Solaris Might Become LSB-compliant

lvv writes "Register: according to Sun's Jonathan Schwartz, Solaris - one of the most proprietary Unixes, might become LSB compliant OpenSolaris. Also some info about future of Solaris desktop (Gnome)."

Comments

wait a minite

[JamesCronus]

hang on, solaris, becomeing linux compliant???? eh???????? i thought solaris, being UNIX was posix complient, and so didnt need to be LSB compliant. hang on wont this turn solaris into a linux clone, but linux is a unix clone................ i'm gonna go and lie down, i think i'm dreaming

Re:wait a minite

[Empty Threats]

POSIX compliant and POSIX conformant are not at all the same thing.

Windows is something like 85% compliant but not conformant; OpenVMS is 100% compliant but not conformant.

I believe compliance is a matter of having the right API's in place, while conformance specifies just how things should work inside the OS.

One of the most proprietary?

[Clue4All]

Solaris - one of the most proprietary Unixes

I'm going to take issue with this statement. Solaris isn't open source by any means, but it's a free download on SPARC and until recently Intel platforms, and you can download the source after agreeing to Sun's license. You can make changes to the source, recompile anything you damn well please, and contribute changes back to Sun (I have done so myself), the only thing you can't do is redistribute it. It's not on par in the open nature of Linux or FreeBSD, but compare this to DEC/Compaq/HP Tru64 or HP-UX or AIX where you pay a huge sum of money for a binary CD. I'd hardly call that the most proprietary.

Re:One of the most proprietary?

[alsta]

Your frustrations with Solaris are most likely due to, forgive me if I sound condescending, inexperience.

I have never heard of a Sun Fire 150. Sun has a Fire V100 and Fire V120. These have two ethernet interfaces, which I think are called dmfe[01]. I don't have access to one so I can't verify that. You can figure this out by using prtconf(1M).

To harden a Solaris box takes a little time. But it shouldn't take 4 hours. You basically need to make sure that RPC services are turned off and that you step through inetd.conf.

Patching Solaris is a breeze compared to various Linux distributions, including Red Hat. Apply the latest MU and then either use PatchPro or Recommended clusters.

You're right, Solaris isn't exactly point-and-click. Perhaps you should, as you suggested, stick with MacOS X.

O.K.!

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

I think that this will finally earn them the right to increment a Major Version Number!

In related news...

[steveadept]

In another fantastic display of pandering, Schwartz noted, "OpenSolaris will be based on UnitedLinux, because that's the direction everybody's going, isn't it? Isn't it?"

LSB means you can use source RPMs

[yerricde]

i thought solaris, being UNIX was posix complient, and so didnt need to be LSB compliant.

Any LSB conforming operating system can use source RPM packages that meet the LSB specs. This should expand the selection of free software that runs on the Solaris operating environment as well as make it easier to install.

All your Linux Standard Base are belong to us.

Sun and standards

[germinatoras]

A lot of us like to accuse Sun of being no better than Microsoft at a lot of things. This may be true on some level, but this is definitely a step in the right direction. While their motivation may be purely profit-driven, at least they are taking the approach of "Linux is getting popular, so we should be more like it", rather than "We need to squeeze every last $0.01 out of our locked-in customers".

Lately, Sun seems to be establishing a good track record for openness. They've created a fairly decent platform-independent programming language and development environment, and have made their Solaris environment look more like the other Unices out there. They are starting to come out with Linux products, or at least are talking about them. Even the source code to Solaris 7 used to be available for purchase on CD-ROM (although they may have backed away from that).

I hope that this is more than just a bid to recapture lost market share, but a real committment to play fair and adhere to open, published, and somewhat popular standards.

Re:Sun and standards

[Richard_Davies]

> While their motivation may be purely profit-driven

Um - aren't pretty much all (profitable) companies profit-driven?

I mean Microsoft, Red Hat, Sun, IBM, etc - none of them are charities right?

Commercial vs. proprietary

[yerricde]

Proprietary: Having a good OS and making money at it

No. Software that produces revenue is called "commercial". The term "proprietary", when used in the context of copyrighted works such as software, refers to licensing that restricts your users.

Big Endian or Litle Endian?

[Snork Asaurus]

Solaris Might Become LSB-compliant

Is Solaris already compliant with all the other bits?

It only makes sense

[Anonymous Coward]

Solaris doesn't make Sun any money. It's the hardware that keeps them afloat. Every developer they've got working on Solaris is a salary that doesn't go to working on the money-making hardware.

Running Linux as their main system allows them to get an OS for free. Granted, it's not quite as polished or stable as Solaris, but they don't have to apply any development effort, people are willing to give their work away for free!

And if they'd done that ten years ago...

[Ungrounded Lightning]

Solaris isn't open source by any means, but it's a free download on SPARC and until recently Intel platforms, and you can download the source after agreeing to Sun's license. You can make changes to the source, recompile anything you damn well please, and contribute changes back to Sun (I have done so myself), the only thing you can't do is redistribute it.

And if they'd done that ten years ago, when I (and others) had a significant need to hack up some min or features and no budget to buy into their source distribution package it wouled have been wonderful - and might have headed off the obsolescence of Solaris.

Now, with Linux (+ GNU utilities + X + Gnome|KDE), and Free/Open/Net BSD, and Mach, and the rest of the Open Source world, it's too little too late.

I've reverse-engineered OSes on IBM, Control Data, DEC, Mac, and Altos when useful to add features or custom hardware. But with Spark's RISC instruction set and Sun's insistance on keeping both hardware and software closed, the cost/benefit balance was tipped.

I retired my last Solaris home machine on Dec 31, 1999, rather than upgrade it for Y2K.

At work:
- The serious networking software development is now done on NetBSD and variants. BSD desktops.
- The ASIC development is still partly on Solaris ... because we still have legacy machines from when that was all the tools would run on. But the simulation farm was ported to Linux long ago. New machines are PCs and the Sun boxes will run - mostly as legacy desktops - until they die or become too painful to maintain.
- And of course the administrators are still on Windoze - though it wouldn't surprise me to see them move to Linux in the near future.

Re:And if they'd done that ten years ago...

[magellan]

"But with Spark's RISC instruction set and Sun's insistance on keeping both hardware and software closed, the cost/benefit balance was tipped."

First, Sun's hardware is not closed. Sun does not own SPARC. SPARC International does (www.sparcinternational.com). You can license the SPARC instruction set from them.

You can buy boards from Sun and build your own SPARC computers.

You can buy complete SPARC computers with no Sun hardware at all from Fujitsu.

You can obtain a license Solaris for single SPARC CPU systems for free (beer).

Solaris 8 is also available for Intel-based computers. Solaris 9 added no features of use for Intel, so the lack of availability for Solaris 9 is irrelavant.

You can already

[turgid]

RPM is provided on the Solaris Companion CD so you can already use source RPMs with Solaris.

Least significant bit

[DahGhostfacedFiddlah]

Until now, Solaris has been based on MSB (Most Significant Bit) technology, which made it incompatible with many PC devices. For instance, you couldn't network a Solaris and PC machine without going to the TCP/IP level, because what would leave the Solaris machine as

11100000 00000111

woule return as

00000111 11100000

As you can tell, this was a major PITA. I, for one, am glad that I'll be able to use all my favourite hardware on my Solaris machine now.

Developing LSB-compliant apps

[Anonymous Bullard]

Here's a quick howto by IBM developerWorks (in fact written by the actual chairman of the Linux Standard Base, George Kraft IV) on developing LSB-certified apps. It's got that October freshness about it...

Incidentally there's a link to a Solaris-to-Linux porting guide in the resources section of that article but LSB isn't even mentioned in that lengthy document...