about with CDDL, they might as well pass away. Don't get me wrong, CDDL ('cuddle') is quite a good FOSS licence. But it has its problems with a coexistence side-by-side to GPL. And GNU is, love it or hate it, thousands of great applications; and moreover a licence accepted by the majority of FOSS developers.
I hope(d) Ian would have the power to apt-ing Solaris, but he doesn't seem to. And when you read the OpenSolaris lists, you find as much ego-tripping as on OpenBSD or Mac. They rather sink with pkgadd.
And I cry for them, yes, because SunOS is the greatest kernel around, with limited hardware support. Back to licencing and square one.
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How could they have chosen this as the license already when it was finalized just a few months ago?
GPLv3 is their big chance (Score:2)
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Most major Linux developments these days are sponsored, and so I would expected it to be with OpenSolaris.
Re:Sure it is fscking late ! (Score:4, Insightful)
Place blame where it belongs - GPL is the one bringing the heavy restrictions creating license incompatibility with EVERYTHING that cannot be converted directly to the GPL (including all BSD style licenses, if you do an exact reading of the GPL and BSD licenses.)
Eivind.
I remember when they opened the source (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I remember when they opened the source (Score:5, Insightful)
I recall people saying similar things, only about Linux, back in the 90s. "Linux is the next big thing", Pundits and advocates trumpeted "Corporations will move to Linux as their preferred server/service platform", and so on. That pretty much did happen, but it took the better part of a decade to realize it. It took the one thing that a not even the most talented coders can't create during an all-night coding binge: Time.
OpenSolaris is a hair over 2 years old now. If you think about it, most decently sized shops change out comodity infrastructure every 3-4 years, a time frame pimarily goverened by hardware warranties. If an organization says "Let's try another OS the next time around... lets try Solaris" then the proper time to do that would be consumate with normal upgrade cycles. In other words, no one can reasonably expect one thing (Solaris in this case) to massively gain meaningful, measurable share instantly. It takes time. Just like it did with Linux.
fine (Score:3, Insightful)
Solaris has known stability... (Score:3, Insightful)
One of my boxes downstairs, a recent machine (less than 6 months old) running stock Debian (amd64) without a mod to the sources.lst has a slight instability (almost certainly in a driver) and crashes every week or so.
Now, one could say that I should replace the hardware which has the suspect driver (always seems to be on a disk access). Or I should get on the Debian lists and report it. If it was a Sun Solaris box I would know that the hardware I had was (or was not) supported. The word 'Supported' in the Linux world really (I am sorry) does not mean as much as it does to Sun.
Now I have other Linux boxen, (a little older) which have uptimes of over a year. No problems. But on odd occasions as this I would like to have stability and I can't find it. (Read, maybe don't have the time at the moment). And I need the box UP. I can't rebuild it AGAIN! I am on the 6th distro in an attempt to gain stability. That's an aside.
In Sun's world. You pay a little more for your hardware and 'Know' it is going to work.
I could not case less for Solaris,... (Score:3, Interesting)
So please could anyone tell me, what are the USP's of Solaris?
Solaris as Hypervisor for Linux VMs? (Score:3, Interesting)
Last time I checked, Xen was not fully ready for prime time on Solaris. But, that was quite a while ago. If it's Xen is stable, and has good management tools, Solaris would make a good hypervisor. For security reasons, I think it's also nice to have different OS's in the hypervisor and VMs -- making it less likely a single exploit can rip through all layers.
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Oh, really? (Score:2)
There's an enormous momentum building behind Solaris
And where's that? In the Sun break room? Look out! It's a Solaris Tsunami!
Don't think so.
It's NEVER TOO LATE because..... (Score:2)
2 powers houses (Score:2, Interesting)
Open Solaris + Java
Linux + ????
Basically leaves Linux as the bastard step-child with no framework of their own. They kind of have MONO...and they DO have java....but how long til "incompatibilities" start popping up, now that Sun is pushing into the OS market?
Not convinced... (Score:3, Informative)
So on the technical front, there remain kinks to work out. In the meantime, Linux has incredible momentum, incredible talent in the market, and from a business standpoint, is in an advantageous position. Linux has more corporate backing (you want serious software support for Solaris, you have only Sun to choose really, while in Linux, well, at least Novell and RedHat are serious software support contenders, and more hardware vendors embrace Linux than Solaris).
The other sad thing was the Solaris platform package management. Nexenta was a refreshing thing to evaluate, but looking at the community at large it seems Nexenta gets the shaft. It's all up to Indiana to see if they can pull off a well-accepted, decent package/repository system. I have to admit, this is by *far* the biggest thing Linux platforms have going for it (apt/yum) and very much outweighs the benefits of ZFS (it's like apples and oranges, true, but when you have to pick one or the other...). Of course, the Nexenta situation points to them not pursuing the other thing they need to be a Linux contender, they'd have to allow other companies to have control and be able to provide software support on their own without any help or money exchange with Sun themselves. The question is if they did that, would Sun's share of the Solaris market still be more than the current Solaris market in the face of a dominant Linux market, and I really have no idea. They might just have to lose out on Solaris to make it have a chance, and that really gets them nowhere. It's a fine line to walk and it wil be interesting to see what they do to try to pull it off.
Division is not good. (Score:2, Interesting)
- Minix had switched policy to 160$ for the diskettes.
- The BSDs said that they were going to go free, but the board of directors didn't want to lose potential profits and that was constantly delayed.
- MS-DOS is not an operating system.
We were in a deadend. Linux was the right thing at the time.
*After* linux took off, the others got scared and as a *reaction* to linux, started giving out open/free o
It's not going to take over anytime soon... (Score:2)
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SUN is horrible on the desktop (Score:2)
Though their Sun Ray clients are easy on the administrator and the best on the market, you just got to love a thin client with two monitors at 1920x1200 (Sun Ray 2FS) [sun.com]. They are also pretty ceap $200 - $600.
"...uptake already enjoyed by Java" (Score:2)
Personally, I already think Java's becoming obsolete [beplacid.net], but I don't see the same fate for OpenSolaris.
Sounds good to me.. (Score:4, Interesting)
Yawn (Score:3, Interesting)
* Has as much open drivers as Linux has;
* When it has ALSA (I know, it sucks sorta, but it works at least);
* When it has very vibrant and lively developer and user community;
* And when you don't have to release such PR to say 'momentum is building behind OpenSolaris'. I know hyping is sometimes quite cool, but it is just sick.
People hype about ZFS. But do really there are mass defection to OpenSolaris because of that? I don't.
No big deal. Can easyly be done. (Score:5, Interesting)
2.) Use a pimped zshell as shell with a prime quality default setup and some good-looking, neat tutorials to get the Bash crowd in line for it.
3.) De-suckify the entire grafical desktop stack, unifing GTK and QT with the same, one and only default theme that looks good.
4.) Use APT as distribution system.
5.) GPL Solaris and remove the distinction between Solaris and OpenSolaris.
6.) Build a marketing army to push Solaris as "Mac OS X" for all non-Apple computers and 'the better open Unix variant / the better Linux' at the same time.
There's only one big problem in all this: Sun. They are a technology driven company. Gigs like Apple or Canonical (Ubuntu) are vision driven and have a single boss who's considered king. They have a vision and they convey it to any opinion leader in the industry they care about.
Suns staff wouldn't know a well designed desktop or a constently marketed brand if you showed it in their face. Just look at the video presentations from JavaOne. Anyone delivering such a presentation at Apples MacWorld would lose his job the next day. Sun is putting out CEO computable marketing babble and if at all they will only come through half way.
Mind you, Solaris overtaking Linux is possible. Theoretically. Solaris has the prime advantage of not having an image torn to tiny bits and pieces by a thousand distributions - if Sun would do all the things mentioned above they could seriously capitalize on this distinction to Linux. But as I mentioned allready, they lack the vision and conceptual consitency to really pull through with it. That's my experience anyway.
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and
These two concepts are mutually exclusive. GPL'ing Solaris will undoubtedly create a thousand distributions. I believe the biggest problem people have in understanding the situation is that Solaris is an OS, not just a kernel (like Linux). Sun doesn't have to beat Linux as a whol
Less talk, more action (Score:4, Informative)
It's been two years and still there is no self-hosting OpenSolaris distribution. Again, there is no self-hosting OpenSolaris distribution. Again, there is yet to be ANY self-hosting OpenSolaris distribution. Not Nexenta, not Belenix, not Schillix, and sorry but Solaris Express is not open nor freely redistributable.
Source or no source, if that damn thing can't even be made to be self-hosting, and the resulting product freely-redistributable, then it can't even be compared with Linux, much less overtake it. Enough with the smoke and mirrors already
I fell for this hype two years ago when all the rage about Solaris 10 came out. Here's the deal: ZFS - great. DTrace - amazing. The Solaris kernel - truly exceptional. The userland, installer, package system, and general feel of the OS - horrendously bad ... so awful that it sent all of us who tried it screaming back to Linux and BSD. And they are still going to stick with that awful package system -- even after Nexenta has done all the work to get Apt working, even after hiring Ian Murdock. And that's the amazing thing: Nexenta is a shining example of a budding community that has filled in almost every glaring gap that Solaris was lacking and rather than gobble it up, Sun has basically patted it on the head like a good little wannabe and marched right on by drunk in its typical, massive, NIH syndrome.
Not a chance. Keep the press releases coming, hire all the Linux people you want, but at the end of the day, I have at least two choices for a self-hosting, community-driven operating system with package systems, installers, and userlands that work now, not in years to come.
And Sun, please stop with the "we're gonna beat Linux" crap. Haven't you learned by now that that doesn't help you. The whole "us verses them" mentality has no place in the community, and just makes you look like an ass. Linux earned its place. Earn yours, with action, not press releases.
The TV Ad (Score:3, Funny)
SATURDAYsaturday, at the WORLD SOFTWARE FEDERATION'S OPEN SOURCE WARS, see Son of Java take on the Mighty Herd of Penguins in a STEEL CAGE GRUDGE MATCH!
Watch as the up and coming challenger ROARS its defiance and CHARGES! Watch as the hoard of cute little defenders mass together TRANSFORMER-LIKE into the implacable foe we know and love!
Will OpenSolaris be able to take the away the WSF crown away from Tux?
Will the Penguin bide its time and then DESTROY the challenger with righteousness like it did with last week's challenger SCO?
Will the lumbering, slumbering giant from Redmond wake up and SPEW OLD CODE to join the fight or will it continue to snooze and pretend NOT TO NOTICE?
SATURDAYsaturday, see the UNMOVABLE FORCE take on the UNSTOPPABLE OBJECT at the OPEN SOFTWARE WARS from the WSF, where YOU the VIEWER are in... connnTROOOLLLLLLLL.........
(Offer not valid in any country according to Microsoft; side effects may include multiple reformattings, several competing discussion groups, too many vaporware announcements on Slashdot, flamewars, and paying different prices for different versions of free software; for external use only, your mileage may vary, do not taunt Happy Fun Ball).
Most people can't tell the difference (Score:3, Insightful)
So you assume the wold is closer to it's end than it's beginning? No, there are thousands of years still to go. we are only just beginning with computers. It is hardly "late".
Most end users could not tell the difference between Solaris and Linux. Users interact with the graphical desktops system, web browsers and text editors. Most sys admins deal with the server software, like Apache or the shell. All of this is exactly the same on both Linux and Solaris. The differences are closer to the kernel and how each handles virtualization and the file systems. Thinks most users don't know much about.
Today I think your hardware drives the choice between Linuux and Solaris. If you need high end SPARC hardware Solaris is the way to go but Linux runs better on commodity PC hardware. And Linux has been ported to embedded processors and I doubt Solaris ever will reach for the low end
Obviously Solaris will succeed (Score:3, Insightful)
On kernel talk (Score:3, Insightful)
Let me go kinda off-topic, I find it odd that when people talk of the wonders of Linux they are rarely talking about the kernle itself.
Take ubuntu for example, all what makes it "Linux for human beings" are actually things outside the kernel.
More and more the user experiences less of the kernel and more of other things like X or a DE
Everybody (In the linux world) seems to have an inclination about gnome or KDE or another de over windows' and name the advantage
Another big group prefers it for open source in general and not really for the Linux kernel itself.
I like "Linux" for most of these reasons, open source, gnome being customizable in a way I like, the unix file system structure and symlinks. None of this is specific to the kernel itself.
And solaris got symlinks, and is unix like, and can run gnome. This said if it gets a GPL license it will get more attention from the world and if it gets a GPLv3 license I might even consider switching.
Solaris Won't Stop Linux (Score:3, Interesting)
But it just may be slowing it down:
Re: (Score:2)
I do however find it hard to believe Solaris can take on Linux as a whole and come out tops.
Good luck to them however, if they dont play any MS scare tactics I'll be glad to have them as another viable competitor to Linux. I've not really had that much joy with Solaris personally, but like Novel I respect their roots and believe that if any big iron corporation can do an IBM then Sun can.
Java is *the* business language (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
And big business is taking it seriously. Lots of feasibility studies and pilot projects at the
moment but thats how java started off.
Plus java on the mainframe has been tried and found wanting, big iron developers are returning to COBOL
and good old C.
Java is tomorows legacy language.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
The probem is that even if it becomes a legacy language, it'll still be used... just like COBOL.
As for which one is easier to use, I think that's a matter of the IDE you use. Eclipse is rather good and has some ni
Re:Too late, too irrelevant (Score:4, Informative)
No [tiobe.com], hardly.
It's quite rare now to see any client programs written in Java;
Not in the business world, where Swing clients are probably second only after Visual Basic. Sun is also currently putting a lot of effort into improving the JVM desktop experience [java.net].
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Yep, but after the opensourcing of Java, I see a bright future for gcj and classpath.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
".. Java runs on more devices than Microsoft Windows, Linux, Solaris, Symbian and the Mac combined. Nearly 4 billion devices at this point, from smart cards to consumer devices, DVD players to set top boxes, medical equipment, all the way up into the majority of the world's transactional systems and 8 out of every 10 cellphones sold."
http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/fueling_the_ne twork_effect [sun.com]
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Re: (Score:2)