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Free Solaris 8
quakeaddict writes "It seems Scott McNealy has some new ideas for Solaris 8 according to this article. " It's not free as in software, but free as in "no license fees". Evidently, this is going to be the center-piece of their new public-relations campaign, with the official rollout of Solaris 8 starting in February. However, a top Sun official also went on to say that Sun will "never" adopt Linux and expressed amazement that folks like IBM and others were "chasing after" Linux.
I think this is GREAT! It carries the message that Linux started delivering to it's logical conclusion. The OS isn't a profit point anymore, but merely part of the iron. Sun makes the majority of their money from the HARDWARE!
But ol' Microsoft can't say that. How do they justify thousands of dollars for W2K when their largest competitor (in the server arena in particular) isn't charging ANYTHING!
I just love it!
Have you compiled your kernel today??
First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then they join you? Sun is clearly somewhere between the ridicule and the fighting stages.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
A point well made.... Win2k is very stable and quite good (no flame intended), now if i were an admin in charge of a large server system i would rather run it on a commerciall supported *nix than somthing coded (no offence) by the general public. Linux is wonderful but commerce breads commerce. Beos is a multimedia system and will find its own snug corner in the market - but i think linux will co-exist nicely with win2k on the desktop/office workstation....
What I'm waiting for is the release of the OS-X source.
-- Count Spatula: The Culinary Vampire "...because my cooking sucks."
Hello, I am a fairly new linux user, but I am sure others have the same question:
What are the differences between Solaris and Linux?
From what I've seen, they look very similar. Thanks to all.
I can't say I'm suprised how they "scratch thier heads" in confusion at the way other co.'s like Linux. They do have their flagship product and they probably like it too (tho selling hardware is their bread and butter). Linux eats away at their smaller sales, which probably isn't all that imporatant to them.
Whats the phrase, the enemy of my enemy is my friend, at least for the moment.
It's not just an operating system. Solaris is an "operating environment".
Let's see. Solaris=environment while linux=penguin. Environments (as we all know) get abused by developers whereas penguins swim around and micturate on the environment. Highly metaphorical, no? Ok, maybe no.
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
Yeah right. Linux can't be defeated.
They will change their minds...
.edu once told me that they would NEVER use linux on their network... (They were an NT and Novell shop)
:-)
I always laugh at any place that makes such a bold statement as "we will never use Linux"...
In 1997 an administrator for a local
They have now converted several of their servers to use Linux... (about time; even though hey were "enlightened" about it ~1996...)
so...
They will come around.. it may take a while... but sooner or later those disbelievers will realize that Linux is here to stay..... and can only get better..
--
Time is on my side
http://www.zdnet.com/ zdnn/stories/news/0,4586,2426200,00.html says that the source is opened under Sun's Community Source License. Now, I know this isn't as free (as in software) as Linux but it is certainly more free (as in software) than it is at the moment.
Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.
Looks just like this thread from way earlier in the LinuxONE thread: Real UNIX Sun releasing Solaris 8 source code
Thank gawd for the regular users positng real news.
...maybe now that dumbass who posted it on every other thread for the last few days will shut the hell up. Why exactly did you have so much invested in this particular story, Mr. AC? I mean, it's not THAT big a deal.
Especially since it's not exactly unexpected or undercovered. Past slashdot stories on this theme...
"Sun to release Solaris source code" by HeUnique on Friday October 01
"Solaris to be Community Licensed" by sengan on Thursday February 25
"Sun plans open source Solaris?" by CmdrTaco on Tuesday January 12
"Solaris 7 available for $10" by sengan on Tuesday October 27
"Solaris 2.6 free" by Hemos on Monday August 10
See a pattern there?
There are times when I'll take free beer over free speech. Because sometimes you just want to shut up and drink some beer. But it's good to see that the Open Source community is having an effect on traditional business models, even if traditional businessmen still don't get it.
Yeah, it'll probably be released under the SCSL again. Big deal. We need a generic, DFSG-compliant (or whatever it's called this week) software license that doesn't scare corporate lawyers. Convincing them to use that because its good for them would be a big step for hackers everywhere.
(Almost as big as stopping people from taking our stuff because we code programs that lawyers do not like or understand. My favorite, IIRC, is probably when they did this to Steve Jackson Games in The Hacker Crackdown. That was a classic.)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I can't understand, how even with the rapid grown of the Linux scene, companies like Sun that seem to be on 'our' side refuse to join in. If anything, Sun should recognize the Linux movement as an effort to stamp out Microsoft. You'd think that they'd like the idea of ridding themselves of the petty competition.
What has been the major objection of many PHBs to using Linux on servers or workstations?
"We're not willing to trust something that's free".
Now that a defintively mainstream OS has become free (as in beer, alas, not as in speech yet), perhaps they'll start taking Linux more seriously.
Just my $0.02.
"If ignorance is bliss, may I never be happy.
-- Veni, vidi, dormivi
IBM is still embracing Linux, regardless of what Sun says. I think the real point is that Linux is portable across an amazing range of hardware. It is easy enough to leverage a known OS, with a good reputation, and an active community of open source developers. If you want it on your own hardware, you dedicate a team of programmers to writing device drivers and any other code you need specific to your iron.
... yet. Solaris can say the same. But the question is whether Sun can sustain Solaris development as a freebie. If it gives them a platform on which to sell other stuff, probably for a while. I don't know what their costs and margins look like. We'll all have to watch and see if it works for them.
Now I am well aware that AIX has some things going for it that Linux doesn't have
I for one am not going to criticize them for keeping Solaris closed source. It isn't my choice. It doesn't detract from the open source OSs that I have to choose from. Hmm. Linux CDs are still here. FreeBSD was still on the bookstore shelves at lunchtime.
The net will not be what we demand, but what we make it. Build it well.
Man, this "news" is like a month old at least. Seriously, I got an email from Sun dated Jan 10th concering Solaris 8.
Yes, please boycott /. That would make many users happy :)
------- What exactly is real?
Solaris may be more robust in some ways, but the fact is that they simply cannot compete well against Linux. This is, to me, just a simple admission of this fact.
They're playing catch-up now against an OS with much greater potential and much greater momentum. This is encouraging, though. This means that the OS is starting to become a commodity. MS will be the last to go... but when they do, it'll be spectacular.
If you can't figure out how to mail me, don't.
For linux tips: http://www.linuxtipsblog.com
All they did was rename what was going to be Solaris 2.7 to Solaris 7, since it became obvious they weren't getting out of 2.x in the observable future.
// zyqqh
I don't think this is really the case.
First consider the large number of manufacturers that have adopted linux as a second OS. It's likely that a few of them will migrate to Linux as their MAIN OS. Certainly SGI seems to be putting a large piece of their efforts into such a path.
Then there are the manufacturers like VA Linux that use it as their MAIN OS. These guys could go with another OS like one of the BSD's...but Linux has the most momentum (and external support..)
Solaris being "free" doesn't enable either of these two classes of manufacturers. It takes a third player.
Lastly - the open source movement has it's own reason for being and is it's own success story beyond linux. Solaris doesn't play into this part of the story at all.
Have you compiled your kernel today??
this is great! i've been waiting quite some time for something like this to happen, because i've heard alot abuot this OS and wanted to test it out on my box, so i'm really happy about it :)
Someone's actually posting news about real tech stuff? I thought this site was turning into People Magazine. Oh well, I guess I was wrong.
There's always something hidden. My school offered "free" OEM copies of Microsoft software this past semester (Win 98 SE, Win NT Workstation 4.0, FrontRage 98, etc.) through this agreement and naturally I was interested in picking up a few "legit" copies of Win NT. You guessed it, it wasn't exactly free - they weren't letting people take the CDs as they please.
Instead, you paid $5 for the "media" (although I don't believe it costs MS $5 to burn a CD in volume). Fair enough, I say, here's a $5 bill. Now hand me my NT!
Nope, you have to sign a contract first. Oh, this is some fun shit. I'm supposed to use it only on one machine, and only when it's in the best interest of the school, and I can forget about reselling it, or anything else...so I sign the contract and get my CD. Part of the contract I signed said that I'm only able to buy one copy - I guess MS isn't sympathetic to people with more than one PC, because if I can't buy more than one copy, and I can only use the one copy I do get on a sinlge machine, I'm SOL. Now was the software *really* free, or was it equal to the cost of the media plus agreeing to the contract?
Anyway, I got four friends to each buy me a copy and I slipped them each a $5 bill as soon as I got out of the university bookstore.
[bs]By the way, I have a couple copies of NT workstation available, $15 OBO :) Just kidding. I saw an anti-piracy expo at a recent computer fair this past weekend and it turned me into a fine Internet citizen(TM). I even destroyed those other four semi-legally acquired copies of NT as per the agreement I signed.[/bs]
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Oscarfish.com: tropical fish with attitude. Way t
Is because of the GPL. If Sun GPLs the Solaris source, then there will be competition for Linux. Until that happens, people who use Linux are likely to stick to it.
Before you yell "BSD!", think for a moment. If people were comfortable with the BSDL, why is Linux enjoying large-scale success, while *BSD is not? It doesn't matter what's more free, it's what developers and users a like are at ease with.
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"I already have all the latest software."
CNN Entertainment Story here Don Knots plays hacker Emmanuel Goldstein in the soon to be released movie.
At my work, we got a bunch of new solaris boxes. Solaris has a pretty nice install, and is decently polished out of the box. On the flipside, it is missing a lot of things people take for granted if you come from the Linux or *BSD world, like gcc, perl and apache.
On a sour note, I had a bad experience with Solaris 7. If you wanted to set up diskless clients, you were out of luck - out of the box, setting them up was broken. To get the patch, you had to have a service contract with Sun (ie lots of money!) and then search for it for quite a while. It wasn't in any of the free patchsets they distribute over the net - its like buying a car and then having to pay the dealer to fix something that was wrong with it when you bought it! This really sucks - documentation and fixes should be free!
Solaris 8 supposedly has a lot of GNU tools (including the ones mentioned above). They're finally getting a clue it looks like....
IBM, Solaris, Digital, SCO, SGI. They all used to crow about how their UNIX was better than everyone else's.
Bill Gates, meet everybody. Sorry guys, your UNIX is no longer needed.
Fast-forward to 1999. Microsoft is everywhere. While the UNIXes argued, the fox made off with the chickens. Everybody, meet Linus.
Most of the UNIX vendors decided to support, if grudgingly so, this tiny little OS we all built for the hell of it. Oh, shucks, it's kinda good, ain't it?
Scott McNealy, meet Linus. You tried to own the desktop, but that didn't work. You declared year X the year of the Network Computer. Sucks being ahead of your time by a year every twelve months, doesn't it. You tried to own JAVA, and you may yet. Ever heard of a "Pyrrhic Victory?"
It sucks taking Bill Gates' sloppy seconds, doesn't it Scott? You don't get no respect. Here's a stinking, good-for-nothing, operating system getting ten times the attention your precious darling ever could, and will.
But really, Scott, who's chasing who here? Free Solaris? Who'd a thunk it! So what, now you're going to just make the $ on hardware, right. That's what we've been trying to tell you along, if only you'd listen.
Fragmented UNIX is dying, and if you want to go down with the ship, don't expect us to come along. I don't want your operating system, not because it's expensive, but because you'd be just as bad as your Big Brother Bill, if ever given the chance.
So you'll give me Solaris. Thanks, but no thanks. Okay, it's more stable than Linux by a long shot. But the gap closes every day, old chap, and you're feeling the heat. So what, now you think we'll suddenly all switch, and wait for you to pull the rug out from under our lemonade stand like you're trying to do with Java? Fat @#$%ing chance.
We're not going to let you. Not now, not ever. IBM? Anybody remember how close to the brink they were, ten years back? I don't know about you, but they had a near-death experience, and they see the future.
Scott McNealy, meet the ghost of Computers Future. It doesn't include Solaris. Whether it includes Sun or not is up to you.
-cwk.
...this will mean that Unix as a whole will move up in the enterprise as an alternative to W2K, Novell, etc.
;-)...
Plus, more interestingly, it will put the pressure to Linux to become better. For one thing, NT was too easy a target
engineers never lie; we just approximate the truth.
It's funny that Sun says that Linux is "low end", while my company beat Sun (and IBM and HP and SGI) on a $15 million dollar supercomputer bid with a cluster running... Linux.
I guess that's just too little money for Sun to be interested.
"Next release is going to be free, plus nobody wants linux."
Where is SCO now? The place Sun is headed to. hahaha
Didn't we see this exact same announcement about 2 months ago? Is there anybody here who didn't know Solaris is going to be free and open-source? Why the hell do we keep repeating the same damn news day in and day out?
Hello, I've never used this OS before, but I'm curious about why it's referred to as "Slowaris." Why is this? Is it really slow, or is it just a misplaced insulting pun like "open soars"?
Most Sun customers don't appear to be fazed by the fact the Solaris isn't free or even cheap.
On the other hand, Sun, like other unix vendors, are in danger of becoming boutique shops. Most web farms can be run adequately on intel boxes (they need not even be cutting edge), and commodity solutions are even making inroads in the database market (my employer is rolling over NT Oracle installations in favor of linux Oracle).
Actually, as a web server platform, Solaris is top-notch. The only thing that made it less attractive than Linux was the cost factor. For Sun, releasing a free version is a Very Good Idea. The whole point of the exercise is to get people hooked on your OS and therefore evangelize it to others. The same theory applies to the decision regarding BeOS 5 and others.
This is a good thing for several reasons, even though these aren't being GPLed. First of all, it gives Linux a little extra incentive to progress, as it better have more to offer than just being free. If Linux wants to survive, it had better be able to compete. As we all have learned by now, competition makes for better products.
Also, hobbyists like myself get a chance to play around with a new OS and see how it ticks. I intend to install BeOS when it comes out and see how it runs, and now I'll add Solaris to that list. I probably will only dabble in both, but it is an opportunity to broaden my OS horizons.
The only drawback I can see is that we may yet have an OS market Balkanization. With all these free OSes flying around, we need common standards to make sure that the free exchange of data can continue. Things like XML and other open file formats are crucial. The Linux ELF binary format is supported by both BeOS and Solaris via an emulation layer, but that's only a start. It would be nice to have the same apps work across multiple OSes.
Still, despite that, the release of Solaris is a good idea for all involved. Hopefully this free software boom will continue as companies find new ways to maintain good software development and expand new technologies while keeping the results of that research free for all.
Re: SOLARIS SUCKS yes, you are a 6th grader... I see...
The only things Sun sells that anyone would want are made of metal and run Linux.
First of all, I'm so glad that Solaris 8 is out, second of all I don't mind about Win2K. Third of all, theres an operating system that "X" eyes linux. It's called the MacOS X, and I also don't mind about that either. I wonder what the screen shots would look like in Solaris 8. I just don't get the point where large computer networks should switch to Linux just because it's stable. Even though other people out there have trouble installing Linux on to their computers. And minux, is an other old operating system that I never heard of before. And whoever said "Linux can't be defeted.", what have you been smoking lately?
Sun can keep spending money maintaining Solaris by itself while IBM SGI and more are combining their efforts into one OS, they see the benefit in not duplicating efforts maintaining their propreitary OSes. Sure Linux not as good now and has some disadvantages, but give it a while, and it will soon be a lot better. Sun is obviously not thinking long-term.
Windows is probably going to keep going for a long term, W2k seems pretty nice, not sure about BeOS, but it is a solid OS.
Do you think SGI and IBM really went with Linux just because of the hype? That's probably what Sun thinks, and well, they can keep thinking that....
This puts a ding in Microsoft but the secondary emmissions will put a hard whack on companies like BSDI (and SCO perhaps). Linux probably won't be affected too much since Linux occupies a different niche, plus Linux has the backing of Sun competitors SGI, Intel, IBM, HP, and a few others. Linux R&D at these companies is in full force. I don't see any affect at all on BeOS. OTOH, the various variants of BSD will be put under strain, how much is hard to say. We'll have to wait for the shake out.
Gentle reader:
End MPAA oppression once and for all! Put the DeCSS source code somewhere where it'll be in public view FOREVER, and they'll NEVER be able to supress it and take it away: Natalie Portman's bare naked ass!
That's right, once the DeCSS source is tatood on Natalie Portman's nude butt, it'll be ours FOREVER!
Do you think before you type?
To say that I am amuzed by Sun's contention is a little bit of an understatement.
Sun is scared, very scared, and yet the people in Sun is trying to put up a brave face, and think that the world will buy their "I am not scared of nobody" ploy.
IBM, by comparison, is more honest in their approach. IBM knows that in the coming decades, whichever OS the users use is not important, what is important is that the APPLICATIONS and the HARDWARE the users will choose. That is why IBM has embarked on its journey in adopting Linux, and IBM is not apologetic on what they are doing.
Unlike Sun, IBM is not scared of Linux. IBM looks at Linux as a UTLITY, while Sun looks at Linux as a THREAT.
I think that sums up the difference between IBM (a winner) and Sun (a loser).
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Or maybe Linux has some things going for it that AIX doesn't have... yet. Why do people see Linux as ever-changing and improving, yet think that other operating systems (read: Windows 2000 and Solaris) are just getting worse and more bloated.
Derivatives. Windows* and Solaris were big deals five years ago, and while they've been improved it has been fairly incremental. Linux was barely on the radar five years ago and it's improvement since then has been amazing. This gives the impression that Linux is getting better much faster than the other guys. Whether this is reasonable or not (i.e. whether it's just that Linux has benefitted by chasing others' taillights) seems to be ignored.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
Frankly, in a world where almost all of the cheap hardware is x86 commodity components, the allure of NetBSD (emphasizing portability to esoteric platforms) isn't really compelling, and I never could figure out why poeple liked BSDI.
Yeah, a number of vendors are choosing Linux as their second OS. But why would that make it likely for them to make it their first OS? Ham is my 2nd favorite deli meat, right after Turkey. That doesn't mean I'm about to switch to packing Ham sandwiches in all my lunches. SGI might be moving towards packing Ham in their lunches, but that's just because they weren't successful in packing their own deli-meats (in this case, Bologna).
And sure, VA Linux is packaging Linux with their systems, but what does that say? VA is a good company, and their getting on their feet, but they're not even close to being in the same class as vendors like Dell and Compaq (who choose Ham-lunches as 2nd, and 3rd-choice, respectively). Don't confuse stock-value with anything other than stock-value.
Also: Sun doesn't need a 3rd-party manufacturer; they make their own systems. They can *give* their software away all they want and it won't matter as long as their selling hardware. And believe me, the hardware business is still looking a lot better than the "support" business.
To you're final point -- You're right, Open Source has it's own reasons for success that have nothing to do with Sun. Keep that in mind. Just because Sun is giving their software away now, doesn't mean they're throwing in the towel. Not hardly. Remember when Microsoft *gave* their browser away? They're just trying to regain market-share here, and I for one say "More power to them". It makes the consumer happy (they don't have to pay hefty fees for their favorite OS) and it gives Sun the ability to compete with Linux's infamous "price".
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
C'mon Sun, I looked at your website and was eager to download Solaris 8 - if only to give VMWare something else to do and to fill up that spare 8GB lying around. Solaris 8 is still listed as early access - no sign of the annoucement. Also, what's with this $20 media cost and $10 postage and handling? Sounds like profit to me, unless I get a nice cardboard box and manuals. How about a download option?
Linux is still great as ever!!
Win2K Pro is OK, barely. It runs my games and my other win32 bound apps. It, is, however, MS's usual. Missing features, massive size, slow, *sigh*.
I've ordered solaris 8 on the site. It should be good.
The BeOS, imho, is a fatally flawed beast. Its got a good OS, but, the hardware support is appalling, the apps are few and far between. I've got R4 installed. However, it does have its upside, the BeFS is an outstanding file system.
Having said that, R5 running on a 16 processor Merced machine would be utterly amazing. Oh well, I can dream.
LINUX FOREVER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
**This message was brought to you by the letters N, T and the number 666**
I am not sure what the big deal is and why this is ment to be the death of linux. For a long time I user Solaris 2 X86, Orginally I used it because the developement environment was nice, ie. include files worked etc. Tailoring my hardware to fit that they supported.
... NOw I doubt it.
The I got a laptop, solaris would talk pcmcia to it, which is a pain if you want to do anything useful, like talk on a network! so it got linux
Next my mailserver network card kept stopping working under solaris (it was a supported 3com card) so I put linux on it the problem with the card went away!
So, its free whats the big deal? I do see IBM or SGI racing to make sun there OS vendor, why enhance someone elses OS with support for there hardware? Sun mainly sell hardware, the core OS is nothing compared to the price of that.
So Solaris 2 X86 may be free Driver support is nothing like as good as linux! Who is going to write drivers for that? When sun could snatch your work as they did to blackdown. What happens if they drop support for your old hardware in the next release, the decision is theirs.
Linux, BSD and hurd are both good choices because they are vendor independant, solathing solaris will never be.
I would like to see the future and see if sun eats their words about embrassing a free OS. Linux is on a roll, this seems a regyard action by sun. If they had done it 5 years ago it might have made a difference
Alright, while I think this would be Really Cool (TM) and all, I think we have to remember who we are dealing with here. The company which has recently proven it has more faces then a pair of dice: Sun Microsystems.
These are the people who let the Blackdown Java porting effort do all the work, and then took it all from them with no credit.
These are the people who have said several times (here, here, and as far back as here) that Solaris isn't just going to be free, but Open Source.
These are the people who pushed Java as an open standard, and then -- once many companies had tied their future to it -- pulled out of the standards process. Then, when others suggested going forward with a Java standard without Sun, claimed that their own public documentation was not complete enough for anyone to do that.
So, when they say Solaris is going to be "free", I have to say: "Sure, and I have a bridge to sell you. It's in Brooklyn. Great view of the water."
I think Sun's products are pretty good (they're certainly a hell of a lot better then Micros~1) and that Java still has a lot of promise, but I'm still not gonna trust Sun any further then I can throw an E10K.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
I just shutdown slashdot's mail server. I am the fucking man !!!
If you want to bother to get that right, it should be *cough*RED HAT*cough* since they did that BEFORE Slackware, and were the main reason that Slackware did that in the first case.
While I agree that the version number jumping game is silly and confusing, if not morally wrong, I am confused here. I am fairly confident Red Hat has gone through all the major version numbers, from 1.0 ("Mother's Day") to 6.1. Personally, I've run 2.1, 4.0, 4.1, 4.2, 5.0, 5.1, 5.2, 6.0, and 6.1. What makes you say Red Hat did any skipping?
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
AIX sucked. It just flat out it sucked. It was a result of AT&T and Sun hopping in bed together and IBM/DEC/HP had to do something. The result was an ill-concieved inbreed os. Sun had a very strong BSD based unix and AT&T had System V R3 (which had a single bsd feature called vi added after R2). Sys V was rock solid. It never went down (its close kin is still running many phone switches) but it was useless if you need a user interface of any kind (and I'm not even talking about the level requireed to run X)
So why is IBM going with Linux? They don't have a real unix and they need one. Sun has a real unix and doesn't need one.
Keep in mind the Bill Joy (co founder of sun, now a VP of some sort) was into writing "free" unix software early in the game. He wrote vi as well as lots of other things including some of the kernel bits.
Personaly I think that sun sys V sucks compared to the bsd stuff but once they went down that road, there was no going back. It was the first of a long line of stupid things they've done.
Anyone know why they took a 64 bit bus that ran well on a 32 bit cpu (sbus) and replaced it with a 32 bit bus (pci) that runs on a 64 bit cpu? I guess they like to see their expensive boxes die in preformace reviews so they can save a few bucks buy putting crap components in my servers...
After seeing Bill Joy speak at "Sun Market^H^H^H^H^H^H Technology Days" in Seattle, I don't think McNealy deserves to keep all of one's contempt. Bill Joy showed contempt for UNIX, Open Source, and anything that wasn't Java.
Paraphrasing: "Open Source? I don't want to see the source, I want it to work and be documented." To which the audience applauded. (This after he talked about how he worked on BSD UNIX's source in the early 1970's to make it more stable.)
He said that it was impossible to build a reliable library of code when you couldn't guarantee that your code wouldn't overwrite other places in memory. (It makes me think of Larry Wall who says that a language tends to be inversely useful to the number of axes the author has to grind.)
I'm a little worn of the "out to win" mindset that the linux community has grown (especially lately). Lets look to the long term. Not everybody everywhere is going to use linux and that is a good thing. We like variety, right? Linux has begun to occupy a very unique position in the computer world. It is being used because its widely available, easy modified, and useful for MANY different tasks. Plus, there is a sea of software for it. Personally, I hoping that linux becomes a standard, much in the same way that programming langauge and hardware standards came about. You don't have to look too close to see it happening: IBM, HP, etc... Solaris isn't going to "take over" linux. Linux is *fun* and *practical* and *easy* in ways that Solaris isn't. Of course sun doesn't like that. Jini and Java are supposed to take over the embedded market, right? Well embedded device companies are flocking to linux because its well suited for that. Personally, I'm hoping that the linux+java+jini relationship grows tight in the embedded market so sun won't see linux as a competitor, but as a VERY good tool that is good for everybody. Then maybe we'll get some free drugs and porn....
I suppose I'm not too threatening, presently, but wait till I start Nautilus
Linux advocacy is nice until it reaches the point where you're kicking and scraping to convince yourself and others that it is the greatest thing since sliced bread. Solaris is a very good operating system on its native hardware (SPARC et al) it is however a little weaker on non-native hardware. You also have to remember that Sun is in the enterprise solution/packages business, not merely some hardware with a webserver on it like Dell and others. Since most of these packages are not development environments (the ones that are develope for Solaris on Solaris in a business to business sense for the most part) it would seem kinda silly for them to come jam packed with a bunch of source code and compilers, who is going to be using their brand new E10k ultra server box for hacking out some C++? Solaris also scales very well RIGHT OUT OF THE BOX, that is something I think open source people take for granted. Since you recompile the kernel to make changes it is really easy if you know what you're doing to scale it to a 10 node server farm. Solaris does this WITHOUT recompiling and does it very well. For the me toos out there that love to call it Slowaris, learn to read. There are what we called "system requirements" and we use that information to figure out if we can indeed run a certain piece of software on our hardware. Of course it runs slower on x86 hardware, it is natively run on SPARC machines! Solaris also likes to use alot of RAM, so you would be hard pressed to slap it on your old 486 with 16 megs of RAM. Come on people, quit the "if it ain't Linux we bash it" attitude. I think it's really cool that Sun is going to release Solaris 8 for free, I have my copy already. They aren't releasing it free to copy Linux (which should be stated as copying the GPL rather than Linux itself since Sun isn't trying to make the Solaris kernel run like the Linux kernel), it's an appetizer so sysadmins can get ahold of a copy and see if they want to invest in Sun or want to stick with what they have.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
In the Viet Nam War the Americans used high tech multi-million dollar airplanes in an effort to bomb North Viet Nam's supply line--the Ho Chi Min Trail--out of existance. It didn't work. Why? The Ho Chi Min trail was built with a multitude of dedicated workers using shovels, picks, and buckets. No they weren't the most absolutely brilliant civil engineers in the world. But after each bombing the trail was quickly rebuilt. Even after years of bombing the trail grew and grew in quality and size. The Americans were never able to stop its growth. After all, how do you bomb a shovel?
The moral: The persevering multitudes armed with picks and shovels will usually win.IMO, it's their loss, not ours.
Why couldn't Microsoft sue Sun now for destroying the market for operating systems? Isn't this the same as what Microsoft did to Netscape? I'm not saying that Microsoft's not deserving (they definitely have it coming to them), but at the same time, how the hell can Microsoft possibly justify charging $250+ per license for Windows 2000 now? It really seems as if Sun is going for the juggular here. They did the same thing earlier with Star Office. But I guess that really didn't hurt Microsoft's sales of Office 2000 too badly. But I really think this might hurt Microsoft on their high-end Win2000 servers.
All we need now is for Oracle to make their dbs free and Microsoft is finished for sure!
However, there are plenty of companies that are going to go for the Free Beer aspect of this and that is going to hurt Linux.
The article has a little dig at the end about Sun sucking up to the Open Source community by funding the next Apache conference. I can imagine that they're keen to get their co-operation and stimulate the Jakarta side of things there, but once again, if they had any intention of it taking off then they'd make it standard.
Yeah, right. Did anyone really think that Sun was a friend of Linux or the open source/free software community? Come now, they never have been and never will be. They are making too much money being at the top of the proprietary Unix heap.
I would have more respect for slashdot if the nice little Sun logo icon were replaced with Scott McNealy (whose name rhymes with "Mr. McFeely") as a borg, a la Microsoft's icon.
Do you have ESP?
Is that because you're a dirty slut who fucks anything for $5 to support a crack-cocaine addiction?
If you're not some nutcase transexual/transvestite/crossdressor or fat chick with VD, maybe we should get together for some hot 3-way action between you, me, and my inflatable doll.
"I can only show you Linux... you're the one who has to read the man pages."
for most people. Sure, if I was running eBay, I would choose Solaris. But really Linux is much easier. When I get a new Sun box I have to spend about a week compiling and installing essential software. That's partly because most software these days is designed to "just work" on Linux, and partly because Sun is lazy in installing useful software. Whatever, if Scott McNealy is "amazed" why companies are chasing Linux, then he's pretty thick.
Sigh... MS will probably release the windows 2000 source code before Slashdot releases the SLASH code...
Well, first off I have to say I really love Sun (the company and technology) and think that the rap they get here on Slashdot is unfair, however...
Why the hell are they ripping on Linux all of a sudden? Isn't this the same company that purchased Star Office for Linux and is giving it away free? Isn't the same company that's helping out the apache project? Isn't this the same company that released a solid Linux Java jvm 1.2 before Windows or Solaris? Oh wait, I am on crack! But what's up? You would think they would respect Linux and its place? There's definitely a place for more than one OS in the universe, thank god! I don't think there's anyone out there, even the stauchest Linuxite that would like if Linux were the ONLY OS choice out there! I'm really surprised my Sun's apparent disdain of Linux here.
Don't be fooled by this announcement. Sun has one company in mind and thats Sun. Sun doesn't do anything that it considers a benefit to Sun. What has Sun done for Open Source? Nothing. They helped port Linux to Sparc only in hopes that it would sell their hardware.... They have not even come close to companies like SGI and IBM and others who have poured technology into Linux. Granted, every company has to look out for number one - but recall what Sun has done...have they ported any of their own software to Linux? Now that they own an office suite, lets wait an see what the last OS is that they port it to. With the exception of MicroSoft, Sun has badmouthed Linux more than any other software/hardware company I can think of. Sun has, for as long as I can recall, a hostile attitude. In many ways, I consider them worse than MicroSoft...At least when Microsoft dominates the industry, they do it with a smile. Sun wants to dominate us as well, only they carry whips and chains and yell nasty names at anyone in their way. Bastards. Sun will *NEVER* get past the server market. They are in a niche and they don't even know it. The desktop is so far fetched for Sun, that they can't even dream about it. For the average user, which is where the money is, Sun will never have anything that is marketable. They just don't get it. They don't listen to what people want. They do what they think is best and try to shove it down everyone's throat. Sun's market is the server world, and that's it....a niche....and there's big competition in that market. Players like MicroSoft and IBM aren't going to go away anytime soon. For the price you pay, Sun software(expecially hardware) just isn't worth it. Just like every other OS, Solaris crashes. Enterprise admin with Solaris(NIS+ especially) is just as shitty and difficult as every other Unix equivalent. I'll take Linux any day. It is progressing in leaps and bounds. It is already comsuming the lower end market and nudging in on the medium sized networks/system. Linux has already and will continue to take a bite out of Suns arena.
As we are all aware Linux was built by people following a philosophy that software should be free....the user has the controls...none of the other OS's have followed suit in quite the same manner of GNU/Linux...RIP Linux...is unquestionably a misguided statement...Linux does not live in the same world that say MS Windows or Solaris or even Mac OS live...it has been free from the beginning...no one company controls it....those that use it control it.....since this is the case, Linux will not be going away anytime soon....I think that we should all be flattered that all of these corporate OS's are attempting in some manner to mimic the philosophy of GNU/Linux even though it is obvious that they dont quite get it....I further believe that Linux will continue to spread as the average user in this technically information driven world gets more savy and demands more control of their own systems....With organizations like NSA, IBM, the French govt, many many scientists at National Labs...and all of you using Linux I believe that the GNU/Linux philosophy be it called free or opensource is going to be the Rule not the exception in the future....its spreading everyday....
I am a developer and what irks me about Solaris 2.6 is that after purchasing a Ultra 10 for porting purposes, we had to fork out USD 3500 for compilers for the SUN workshop package ? Are they going to be free too ????
free or not free it makes no difference. fact is, solaris is not an enterprise ready os like linux. it runs on crappy, unscalable hardware. it is buggy and insecure. it is not very efficient with its SMP code. and lets compare CDE to GNOME. enough said.
if you want a real enterprise os, buy redhat.
But it has the same root. Isn't English wonderful?...
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
has anybody else noticed that ol's scotty is always bitching that windoze should release its source code, or that the judge should force microshaft to open it source code to the public, yet he has to try to emulate linux's appeal and momentum by making his not-even-close-to-linux OS "free", yet he has yet to open the source code??? why does scott want to beat bill, so he can be the next one to be able to donate 5 billion dollars to charity!!!
I've had SunOS/Solaris on my home systems for about a decade now - and have gotten fed up with Sun's closed nature. There were several hacks I wanted to do during that time, and I had to give them up because (variously) the hardware or the software was closed, and I didn't have enough time to reverse engineer it.
Now they've kinda opened the software: I could see it and make local mods - though there are limits on what I can do with it. And they've cut the price to zero - for now.
But it's too little and too late.
Now there's Linux, which is truly Open Source, on architectures that are fully visible. And there's Open/Free/Net BSD. And more to come.
So I used the Y2K upgrade as an excuse to spend the time necessary to migrate completely off SunOS/Solaris. At this point my home network is all Linux (except for one SunOS box that I might turn back on some day - if I ever want to use one particular application that I don't want to spend the time porting).
While I might bring up other OSes in the future (like maybe OpenBSD for a hardened server), it will be really tough to get me to bother with anything that isn't truly Open Source.
And after wasting a decade crippled by lack of source and lack of hardware info, it will be a cold day in hell before I invest more of my life hacking on a Sun operating system.
RIP, Solaris.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
We should be congratulating sun here at openening there OS and giving leting us all learn it here at home and instead your bashing them and being totally ingorant and arogent about its Solaris OS!
Sun has been a memeber of linux international for quite some years and has supported some unix projects and even offeres linux and a few of its sun workstations. This zdnet is yet another article is totally offbase! Sun likes linux because its not owned by 1 company, most linux users start to appreciate unix and offer it at work rather then NT, Linux has brought kde, gnome, and more programmers to the samba and apache projects.
Sun likes linux and only a fool would use linux in a $50,000 server with multi-cpu's and ethernet cards with data-warehousing software being used. The tcp/ip stack in linux is not even mult-threaded and this is un-acceptable in a high end e-commerce server.
I like linux and I love it alot but I would not base a corporate's main mission critical server on it. Solaris is slow for a single cpu system but its designed for 32 processor systems.
Linux may be a great OS but its second for a truly huge server. I appluad sun for makeing the sofware cheaper and I plan to be sun certified now!
Stop bashing guys! Just go to mindcrafts and pc-magazines homepage to see how linux really performs on high end systems.
No.
No. No. No. No. No.
:o)
**This message was brought to you by the letters N, T and the number 666**
SOCIALISTS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1
Oh yeah, like have Son and Linux team up to crush Microsoft. What kind of a lame idea is that?
Oh yeah, like have Sun and Linux team up to crush Microsoft. What kind of a lame idea is that?
I love a steely rod that is soft underneath the head, right where I love to tease with my tongue. I anxiously await a molten hot load of chunky semen to flood my mouth to the point of spilling.
I've always loved turkey but there was always soemthing about that roast beef hoagie that I was always dreaming of taking. Espicially with mayonaise and lettuce packed on to it. Well, besides making myself extremly hungry at 12:30am I'm trying to say that a lot of people get bored with the same thing. I mean how many different flavors can you achieve with windows? You can chage the shell to litestep and the like, but it's still basically the same thing. With Linux (or any other flavor for that matter) it allows people to break out of the shell. Personally I believe the world will wake up (with the hell of many companies support) and find that alternative operating systems will be first in businesses then the turkey hoagie... Oh welps, I believe I'm heading up to the Aplus mini-mart for a roast beef hoagie now. Thanks :-)
------- What exactly is real?
OK, I might be able to see why they think they might beat out IBM, and can blow off the Mac, and I could see why they might think that they can make the Alpha obsolete, and I could possibly comprehend that they might think that they're better than HP, and can ignore VA and RedHat, and I could even see why they might think that they can still compete against x86 makers who are catching up in performance to their workstations real fast. But thinking that they can outdoo everybody combined in the OS department is just going too far!! sheesh, for God's sake - what's it gonna take for these guys to get a hint.
And this is coming from a sysadmin for solaris boxes too.... I see the coming of Linux and I can't wait to dunp every other OS. It's just so fusterating dealing with soooo many stupid people in the IT busisness.
Must everything in the universe be Linux-centred? Linux is not ready to run banks and stock exchanges - maybe some day it will be.
BUT, the only way I can see kernal hackers adding Solaris-like features to Linux [i.e. failover clustering, high availability support, 64-proc SMP] is if Sun continues to put their money into funding competitors like Solaris. It keeps the game fresh, and gives the OSS community a reason to keep on innovating by releasing open versions of that which is closed...
-Stu
The BeOS has been out for a while and is currently at release # 4.5.2. Do you mean "released" for some non-x86 non-ppc hardware?
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
The one thing that puts me off /. is the constant Linux vs The World jingoistic reactionaryism that takes place here. Linux is not right for every purpose, and by continuing to insist this, your all no better, at least in my eyes, than Microsoft, which seems to also think they're the only right solution for everything. Solaris is one of the most stable platforms around, having personally used it for all sorts of projects since it was SunOS in disguise. I've also used and had to deal with Linux on and off since the pre 1.0 days. A lot of the negative comments I've seen here about Solaris are just laughably wrong. Personally, I'm an OpenBSD snob, but I'm not trying to push it on everyone for every purpose. If someone comes to me looking to develop a LARGE scale Internet application of some sort, I'm going to suggest Solaris, or, for smaller scale enterprises, or those that require a fair amount of security, OpenBSD. I'd NEVER suggest Linux, because my personal experience with it has been that the development model leads to sloppy code that bugs out at the wrong moment. I know you don't like to hear it, but thats my opinion. However, I'm certainly not going to deny you your love of Linux. If you like it on your desktop, great! If you like it on your web server, great! Just don't make me use it, and don't waste yours and everyone elses time trying to take over the world with it. The only difference between a world run by MS and a world run by Linux would be the strange Penguin fetishism.
\w0zz - OpenBSD - A Better Solution
Sun and the Linux Community
Consistent with Sun's own computing vision, Linux uses open standards and non-proprietary interfaces. Sun's Solaris(TM) operating environment and Linux are both driving growth, innovation, and success of UNIX and network computing. Users, administrators, and developers who have been frustrated by proprietary operating systems appreciate the robustness, reliability, and flexibility of solutions based on open standards. Corporate managers are also attracted to open-standards-based computing environments because they can select from:
More innovative and compelling new applications. A large and growing talent pool of knowledgeable administrators and developers. A broad range of computing solutions from multiple vendors.
So this is a company that hates Linux??? I don't think so.
This is smargle frep... eat my ass out first then I will give you further instructions....
if i was a doll, would you blow me?
Back in the 1980s Sun trunned away from selling workstations to home users...
At that time Windows was a joke and people were looking to Unix as the "next big thing"...
It never happend....
Each Unix had a problem...
Suns problem is Sun would discontinue workstations before the could drop into a price range home users could affort..
Thats fine.. Sun like many companys prefered to focuse on the high end market...
The low end market couldn't wait for a reasonably prices Unix and ended up going with Windows...
ISPs looking to save money examined alternitives to Sun and found Windows NT to be a way to cut costs. Sun being a bit blind to the market realitys offered Solarus with a rather expensive pricetag.
As Linux would move into the light Linux would replace Windows NT...
Sun has been phased out over 10 years... just now noticing they arn't in controll of the market...
It says some bad things about Sun when they can be taken by supprise by something thats been slowly comming to pass over a decade...
It seems Sun has simply expected the old Unix market to remain forever... If thats true there really is something wrong as Sun themselfs is responsable for moving Unix from the mainframe to the desktop.... Putting an end to the old Unix mainframe market forever
I don't actually exist.
Here's the full list of new features Solaris 8 will have:
Live Upgrade: Lets you upgrade to Solaris 8 on a seperate partition while Solaris 7 is still running
Web Start Wizards: Supposedly ease installation
A new Print Manager: Configure local and remote printers more easily
Role-based Access Control: "enables system administrators to provide limited administrative capabilities to other users" -- sounds suspiciously like sudo
Improved error messages and debugging capabilities
A new remote console
IPSec, smart cards, PAM, and Kerberos v5
IPv6 and migration tools
Service Location Protocol (SLP)
PDA synchronization support for Palm computers
JMF (Java Media Framework) supporting MPEG1/2, Quicktime, VIVO, AVI, AIFF, GSM, WAV, RMF, AU, and MIDI
Netscape application launcher
Hot-key editor
JDK 2
Apache Web server
Perl
StarOffice 5.1
Graphical Audio Mixing Tool
DVD support
New X Server based on X11R6.4
USB and IEEE 1394
Some GNU tools
So there are a few exciting features -- MIDI, Palm synchronization, DVD, USB, and the JMF.
Are these enough? Dunno, I'm waiting for the actual release.
Gotta get back to porting Glide to Solaris/x86.
Glückwünsche, haben Sie Slashdot ermordet, indem Sie zum korporativen Druck beugten und Subskriptionen einlei
That's encouraging. President Reagan, of reverend memory (figuratively speaking, of course, as he's still alive and [drifting farther, if I may] hasn't had any memory to speak of since his days with Tail-Gunner Joe McCarthy's heroes of freedom), was a great believer in supply-side economics, and on the same principle as that by which the Theory of Relativity must be rejected due to the presence of the word "relative" (see Ms. Rand, another great 20th century philosopher), I must therefore hail Solaris as the operating system of the free-market [No PNG's due to lack of copyright problems] future.
Thank you and good night.
Having a free commercial unix will pull more companies away from developing for win32, which is a good thing for *nix users. No matter how good wine gets, it won't be as good as having a native app, and that's what's keeping *nix, espically linux away from true mainstream desktops.
Desperation is a stinky cologne
It won't fit.
Try Rosie O'Donnell's.
Remember how the CEO (or whatever he was) of Lotus (Papows - now ex- Lotus) said "Lotus Notes will never run on Linux". That lasted a whole what - six months maybe?
Since SunStore is selling Redhat for SPAC (here, if you don't believe me) right now, I don't know how long "never" means to the "Sun Official". I'd guess just about as long as it takes them to realize that it would be cheaper to Open-Source Solaris, and hope for a great Solaris/Linux/BSD hybrid operating system that will fly on Sun's hardware. Actually, considering this is Sun - never might mean a depressingly long time.
It's a pity, really. Now Sun is giving away Solaris, what would Open Sourcing cost them? Control, I guess.
Compare this to, for example, IBM, where Linux is starting to became an integral part of the corporate strategy; a vessel through which IBM tries to gain ground in the software world (and they do make some amazing software). There are surprises here; IBM supports Linux because it makes sense for them to do so, whereas Sun supports Linux because they can't afford not to.
http://www.sun.com/developers/tools/solaris/prom oterms.html describes the license underwhich the software is available.
http://www.sun.com/developers/tools/solaris/prom ofaq.html is the general FAQ
It makes perfectly good sense for Sun to make Solaris more open, since they are mostly a hardware company. No, Linux won't die and neither will Solaris or Win2k. The market will just shift
What makes the least sense here is that apparently the license will not allow me to port a commercial application to Solaris. That would be considered "commercial use".
The ability to move my mouse around on a Solaris desktop and run some of their apps just to see how they look and feel is nice, but when you get right down to it, this is a "teaser", and one that you have to pay $20 for to boot!
No thanks, Sun.
OTOH, if they make an exception to the license that will allow people to use it for porting purposes, I'm all over it.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
The internet has started a renaissance in the software industry. Programmers can get industrial strength tools like Linux for free. Every useful application is being developed for the internet. If you're starting a company now why would you spend money on an OS or development tools? Save your money for hardware and bandwidth.
As for users, they don't care what the server is running. They want their client to work when they press a button. In five years, when we're all surfing the internet through our wristwatches, MS will be a forgotten $10bn company. And Sun will be selling Linux servers with 4096 processors.
Your points are not well made: (1)would rather run it on a commerciall supported *nix than somthing coded (no offence) by the general public. It is a classic FUD statment. This point has a hidden assumption that softwares written by big company are being supported better. He/she does not show evidence that it is true or not. (2)Beos is a multimedia system and will find its own snug corner in the market Do you call an OS which cannot direct play(without proper configuration) mp3, cd ripping, image editing(neither usable stuff like gimp/photoshop) a multimedia system OS? Well, if you do, I don't mind. base on your thought, I will say Linux is "Multi-platform almighty fool proof bullet proof, laser-gun, triple valves, Wolala, Ohahah real rock ass-wiping....." OS and will find its own snug corner in the market.. blah blah. Amen
Even my most rabid pro-linux friends admit that it is still late beta, not ready for prime time, almost-but-not-quite-there.
The only reason any corporations are taking the huge risk of putting mission-critical applications on Linux, is the massive publicity and propaganda promoting it as the greatest thing since sliced bread.
The truth is, Solaris on Sparc is a tried and true solution for servers where reliability, scalability, ease of administration, and technical support are more important than price.
My company is spending $134K on a single Sparc server to run Solaris as part of a mission critical database system. Why?
Because we know that it works.
I do not deploy Linux. Ever.
"...support for IPSEC and IPv6, allowing an almost infinite number of Internet addresses." Almost infinite? Did I just hear a professional journalist use the equivalent of "infinity minus one?" Grrr...innumeracy at it's finest. I mean, it's not like they said practically infinite - which may or may not be true, but is at least open to interpertation. "Almost infinite" - I mean, 3.4x10^38 is a truly huge number - but instead of just making up crap - why not try to inform the user. It didn't really drive towards the point of the whole article - so why even bother. Sigh...I mean the number "1" is pretty much just as close to "almost infinite." When are computer journalists going to get a clue?
Sun is as much a hardware company as a software company, I continue to recommend Solaris on Sparc because it works.
Personally I run OpenBSD on Sparc, but even if there were an Ultra port of *BSD, I would stick with Solaris for real commercial applications.
The big bucks you pay for Sun hardware isn't for the OS, it's for reliable, fast, scalable hardware that performs as advertised.
If you buy a Sparc and load Linux on it, Sun is not going to be unhappy. But it's perfectly reasonable for them to refuse to jump on the Linux bandwagon just because it is popular.
I do not deploy Linux. Ever.
Why would a manufacturer choose Linux as their first OS. Ask VA Linux? No - it's not because they have Linux in their name ;-)
;-)
Seriously - as one who has been around Unix box development most of his career, OS kernel development is an expensive operation for a company. Doesn't it make more sense to leverage a workable free OS to do the job, i.e. move it to the state you need it in, instead of supporting the entire required infrastructure yourself? That is the single largest reason for a company like SGI or HP to move into the Linux camp with both feet. That isn't to say that they WILL, but it seems like a reasonable move from a stock-holder's point of view, i.e. dollars and sense
Have you compiled your kernel today??
Here's a slightly more detailed history, for the anal retentives like myself :-)
:-) Install scripts slightly tweaked.
.1 and .2
Slackware:
1994
1.0 -> SLS based v1.0 kernel
1995
2.x -> Slackware has install scripts that are ncurses fueled. Runs 1.2 kernel ELF beta introduced. Slackware 2.3 was out when Red Hat "Mother's Day" +0.1 was out. libc 4, AFAIK
1996
Slackware 96 -> Linux 2.0.0 kernel. ELF clean
1997 - 1998
3.x -> 2.0.x kernel with libc5
3.9 --- A real release. Basically Slack4 with the 2.0 kernel.
1999
4.0 --- Linux 2.2.0 (basically Slackware 3.9 with a 2.0 kernel). KDE also included
7.0 --- glibc 2.1 (important!). GUI side, includes both a newer KDE and October Gnome officially, and a completely new ncurses library. Install scripts have been revamped a bit more a slicker install that allowed for DHCP out of the box, "upgradepkg" script, and included RPM in an unsupported fashion. (So, yes, 7 is a big jump, but there are a lot of important changes)
RedHat:
1995
"Mother's Day" +0.1 (First collection of packages)
4.0 -> First "Real" release. Kernel 1.2.x
4.1 -> Tweaks to fix bugs regularly became
1996
4.2
5.0 -> Kernel 2.0.x
1997
5.1 -> Glibc 2.0 (**development library, WHY! **)
1998
5.2
1999
6.0 -> Linux kernel 2.2.x
6.1 -- Graphical installer, glibc 2.1. KDE as an option (might've been in 6.0).
I'm a Slackware clan member, so I couldn't give as much info as Slackware, but this should give you an idea on how much of a jump Red Hat had. Especially considering Slackware 4.0 was the 2.2.x kernel, whereas Red Hat 4.0 was the 1.2.x kernel.. Slackware has also "done" more with their releases, especially if you consider that Slackware is basically Patrick and a few volunteers (maybe 5 people tops), compared to Red Hat (which recently ate Cygnus, among other things).
---
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
tired of proprietary OSes over which they have no control. Everybody has learnt a very difficult lesson with Microsoft: i.e. the owner of an OS can leverage this fact considerably against any business venture you want to undertake. ... yeah its free, but you pay by bowing before the next master.
SUN just wants to be the next Microsoft. IBM understands that will not be possible in the future and the key to success is having kick ass middle ware and enterprise products and services.
Free Solaris reminds me of "free internet explorer"
I find comments that "Linux isn't desirable because its developed by the hordes of Linux maniacs" so devoid of vision they make me almost laugh. Personally to me, any lack of "industrial applications" in Linux translates to huge opportunity for big businesses like IBM.
You can keep Solaris. I'm tired of having the owner of the OS ram solutions down my throat. My vote is for choice, choice which is only truly afforded (read guaranteed) by open source and free OSes like Linux.
Do not spread "09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0" over the internet, thank you.
Solaris admin for 5 years. Linux kicks its ass. What else to say?
...when you think about it, at least Bill Gates was at least an honest nerd once. Scott McNealy is just a loud mouthed Harvard football jock who happened to go on to CEO a computer company. And when looked at that way, I have to admit my sympathies are with the nerd!
Sig? What sig? Do I have to have a sig!?!?
"If Linux wants to survive, it had better be able to compete" - what complete and utter nonsense. Linux has got where it is by simply focussing on being technically correct, just like Apache. And guess what? It works! Just like most people who use Linux, I don't care about competing with M$, Sun, IBM, etc. I just want something that works, that I don't have to sell my children to afford. Having been reamed by Sun in the past for inadequate hardware and software, my opinion is that the only reason we have NT and Novell, etc. is due to the greed of vendors like Sun who MADE companies look for cheaper solutions.
But your "Linux is the greatest" prejudices are showing. And yes, before you figure me for a Linux naysayer, I am a long-time Linux dabbler and know where it is useful - and where it is not. Guess what? I use Solaris for real serious projects than I do Linux and where I see free OSes at work, it's usually a BSD.
Linux has a long way to go before it suck less than Solaris.
-M
ASUKA LANGLEY NAKED WARM WET AND BREATHING!
DOWN WITH PETRIFICATION!
We're not talking about linux 0.99, and we're not talking about running it on a loser peecee. Linux sucked less than Solaris starting about 3 years ago, when Solaris 2.6 (ugh) and Linux 2.0 (less ugh) were current. If 2.8 looks anything like 2.7, the gap is only widening.
It arrived quickly, and while I haven't had a chance to try it out, I thought it was interesting that the (7) CDs all have Solaris 8 BETA REFRESH printed on them...
--
This
There's a marked difference between us and Windows NT. People are free to believe in Linux because developers everywhere can see its progress. IBM has realized their mistake -- noone knew NT was going to fail, because noone had realized just how flawed NT was at its core.
If there is something to Linux that would make it impossible to use for high-end tasks, it would be seen by all.
Guess what. It isn't there.
We Will Bury You.
Wow!!! This is really....ZZZZzzzzzzzzzz
Simon
The real linux_penguin has Slashdot ID 101961. Anyone else is an impostor. Including Bruce Perens.
"Sun began when BSD (renamed SunOS by an infant Sun Microsystems) became fairly stable and added IP networking to the kernel."
The internet protocol stack was added by Bolt, Beranek and Newman to pure 4.3BSD. BB&N were working under an ARPAnet grant. This was the original and definitive TCP/IP implementation.
"Another example of a company that "just doesn't get it". Linux hasn't been ported to every platform known to man, become so popular in the market, and captured the hearts of millions just because it's free. Why is Transmeta using Linux on their new chips instead of Solaris 8, why is Oracle porting their software, why are game companies and 3D accelerator companies taking notice of Linux, why is Corel porting its software to Linux, why is SCO announcing they will now get into the business of Linux support, why is IBM creating embedded devices based on Linux, why is SGI wielding Linux as their new OS of choice, why do a great deal of Microsoft employees play with Linux as a hobby, why am I currently working on the Quake engine in Linux right now, why are companies like VA Linux, RedHat, SuSe, Caldera, Cygnus (now Redhat), Andover.net, TurboLinux, etc. so successful, why are companies like Microsoft and Sun targetting Linux as a competitor? Why? I'll tell you why. Linux is the greatest revolution in computing to every hit the face of this planet. Millions of developers have tapped into an oracle that places them on a level next to heaven. It is the equivilant of giving archeologists a time machine. The immense sense of freedom and power that Linux gives users and developers can not replaced by a "kindof but not really" open Solaris 8. I think Sun is going to find this out the hard way. Linux is not great because of its massive developer mindshare and user base, which even now is smaller than other OS vendors (but larger than Apple or Amiga) but is growing at an alarming rate. No, Linux is great because it has captured the hearts of everyone it has touched. Employees, after years of fighting corporate doubt, are finally succeeding in convincing their companies that Linux is the solution. "Hah, who makes money off of free software?" Billions and billions of people worldwide. An OS that can turn these many heads is not something to scoff at, obviously Sun is in denial. The demand for workers familiar with Linux for development, administration, support, and management, is booming. Linux is here, it is making waves, it will outlive any proprietary attempts, it is here to stay. I love it."
So says a comment posted on ZDNET. Couldn't say better myself.Sorry for Sun: they lose for me.
StarTrek.org Free Webmail
and the insulting last sentence,
im surprised to say that that post make sa couple of good points.
True, Linux opens up people who are used to windows to the whole world of Unix.
If I had a $50,000 server, like sun sells, I would not be running linux on it. And, yes, the lack of multithreaded IP thing is a big drawback for large servers, i imagine.
BUT MINDCRAFT? PC-MAGAZINE? fuck that.
the mindcraft test illustrated only that when microsoft chooses a platform and tests to compare NT to Linux, they choose the ones that make them look good.
If it had been comparing dynamic content, the test would have been a lot different than the static comparison, for one. For two..
um, never mind. i'm going to eat sandwich instead
Juln
yeah.
so there.
If you are going to try to moan, at least get your facts right.
Forgotten Solaris 7 already, did you then?
Let's see if this makes things any easier for you.
SunOS4 (aka Solaris 2)
SunOS5 (aka Solaris 2)
SunOS6 (aka Solaris 2.6)
SunOS7 (aka Solaris 2.7 which became known as Solaris 8)
SunOS8 (aka Solaris 8)
All looks pretty logical to me.
But then again, I'm not running Linux, so maybe such complex maths are beyond me, eh?
Here we go with some minor nitpicking.
1) The real answer to "How do you bomb a shovel?" is "Don't bomb one shovel, bomb them all"
2) Errr, what makes you think it was a tactical decision? There was no special tactical advantage to succeeding in Vietnam, it was purely political.
3) Vietnam was an unpopular war, and using an unpopular weapon to end an unpopular war for no strategic or economic advantage would have been political suicide... en masse!
Dear oh dearie me. Yet another zealot talking out of his ass.
...
A couple of remarks:
> Linux runs on a proper superset of the platforms Solaris runs on.
Well done, I see we have done some Set theory at school, haven't we?
What is the significance of this? Sun is making most of its money from selling hardware. Sun makes an OS that runs _well_ on this hardware. How this implies "suckiness" is beyond me.
> Solaris is pretty strictly system V, while Linux is some SysV, some BSD, and some "other."
So this mishmash makes Linux more "unsucky". Go figure.
FYI, Solaris is SysV _and_ BSD. That's a large part of what Sun brought to the SVR4 table.
> Solaris uses the UFS filesystem. Linux uses primarily the Ext2 filesystem .
This fact actually works _against_Linux; ext2fs (which I guess is probably the only FS you've worked with besides FAT and maybe NTFS) is not half as reliable as UFS. I don't know the performance numbers, but that's irrelevant - reliability is what you're after in an _enterprise_ OS. Solaris also utilises VXFS (if you pay something extra or order a large configuration), which is a full-blown journalling FS allowing smart volume management etc.
> The obvious differences, like licensing
OK, I see that licensing is what matters to you. Oh well, I won't argue with that, but it seems that it is _mostly_ what matters to you. Well, in that case you are welcome to not use a commercial, non-opensource OS to your heart's content. However, it also seems to me that you are not exactly knowledgeable on any OS other than a certain free one, and therefore are looking to get as many karma points here on slashdot by trolling. You should be moderated below the ground.
Let us continue.
> On common hardware, Linux tends to be faster, especially for interactive tasks.
> Solaris might be faster on machines with 16 processors or more.
If you are talking about single-CPU workstations, you might be right. But not by much.
On any system with 2 or more CPUs, almost _any_ SVR4MP system (e.g. Solaris) smokes Linux. It is a kernel that has been built from the ground up to run on SMP hardware (including the TCP/IP stack), unlike Linux which is undergoing painful and destabilizing surgery to make it be capable of going anywhere near a 4-CPU machine. On Solaris in particular, you can dedicate groups of CPU's to specific processes. And binding a network adapter to a CPU (which Linux is absolutely incapable of) is also possible on most SVR4 systems (haven't done that on Solaris, but I know it is possible on other SVR4's, e.g. UnixWare).
Linux has a very long way to go before it can be considered an enterprise server OS. Give it a couple of years - till then, the desktop and a bit file/web serving, no more. It simply doesn't scale.
Hope this puts things slightly more in perspective for you. I wish all these Linux zealots would at least consider getting the facts right next time before entering the discussion. Maybe even rely on some _solid_ experience, for a change? Can you manage this, at least?
*vent*
It's exactly this sort of rabidness that's putting off more and more people off this system; I've stopped using Linux and started on FreeBSD some 6 months ago exactly because of this sort of behaviour in the Linux camp, and frankly I'm glad I did it. I've had been a Linux user since 1994 (Slackware then RedHat), and this kind of trolling had been going on since then, only in smaller amounts. Sure there are many responsible users/developers out there, and Linux is definitely a good system, but the signal to noise ratio in all non strictly technical discussions has been growing smaller and smaller by the month. This has indeed become the Cult of the Penguin.
*/vent*
Seems you let your prejudices cloud the facts, "The Man".
:(
Solaris is not "strictly SystemV" - yes it is mainly SysV, but it also has a lot of BSD equivalents in it too if that is the way you prefer to work.
The rest of your claimed "advantages" of Linux are pure opinion and do not have any merit to them either, I'm afraid.
It's people like you who make us Linux users look stupid
If i take what happened to Linux in last 6 months:
Nearly every company has something to do with it.
I am worried, that suites took Linux as a "shield" to help them fight M$, not as a solution, to cure problems with CloseSource and Un*x fragmentation.
Suits think: If Linux did it, why can not we? They still did not learn their lesson...
what a pity
Sun knows why IBM and others are helping linux. Why else would it open up it's own OS? What's more they just gave another reason for IBM to put more resource into linux. I think IBM would rather die then have people install Sun software on it's systems.
...?...?...?
All I can see if the option to purchase it for the cost of media and shipping.
--srj/mmv
Well well, this is indeed a nicely crafted piece of FUD from the Linux Media 3l337.
:] Can I have some of what you're having?
> And the brilliant Sun engineers who designed and built those machines find out that their OS counterparts let them down.
Poor, poor hardware engineers. I'm weepy.
> Unless you're one of a handful who need an E10k with dozens of processors, Linux is the only way to go on SPARCs. Try it; you'll never go back.
Do you have benchmarks to back your claims? I'd like to see Linux smoke Solaris on a 2-CPU SPARC box (4 is already way, way too many). Benchmarks? no. Why? Because Linux can't do it. Otherwise the zealots (and ZDnet, you can be sure) would be plastering them all over the net. The Mind$haft benchmark showed one thing, and that is that Linux is good on 1 CPU, useless on more than 2.
> If you amalgamated the very best of all these into one product and called it Linux (for lack of a better name), I doubt you'd find any Solaris in it at all. But that's what you'll get, 10 years from now. And Solaris? A distant memory.
*ROTFL*. Excellent, excellent
Why on earth should a company which has invested hundreds of millions of $ into developing a system tailored to the hardware it's making throw away that product (which is clearly superior and years ahead of the penguin thing) just to follow the cult du jour? Nobody has yet answered this. Why should it "amalgamate" all its diverse products, throw in a bit of penguin dust, and call it Linux, for God's sake? Do you seriously thing IBM is going to dump AIX/Monterey or whatever for Linux?
You guys need to learn to stop and think/check the facts once in a while, but then I guess it's difficult to put down all that youthful exuberance, eh?
-[rev_pra_jbillim_2.0_bugfix-jbillim@dda083]---L D016)-: uname -a
-(0:/vobs/rev/pass_rev/src_sales/src/src/val/VA
SunOS dda083 5.6 Generic_105181-15 sun4u sparc SUNW,Ultra-Enterprise-10000
Sun does not sell Intel HW, which is what >90% of Linux is based on. Sun does not have a sigifnificant revenue/profit producing SW business nor services business. So, Sun has really no way to make significant money with Linux except perhaps to sell large scale Sun servers as a database server behind many smaller Linux web servers and things like that.
IBM has an Intel HW business and SW and Services.
So, yes, Sun will be on the defensive and will probably have to incrementally change its strategy over time.
Can you say "Let's build Intel servers", Scott?
Army No Va
Aide: Grant drinks too much to command an army. Lincoln: Find out what he drinks and give it to my other generals!
Sure, other Unices may suck even less than Linux does. But does that mean we should switch over?
The other reason we use Linux is because it doesn't leave us beholden to a company's execs and/or shareholders.
So now they're giving us the old "first fix is free" line. Sounds to me like all the more reason to avoid them: this is just giving away your browser on a larger scale. The game is still the same.
They say a monkey won't let a banana go to save itself from a trap, and some consumers appear to approach the world with the same strategy. Not me. When a stranger offers me a free beer, I mentally weigh the golden chains attached to the mug.
Sun hasn't got anything I want bad enough to trade my independence for.
--
It's October 6th. Where's W2K? Over the horizon again, eh?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Amen brother :)
You echo my exact sentiment. The shrill disinformation and plain idiocy that the penguin camp is increasingly becoming full of, is truly disgusting. Being a long-time Unix sysadmin and developer I am very saddened by this. Linux zealots have always been the noisiest ones around, but what we are witnessing is indeed a phenomenon on a Microsoftish scale.
I've dumped Linux for FreeBSD about 6 months ago, and haven't looked back. It is very evident that BSD and SVR4 represent more than 2 decades of research, something that many in the linux camp choose to overlook. I believe this will damage the evolution of Linux in the long term. It seems better to them to trash "the competition" than to learn from it.
Free Solaris is the death knell for most of the BSDs. No way that BSDI can survive. The other BSDs have no advantage over Solaris in terms of user base or available software. All the BSDs combined hardly equal 10% of Solaris's installed base. And other then a couple of applications, their is no commercial software support for any of the BSDs. Turn out the lights, the party's over.
-- by between 30 and 40% percent. Tell your managers / bosses / colleagues / accountants / P.H.B.s (OK not mutually exclusive) etc.
"Horse for courses" here. We all know that Solaris sucks on x86 hardware, that its performance and device compatability is poor. Sun have been trying to close off Solaris x86 for a year or so (witness the cancelling of their graphics driver development..). This is mainly I think in response to the sucess of Linux on x86 platform.
Solaris is also a bit lame when it comes to a development environment as well!
However Solaris does excel as the operating system for Sun hardware, especially the enterprise stuff. Everything works, all the hardware is (of course) supported and works like a dream. The centralisation of control of the Os under the Community license also means central bug control and regular patch clusters to keep things up to date. This makes the SA's job a lot easier.
The whole idea, behind Java, I believe was to make Sun machines easier to use. McNeely has seen the writing on the wall for software (and OS's) as a profitable business line, so he wants to sell as much hardware as possible
Hence Java, and now 'free' Solaris (which probably would have been available sooner if it wasn't for the 3rd party stuff included
Everything has its place. I can see a IBM sponsered Linux running on AS/400 and the like as a big competitor for Sun in the Enterprise level server market
Should be interesting
I'm not an expert on business computing, but it seems to me that Sun should be reaching the end of its rope within the next couple years. As Linux matures, CIOs will be saying, "Hmmm, I can go with SPARC/Solaris and have a good system, or I can go with Intel(etc.)/Linux and have a system that's _almost_ as reliable, probably faster, and costs 1/5 as much. Hmmm."
So I was leafing through an old Linux Journal this morning. I think it was Feb. 99, though I might be wrong. They had a blurb on Sun joining Linux International and supporting the port of Linux to the UltraSparc.
So how or why do they say "we'll never support Linux" when they starting supporting linux before IBM did?
Methinks that either the person who spoke doesn't speak for the company or the company is changing positions, or the company has a face for the people that care about Solaris and another face for those that care about Linux.
"Im afraid........ the Shields will be quite operational when your friends arive......" The Phantom, Return of the Jedi
Personally I have a an IPC, Sparc5, and Sparc 20, all except the 20 run OpenBSD with a kernel built specifically for the hardware it runs on.
I've tried NFS servers on every OS known to man, of those only two are acceptable for production business use- Network Appliance and Solaris.
I do not deploy Linux. Ever.
I know of people working on real SMP support for OpenBSD, but they are concentrating on PC and the current Sparc port, not Ultra... primarily because they cannot (yet) afford an 2x200Mhz Ultra.
One of these days we need to set up a charitable educational OpenBSD foundation so I can donate hardware to the cause and take the tax write off.
They are called 'packages' and a large archive of ready-to-roll Solaris binaries for Sparc and Intel is available at http://metalab.unc.edu/pub/solaris/sparc/
I do not deploy Linux. Ever.
Graymalkin's points are all very good, most especially this one:
Solaris 7 (and there is a perfectly good reason for dropping the "2." as I've stated before) is much better than previous versions of Solaris, and Solaris 8 shows every sign of making it even better. Just because it doesn't have a penguin and allow 12-year-olds to form corporations based on it doesn't mean it's poor.We use a great deal of Solaris here in a professional research environment. We also use Linux on a laptop or two when somebody needs to do a traveling demo. The idea is balance, people -- the entire world running Linux would be little different from the entire world running Solaris or the entire world running WindowsNiceTry.
Those of you still going through puberty may now begin the flaming.
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
sun was one of the companies that put mitnick in jail saying that by stealing solaris source code he had harmed the company and they had lost tens of thosuands of dollars... now they give it away for free.
Well, I have one of these here, but unfortunately it's a production system so I can't be taking it down to put other OSs on it. Funny, that's what everyone with any decent system says, which makes it tough to get multi-os benchmarks on good hardware. Want to send me another one?
but then I guess it's difficult to put down all that youthful exuberance, eh?
Youth has nothing to do with it. Anybody with this big an advantage would have to be exuberant. But it's nice to know that our enemies are down to personal attacks. A sure sign of impending victory.
I've seen independent benchmarks for things like Web serving where Solaris scales BETTER than linear on multiprocessor boxen. (things like excellent cache coherency multiply the apparent size of the cache)
More fundamentally, running enterprise class systems requires a very different mentality than I think the Open Source world is ready to provide. Scaling to 64 or 128 processors requires a Cathedral mentality, not a Bazaar. You can't screw up anywhere, use any faulty materials or have any shoddy engineering or the whole thing topples.
If even a few tiny areas are not fully optimized, hold locks for just a bit too long, or just use the wrong kind of lock, things go in the toilet. Review the problems in the Linux TCP/IP stack that were found with the Mindcraft testing, or IBM's kernel patches for the scheduler and Java performance if you doubt this.
These are a triumph of Open Source, you say? Yes, and they're being fixed, but unfortunately, it's very hard for anybody but a big organization with lots of QA resources available to police an OS to the extreme extent necesary for scalability on large systems. To the extent that SGI and IBM make contributions or fix problems, they'll either be on a treadmill, or they'll take defacto control of the development of scalable varieties of Linux. (even if they release the source afterwards, the development process would still be corporate)
And finally, if you know anything about concurrent and parallel programming, you know that the programs that scale well to high level concurrency are not the same ones that run the quickest on minimal hardware with one or two threads. There are inherent tradeoffs in the optimization strategies involved, and you'll see that the more Linux is able to scale like Solaris, the smaller the performance gap on the low end will become.
I've got a copy of Red Hat Linux 2.1 sitting right in front of me, and I am fairly confident I've seen a 3.x release as well.
I cannot help but think that you're a Slackware fan blinded by loyalty, as you are leaving a number of Red Hat releases from your "facts".
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
I've got a copy of Red Hat Linux 2.1 sitting right in front of me, and I am fairly confident I've seen a 3.x release as well.
I cannot help but think that you're a Slackware fan blinded by loyalty, as you are leaving a number of Red Hat releases from your "facts".
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
no kidding, I bet people would pay big bucks to have him over to the house and hack on their linux box.
Linux is just the kernel. Most of the tools for linux will also be useable on solaris(and sco and other unixes). If we are to compare anything, we should compare the two kernels and core systems.
Joe
We are the Might Linux Army! Death to all who oppose us! We are so cool that all molecular motion in a ten meter radius around us stops completely! We saved IBM!
Yeah, right. You notice that the people who actually deserve the credit for these braggable accomplishments are to busy to crow about them here. Get coding, luser.
Visit the Signal 11 Shrine to see Signal 11 naked and petrified.
--
Brian Fundakowski Feldman
I admit that it _does_ sound lame to stop using a system due to these reasons. However, these reasons were only the small shove I needed.
I use FBSD (previously Linux) at home mainly in a hobby capacity; it is an excellent way to study Unix at home.
Coming from a mainly commercial-Unix background background, I was becoming increasingly displeased with the inconsistent feel of Linux. Certainly, RedHat have made serious efforts in giving their distribution a commercial feel, but the cohesion isn't there. That is something that I _did_ find in FreeBSD, despite it being a very different beast to SVR[34] (to which I am accustomed).
Now, before you all flame me, I admit that I am not a kernel hacker: I have studied STREAMS and DDI driver development, but besides a couple of basic modules haven't done anything of note in that direction, particularly on a free OS. I do not have the tools to personally evaluate the merits of the Linux or FreeBSD kernels. However, I find that the packaging and organisation of FreeBSD is superior by far to that of the Linux distributions I have used (and closer in quality to that of commercial Unixes), and made me feel "at home" (after a certain acclimatisation period, of course).
In the BSD discussion groups I found a helpful and above all _professional_ atmosphere, which I found lacking in those of Linux. Particularly in Slashdot, where the kiddies are out to preach their 3l337ness (sorry Rob & Hemos, you've done an excellent job with your forum; it's a daily spot for me). Posts like this guy's simply infuriate me. Compounded with a general attitude of "well have your SysV's and BSD's, we'll crush you all anyway" from intelligent and professional people I've worked and studied with, I am left disgusted. I'm sorry if I made it seem that this was the reason I've decided to try out an alternative; it was just a trigger. After sampling the news groups and reading about the system, I simply decided to give it a go, and ordered the FreeBSD 3.2 CD's. I am extremely glad that I've switched over. And until the Hurd becomes stable for a serious try-out, I think I'll stick with the BSD's.
I would be interested in getting a detailed version history of RedHat.. Just head over to RedHat's website, and find the info for me, then post a reply :-)
:-)
:)
Well, I'm not going to do your work for you.
Seriously, just because Red Hat doesn't maintain a full version history in an easy-to-find spot doesn't mean the versions don't exist.
But RedHat still went up from 0.1 to 4.0 in a period of two years or so, which seems weird.
Welcome to the world of Open Source Software. Developments are rapid.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
Even if they chare $100 per copy of W2K If you put it on 10 machines you are at $1000.
You could also say there's no reason to install OpenBSD, because you can just go and audit your server afterwards and fix any problems..
:-)
But this doesn't scale if you have to manage more than a few boxen. What you include at install time (and can be scripted to install) is pretty much it for most of my fire & forget jobs, like small firewalls that protect a SOHO or small business network. But then, Sun doesn't target that market, and there's no way they could afford the pricing that they used -- and now that it's free (beer), the quality is the dubious aspect. The "Solaris version" sounds like non-audited, eyeballed by the community code to me.
No thanks
---
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
Heh. I'm 25, not 50.
The reason I assume that the flamers are all kids is because they ARE.
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)