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Sun Closes Solaris Source Sales June 30
Vardamir writes: "
It appears that Sun is no longer interested
in distributing the source code to their Solaris Operating System, even for
a charge of $75.00. 'Thanks for your interest and welcome to the
Solaris[tm] 8 Foundation Source Program. Please note that the Solaris
8 Foundation Source Program will be canceled effective June 30, 2001. In
addition, both the secure chat and code-exchange sites will also be terminated
on this date.' Get it while you still can, bzip it, and upload to a gnutella
server!" Hasn't exactly been that long a ride since this idea was first floated, but it never seemed to be the roaring success that Sun perhaps thought it would.
The IDE model is extremely inexpensive, and the dual processor 1U netra is under $5000, I think.
No, this is not an e10k, and you can't partition it, but it is a solaris machine nonetheless.
Also, solaris is available for FREE for intel and sparc, so there can't be any argument about accessibility for Solaris. The source effort must have failed for other reasons, which I guess to be lack of enthusiasm.
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Care about electronic freedom? Consider donating to the EFF!
"Get it while you still can, bzip it, and upload to a gnutella server!"
How can you upload anything to a gnutella server?
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Fredrik Borg
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Fredrik Borg
Student at the Department of Informatics, University of Oslo
It's not slashdot's opinion, it's the submitter's.
Szo
Red Leader Standing By!
You put up your post, in a public forum, fully aware that it would be read, in such a manner.
Sun released their source code, under very specific guidelines. Which included not re-distributing it.
If you are going to insist, that companies like MS not hijack open source code, and repackage it as their own. Then you should allow them to use those same laws in the opposite manner. IP laws, are a two way street.
"Politicians are interested in people. Not that this is always a virtue. Fleas are interested in dogs." P.J. O'Rourke
Is this yet another sign that Sun is weakening? Their hardware sales are begininning to be impacted by x86 as their system line falters and their OS if being whacked (especially on the low end) by Linux and its BSD bretheren. As the x86-64 and IA-64 lines progress the advantages of Sun hardware shrink. Free Java simplementations are starting to overshadow the JDK, especially in the Linux community. Sun, like SGI, is well on its way to becoming another RISC UNIX vendor killed by Linux and NT on x86. (How would _you_ save them? replies)
Also I think the Solaris code licensing fialure is do to the fact it wasn't an open project which would have allowed a "community" to be built around improving and enhancing Solaris. With the media cost so high, no one other than companies who base much of their biiz on Solaris would have any interest in seriously looking at the source.
... to encourage people to get the source and put it Gnutella ?
C'mon people, this is not open source, they were selling the source and are now cancelling the effort (who knows why). But by making little comments like that, you're making us look like a community of software pirates not open source advocates !
- sigs are for wimps.
Rather than deal with continued maintenance of products that have new versions out, Sun tends to ask its users to upgrade to the newest version, and enforce this by killing off access to the older versions. Personally, I see nothing wrong with this (though having an archive available is always nice). Who wants a tech support call for a modified version of an outdated product? Especially if the problem is one that is fixed in a later version.
Rumours are that Gnome will ship with Solaris 9, but I don't know if it will be the default desktop. As for the release date, don't know, would have to look on the sun.com site for info. Sun is a BIG company, so I don't have any idea what the OS guys are doing.
Stealing a rhinoceros should not be attempted lightly.
DISCLAIMER : I work for Sun, so am biased, but the below comments are in no way endorsed by Sun or necessarily reflect any of Sun's official positions.
I suppose the same applies to TCL? I believe one of the lead developers of TCL/Expect is in the full-time employ of Sun and has been for some time. Besides, GNOME spent a lot of time shouting at KDE for their proprietary library, so there is no way they will let anything proprietary into the GNOME source. So exactly HOW will Sun kill GNOME? If people don't like something Sun gets into GNOME, someone will put in a way to disable it, or more likely it won't get into the official version.
I see all sorts of negative comments against Sun, yet no-one seems to have any real facts. Yes, Sun still has proprietary code, these things take time to change (has IBM open-sourced AIX? HP HP-UX? Oracle? ). Yes, they still don't really support Linux, but the Cobalt range still runs it, and Sun owns them, again, it will take time to change. I think they'll get there, probably only on the low-end high-volume stuff for quite some time, but they'll get there when the really mission-critical (which is mostly where they sell) guys start to demand it. Don't forget in Sun's marketplace it's maximum uptime and speed that counts, not a pretty desktop. That and CONFIDENCE, try selling a Linux solution for a banks core systems.. won't work (yet).. but Solaris is a serious contender.
So, where does that leave us? Sun doesn't fit with "pure RMS tenants", well ok, show me an old-style computer firm that does! Those companies started with a pure open-source philosophy have a much easier time maintaining that philisophy than firms that grew up with the "what's mine is mine, what's yours is mine" marketplace that M$ et al forged. Sun has open-sourced a lot of its stuff, StarOffice, lest you forget, Java, etc. StarOffice alone may do more good for Linux's success than anything else, and don't forget Sun actually laid out hard cash to buy that just to give away, who else can claim that? Personally I think Sun is helping Linux incredibly, and whilst it may not be pushing it or supporting it on its own hardware, yet, Linux is certainly not being hurt by Sun's contributions. Can you say the same about Microsoft, to which you compared them?
Just my two pence.
Stealing a rhinoceros should not be attempted lightly.
Apple needs Java to work on Macs more than anything.
I'm a Java developer and glad about every 1.2 / 1.3 JDK that is available, but why do you think that Apple needs Java? It seems to me that Apple's systems are very much end-user-driven, so that Java isn't really much of an issue. Java never really made it to the desktop (Swing speed issues etc.)
Solaris is still sold (for a lot of money) with the large (16-way+) servers like the E10000.
Sun *DOES* care about the OS, because with Solaris they have a better lock on selling the hardware.
With Linux you can put it on your existing Sparc systems then migrate to (cheaper) Intel systems whenever the need arises. As long as they are low-end ( =4 cpus ) workstations, you won't have a problem. The software should run with just a recompile. Linux is a foot in the door and a nail in the coffin for Sun.
Look at Red Hat's latest PR -- about their quarterly results. Notice the bullet point about Nortel contracting for support to switch from "proprietary Unix" (that is Sun Solaris, BTW) on their Network Management Systems to Red Hat Linux 7.1.
Remember IBM's announcement about Telestra -- the Scandanavian ISP that replaced a room full of Sun Servers with a single S/390 running Linux?
McNealy is so focused on Bill Gates he doesn't realize that the cute little penguin he was so generously helping out is about to rip his leg off.
IBM jumped on the bandwagon; Sun seems to have an "oh, isn't that cute -- a little OS" opinion of Linux.
Sun had it's moment but it is gone. An eclipse is coming.
Linux. Join us or die.
--
Charles E. Hill
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Low spec PC for single user, Blade 1000 workstation, $1000.
Medium spec PC, eg small website, Ultra 5 or 10, under $10,000.
Higher spec PC, eg Database, Enterprise 220, under $30,000.
Yes, the high end stuff is very expensive, but then there are no PC generic equivilants for the E10K.
John Ousterhout was at Sun for a while, after leaving Berkeley, however he left Sun, formed Scriptics, which was supposed to promote TCL, then apparently he is now working for interwoven. His homepage is at http://www.scriptics.com/people/john.ousterhout/.
Here is a page which docuements TCL moving into, and out of, Sun's sphere.
YYeah sorryy, bounced on the 0 keyy one time to manyy.
To be honest, compared to Debian it sucks. I have been told that Solaris is better than Linux for some things, but for everything I do, Debian is/was clearly superior.
Carefree highway, let me slip away on you.
> Solaris still has the most scalable SMP tech. There's a lot to be learned by groveling through that code.
*cough* *cough*
Sorry, Solaris doesn't even come close to having the most scalable SMP code. That honor belongs to SGI's IRIX (currently 512P on Origin 2000 and Origin 3000) and Cray's Unicos/mk (approximately 1800P on the largest T3E I'm aware of). A measly little 64P Solaris UE10000 system cannot come anywhere making that claim.
Note: Yes, there may technically be some larger SMP systems in existence running one-off operating systems; I am limiting my discussion to commercially available (at some point) systems.
I will agree, however, that there is a lot to be gained from reading Solaris code. However, I wouldn't advise doing so and then bringing ideas into your operating system kernel of choice. Sun lawyers may very well have a heyday with you if that happens.
Cyrano de Maniac
What does M$ have to do with a stable platform maintained by a competent company?
>>>>>>>>>>>>>
It's called Windows 2000. MS might not be the "nicest" company in the world, but nobody looking at the success of Windows would argue that the are not "competent."
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
You probably have it misconfigured. I have three machines here running Win2K, and two of them run some pretty heavy duty apps (Photoshop, 3D Studio, Visual C++). Hasn't crashed on me yet. The majority of people on the web (either through posting or doing reviews or whatnot), the "word on the street" if you will, says that Win2K is damn stable. Thus, personal experience (neither mine nor yours) counts for nothing.
As for MS's operating systems, Linux could learn somethings from Win2K (just as Win2K could learn things from Linux) Win2K sheduler gives much better response to GUI apps than Linux's does, its GUI is much smoother, and some of the internals (look in an OS case study) are much more suited to a desktop OS. On the other hand, Win2K could stand to dump the Win32 environment subsystem paradigm, and pick up XFS and UVM while it was at it.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Solaris is ten times the OS as Linux as much as I love linux. While I personally hope (because I am cheap) that the linux 2.5 and 2.6 kernels get us closer to a Solaris like OS, that day hasn't arrived.
Sun Doesn't need PR, good or bad. The reality is that engineers know that Solaris is dependable for large scale 24/7 operations. Otherwise they wouldn't fork out the rediculous prices for Sparcs. So whatever these RMS pricks say is irrelevant. I don't know why Sun even bothers courting them in the first place.
Someone you trust is one of us.
as a commerical software vendor with your source totally closed, you're able to integrate GPLed code without anyone knowing about it. I'd keep a close eye on Sun over the next 12 months.
What a joke. Firstly, check out http://www.sunsource.net. Secondly, check out Sun's contribution to the internet and Unix in general over the last 20 years. Thirdly, Solaris source code may not even be pulled from the publics eyes, good presumption there. Fourthly, Solaris source code will presumably still be available to third level institutions and Sun customers. And finally, Sun have got so many good engineers that the idea of Sun taking any of, say, Linux and integrating it into the Solaris kernel is a joke.
You can't emulate the success of the Open Source community by trying to copy some superficial part of it without "Getting It."
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Sun offers the Solaris OS at basically zero cost, because more people will buy their hardware if they have an operating system to run on them.
If you want to run Linux on your Sparc, Sun is not going to try to stop you- anything that encourages you to buy their hardware is a good thing.
I do not deploy Linux. Ever.
Sun offers the Solaris OS at basically zero cost, because more people will buy their hardware if they have an operating system to run on them.
If you want to run Linux on your Sparc, Sun is not going to try to stop you- anything that encourages you to buy their hardware is a good thing.
I do not deploy Linux. Ever.
Face it: if Sun were a software company selling Solaris, they'd be long since dead. They may have brilliant kernel hackers, but the userland feels unmaintained and obsolete.
Linux on commodity hardware offers vastly more bang for the buck than traditional Unix on high-end hardware. The only logical role for high end hardware is problems that do not lend to parallelization, such as databases. And yet Oracle is attacking this problem space via parallelization too.
There is an irrational attachment to 'big iron' which is not going to survive continued economic downturn and the increased visiblity of Linux solutions. Believe me, I know exactly the people you're talking about, and many are talented sysadmins. But they are a little isolated from the outside world - they still speak in terms of 'PC vs Unix' and merge the shortcomings of Windows with the shortcomings of the PC platform in their discussion.
I was thinking more along the lines of "Sun should follow SGI's lead". Why not drop Solaris, have engineers go to town on Linux for Sparc, and sell some support licenses and servers. Isn't that Sun's business model anyways?
-no broken link
Which part of "Linux for Sparc" needed to be bolded?
-no broken link
How appropriate your comment is when your homepage is mp3smuggler.com ... how does source code differ from mp3s?
Free Techno/Jazz/DNB/MI Music by guys obsessed with monkeys!
It's obvious why a company would release their code under a nominally open source license - they are looking for geeks to improve their code for free. Equally pathetic are the licenses of Inferno and Plan9: Bell OWNS your code, if you make any "improvements". Sun pulls this same kind of monkey business with their community source license, if I'm not mistaken. /*Rant
People don't want to code for(not ON) a license-hampered OS in their free time, because there is not much of a sense of satisfaction in helping a large corporation for free. Netscape, Apple, and all the rest including Microsoft are attempting to beguile us with their so-called embrace of open source. Fuck that!
Rant*/
It was my impression that many of the backend systems were Linux, especially for the J2ME applications.
-Pete
Soccer Goal Plans
I was watching the JavaOne keynote's last week and something struck me as interesting. While JavaOne is a conference sponsered by Sun, the majority of the products that had on-stage demos were running under the Linux OS. Not all of them, but a lot of them were.
I thought it was interesting how people kept coming up on stage and telling the Sun reps that this that or the other thing ran with a Linux backend. Once or twice they had the comment "oh....it runs on Linux?"
If I worked for Sun, I would have taken that as a wakeup call. Currently Sun is one of the companies that doesn't know quite what to make of little free OS we know and love.
I personally never thought it really made sense to release the Solaris code. Maybe they are starting to come up with a real open source strategy...at least we can hope.
-Pete
Soccer Goal Plans
I think it's very useful for certain types of users to have access to the Solaris source -- not because they want to compile it, but because they want to be able to see how certain things work. When I was doing much more in-depth work with the TCP/IP stack (including TCP parameter tuning) and ATM on Solaris, it would have saved me trouble to be able to get a look at some of the source to better understand how certain things were behaving rather than having to tweak parameters semi-blindly and see what ended up working best. If had still been doing that work when Sun released the source code I would have been all over it. I'm sure I can't be alone, there must be other Solaris users out there with similar needs. These types of users also tend to be very proactive about helping Sun resolve bugs, and I would not be surprised if the speed of implementation of bug fixes has been improved with their help.
As a side note, I also know that Sun had distributed source to certain (usually educational) institutions over the years prior to this program, including UCLA.
...and nothing more... but as a commerical software vendor with your source totally closed, you're able to integrate GPLed code without anyone knowing about it. I'd keep a close eye on Sun over the next 12 months.
Sun's own Java people are very aware of how silly it is to pretend that Solaris and Java are tied together. But they have no say in the matter. When I worked there, everyone's favorite bitch was that they only had resources for three reference implementations of Java, and one of those three had to be Solaris/86 -- an OS almost nobody uses. It accounts for about 1% of JDK downloads.
Have you ever noticed that some of the installation instructions for the Windows JDK seem to be written by people who don't have access to Windows systems? That's because they don't. Never mind that 90% of JDK downloads are by Windows users....
__
Some geeks seem to think that everybody has all the time available to tweak and twiddle with everything they can get their hands on, while all most of us (this includes a lot geeks as well) want is a stable platform that is maintained by a competent company so we don't have to. Hence the real-life success of companies like Microsoft, Oracle and Sun...and the less-than-spectacular interest in Solaris Source Code.
When was the last time you looked at the blueprints of your car's engine, anyway ?
Flourescent (adj): smelling like ground wheat.
...it's because they finally figured out the "Network is NOT the computer".
Perhaps the often prohibitive cost of most sun hardware is that which contributes most to the failure of this effort. Had an effort been made to make the hardware as accessible as the software maybe things would be different.
SMP, by definition, has all processors sharing a common memory (uniform memory), with memory contention/bandwidth typically becoming the limiting factor on scalability.
NUMA utilizes cache coherency strategies to add multiple memory pools, introducing the concepts of local (memory local to one or more processors, e.g. those on the same board) and far (non-local memory owned by other processors in the machine) memory accesses. NUMA reduces the contention for memory, thus achieves a higher scalability with the performance cost being in terms of memory latency on far accesses.
Lastly, MPP is essentially NUMA without cache coherency, which is why programming MPP machines requires additional effort on the part of application developers.
Certain types of applications favor different scalability models, so one machine does NOT fit all. For general purpose computing, SMP is typically the best bang for the buck, since the architectural complexity is typically less. However, with the right problem to solve, NUMA and MPP systems will fly past SMP, but typically cost way more $$$ to get there.
Solaris probably cannot improve scalability much further with SMP with today's hardware. They are utilizing crossbar memory backplanes in the highend already to get to 64 processors. Bottom-line, I believe they are doing a darned good job on the SMP hardware they produce.
They can't. The source code is already available at Open Office. Probably, what Sun wants to do is sell a proprietary, "enhanced" version of StarOffice base on the Open Office code, but you could still get the open source version. Same as what Reghat is doing with Postgress. I don't see a problem with your Linux distributor shipping Open Office (although he'd have to check the site for the exact licencing agreement *sigh*)
"What are we going to do tonight, Bill?"
www.lucernesys.comHorizon: Calendar-based personal finance
They can't sell it for 80 bucks, but when Kevin Mitnick stole it, is was worth 80 million bucks.
We should each mail the district attorney in the mitnick case a copy of the Solaris Source code. Or maybe we could send it to John Markoff...
sigh.
First, there are still many boatloads of legacy Sun equipment out there with proprietary drivers for hardware that's poorly documented, if at all. Access to Sun's source is a leg-up for anyone who wants to understand how such hardware works.
Solaris still has the most scalable SMP tech. There's a lot to be learned by groveling through that code.
Now think about people who have to support large Solaris networks - bugs and all. When you run up against a problem and can't get Sun to admit that it is a problem, your only recourse is to fix it yourself. Try that without source.
Carl G. Jung
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Carl G. Jung
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"With one breath, with one flow, You will know Synchronicity" -La Policia