Slashdot Mirror

So, let's get this right. the BEST that Linux can get is a murderer and a SUN REJECT? lol quality.

Excuse me, I think I'll stick to a REAL OS that features a REAL FS backed by a REAL company!

um, Unlike linux companies, they can sink, a butload of cash into Networking R&D and come up with this.

While Sun may not be the strongest FOSS advocate, they've made many adjustments over the past few years to open up several products.

Stop right there. Sun is one of the biggest corporate contributors to open source. Go ahead, count lines of code. I'm betting Sun will be in the top two if not #1.

Here's a brief list of things Sun has open sourced:
Solaris - Their entire OS, including ZFS and Dtrace
SPARC - Their CPU line
Java - Maybe you've heard of it.
OpenOffice - The office suite that ships with every desktop Linux distribution.
VirtualBox - A GPL desktop virtual machine.
NetBeans IDE - A multi-platform IDE.
OpenDS - LDAP Directory Server
High Availability Cluster

Honorable mention:
NFS - The Network File System
vi - developed by Sun founder Bill Joy
MySQL - Now owned and maintained by Sun-paid engineers

So, next time you say Sun hadn't done much for open source, look again. It would be a shame if Sun was bought by Oracle and all of their valuable contributions were abandoned.

> Microsoft can't offer Windows for free until it loses it's monopoly.

Why? They happen to be the absolute LAST vendor trying to sell a PC operating system. So who would they be accused of competing unfairly against? Sun/Solaris? Red Hat? Ubuntu? Apple doesn't really count since they only sell hardware/software bundles. OS/2 is long since in the grave and NOBODY gives a crap about SCO/UNIXWare.

If they strongarm OEMs to preload Windows instead of competing systems it would be an anti-trust problem whether they sell it or give it away.

Just sayin'

First, this is about OpenSolaris, not Solaris. The differences are staggering.
*gasp* a live CD!

Unless you job is to write and compile and or run Solaris X86 Apps.

s/Solaris/Solaris & OpenSolaris/
That's actually a very big reason Sun is spending all this time on OpenSolaris, AFAIK. Solaris is a very strong server OS, and they want more developer mindshare. OpenSolaris aims to fix the problems Solaris has on the desktop. It really is a shame that Linux is replacing Solaris in the datacenter in many cases because of its desktop exposure to sysadmins. I work with sysadmins that overlook every SINGLE feature of Solaris that deviates from Linux's offerings. "Jumpstart is just a poor kickstart imitation", silly userland GNU tools (that can are often are installed on Solaris servers) are more important than SAN management, tight hardware integration, better filesystems, per user/application limit settings without reboots (/etc/system stuff), RBAC, SMF init, the list goes on.
You know, for that mater, we could use the same argument for Linux & Windows or Linux & Mac OS X. Unless you need to write, compile, run Linux apps, what is the point? You have real desktop systems on one hand, and a real server systems on the other. In the middle is Linux. The argument for software freedom only goes so far. I don't think it's even part of the equation for Linux in the datacenter but it gets selected anyway while offering... well, I don't know if it offers any real features above these others OS's that concerns typical datacenter operations.

communicates very well with Solaris Based Type Networks, As far as End User is concerned Linux and Solaris really look so much alike that it wouldn't be much of a learning curve.

The picture I'm drawing here is SSHD == communicates well, and end user concerns == bash? I think your shallow view is right if 'end user' refers to Linux server admins. I've had to remind annoying Linux pushers that to the real end user, Windows looks the same as UNIX servers. I'm not switching a Solaris server to Linux until they demonstrate they understand the technical pros/cons of at least ONE other OS :)

See, this is one of the problems I hope OpenSolaris solves. Solaris is so poorly understood. There's a heaping ton of value there, but Linux steals the spotlight because of geek desktop penetration. Maybe it's just the general desktop IT culture mixing with datacenter IT culture that's to blame. If one honestly thinks sudo scales to infinity servers/users, then I suppose they wouldn't look very far beyond sudo - that is the kind of person who would see no value in Solaris.. or any other OS. It always starts with "X is ideal, and less practical than Y, but X is just good enough for Z", then Z grows stupefyingly to "everyone and everything". What causes that, religion?

Solaris is superior as a server OS. But for a desktop Laptop OS... Why?

For developers. Are there that many people running Linux on a laptop for a different reason? Yah, some of you are going to tell me you use it and aren't developers. I want to know how many different languages you wrote a "Hello World" program in, and then you can turn yourselves right around. ;)

If I had to build a NAS/SAN on the cheap for work it would be something based off of OpenSolaris/ZFS. The amount of features you'll get out of ZFS/Opensolaris for free can't be beat. Really worth a look. A few products that I would say to look at are: http://www.pogolinux.com/nexenta.php http://www.nexenta.com/corp/index.php?option=com_frontpage&Itemid=148 http://www.nexenta.org/os and of course: http://www.opensolaris.com/

Here's a list of new features in the latest release:

http://www.opensolaris.com/learn/features/whats-new/200811/

What are you talking about? You can download the latest OpenSolaris right here without any registration: http://www.opensolaris.com/get/index.html
And Sun finally stepped into the new decade by finally providing a package manager by using IPS.

As for the red tape, all large open source organisations require contributors to sign some form of agreement to allow them stewardship over the code. This allows them to relicense it in the future. Sure Sun was slow and late on the uptake, but they are opening up a lot more than other companies.

I'll second that ZFS is the only filesystem I'd want to run for NAS, but instead of Nextnta Stor, I just use OpenSolaris 2008.05 for private use.

How is OpenSolaris connected to this Indiana thingy and what is the difference between Indiana and Nexenta?

My take is that Nexenta is compiling the GNU software tools and providing them in their repositories. Is Indiana doing this as well or are they just trying to mimic the package management system itself but providing no GNU software?

Anyone know?