Sun Mulling GPL for Solaris

comforteagle writes "According to this article in InfoWorld, Sun Microsystems is considering open sourcing Solaris by changing licenses to the GPL. What kind of impact would this have on those of you considering opting out of Unix for Linux? Red Hat and others have openly targeted Solaris users to switch." By the end of the article, the change seems rather unlikely to happen, but it's still interesting to see what changes this could bring about.

Comments

Why?

[bcmm]

Is this because enough people want open-source that they can no longer compete without it?

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

More like "they can't even give it away"

Re:Why?

[newhoggy]

Probably to make us look so that Sun can have the opportunity to preach about the virtues of "open standards" over "open source".

Re:Why?

[jc42]

An explanation that I've found very effective over the years:

Way back in the 1980's, I worked on a number of projects that had teams building their software on a number of different kinds of small computer systems. The teams using Sun workstations often got a bit of flak for using a system with a fairly high price/performance ratio. But the Sun-based teams invariably had the last laugh.

What happened was that debugging would frequently lead into parts of "the system", i.e., system libraries and/or the kernel. When we asked the vendor for details of the low-level software, the answer would reduce to "We can't tell you; it's proprietary". The proprietary, closed-source parts of the systems were brick walls that blocked progress.

With Sun (SunOS or Solaris), if we couldn't get an immediate answer from Sun, we would just ask on one of the Sun newsgroups. Usually an answer would come back within hours, most often from an engineer within Sun. Very often, they would include a chunk of the source code as an explanation.

The result was that the teams developing on Suns would get answers to their technical questions, and would have a functioning product long before any of the other teams. There's a real advantage to having a working, marketable product, even if it's more expensive than a competitor that doesn't work yet.

Over the years, this Sun advantage has evaporated. It has slowly become more difficult to get accurate details on the inner working of Solaris and other Sun libraries and tools. They have gone the protective, proprietary route. And their market is slowly being eaten by linux, for exactly the same reasons as above.

It's possible that what is happening inside Sun is that the people who understand this are starting to be heard again. If they can make the innards of their system as open as it was 20 years ago, they stand a good chance of recovering their business.

Alternatively, if the protectionist factions inside Sun prevail, they could also start up a linux-based line. This would be a bit of an expense, but no more so than their switch from SunOS to Solaris (i.e., from BSD to Sys/V) 15 or so years ago. If they did this, a Sun linux would probably wipe out Solaris over a few years, for the same reasons of faster development times on an open system.

The cheapest would be to open-source Solaris. This would get them back into the good graces of software developers, and would restore their earlier status as a system on which you can bring a debugged, reliable product to market very quickly.

And it would probably be better for all of us, since it would avoid the growing threat of a linux "monoculture". The unix part of the industry has always been better off because it isn't a monoculture, and thus isn't susceptible to the virus/worm-type attacks of the "market leader".

But there are those elephants hiding in the middle of the room: patent and copyright. Can Sun legally open-source all of Solaris? If they try it, can they withstand the legal might of an SCO with behind-the-scene Microsoft support? Stay tuned ...

Re:Why?

[Waldmeister]

Thanks for that great article, I've just two additions:

Linux "monoculture"

I don't think, that there is a big thread for Linux to become a monoculture or proriety. (This would be the thread, Jonathan Schwartz was bashed here a few days ago, right?). There are several different distributions, and I doubt that Redhat will become too dominant. The bigger corporations like IBM or HP will be aware, that there are different flavors.

Can Sun legally open-source all of Solaris?

I think they can, they've bought very extensive rights about SVR4 from AT&T years ago. And they got based for paying SCO some money some time ago. So I expect they have all the rights to open source Solaris, at least the SVR4 parts.

And it would be a huge slap into the face of SCO and their cruise against Linux. :-)

Re:Why?

[the_thunderbird]

And you actually believe an article written by infoworld????? I mean come on dude!

Re:Why?

[jc42]

I don't think, that there is a big thread for Linux to become a monoculture or proriety. (This would be the thread, Jonathan Schwartz was bashed here a few days ago, right?).

Yeah, you're probably right. The linux landscape is the metaphoric "herd of cats".

But still, we should be aware of the potential problem, and we should discuss it. It's similar to how we shouldn't be too smug about the linux (and *BSD) security question. In both cases, we're muuch better off if we constantly harp on such problems, and point fingers at potential problems.

In the case of the monoculture, there is indeed a real potential for problems in the business arena. The business world has always favored a monoculture, as a way to simplify decision making (which can be costly in both money and careers). In the corporate linux market, RedHat has a strong lead, and there's a serious possibility that they could end up ruling the linux business world.

RedHat deserves a lot of credit and support for what they've done. But "winning" and vanquishing their competition could make them a target for the virus/worm plague that has infected the Windows user community. Granted, writing such software for linux is much more difficult than with Windows, but it's not impossible that a single distro would have an exploitable hole. Then we could see half the banking system or half the credit industry going offline simultaneously.

So we should be preaching to the business folks about the dangers of putting all their corporate eggs in the RedHat basket. We should teach them that part of the reason for all the Windows problems is the monoculture. They should intentionally use different distros, configure them differently, run different DBs, etc. They should look for ways to tailor their systems to their environment, so that they aren't too similar to other computers.

And we should be on the lookout for other such developments. We want a herd of cats, not a flock of sheep, to help prevent the single points of failure that results from widespread use of a single distro. If we make serious sales to the non-tech world, we should fight the widespread desire to have a single "one size fits all" computer that everyone is pressured to buy.

Re:Why?

[Mr. Piddle]

I definitely agree that Sun probably has people on both sides of the issue internally. For example, they provided the source code for Solaris 8 and the Java libraries but not Solaris 9. Also, the Solaris 8 source had some curious omissions, which are probably the parts that have licensing issues (OpenGL, SCO-cruft, etc.).

So, what would be very likely, based on prior behavior, would be for Sun to possibly release _most_ of Solaris under GPL minus the parts their lawyers are still unsure of. This would still be a big win for developers, who can benefit from debugging at nearly all levels. I've already benefited from having the Java source, GPL or no, and fully understand what those developers in the 1980's must have felt like.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps it's just an idle threat intended to induce Microsoft to buy Solaris, or maybe even Sun itself, in order to keep Solaris from going GPL.

Re:Why?

[JPriest]

They should intentionally use different distros, configure them differently, run different DBs, etc.

And hire different admins and DBA for all of the different systems? As well as some good project teams when they need one DB to tie in seamlessly with another DB?

Our systems are different enough as we use different technologies over the years, I can't even imagine the nightmare if we went out of our way to use different software and configs for all the boxes, not to mention having to seperately test all patches in a _massive_ lab environment.

Re:Why?

[calidoscope]

Can Sun legally open-source all of Solaris?

I think they can, they've bought very extensive rights about SVR4 from AT&T years ago. And they got based for paying SCO some money some time ago. So I expect they have all the rights to open source Solaris, at least the SVR4 parts.

I beg to disagree - Solaris cotains a lot of code from entities other than AT&T/USL/SCO (even though they have unlimited rights to use the code, i.e. no royalties due to SCO - they don't have the rights to distribute the code to others). One example would be the PostScript code in xsun.

Re:Why?

[BiggyP]

if only they'd come to that same decision over Java.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Only the copyright holder can place software under the GPL. Doesn't Novell (or SCO if you believe them - but in any case, not Sun) hold the copyrights to Sys V?

Re:Why?

[calidoscope]

Only the copyright holder can place software under the GPL. Doesn't Novell (or SCO if you believe them - but in any case, not Sun) hold the copyrights to Sys V?

That's my understanding as well - and that's precisely why I don't think Sun can GPL all of Solaris.

Re:Why?

[Waldmeister]

We want a herd of cats, not a flock of sheep, to help prevent the single points of failure that results from widespread use of a single distro.

I agree to that, but I think that the big IT companies like IBM, HP or Sun know of this danger.

If you compare the Linux companies like Redhat or Suse to the IT giants, the latter are still much bigger. They can and will help to keep several competing Linux companies alive. Not only for their customers benefit, but also for their very own. They know, how worse things can get, if you have to deal with a monpolist like Microsoft. :-)

Re:Why?

[Waldmeister]

One example would be the PostScript code in xsun.

Okay, the Adobe DPS part should be a real problem, some drivers probably, too.

But a Sunnie told me some time ago, that they are currently investigating how to get rid of Xsun and get back closer to something more popular like XFree86 or the new X.org X11R6.7.

I didn't see another benefit that getting rid of all the legacy stuff from many years, but it would also make perfectly sense, if you want to open source Solaris, or at least the vital parts.

Re:Why?

[nutznboltz]

But a Sunnie told me some time ago, that they are currently investigating how to get rid of Xsun and get back closer to something more popular like XFree86 or the new X.org X11R6.7.

Moving from CDE to Gnome is already accomplished. The idea that this move was part of the plan to go FOSS is not that far fetched to me.

Re:Why?

[gothamboy]

There are two questions: Firstly, why would Sun do it and secondly, what is good about this in the open source world. The first question, IMHO, is that Sun's customers are somehow driving Sun to Open Solaris probablyu because they are resistant to runing aps on Solaris and would rather use Linux. This is possibly because they are concerned about Sun's long term survivability. They would consider Solaris more seriously if it were Open source and ported to other platforms. It is also important to recognize that large portions of AIX were "open sourced" by their inclusion in Linux--thus the SCO lawsuit. IBM appears to want to get out of the UX-OS business entirely and their strategy is to boost up Linux with functionality and sell consulting services to their customers to help them migrate! My answer to the second question is one that should make /.ers jump for joy. Solaris has the BEST SMP support (most linear) of all the UXes...wouldn't it be great to use that code to improve Linux?

Always Wanted to Try It

[Laebshade]

Just never had the money/accessibility to use it. How well does it run? Does it even run on systems not designed to run on it?

Re:Always Wanted to Try It

[Anonymous Coward]

They have free versions for educational use. Just download it or order the CD set for some dollars.

Re:Always Wanted to Try It

[Anonymous Coward]

It's free (beer). You can download x86-isos from
their site.

And oh boy, are SCO going to go boinkers if Solaris goes GPL.

-Peder

Re:Always Wanted to Try It

[mattdm]

How well does it run? Does it even run on systems not designed to run on it?

1. pretty nicely on expensive hardware, but I wouldn't choose it over Linux. (And in my job, I *do* basically have that choice.)

2. not really, no. The x86 version was available "free as in the cost of media" for a while, and it was a sad, sad joke.

Anyway, the article is pretty full of silly FUD, like this choice tidbit:

"What worries us about the GPL is its capacity to encourage forking, because what's happened in Linux is that Red Hat has forked. Not in the sense that the kernel is different ... It's forked because if you write to the Red Hat distribution, you can't go and run on Debian."

That's ridiculous of course, but more importantly, the only way in which it really makes sense is when you're still thinking about developing *propriatary* apps. If you can just recompile, pretty much *anything* that runs on one Linux distro will run on another. But if you're stuck in a shlepping-around-binaries mindset, yeah, there may be some difficulties.

Basically, they're still as clueless as ever. And we're certainly not going to see what Sun really needs -- an open source Java.

Re:Always Wanted to Try It

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree with with the parent they seem pretty cluesless.

Binary packages can be taken from one distro to another using something like alien (does .tgz and .rpm into .debs) which I've used a few times in debian.

Also, can't they just pick a lience that lets people
1. modify source
2. contribute bug fixes back to them
3. and rebuild there system from source code (aka buildworld).
but dis-allows forking ?

Re:Always Wanted to Try It

[Waffle Iron]

What worries us about the GPL is its capacity to encourage forking, because what's happened in Linux is that Red Hat has forked.

As opposed to the original AT&T UNIX license which thankfully prevented companies like Sun, HP, IBM, SCO, SGI, DEC, BSDi, etc. from forking...

Re:Always Wanted to Try It

[Anonymous Coward]

Sun doesn't need an open source Java. Quite frankly I hope they don't open source it because right now, I can pretty much guarantee my apps will run the same anywhere (sure, there are some other VMs kicking around, but almost everyone uses the Sun one). If it's open source, Jimmy Fuckwad from Debian won't like something and will probably make a change while Johnny Assclown from Gentoo wants speed improvements so he makes another that makes the two incompatible. No, no, it's been nice having Sun regulate it.

Re:Always Wanted to Try It

[Anonymous Coward]

Your point is soo off it's not even funny. There are 1000 of libraries that don't for around just because they are open source. Apart from redhats GCC 2.96 gcc has been quite stable too. There is one PHP, one Python.

Why would JAVA be so totaly forked if it was opensouced?

Re:Always Wanted to Try It

[Anonymous Coward]

full of silly FUD

"FUD" is the new "trolling". i.e. defined as 'Something someone said that I don't agree with'.

Re:Always Wanted to Try It

[smallpaul]

Another thing Schwartz doesn't get: the possibility of forking is precisely what makes "Open source" open. The CIO does not want open source code because he wants his internal IT team to make a fork. He wants open source code because he wants the assurance that if Sun drops the ball technically or goes out of business (both possibilities) IBM or Red Hat or some mythical "Solaris Support Inc.) could pick up the Solaris ball and keep running with it. As long as it is proprietary to Sun, it gets bought by whoever buys Sun and it may be in their best interest to kill it. Mitchell Baker said it best: Open Source is about the freedom to choose leadership. Solaris users should be able to follow Sun's variant of Solaris as long as Sun continues to innovate and lead. But they should be able to follow someone else's variant if Sun starts to falter. This is all true for Java as well of course.

Re:Always Wanted to Try It

[FyRE666]

You can download the x86 version for free, but it's nowhere near close to Linux in terms of functionality or hardware support. I tried it for a few days, installed all the GNU tools to make it usable, but in the end I decided there was little point in running something that treats my 300 graphic card like a 5 dumb frame buffer, has no support for my soundcard, and seemed to be much slower at accessing the disks...

I'm not dissing Solaris, but I just don't consider it competitive on x86 hardware, as the developers behind the alternatives have invested much more time and effort into targetting the intel platform.

Re:Always Wanted to Try It

[ajs318]

it's been nice having Sun regulate it

Java has been Sun's baby; but the thing about babies is that they have a tendency to grow up. It's good that the Java specification is open, because that has led to the creation of alternative Java interpreters. But, as you say, Sun have been nice enough about letting people use theirs.

Releasing Java under the GPL need not necessarily lead to forking. As long as distributors have no need to modify it, they won't -- and Sun can answer any criticism by incorporating patches into the main source tree. Also, any forked versions would themselves have to be licenced under the GPL -- thus preventing the worst nightmare scenario where a closed-source alternative becomes the new de facto standard and replaces the "original" Java.

Alternatively, Sun could release Java under something like the Pine licence. This would give Sun effective control over the "official" version.

Re:Always Wanted to Try It

[dasmegabyte]

And of course every UNIX software package is available for all of these because they are practically identical.

Re:Always Wanted to Try It

[Anonymous Coward]

x86 is great for prototyping and low end use. I use x86 at work to demonstrate a project and get funding, then the source is simply recompiled on a sparc machine and installed on the sparc "Big Iron". Within x86 I can use the existing Solaris security and LDAP directory services and it is identical to the production server management security and access control environment.

In my experience, Solaris under extreme and long running loads seems far more stable then Linux, especially on the Sparc platforms. Yesterday we closed fiscal year end and our 16CPU/16GB RAM/6TB disk Sparc server showed load run queue of 100+ all day long, users noticed it "slowed down a little bit." And no, our business applications cannot be run in parallell on a bunch of cheap PC's ala Google..

I am also suprised nobody remembers Sun was providing free downloads of the Solaris source from 1999 to 2001. (search slashdot...) Sun discontinued the foundation source program due to lack of interest in 2001. I learned a lot from my study of the Solaris 8 source tree, and I modified a number of components and incorporated them into my systems.

I run x86 Solaris as file and backup servers at home, and dev/test/prototyping machines at work, and they are extremely stable, given good hardware. x86 Solaris is also a great way to get an understanding of the operating system

Re:Always Wanted to Try It

[Anonymous Coward]

"The x86 version was available "free as in the cost of media" for a while, and it was a sad, sad joke."

For those that want to try it the x86 9.0 version is currently a free download from Sun.
Another point is, you'd be running an EAL certified OS that no Linux or Microsoft OS has ever achieved.
Icing on the cake is, KDE, Gnome and a host of other OSS now runs on Solaris.

Re:Always Wanted to Try It

[Anonymous Coward]

And of course every Linux software package is available for all Linux distributions because they are practically identical.

Re:Always Wanted to Try It

[MrChuck]

Because it's FREE to use for single processor SPARCs and x86? Did that part slow you down?

/me looks at the sub-$200 Ultra 60 with Solaris A
["A" comes after "8" then "9" - though word is that Sun is mulling calling it something like "solaris nextgen" or something pathetic. Recalling the hyperbolic chip names, they date really poorly. Here's a quiz. Put these in order:

1. ultra
2. turbo
3. super
4. mondo
5. hyper

Now kids, can we diffential between Code is available to see which is easy for Sun to do, and Code is available to use, modify, share?

This would be far more useful for Java. Solaris is just not really a big advantage when we have Linux and BSD and thousands of people already intimate with that code.

This big questions is will Sun redistribute code that gets userland tools from after 1988? (a modern vi, moving executables out of /usr/lib/, moving logs out of /var/adm/ and links to binaries in /etc!??)

Re:Always Wanted to Try It

[Curtman]

I'm not dissing Solaris

Yes you are. Don't be a wuss about it.

Re:Always Wanted to Try It

[omb]

The poster is EXACTLY RIGHT, and apposite in the last sentance; they havn't go a clue;

as has been said SUN took off because it was the best development platform available, that is now Linux,

for some Corporates C# and the .Net scenario will make increasing sense.

Downward pressoure on harware prices and competition fostered by linux will attack the high end

since they talk to their oun IT people, at lunch, even Wall St. IT analysts see this.

Re:Always Wanted to Try It

[mattdm]

Err, sure, yeah. But this is _actually_ FUD in the classic sense.

Just wondering.

[MrMr]

Would this inculde Re-GPLing the part they licensed from SCO?

Re:Just wondering.

[TiMac]

That was my first thought as well. This may all depend on the court determining that SCO has no right to the material anyway, as has been suggested by Novell and others.

Re:Just wondering.

[newhoggy]

Would this inculde Re-GPLing the part they licensed from SCO?

It doesn't matter. In SCO's eyes the whole thing is a "derivative" anyway.

Re:Just wondering.

[Anonymous Coward]

what the hell is spray?

Re:Just wondering.

[Pseudonym]

Well, it is. Solaris is a derivative work of Unix.

Whether Sun's changes taken on their own, with the Unix parts removed, is a derivative work... well, that's something that SCO would really, really like to argue, but neither law nor reason are on their side.

Re:Just wondering.

[TiMac]

Spray

Re:Just wondering.

[noselasd]

Care to explain ?

Re:Just wondering.

[corsec67]

The only problem with you signature is that it is a lawsuit waiting to happen. If one fails you don't want to do the rest. that would be very bad.
you want to use && instead of ;

Re:Just wondering.

[Anonymous Coward]

Would this inculde Re-GPLing the part they licensed from SCO?

The only thing that Sun licenced from SCO was x86 device drivers (which are really the UnixWare crown jewels). I dunno why they couldn't.

Re:Just wondering.

[menace3society]

This may all depend on the court determining that SCO has no right to the material anyway, as has been suggested by Novell and others.
I see two possibilities with this: either Sun is waiting for SCO to lose the case entirely, or else they're expecting SCO to win some ruling, and Sun'll have a semi-open/free operating system to pick up on the momentum Linux had, but lost when they lost the ruling.

switching

[Knights who say 'INT]

I just posted this on an OpenBSD story, but it fits quite well here. I only use Linux because it's the easiest way to get myself a KDE desktop.

Really, if *BSD or a Free Solaris or anything else come up with live cd's or start-me-up installers, I might as well try them to test for performance and stability. Since KDE runs in any Unix-like system, "switching" is not quite a problem for me.

I just want the best desktop environment available today and that's KDE. What it's running on top of, I don't care.

Re:switching

[DrLZRDMN]

There is an unofficial KDE for Windows project IIRC...
though i suppose it probobly isn't that easy to do
so you know if you realy don't care what its running on...

Re:switching

[vorpal22]

I just want the best desktop environment available today and that's KDE.

Absolute nonsense. I've played around with KDE extensively over the years, from the early version 1.0 branch to the present, and I have to say that in terms of usability, it's gotten appallingly worse as time has progressed. I mean, whoever organized the KDE control panel should be ashamed of themselves! It's a convoluted mess of far too many options that makes it damn near impossible to get done whatever you want to get done unless you know exactly how to do it. Upon my last few installs of KDE, after hearing that god-awful sound scheme, I scampered off to the control panel to turn it off. This sort of task should theoretically be easy, right? It wasn't. It took me a significant amount of time to locate the appropriate settings and disable.

KDE certainly has many strong points and it has a lot of potential. However, it seriously needs a heavy dose of usability. Now Mac OS X... there's a desktop environment I can worship for its elegance and functionality.

Re:switching

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, it only takes little more than one command and the download time to set up KDE on OpenBSD -- kind of a lame complaint for any 'non-newbie' freenix user (and not bad considering 'friendly desktop setting' isn't an OpenBSD design goal). If Sun opens Solaris, package management will follow very quickly. For example, NetBSD's package management system is already designed to support additional operating systems -- the work is virtually done. This would make it mind-numbingly easy to keep Sun systems up to date with the latest addons. Apt-get, or RPM (boo!) could be adapted without too much work either I'm sure. I expect this move would certainly save Solaris. Sadly though, I'm not so sure it will save Sun.

Re:switching

[mattyrobinson69]

you sir, are a bollock.

i happen to like kde.

Re:switching

[croddy]

maybe part of the reason you like KDE so much is not *just* that it's an excellent desktop enviroment, but the great applications on the system you're running? personally, I can't think of another *n?x besides Linux where sound, accelerated video, CD recording, etc. are so easy to set up -- I certainly don't want to re-learn all that on Solaris, do you?

Re:switching

[MrHanky]

Upon my last few installs of KDE, after hearing that god-awful sound scheme, I scampered off to the control panel to turn it off. This sort of task should theoretically be easy, right? It wasn't.

It is. Now stop trolling. (Sound & Multimedia --> System Notifications. Done).

Re:switching

[Minna Kirai]

It's a convoluted mess of far too many options that makes it damn near impossible to get done whatever you want to get done unless you know exactly how to do it.

The WindowsXP panel is even worse in that regard. (However, both the KDE and Gnome control panels share a weakness that isn't their fault: they don't control the underlying OS, filesystem, or even X server, so they can't let the user adjust those things with any assurance)

Now Mac OS X... there's a desktop environment I can worship for its elegance and functionality.

OS X has taken major steps backwards, favoring eye-candy over functionality. Many of those problems are extensively documented in HCT and Mac-head journals... the most blatant problem, of course, is the travesty called "The Dock".

Re:switching

[byolinux]

Mac OS X? ;)

Re:switching

[Knights who say 'INT]

Curious. After I've set up my workstation, I've never even had to mess with the control panel again.

Sure, the default setup is bad. The Panel (not the control panel, the taskbar-cum-start-menu thing) is a mess, Keramik is a classic exercise in bad taste, and I don't particularly like those icons.

I moved the Panel to the top, got rid of the taskbar - replacing it with the wonderful KTicker, who keeps me up with Slashdot news when I can't waste the time, and watches for my keywords in other RDF sources - changed the buttons to submenus with the tools I need, and added a quickbrowser.

The quickbrowser is a bliss. This should have been the default interface for browsing files since the beginning. I have my work files organized by directories (that can be created on the fly when saving'em), and gretl my way into academic fame. For text editing, I use LyX.

Did I mention I love the PIM tools? My screen's always chock full of KNote yellow-stickers, TeaCooker helps me not to burn food, and Korganizer helps me not to forget deadlines.

I mean, except for LyX and gretl, these tools are all standard in a KDE install. You can imagine what the optionals are. I'm just dropping out of an underpaid internship where I had to do some work with Windows, and it was just a pain after experiencing KDE.

Sad but true - Linux excels precisely in UI, though it loses in performance and hardware support and other things they've boasted.

Re:switching

[Anonymous Coward]

Agreed. OS X is completely inflexible in a number of areas, and inconsistent in some too.

IRIX's 4Dwm is the easiest desktop to use, IMO.

No, I haven't used them all.

Re:switching

[sean23007]

It loses in performance? Do you have any numbers to show that, or are you just making it up to enforce your point that everything is reversed now? I would be interested in a link, or some other kind of proof.

Anecdotally, I have a 17" laptop with a P4 2.8GHz HT, and it came with Windows. It ran a little slowly, dragging on mundane tasks, and it got too hot to touch after just a few minutes of being on. I got fed up, and decided to install Gentoo. After getting everything set up and working (except sound), it's a speed demon. Mozilla starts instantaneously. Everything does. There is no waiting for anything. It only takes 10-15 seconds to boot. Compared to Windows, Linux runs away with the trophy. But it struggles in hardware support.

Re:switching

[Knights who say 'INT]

Yes, apparently Linux takes the most of higher-end machines, and loses in older equipment.

While KDE 3.2 is MUCH MUCH faster than 3.0, it runs about as fast as WinXP. That's pretty much the main reason I haven't started recommending a Linux+KDE workstation to everyone I know - remember, not everyone is in America, and even in Brazil, the tenth largest economy in the world, most people are stuck with 3-4 years old machines.

Re:switching

[Anonymous Coward]

GNOME slaughters KDE in terms of speed.

I run GNOME on my 166 Pentium MMX machine.

Re:switching

[SirTalon42]

Its not hard to install, but it doesn't (yet) integrate well with the rest of windows, and you have to have CygWin installed to run it. The speed isn't also that amazing.

Re:switching

[SirTalon42]

KControl -> Sounds and Multimedia -> System Notifications -> KDE System Notifications -> KDE is Starting Up

Even if that seems like a lot of steps, its incredibly easy when you actually try it. For a challenge, try disabling the sound all macs make when they first boot up.

Keep on worshipping OS X

Re:switching

[Rtsbasic]

I believe he ment native port, given the work on qt-x11-free porting to win32 recently, its possible.

Re:switching

[MikeCapone]

While KDE 3.2 is MUCH MUCH faster than 3.0, it runs about as fast as WinXP.

I'll have to disagree with this.

I have a dual boot of WinXP pro and Slackware (2.6 kernel, KDE 3.2) on an old AMD K6-2 450mhz, 192 megs RAM and KDE is much faster than WinXP (and I've turned off all the graphics extras in Win).

The 2.6.x kernel probably helps with the speed and responsiveness, though. I suggest you try it if you haven't already. (and not to mention Slackware, which is fast as hell)

Re:switching

[jdew]

pretty simple to get kde on openbsd. 1) install openbsd via whatever means 2) as root: pkg_add ftp://ftp.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/3.5/packages/i38 6/kdebase-3.2.1.tgz 3) edit /etc/rc.conf and edit xdm_flags from NO to "" 4) echo startx > ~/.xsession

Re:switching

[Anonymous Coward]

Notice: the original message in this thread was entirely an entirely off-topic plug for KDE full of nothing but fan-boy wank -- and it gets modded to +5. This message criticises KDE and gets slapped down by the hordes of drooling KDE super-fan. Truly, slashdot has reached an all-time low.

Re:switching

[ljaguar]

OS X's dock has roots in NeXTStep. NeXT made significant advances and utilized many cool stuff such as Objective-C and a very nice user interface. Also, the new file selector is NeXT based as well.

The UI has been lauded much and many many open source software copies it. Consider WindowMaker for one. It copies NeXT interface including dock and the file selector. Being an avid WindowMaker fan, Mac OS X user interface feels right at home.

It sounds like you are being ignorant of roots and geneology of things. You know, things didn't start with windows 95.

Young ones nowadays...

Re:switching

[Anonymous Coward]

Obviously reading isn't your strongest skill then... Sound&multimedia -> Sytem notifications

There you go, how illogical and/or hard was that? You can either kill all at once, or do it on a per app base. Doesn't get much better than that.

Re:switching

[Brandybuck]

It sounds like you need LiveBSD's KDE 3.2 Live Desktop!

Re:switching

[Octorian]

Yeah, and I'm posting this from a Solaris 9 machine running KDE.

Honestly, one thing that bugs me is how so many people think of all this stuff as "Linux" software, when it'll compile and run just perfectly fine on any *nix. Linux is just an open-source POSIX-style operating system, and it certanly isn't the only game in town.

I find it kinda interesting how I basically use all the same software your average Linux user runs, and use a multitude of non-Windows operating systems, but I don't actually use Linux myself.

Re:switching

[pantherace]

I open the KDE control panel to find these categories:
Appearance & Themes
CD Bake Oven (something I installed, and should remove)
Desktop
Internet & Network
KDE Componets
Peripherals
Power Control
Regional & Accessibility
Security & Privacy
Sound & Multimedia
System Administration

Given that it is sound you are looking for, I don't know about you, but I would chose the "Sound & Multimedia" Option, under which we get:
Audio CDs
CDDB Retrieval
Sound System
System Bell
System Notifications

This one might be slightly confusing, but System Notifications is the only one that makes sense, so I click, I see KDE System Notifications at the top, and "KDE is Starting Up" in the selector window. I uncheck "Play a sound", and that no longer works, now, it's relatively easy to find other things (and overall I think this menu while somewhat complicated, works better, as it allows you to configure applications as well.)

KDE really is usability friendly. If it isn't please discribe an example you DO think is usability friendly, not "Windows" or "MacOS", please discribe it, as was done above.

Re:switching

[Anonymous Coward]

How is the historical roots of OSX relevant to the original posters claims that it is emphasizing eye-candy over functionality?

Did you even read the post you're replying to?

No doubt just another 23 year old old-timer who professes love of NeXT but has never used it. I used it back in the mid 90s and hated it; it was incredibly slow, even for the time.

Re:switching

[SETIGuy]

Now Mac OS X... there's a desktop environment I can worship for its elegance and functionality.

Yeah, it's great, assuming you neither need nor want it to be X11 compatible.

And the OS, no I can't worship it, either, especially in a mixed environment because of

• its obscene, and often non-functional NFS automounter,
• its inablility to understand that when I say I want the local disks mounted before certain startup items are run I mean it,
• its lack of NIS compatibility,
• its assumption that a logout on the console means "unmount all volumes"
• its inability to use the 64-bit capabilities of the architecture

I'm seriously considering a move to Linux on our G5's. I'm also pretty sure I won't recommend further purchases.

Re:switching

[Minna Kirai]

I second the AC's implications about your own ignorance.

Also, the new file selector is NeXT based as well.

Apple used to be proud that you didn't really need any file selector besides Finder.

It sounds like you are being ignorant of roots and geneology of things. You know, things didn't start with windows 95.

The OSX Dock isn't much like the NeXTStep Dock... in fact, it's very much a combination of the features of the Windows95 taskbar and appearance of the NS Dock. (Being a combination is in itself a bad thing, because consistency is an important part of a good UI)

Let's step through a few major traits of Taskbar, NSDock, and OSXDock. Then we can guess what's derived from what.

Default position:

1. Taskbar: Bottom.
2. 
   NSDock: Right.
   OSXDock: Bottom
   So in this instance, OSX copies from Microsoft, not NeXT. However, there is a good reason the MS Taskbar is on the bottom: Words use up less space horizontaly. But the NeXT and OSX Docks have icons, not words, so there's no reason not to be vertical.

Appearance

1. Taskbar: Icon + Text.
2. 
   NSDock: Icon.
   OSXDock: Icon, + Text only when mouseover.
   This is an area where OSXDock copies the outward appearance of the NSDock, but for no good reason. NSDock only needed an icon because each button represented an application, not a document. With OSXDock, each open document has a new icon, which looks identical (or just similar) to other open docs of the same format. This forces the user to wave the mouse across the dock to find where she wants to click, which is bad.

Repositioning

1. Taskbar: Dynamically resizes as you run more programs.
2. 
   NSDock: Manually resized only when you configure new applications.
   OSXDock: Dynamically resizes when you run more programs, or when the mouse cursor is nearby.
   So for this one, OSX is like MS Windows, because it resizes dynamically. But it's a lot worse than the Windows taskbar, because the position of the things you're trying to click on actually movies around as the mouse gets closer!

Contents

1. Taskbar: Each open application window that
2. is running.
   NSDock: Installed applications that can run.
   OSXDock: Installed applications that can run, and each open application window that is running, and the Trash.
   This is where the Dock's biggest conceptual problem arises. It combines non-running applications, open documents, and the trashcan in one single amorphous list. The old Mac OS (9 and earlier) kept these things separate: non-running programs in a menu to the upper left, currently-open documents on a menu in the upper right, and the trash as an icon to the lower right. Mixing up of different kinds of icons in one place is the Dock's single biggest sin.

education

[ezelkow1]

Im not sure how this would affect the business world, but here at least it would most likely spread more understanding of *nix. Most of the apps we use here in classes, various Programming/Asic/Chip design programs, are only run on solaris boxes. If solaris were available for free, i have a feeling many students would install it on their system, just to more easily use these apps if for nothing else.

Re:education

[Anonymous Coward]

But Solaris for x86 IS available for free (as in beer).

Re:education

[lpontiac]

If solaris were available for free

For personal/evaluation/educational/etc uses, it already is.

Re:education

[gregmac]

If solaris were available for free, i have a feeling many students would install it on their system, just to more easily use these apps if for nothing else.

Well, you can actually get Solaris for free already.

Re:education

[Espectr0]

Isn't it ironic you can download solaris propietary unix for free and you can't download java desktop system which is a linux distro?

Re:education

[ezelkow1]

Yes, i know, and have downloaded it, but its hardware support really really sucks. Not really worth installing on a regular home x86 machine anyway. If it were open sourced, at least some drivers would probably be created.

Re:education

[elmegil]

Sun's driver spec is freely available, go scratch your itch. You don't have to have an open source kernel for people to be able to write frickin' drivers.

Can they even do this?

[mst76]

I though there was a lot of System V code in Solaris. How can SUN ever GPL that?

Re:Can they even do this?

[adam mcmaster]

My guess is that they'd rewrite the parts they don't own - kind of like what happened with BSD.

Re:Can they even do this?

[Anonymous Coward]

This can be done if (and only if) Sun buys out SCO with the money they recently got from Gates and Co. by signing partnership with them. Sun's been really sneaky for the last few years because they obviously don't know which way they should go. Scott McNealy doesn't want opensource to prevail, but he's been *pretending* to be a part of it. Lame.

Re:Can they even do this?

[krygny]

They probably wouldn't or couldn't GPL everything, but it might be more than enough to keep existing Solaris customers from migrating to Linux, maybe keep upgrading to Sun hardware, and maintain revenue streams that would eventually dry up anyway. Not to mention creating a new OS development community for which a tremendous knowledge and talent base already exists.

It could be an absolutely brilliant strategic move.

Re:Can they even do this?

[Anonymous Coward]

This can be done if (and only if) Sun buys out SCO with the money they recently got from Gates and Co. by signing partnership with them.

Huh? How would buying SCO help them to GPL SysV code? Are you sure you're not thinking of Novell?

Re:Can they even do this?

[Johnny Mnemonic]

It could be an absolutely brilliant strategic move.

Could be. It could also be the end of the line for them, as other Linux developers take all the interesting bits from Solaris and port them to the Linux kernel--then you get all the stability etc of Solaris, but with Linux. Then Sun has not much left to offer but nice support plans.

Come to think, GPL of Solaris would allow Sun to build their own Linux and include the good bits of Solaris in it; maybe that's their plan.

Re:Can they even do this?

[SEE]

Part 1: Whether SCO or Novell has the copyrights to SysV, SCO has licensing rights broad enough to release it under the GPL themselves.

Part 2: A while back, Sun bought a broad license to Unix from SCO. Exactly how broad nobody knows, but SCO at one point publically said that it immunizes Sun from the sort of lawsuit they launched against IBM. Since that involved IBM GPLing what SCO claims is System V code . . .

Again, the exact terms of Sun's license are not known, so this is speculation. But it is intriguing, isn't it?

Re:Can they even do this?

[zerocool^]

Then Sun has not much left to offer but nice support plans.

And really, really nice 64bit hardware. But, you're right, that's going to have major competition in the years going forward.

I like sun. I think there will still be a niche market for them for quite some time (they're not dying, blah blah). But, I do think they need to innovate something. If they open solaris, it's going to keep a lot of people on solaris that might have switched and just been willing to deal with mediocre hardware, but it will also probably mean that a lot of stability could find its way into linux. So, yeah, you're right. This + something new and cool could be a good business move.

~Will

Re:Can they even do this?

[Anonymous Coward]

> A while back, Sun bought a broad license to Unix from SCO

It was so long ago that they bought it from AT&T, not SCO. It is known that Sun does not pay royalties to SCO/Novell, unlike IBM, HP, SGI.

Re:Can they even do this?

[squiggleslash]

SCO has a license that allows them to redistribute SysV (etc) under whatever licenses they wish. This is how they were able to release prior versions of Unix under a BSD style license back when they were Caldera and not evil. Before McBride. Before the darkness set in.

Re:Can they even do this?

[squiggleslash]

I don't believe IBM paid royalties to SCO/Novell either. Indeed, virtually everything people have said was "special" about the Sun license is true of the IBM license ("irrevocable", "permanent", etc.) But SCO's suing anyway because it believes that IBM breached the terms of that license, and believes that by doing so, the penalties they can levy go beyond those described in the license. IBM, naturally, disagrees, both in that SCO can revoke the license as a legitimate penalty, and in that they breached it in the first place.

Re:Can they even do this?

[Mr. Piddle]

...Linux developers take all the interesting bits from Solaris and port them to the Linux kernel--then you get all the stability etc of Solaris, but with Linux

Linux developers have pretty much always had this opportunity. The Solaris kernel architecture is well-documented in a publicly-available book, and the kernel source code has been made available before. Actually, the only parts of Solaris inaccessible to Linux developers are the parts they could never use anyway due to patents or licening issues. Sun's position doesn't really change either way, IMO.

What would be really fun is for someone in a far-off land immune from lawyers to re-release that leaked Windows code under the GPL and watch the Benny Hill-esque antics begin!

Re:Can they even do this?

[Anonymous Coward]

IBM has been and is still paying royalties to SCO (who sends 95% of it to Novell). As IBM says, "irrevocable, fully paid-up, and perpetual".

IIRC, Sun paid something like $100 Million for the full rights to System V. No other UNIX vendor has ever claimed to have the rights that Sun has -- and they would if they could because Sun has used this as marketing point consistently over the years.

Re:Can they even do this?

[fantastic]

For Solaris x86 to even have a chance it needs access to the GPL drivers out there. However adding GPL drivers means the product is GPL so they probably don't have any choice but to GPL it for Solaris x86 to catch up

Re:Can they even do this?

[Skjellifetti]

Come to think, GPL of Solaris would allow Sun to build their own Linux and include the good bits of Solaris in it; maybe that's their plan.

Come to think, GPL of Solaris would allow Sun to build their own Solaris and include the good bits of Linux in it; maybe that's their plan.

Re:Can they even do this?

[Anonymous Coward]

Such as move would be in line with Sun's strategy to move away from big iron and more toward desktop management. They release Solaris to give Linux a booster shot then use Java Desktop and smartcards to take over the corporate desktop all the way down to the mom and pop small business.

They can stil sell big iron, but they know the small business market is being neglected and if they can get a package so that an office of 5 can make an affordable turnkey setup for a network with services and security with centralized rights management they'll eat up Microsoft's business because setting up a well managed Microsoft network requires nothing short of an MCSE and a handful of expensive tools and dedicated personnel that a shop of 5-20 just doesn't have the time or money to fuck with.

Re:Can they even do this?

[Anonymous Coward]

...Linux developers take all the interesting bits from Solaris and port them to the Linux kernel--then you get all the stability etc of Solaris, but with Linux.

Except stability (like security) is not a feature and thus can't simply be grafted from one code base to another.

Re:Can they even do this?

[Curtman]

I wonder if they would at all. Why couldn't they use the GPL exemption for system components, and just put linux compatibility hooks into the kernel with a usermode loader app akin to insmod/modprobe? Probably easier said than done, but I don't think the GPL prohibits that.

Re:Can they even do this?

[Anonymous Coward]

Could you name the book(s) please? I'd be interested in reading more thorough book on Solaris' architecture than the short descriptions in most OS Design books.

Re:Can they even do this?

[HiThere]

That wouldn't matter in places that respected copyright. Since the person who released it under GPL didn't have the right to so release it, it wouldn't have been released under the GPL in any place where copyright mattered, and where it didn't matter, it wouldn't matter either.

Re:Can they even do this?

[Anonymous Coward]

According to Novell, SCO doesn't even own rights to System V. Your are reading way too much into the situation.

Re:Can they even do this?

[HiThere]

They bought it as a fully paid up license. That doesn't mean that they are still paying, that means that at the time they bought it, they paid all that they will ever have to pay.

If you wish to claim that they are still paying, then I would like to see your documentation.

Re:Can they even do this?

[squiggleslash]

That's not correct. According to Novell, SCO most certainly does own rights WRT System V, which it has through a contract from Novell. What Novell is saying though is that SCO doesn't own the copyrights, and therefore is not authorized to bring breach of copyright lawsuits with regard to Unix.

SCO does have all the other usual rights related to Unix, including the right to sublicense.

Re:Can they even do this?

[MechaStreisand]

Yup, because there's no way it could use the BSD-licensed NetBSD or FreeBSD drivers... No way, that could never work! GPL is the one true way!

Re:Can they even do this?

[Mr. Piddle]

Solaris Internals by Jim Mauro and Richard McDougall is the one I was thinking of. I'm pretty sure there are others, as well (Amazon shows a couple about performance tuning below the listing of Solaris Internals).

The documentation bundled in the Solaris box set also gives lots of clues about what's under the hood (e.g., tunable parameters, inter-process communication, kernel debugger, virtual memory etc.).

I'd have to say that Solaris is definitely among the most open of the proprietary UNIX systems.

Re:Can they even do this?

[Mr. Piddle]

he documentation bundled in the Solaris box set...

I forgot to mention this is more or less the same as docs.sun.com.

Re:Can they even do this?

[NovaX]

Very cool. I added it to my growing list of books to read. So far I've only read what would be appropriate for undergrad/graduate OS courses. Any other recomendations like this, say for NT or on advanced concepts (e.g. kernal personalities)?

Re:Can they even do this?

[Anonymous Coward]

OK -- I was wrong. IBM bought out their UNIX licence for $10M in 1996. I was basing my info on something an IBM rep told me a few years ago.

http://www.sco.com/scosource/ExhibitD.qxd.pdf

Re:Can they even do this?

[amorsen]

Stability isn't a module you insert. Looking at Solaris won't be helpful when it comes to stability.

GPL'ing Solaris would allow Solaris to use Linux drivers though. That could be a great advantage.

Re:Can they even do this?

[SEE]

They bought a supplementary license from SCO in the last few years, actually.

never happen

[Anonymous Coward]

No way. They wont gpl java, but they'll gpl solaris? Highly doubt it.

Solaris 9/x86 can be obtained for $0

[Craig Ringer]

http://wwws.sun.com/software/solaris/binaries/get. html

It's pretty fussy about hardware etc, though, and very obviously not the equal of Solaris/Sparc.

Re:Solaris 9/x86 can be obtained for $0

[chegosaurus]

It's nowhere near as fussy as people think (I've run it 100% fine on systems with *no* components on the HCL) and it's also a heck of a lot closer to the SPARC version than most people assume.

Sol x86 has never quite shaken off the bad reputation it gained around v2.5.1, when it sucked. So far as stability goes I'd take it over Linux any day, and if you give it decent hardware and know how to manage it, it's at least as quick.

As for GPLing it, as a user, I couldn't care less, as a skeptic, I don't believe it.

Re:Solaris 9/x86 can be obtained for $0

[buysse]

D'ya know any PCI IDE or SATA cards that will work with Solaris? I need more than the two motherboard IDE channels...

Re:Solaris 9/x86 can be obtained for $0

[Anonymous Coward]

> So far as stability goes I'd take it over Linux any day, and if you give it decent hardware and know how to manage it...

This PROVES that you are directly related to solaris.

1. Why is linux unstable????? Is the linux kernel unstable?? That's a laugh. "Stable" releases (2.4, 2.6) are not unstable.

2. "if you give it decent hardware and know how to manage it ...". If you give decent hardware and know how to manage linux, it's definitelly stable and awfully fast.

Re:Solaris 9/x86 can be obtained for $0

[chegosaurus]

This PROVES that you are directly related to solaris.

I make my living from it, if that's what you mean. I'm not employed by Sun though.

1. Why is linux unstable

It isn't, and I didn't say it was. I just think Solaris has the edge.

"if you give it decent hardware and know how to manage it

I make this point because a lot of /.ers have trialled Solaris by installing it on some crappy old 486 they have lying around, then deciding it's just a slow OS. It doesn't go as quickly on low end hardware as Linux or the BSDs. It *needs* decent hardware - they don't.

I also feel a lot of /.ers criticise Solaris because they don't know a lot about it. The amount of ill-informed opinion that one sees in Solaris /. threads is astonishing. Many Linux distributions come out of the box tweaked and hardened, with hundreds of apps and tools - Solaris doesn't. You need to know what you're doing with it, and put a bit of effort in to get the best out of it.

Re:Solaris 9/x86 can be obtained for $0

[Jim_Maryland]

I'll throw in my support for your statements. I also work with Solaris SPARC and have x86 installed at home. The versions are remarkably similar.

Solaris x86 gets a bad reputation because Sun really dropped the ball in stating their intentions about supporting it. People stayed away from it due to the question about it's future.

From some presentations I've seen on Sun and talking to Sun reps, I think Sun is finally presenting a clearer strategy on the relationship of it's SPARC, x86, and Linux solutions. They are struggling though to overcome some of their earlier mistakes in representing x86 in particular.

Re:Solaris 9/x86 can be obtained for $0

[Anonymous Coward]

Many Linux distributions come out of the box tweaked and hardened, with hundreds of apps and tools - Solaris doesn't

One thing to look forward to is the Solaris version of the "Java Desktop System". This should be much more slashdotter-friendly with a bunch of apps preinstalled.

Re:Solaris 9/x86 can be obtained for $0

[jaavaaguru]

We use FCAL on Solaris boxes. Does SATA give any better performance?

Re:Solaris 9/x86 can be obtained for $0

[buysse]

No, but it's a metric assload cheaper. I'm trying to build a decent install server for Jumpstart on the cheap and the old Ultra 10 just don't cut it.

Re:Solaris 9/x86 can be obtained for $0

[Anonymous Coward]

"Many Linux distributions come out of the box tweaked and hardened, with hundreds of apps and tools - Solaris doesn't. You need to know what you're doing with it, and put a bit of effort in to get the best out of it."

This is definitely a problem for Solaris then. If it's possible to supply an OS that is useful AND secure pretty much out of the box, then why not?!

It looks like they are making big strides to change this with Solaris 10 though, and I'm really glad to hear that.

Why doesn't Unix die?

[ObviousGuy]

Hopefully this signals an end to corporate Unices and a move towards more modern operating system concepts like those found in Plan9.

Let the hobbiests stick with Unix and bring the industry up to speed with the performance/usability gains found in the labs and classrooms.

Re:Why doesn't Unix die?

[Anonymous Coward]

blah blah blah plan 9 or is it 10 now. blah blah blah solaris is a hobby operating system real enterprises use linux 2.9 alpha. your argument might be more apprecated if you expanded on plan 9 and how synergy is helping linux but your post is absolutly useless.

Re:Why doesn't Unix die?

[dustmite]

Because it works.

Re:Why doesn't Unix die?

[ObviousGuy]

So do analog TVs.

Meanwhile, the rest of the world is surpassing the U.S. with digital cable/satellite systems and high definition video.

It's one thing to stick with what works. It's another to stick your head in the sand and ignore the changes going on around you.

It's a little like buying a camera, I think. You could bite the bullet and get a digital camera and be on top of the technology. Or you could pretend like you're above the fray and go with an outdated and obsolete film camera. Like I said, leave the old tech for the hobbiests, they don't mind using older stuff.

Re:Why doesn't Unix die?

[Anonymous Coward]

Like I said, leave the old tech for the hobbiests, they don't mind using older stuff.

So there you have it, in operating systems hobbiests outnumber the "must get it just to look flash" crowd. This isn't because there are a lot of hobbiests so much as because you'd have to be pretty sad to base your fashion statements around operating systems. Next question please.

Re:Why doesn't Unix die?

[NDPTAL85]

Linux is the new Unix. Therefore Unix is here to stay.

Re:Why doesn't Unix die?

[Simon Lyngshede]

Honestly, do you see an alternative anywhere? NO, can't let Unix die if you don't have a replacement, that would be stupid.

Re:Why doesn't Unix die?

[dustmite]

WTF, "Troll"? How? Hope the meta-moderators get you.

Re:Why doesn't Unix die?

[dustmite]

Most *nix users are not hobbyists, most are using it for "real" stuff in companies, and normally because it works better/easier/more reliably than other solutions. Those "hobbyists" who play around with it at home are usually the same guys who are using it for real stuff at work at the same time. And so what? If I use Windows at work, does that make me a "hobbyist" if I use Windows at home too? I don't think so.

Re:Why doesn't Unix die?

[Anonymous Coward]

Huh? You might want to work on your reading comprehension.

Re:Why doesn't Unix die?

[grautgrams]

Digital photography is not neccesarily on top of the technology, not yet (if ever). Of course it is important to consider new technology (as many analog photography businesses does, leica, kodak, etc..), but still a lot of professional photographers and enthusiasts prefer analogue photography. Do your digital camera (no matter how expensive)beat a leica M6 in all light conditions?

The same can be said about computing technology, people choose reliable technology for mission critical tasks. And as far as I know unix is not very common among hobbyists, hobbyists rather use bleeding edge technology, not old style, proven (boring) tech.

Re:Why doesn't Unix die?

[Anonymous Coward]

So do analog TVs.

Meanwhile, the rest of the world is surpassing the U.S. with digital cable/satellite systems and high definition video.

Exactly! Why do people go out buying things like Cars or down payments for houses when they can be spending $10k on a television..

Re:Why doesn't Unix die?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's one thing to stick with what works. It's another to stick your head in the sand and ignore the changes going on around you.

Do you know what the hell you're talking about? Seriously. My wife's crew just ripped out an assload of Win2k "Datacenter Edition" boxes and replaced them with some heavy hitting Solaris boxes. When the customer did the eval, other fanboy OS's (linux, BSD) didn't even show up on the radar. The biggest competition was AIX/IBM.

Re:Why doesn't Unix die?

[dustmite]

Sorry, attached that to wrong parent, I was actually responding to higher-up posts from ObviousGuy implying that most *nix users are 'just' hobbyists.

If this isn't a load of hot air...

[oldosadmin]

If this isn't a load of hot air, this is a milestone in OSS software. A major unix vendor open sourcing their code would do several things.

1) It would lend more credence against the SCO argument. "It's my unix and I'll GPL if I want to..."


The bad thing is that I'm gonna be looking at /. tomorrow for the retraction. Either that, or it's Sun's CEO tempting us again, to jerk it away at the last minute.

Re:If this isn't a load of hot air...

[AhBeeDoi]

It would lend more credence against the SCO argument. "It's my unix and I'll GPL if I want to..."

But SCO really doesn't have much of an argument. They're claiming that IBM's contribution of IBM technology, which was previously incorporated into AIX and Dynix, is a breach of contract.

They could make the same bogus arguments against Sun regarding NFS.

Re:If this isn't a load of hot air...

[Anonymous Coward]

1) ...

2) ?

what else?

Re:If this isn't a load of hot air...

[Curtman]

I'm gonna be looking at /. tomorrow for the retraction

The suits don't work Sunday's. Try back Monday or Tuesday.

Re:If this isn't a load of hot air...

[nateb]

3) Profit!!!!!

Great

[Spit]

Solaris kernel is an awesome piece of software. I build Sun systems with a full GNU toolset, would be nice to have a full free systems this good.

Solaris For All!

[LuserOnFire]

I think it would perk up a lot of ears if this happened.

Like RedHat, though, a lot of it would come down to support. If Sun offered an inexpensive support package to compliment it, then that would get more people downloading it.

Wouldn't have much impact

[FAT_VIRGIN]

Much of Linux' popularity is due to its status as the rebel OS, not the lenient licensing. Solaris, on the other hand, has a far more conservative public image -- it's just not considered cool amongst most Linux fans.

It also doesn't help that Solaris' file I/O is so fucking slow.

Re:Wouldn't have much impact

[ebbomega]

Why does everybody assume that the people who are actually tinkering with Linux and using it are entirely doing it for the status it presents.

I use linux because it's the best tool for the job. The job being an operating system that meets my needs. "rebel OS" or whatever the fuck your theory is is as watertight as a seive. If you want a kitschy anti-mainstream OS, Apple's always been happy to serve you.

Re:Wouldn't have much impact

[dasmegabyte]

Word. I use Linux because it didn't fucking cost me anything. I don't use it because it turns me into a superhero, sticking it to the man, because it doesn't do that. I guarantee you Novell, IBM and the other Linux fans in the business world don't use it because it's the operating system equivalent of a leather jacket.

Re:Wouldn't have much impact

[ajs318]

Solaris's file I/O is slow for a reason. When you write to disk in Solaris, you don't get a response till the data is safely in the disk. Linux has an abstraction layer in the way. You can write a file "to disk", but the "OK" response you get comes from the filing system abstraction layer -- which has just cached the data in RAM. In Linux you can create a file, have another application read it and delete it without it ever going near the disk. Linux only ever decaches when (a) the sync command is issued, (b) the file system is just about to be unmounted, or (c) decaching would free up enough RAM to prevent a swap operation {Of course, this does not apply if you are using a journalling file system; but if not, you will be royally shafted in the event of a power failure}.

Solaris can cache data just as aggressively as Linux, but Sun deliberately don't set that as the default because they believe data integrity -- which can only be assured by ensuring that data meant to be written to disk actually has been written -- is more important than speed, which can always be improved by buying dearer^Wfaster hardware.

Very Good

[ThisNukes4u]

This would be good news for everyone. There would be a previously closed OS open to audit and use by everyone. It would be especially be good for the academic community who couldn't previously afford to teach classes on Solaris. It would also give developers a chance to port features form Solaris to Linux or BSD, so that everyone could benefit from the hard work Sun has done on Solaris.

Re:Very Good

[mytec]

It would also give developers a chance to port features form Solaris to Linux or BSD, so that everyone could benefit from the hard work Sun has done on Solaris

What about the other way around? I see this sort of statement and mentality way too much. You sound like a parasite.

Re:Very Good

[Anonymous Coward]

It would also give developers a chance to port features form Solaris to Linux or BSD, so that everyone could benefit from the hard work Sun has done on Solaris.

Since Sun is talking about using the GPL, the BSDs would get about as much from it as they do from Linux.

Wrong month, guys.

[Piquan]

Okay, last time: 5 is May. I think you meant this to be on 4/1.

Re:Wrong month, guys.

[kick_in_the_eye]

Actually it would be 1/5, only the US does month/day/year.

Re:Wrong month, guys.

[Anonymous Coward]

And only Piquan writes out 5 May then expects people to read 4/1 as 1 April.

Re:Wrong month, guys.

[BJH]

Actually that would be 2004/5/1, since year/month/day is the ISO standard.

Re:Wrong month, guys.

[10101001 10101001]

You're kidding?! I thought January was 0.

Re:Wrong month, guys.

[lewp]

Right, the only place that counts.

What kind of impact would this have ?

[kfg]

Getting sued by SCO?

KFG

Re:What kind of impact would this have ?

[newhoggy]

Getting sued by SCO?

For a moment I was excited about the possibility of incorporating the best of Solaris into Linux - but now I have second thoughts. Unless copyright issues are cleared up on why Sun licensed "IP" from SCO we'd better not touch Solaris even if it was GPLed.

Re:What kind of impact would this have ?

[kfg]

For a moment I was excited about the possibility of incorporating the best of Solaris into Linux. . .

Yes, in another and better world that would be the obvious impact. Linux would suck Solaris dry and spit out the rind. Sun would be forced to "go Linux" (while claiming it was their innovation all along) or try to make a living off the rind.

But in this world my orginal comment is so obvious and true that it isn't even funny.

KFG

Re:What kind of impact would this have ?

[Anne Thwacks]

Well in a couple of weeks, Sun will be able to buy SCO for $1.98 anyway*, so I wouldnt worry to much about that.

*Unless IBM insist on a pound of flesh, of course, in which case IBM might just opensource Unix anyway.

Re:What kind of impact would this have ?

[einhverfr]

The parent post was moderated funny, but there is some truth to this. SCO is suing IBM claiming that any product which contains ANY SYSV source code MUST, by the terms of the AT&T license agreement be kept secret in its entirity. SUN has been a very public supporter of SCO thoughout this whole mess, and this could turn the tables pretty quickly.

Essentially, it is not important what SCO's legal standing is. It is important what they want to make it appear to be. Having SUN release Solaris under the GPL would push SCO into a position of HAVING to sue SUN in order to keep their position credible. It is not about the law. It is about politics.

Re:I actually call it "Slowaris"

[MoonBuggy]

Indeed. You'd better work M$ in there too ;-)

I'll believe it when I see it.

[JessLeah]

With that out of the way: This would be a powerful argument against the whole "lol but ur open sores software is only made by teh hobyists and not by teh proffesional programrz at big corpz" line of BS regularly spouted off by corp types and their toadies, the MCSEs and MIS/management types.

Re:I'll believe it when I see it.

[Halfbaked Plan]

Actually, what it would do is reinforce the notion that 'Open Sourcing' is only a viable process when it involved opening the source of a software product that was developed in a proprietary environment.

There are examples of Open Source projects that were open source from the beginning, but there are also:

NetScape
Star Office
Quake
DRDos

and various others.

It's probably not a good thing for companies to see 'Open Source' as a crew of pirates waiting to land on the deck and take control of their 'ship.'

Re:I'll believe it when I see it.

[Anonymous Coward]

ahhh...but judging from many of the statements made by many /.er's "open source" crew is nothing but pirates and parasites. The key mentality is "I could use the features in Solaris for my Linux project and not have to pay a penny!"

Re:I'll believe it when I see it.

[dasmegabyte]

Yes, let's think on how an operating system that is available for free with thousands of free programs might attract some really cheap people.

Not that this is entirely a bad thing -- it certainly helps improve the viability of Linux on older systems. But when "Information needs to be free" is suffixed by "because I don't feel I need to pay for it," there's a problem.

Re:I'll believe it when I see it.

[Anonymous Coward]

But when "Information needs to be free" is suffixed by "because I don't feel I need to pay for it," there's a problem.

Well, it's not like there's a law-of-the-universe thing that makes it natural to pay for information. Capitalism isn't the best system for everything, y'know.

Re:I'll believe it when I see it.

[Anonymous Coward]

I love it how here on Slashdot managers and people with MCSEs are automatically morons.

Great community.

Re:DESPERATION

[bcmm]

Um? Whatever you think of java, it's pretty usefull for people on less-used operating systems to have cross-platform software. Don't have to wait for a port.

Why it should not and won't happen

[ajs]

1. Sun would have to replace all of the UNIX code. They can't put that under the GPL, period (unless SCO and Novell agree it's ok ;-)

2. Solaris includes many products that Sun has incorporated over the years. Most of them would likely have to be replaced, since I doubt the contracts involved allow Sun to just GPL the whole mess.

3. They would just be asking to have SCO add them to the list of companies targetted for a "tainting" suit, though honestly Sun may not care.

In the end, I think it would make far more sense for Sun to open source their SMP code by working with IBM on modifications to Linux. Sun+IBM could probably get Linux deployed on both of their very-high-end boxes in short order.

The SMP stuff is, as far as I know, most of what's left that Solaris does better than Linux, so what's the point in open sourcing the whole OS anyway?

Re:Why it should not and won't happen

[Halfbaked Plan]

The Sun X Server is also better, at least on some of the obscure Sun framebuffers that some of us wish we could use in 24 bit mode on OSes like NetBSD. Instead we have to settle for 8 bit emulation.

Re:Why it should not and won't happen

[CdBee]

"1. Sun would have to replace all of the UNIX code. They can't put that under the GPL, period (unless SCO and Novell agree it's ok ;-)"

Novell being a big Linux vendor now (SuSE), they have some motivation to allow Solaris to be opensourced, after all Linux would immediately benefit.

Re:Why it should not and won't happen

[SEE]

1. Sun would have to replace all of the UNIX code. They can't put that under the GPL

Or can they?

Conveniently enough, SCO's licensing rights are broad enough it can release UNIX under the GPL without Novell permission (and they did for V7), and Sun bought a very broad license to UNIX from SCO a few years back.

While exact terms have not been disclosed publically, from SCO statements about Sun's license in the IBM case, it would seem at least possible SCO has already sold Sun a set of rights so broad Sun could GPL all the UNIX in Solaris.

Again, not certain, merely possible.

Re:Why it should not and won't happen

[Anonymous Coward]

Ya I suppose Novell never would ever back anything to do with Free software. You know those Novell guys, anti-open source to the core.

Those dirty netware loving bastards.

Re:Why it should not and won't happen

[Anonymous Coward]

SCO's licensing rights are broad enough it can release UNIX under the GPL without Novell permission (and they did for V7

Groklaw had the original Novell/SCO contract, which listed the stuff SCO has rights for. The "Ancient Unix" releases were specifically listed, but System V was not.

Also, keep in mind that these old Unix releases were found to be "probably in the public domain" during the BSD trial because they were never properly registered with the copyright office back when that was required. So, SCO wasn't really doing any favors releasing them under a BSD (not GPL) licence.

Re:Why it should not and won't happen

[Bat_Masterson]

To kill Solaris -- why else?

Once the (bulk of) Solaris is GPLed, it will be absorbed into Linux (and *BSD?) and that will be that. At that point, Sun can continue to support it until they ramp up something else (Plan9, Hurd, ?), but leave the bulk of support to the community. It's a winning situation for Sun in that:

* they can move to linux
* they can downsize Solaris
* they can downsize their support staff

The writing is on the wall -- Solaris is being put to bed.

Re:Why it should not and won't happen

[Anonymous Coward]

Just because it's an open source project doesn't mean there aren't people being paid to develop them.

OpenOffice and GNOME developers, among others, are being paid, as we speak, as regular employees of Sun, IBM, etc. Do you think open source developers run on clean air and happy thoughts? No, they're developers just like everyone else and in many cases being bankrolled by big corporations.

They will likely have to keep many of their employees on board and move them to working on Linux instead of Solaris. They won't just fire them all and use Linux off the shelf like a little shop. Sun is one of those companies at the top that's funding this whole Open Source thing.

Re:Why it should not and won't happen

[ajs]

There are practical reasons that Novell might not want that. Regardless of how much they may be embracing open source, they're still making some money from their share of the Sun license. Would Sun just stop paying, or would they pay more because now more people have the source? It's a sticky issue, is all I'm saying, so don't expect it to be solved based on the ideals of those involved.

Solaris user

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm a Solaris user. OK, I'm a Red Hat Linux user too. But all of my important stuff happens on Solaris. It's just part of my reality at work.

I wouldn't mind if Solaris opened up. It wouldn't be a huge deal for me - I'd still pay Sun for "premium" support, and I'd still only use official Sun versions of things. Heck, I need someone big to blame if and when things go really wrong. I pay Sun to be that target.

I use Sun/Solaris because (1) I have the budget to, (2) it works, (3) I only have one vendor to deal with, and (4) there's no compelling reason to change right now.

If Sun can get something out of opening Solaris - great! If open source developers can improve the world by the opening of Solaris - great! But at least in terms of my current position, it won't have direct impact on me.

Sun confused? Never!

[Anonymous Coward]

"Unfortunately, I think Sun is going to have to be a little bit more thoughtful about the way they articulate their thinking, because they have a lot of users confused," Weiss said.

Sun are sending a confusing message you say? Say it ain't so! Why everyone knows that Sun lovehates GPLBSDMicrost what with their embracing openclosed standards. I've always thoguht they've given a very clear message, and that message is:

"Um, we're not quite sure. Could you get back to us in six months perhaps?"

Re:never happen - oh yeah? I see it differently

[CdBee]

I doubt there's much money to be made in selling Operating Systems. As I understand it, Microsoft's bottom line is largely generated by their consumer and professional software, not their OS. Redhat's profits come from support contracts.

I can't see Solaris OS being majorly profitable for Sun either - they sell hardware too and if an open-source Solaris led to more end-user interest in their hardware it's easy to see it leading to an increase in revenue for Sun.

Even if it didn't, more Unix code in the wild would mean better performance for all OSS operating systems, once the predictable legal/licensing issues had been sorted out, (preferably by the assassination of Mr D.McBride and all his staff).

I can't see a GPL'd Solaris being harmful to Sun. They probably couldn't re-licence enough of the code to make competing distributions appear anyway.

choice quotes from Schwartz

[_|()|\|]

[CIOs] don't want more source code ... if you write to the Red Hat distribution, you can't go and run on Debian ... open source does not mean open standards

With friends like these ...

Re:choice quotes from Schwartz

[Anonymous Coward]

CIO's look at the whole package deal, then take a popularity vote, weighing up the pain of moving from business as usual. Emotional Intelligence (EQ) rules currently.

GPL would increase SUN's evaluation selection scoring by 15%. When evaluating OS'es, having full source code adds 10 out of a possible 105 points. Nearly GPL or a BSD licence earns another 5 points. Runs on COTS's hardware another 10.

Major Bank's always had IBM's OS390/z/OS code, and I think thats why MS also came to the party when IBM's linux snared top end companies.If not GPL'ed soon - Solaris, like Open VMS which opened way too late, developers will switch(SCO anyone), and low market share will feed upon itself.

SUN should run to some kind of GPL. Last time, spanking disk raid performance, kept them in the race - maybe not so lucky next time.

Well duh.

[Anonymous Coward]

I think it's obvious what would happen if Solaris were released under the GPL.

They would be able to dip in to all of the device drivers that Linux has today. That would happen first.

What would happen second is the standard cross-polination; anything that's substantially better in either one (think scheduler, VM etc) would be copied from the better one to the worse, improving it. How much Linux might take we won't know until we've seen the code. But I'm certain that Sun would benefit the most from access to those device drivers.

Re:Well duh.

[Octorian]

So what exactly is stopping you from porting/writing drives for Solaris now? Sun has a full development kit and developer documentation freely available on your website. One merely has to want to code the things, and it can happen. Heck, 3rd party opensource Solaris drives do exist, but they're just not that common.

However, I'm not sure how easy it would be to port Linux drivers to Solaris.

Though I have looked at both FreeBSD and Solaris driver code side-by-side, and I must say that they appear quite structurally similar in design. (Different names for the kernel call functions, but they tend to do the same things)

GPL for Solaris POLL TROLL !!~!@'!'''@@@@

[Anonymous Coward]

GPL for Solaris, what is it all about? Is it good or is it whack?

Good
Whack

Recompiling

[Craig Ringer]

Sadly, I must disagree. Modern apps - especially GUI apps - often depend heavily on services and libraries from the major toolkits and desktop environments, and this makes them less source-portable.

It is hard to write an app that'll run on even 2-year-old versions of the same distro it was written on.

OTOH, this is not due to forking at all, but rather the lack of care about stable APIs, combined with rapid release cycles, in a lot of open source software. This has it's advantages - ugly decisions don't lurk forever (witness Windows' APIs by comparison), and things can evolve quickly.

I'd call "forking" a secondary issue for app developers, over trying to support distros over more than about 2 releases.

As for ABIs ... well, that's another story and one that's much more of a problem in the distro forking area.

Re:Recompiling

[Anonymous Coward]

GTK, GTK#, C#, Java et all. Portability is an issue you say? You chose the WRONG tools then.

C++ is NOT an application language, never was never will be except for ego heads.

Re:Recompiling

[drinkypoo]

You can disagree all you want, but the fact is that unless the new versions of the libraries require a newer kernel or libc than your distribution has, which is pretty rare, you can compile them too, and get the new program to run. This does of course contribute to the agony of having a zillion versions of libraries on the system at once, but frankly that has only bothered me in terms of memory and disk space usage, and never been much of an administrative problem for me. YMMV, I guess.

Anyway, if you use a distribution which is meant to be updated and tracks dependencies, such as gentoo, debian, etc, you can do an upgrade from any point to any other point at any time. You might end up rebuilding the whole system using gentoo, but at least your upgrade is more than likely to work.

Re:switching (OT)

[CdBee]

You may be aware of this already, but try FreeSBIE

It's a FreeBSD Unix LiveCD with a desktop environment (XFCE I think). It doesn't work properly on my nForce2 PC (no network and consequently no internet) but it certainly works.

Reunification

[Cpt_Kirks]

It is about time *ALL* *nixes were reunified into one humongous tree, out of which various branches (which will have a common base) will exist for various uses.

We use AIX (AIX Isn't uniX) at work, but Big Blue keeps making noises about replacing it with Linux.

Too many flavors.

Re:Reunification

[CJSpil]

That would be Advanced Interactive eXecutive link

If you're going to expand a TLA (Three Letter Acronym), at least get it right

Re:Reunification

[drinkypoo]

If you're going to turn off your sense of humor when you come to /., please just go away instead.

Personally I prefer to pronounce AIX aloud as "aches", or what your head gets when you have to work with it.

Re:Reunification

[tzanger]

I dunno, I wish people wouldn't bury the letter of the TLA inside the word... "AIE" sounds kind of interesting, especially if they could throw another E on that. :-)

Re:Reunification

[Minna Kirai]

"AIE" sounds kind of interesting,

I always found "aches" perfectly appropriate as the name of the system's software.

Re:Reunification

[JeffTL]

i believe he was reexpanding it as a humorous apronym for comic effect.

Please put down your flamethrower when I say...

[jsse]

I do think this move is benefitial to all.

Please don't flame me for bad-mouthing Linux, I'm a diehard Linux admin myself but I still think Linux has much to catch up in enterprise computing.

We've a Linux cluster which has a critical bug in mounting the share disk which has filesystem. Sometime when one node down the mount point is not released to another node which is supposed to take up the process, thus result in critical failure.

This is all kernel problem(or limitation), and we don't have problem with non-fs type disk(raw disk). Therefore we must use raw disk where possible in cluster, but we don't have choice when some apps require a filesystem(e.g. like infracture database in Oracle's forsaken Real Application Cluster (RAC). Good name huh)

The engineer who diagnosis this problem told me they've no such problem with similar setup with solaris so they THOUGHT it's okay in Linux. Ahem, there goes millions dollars for paying their great product(*cough* Oracle RAC *cough*).

I expect more of such problems could be solved when those companies specialized in enterprise bringing back good stuffs to Linux, and GPL.

Re:Please put down your flamethrower when I say...

[smallpaul]

I read your highly moderated post twice and still don't understand it. Linux has a bug that Solaris does not. Already we're on shaky ground extrapolating from that to "Linux is more buggy than Solaris." But let's suspend disbelief and make that extrapolation. What does this have to do with GPLing Solaris? Are you saying that if Sun changed the license on Solaris to GPL it would somehow magically become more buggy?

You say: I expect more of such problems could be solved when those companies specialized in enterprise bringing back good stuffs to Linux, and GPL. Isn't that exactly what Sun would do if they GPLed Solaris? Bring good enterprise stuff to the open source space?

Re:Please put down your flamethrower when I say...

[Anonymous Coward]

grandparent is total FUD. ignore this fat fuck.

Re:Please put down your flamethrower when I say...

[jsse]

Are you saying that if Sun changed the license on Solaris to GPL it would somehow magically become more buggy?

No. I don't think so, and that's not what I say or imply.

The bug I metioned, more specifically, associates with the failure in release the control of mounted fs when the node took control of infrastructure database of Oracle 9i RAC. The bug exists in Linux's version but not in Solaris version. It doesn't make Solaris superior than Linux, otherwise we wouldn't choose to deploy Linux Cluster. (This is also in response to the retarded Anonymous Coward who replied to your post)

This is hardly the Linux kernel maintainers' problems. They just can't address all unforeseen problems - they're simply human. It must the be those apps developers who build things on Linux fixing their own problem, by making patches to the problem they encountered and submit back to the community such that they could be free of trouble in the future release. That's how community would work with those enterprise players.

That's what I say. I know it's not your intention to put words into my mouth. Thanks for giving me chance to repond to your post with an open question. :)

Re:Please put down your flamethrower when I say...

[Anonymous Coward]

You obviously aren't a programmer and know shit about software engineering.

Have you ever tried to merge two divergent code bases? If you have you'd know it SUCKS BALLS and is the source for most of the bugs and problems with modern software.

You don't just pick up features off a bulleted list and move them from one box to the other just like that.

Think about it this way. "Wouldn't it be great if Internet Explorer, Opera, Safari, and Mozilla combined all their code so they had the best features of each?" The blazing neon answer to that would be a tremendous NO. It would be bloated, buggy, over featured and impossible to navigate piece of shit mess that takes of 500mb of ram and takes 10 minutes to load.

Solaris and Linux have a different underlying architecture and Solaris is better because it has a centralized, clean design that isn't muddled by uncoordinated hackers that jump in while they're in college to develop some app, abandon it when they get a good job, and then the program that everyone has adopted needs to be cleaned up by some other bum developer that thinks programming is an "art" and his uncommented spaghetti code is "beautiful" because it runs 4% faster than a properly engineered alternative.

This is not representative of all open source yadda yadda, but a hella lot of it is started as an academic project and subsequently abandoned after the author gets his phd and a high paying job doing something else.

Re:Please put down your flamethrower when I say...

[smallpaul]

Okay, so apps vendors should test on Linux and submit patches when they find bugs. What does any of this have to do with Solaris being GPLed? I don't understand!

A new day

[Bender Unit 22]

and another Solaris license scheme from Sun.
Stay tuned for next weeks license.

Mirror , just in case

[mirror_dude]

Hi their, just in case things go sidewise as it were I have put up a mirror.
The mirror of http://osdir.com is at http://mirrorit.demonmoo.com/r_121/osdir.com
The mirror of http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/04/30/HNsolari sgpl_1.html is at http://mirrorit.demonmoo.com/r_121/www.infoworld.c om/article/04/04/30/HNsolarisgpl_1.html

Re:Mirror , just in case

[Anonymous Coward]

Hi their

"there".

Microsoft will never consent to it

[Anonymous Coward]

There will be one phone call:

(ring ring)
scott: "hello?"
bill: "what the fuck are you doing?!"
Scott (sweating, scared): "well I, err, I just, thought. ..."
bill (slow calm and menacing): "yes?..."
scott (smiles): "I'm going to fire the fucking idiot who aired this dumb idea in public."
bill: "have a nice day."
scott: "yea, thanks bill. Thanks."

(ring ring)
scott: "have someone in marketing killed and his hands delivered to Bill Gates"
lackey thug: "It's done."

Re:Microsoft will never consent to it

[Anonymous Coward]

That was two phone calls :P

Re:Microsoft will never consent to it

[geeklawyer]

Yes but I calculated it in Excel :)

Diehard linuxers would shun it

[Zetta Matrix]

I think that diehard linux people wouldn't go near it with a ten foot pole, unless to read the kernel source and borrow the things Solaris is particularly good at (scalability and performance at the high end) by implementing it in the Linux kernel. This would be a major win for Linux, and I feel a loss for Solaris (although they might get a popularity boost from the non-diehard linuxers).

Re:Diehard linuxers would shun it

[mungtor]

So you're actually saying that Linux developers "borrow" from other operating systems in order to improve their kernel without having to do the initial development work themselves? That seems to be a dangerous statement to make.

NeWS

[argent]

I think Sun would do better digging up some of their older code. NeWS, in particular... now that Apple has shown that you can be successful with a non-X UNIX GUI based on Postscript, Sun's own networked Postscript display system is ripe for a comeback. Remote desktop performance for a NeWS-based environment using current processors would be a killer, and they could incorporate Java as well as Postscript applets in the GUI.

Re:NeWS

[buysse]

NeWS is unfortunately encumbered by Adobe licenses, and therefore will not [ever?] be a candidate for any form of source release. Adobe is not friendly to such ideas.

Re:NeWS

[argent]

1. Are you sure you're thinking of NeWS and not NeXT's Display Postscript? NeWS was an independent implementation that *wasn't* based on Adobe code (anyone who had to deal with NeWSprinters was exquisitely aware of that).

2. I'm not really talking about Sun open-sourcing NeWS here: there's no reason they can't keep their implementation closed without closing the interfaces and APIs... as the fellow mentioned in the interview, "Open" is a much bigger thing than "Open Source". UNIX was an "Open System" long before Linus had ever heard of Minix.

Re:NeWS

[Wesley Felter]

...now that Apple has shown that you can be successful with a non-X UNIX GUI based on Postscript...

Apple hasn't shown that. Quartz is successful, but it doesn't use Postscript. In fact, Quartz is architecturally very different from NeWS.

Re:NeWS

[buysse]

No, I thought that it used Display Postscript as well. I could be mistaken. I have dealt with the hell of the NeWSprinter, actually. My understanding was that the NeWSprinter was extremely similar to the NeXTprinter -- software rendering on the host, printer was the equivalent of a dumb framebuffer.

Re:NeWS

[spitzak]

You are confusing NeWS with Display Postscript. The NeWS postscript interpreter was written at Sun, and is well known for being incompatable with real Postscript.

The incompatabilities were almost all improvements: you could use nul as a dictionary index, and any numeric value was usable in an if statement without putting "0 ne" after it, those are two that really annoyed me when they "fixed" NeWS in later versions. And of course NeWS added postscript commands to turn a path and ctm into a window (a feature missing now from every single supposedly "advanced" alternative including longhorn and Quartz/Aqua) and change what window you drew into and handle events (the event stuff was a mess and I would replace it).

I absolutely agree that open-source NeWS, even 15 years late, would be a huge benefit. I would argue that the best code would be the earlier versions, before the X11 merge. Nowadays it is perfectly obvious that the best way to emulate X11 would be atop the new system, not beside it. That merge seriously screwed up NeWS performance and the command set.

Re:NeWS

[argent]

Quartz is based on PDF, which is based on Postscript.

And, lord, I know that Quartz and its precursor Display Postscript don't provide a fraction of the capabilities of NeWS, because they only use Postscript or PDF for rendering, not for implementing user-interface features. This difference is NOT in their favor.

Re:NeWS

[argent]

No, Display Postscript was a horrible parody of NeWS. Its only advantage was that since it used Adobe's code the NeXTprinter was reasonably compatible with regular Postscript printers. because it didn't use Postscript to implement GUI elements, it didn't get any of the bandwidth and latency advantages that NeWS did over a network connection.

Re:NeWS

[argent]

I absolutely agree that open-source NeWS, even 15 years late, would be a huge benefit. I would argue that the best code would be the earlier versions, before the X11 merge. Nowadays it is perfectly obvious that the best way to emulate X11 would be atop the new system, not beside it. That merge seriously screwed up NeWS performance and the command set.


That's a good point, given today's processors (CPUs and GPUs) it should be possible to implement an X11 server that ran beside the NeWS server and used it for rendering, and still get good performance. Alternatively, implement both as clients of an OpenGL based system like Berlin...

He's quite right, you know

[Craig Ringer]

He's quite right there, though.

(a) Businesses don't want more source code. Well, to be strictly accurate they don't want to have to manage, worry about, maintain, etc more source code than they have to. I think that given the choice, most intelligent CIOs would definitely say "sure, we'd love the source and rights to use it" - but would probably prefer not to have to actually do much with it, and face the burden of maintaining changes etc.

OSS alleviates this to some extent by permitting changes to be submitted back upstream, but this only works if you have the resources to engineer you changes "properly" and not break anything else (even stuff you don't use or care about).

(b) If you write for RH9 or RHEL3, your app will not run on a stable release of Debian. Not if it's a GUI app that uses any GNOME/KDE libs, needs a recent QT, etc. It can be made to run by either packaging it with a lot of extra libs (see Ximian's RH8 builds of Evolution for an example of this approach), spending a lot more time to make it handle varying versions of libraries, or forcing the user to update their distro or libraries themselves. None of these are attractive.

I see this as a real issue, but not a distro one. It's actually more about _versions_ - the rapid change of OSS, including APIs etc for major libraries and toolkits, is the root of the issue. OTOH, the same thing keeps "ugly" decisions from hanging around, and permits much more rapid advancement.

I'd like to see a cleaner way of running multiple versions of things in parallel (within the package management systems), as a work-around for this issue.

(c) Also quite correct. Many open source apps do not follow established standards, and often the file formats, protocols, etc are defined largely or entirely by the source code of the app. While these protocols/formats are definitely open, they're not open standards and there's usually not much chance that other apps will work with them.

It's true that you do have more chance of enchancing other apps to work with the formats/protocols, time and money permitting, or enhancing the OSS apps to work with the protocls/formats of your choice. It's also true to say that many apps don't support standard protocols or formats because there is no standard in that application domain, or it's crap. These things do not change the truth of his statement.

Re:He's quite right, you know

[a rabid platypus]

Have you ever used Gentoo? Their source management system, Portage, is excellent, even allowing running different version of the same library with little muss. The end user need not worry bout the details, as portage takes care of the nitty gritty. One of the best management systems I've seen.

Netcraft Confirms

[Anonymous Coward]

Plan 9 is bringing back the dead!

Another crippling bomb shell hit the beleagured Plan 9 community... etc. etc.

What if M$ just went and bought Java

[Neo-Rio-101]

With Sun losing so much money, why would they open source Java?

Their new found buddies in Microsoft would probably pay very nicely to buy Java off Sun, and if that's not enough, buy them out completely.

remote desktop performance ... modern processors

[Craig Ringer]

Remote desktop performance tends to be bound by network latency and local video hardware performance more than processor performance in my experience. I have P133s with 32MB of RAM that happily run KDE3.2 remotely in 1280x960 - they have GeForce4 MX/PCI video cards, and a lightly loaded switched 100baseTX link to a server on a gigabit uplink.

If they can improve X's issues with round-trips and latency, then I'll be all ears.

Re:never happen - oh yeah? I see it differently

[Johnny Mnemonic]

I can't see Solaris OS being majorly profitable for Sun either - they sell hardware too and if an open-source Solaris led to more end-user interest in their hardware it's easy to see it leading to an increase in revenue for Sun.

Essentially, Apple's strategy. And not really surprising, since Sun essentially does what Apple does--sell proprietary hardware with a tailored OS.

Question is: has that strategy paid off for Apple? And Sun has more to lose: they have a strong position in the server room, that Apple never had, so Sun would be trying Apple's consumer level strategy out but with their own Enterprise products--results may vary.

Java only works on few Sun-supported platforms

[expro]

Um? Whatever you think of java, it's pretty usefull for people on less-used operating systems to have cross-platform software. Don't have to wait for a port.

It is people on more-used/Sun-endorsed operating systems who don't have to wait for a port of Java.

People on less-used operating systems are likely to be supported by GCC, so they could have ported the app themselves, but do not have a compatible Java version, and porting Java means starting from scratch and incompatibility bugs, because Java is not open source.

Re:Java only works on few Sun-supported platforms

[vegetasaiyajin]

GCJ (GNU Compiler for Java) works on any platform supported by GCC. It is a great implementation of Java. The only important missing thing is AWT/Swing, but you can use SWT (the Eclipse toolkit), which most people think provides better performance.

I haven't tried, but I think you can use Sun's Java library if you conpile it to native with GCJ.

Re:Java only works on few Sun-supported platforms

[expro]

GCJ (GNU Compiler for Java) works on any platform supported by GCC. It is a great implementation of Java.

Yes. Not exactly a ringing endorsement of Sun's proprietary approach or coding to Sun's java standards, but this seems at the moment to be the most-promising way of providing a usable Java. My own experiments a few months back were quite disappointing with respect to speed -- native compiled Java via GCJ running with about 30% of the speed of Sun's jdk.

I wonder if anyone has even tried running, for example, Tomcat + jsp on top of it. If that can be done reasonably, it has reached a very significant milestone.

The only important missing thing is AWT/Swing, but you can use SWT (the Eclipse toolkit), which most people think provides better performance.

If it is clear / easy (especially from a licensing perspective) to use SWT with GPL software, this would be a gain, not a loss, in my opinion. I do not mind leaving swing and awt applications behind.

Another important milestone would be being able to launch web-downloaded apps/applets within a sandbox with these UI libraries, etc. functional.

I haven't tried, but I think you can use Sun's Java library if you conpile it to native with GCJ.

I think there might be severe licensing problems doing that.

Just what we need.

[ebbomega]

Now RMS can go on crusades to let the world know it's not Solaris, it's GNU/Solaris.

Re:Just what we need.

[TeknoHog]

GNU/Solaris

That would mean a Solaris kernel with GNU userland tools. But the tools are not going to change into GNU software merely by being GPLed, moreover the kernel of Solaris is called SunOS.

Re:Just what we need.

[drinkypoo]

Specifically, Solaris is the bundle of SunOS and the X Window System. In the olden days that meant SunOS+OpenWindows (SunOS4, or Solaris 1.x) and now that means SunOS+CDE or SunOS+GNOME depending on the vintage of SunOS5-based Solaris.

We really don't need the majority Solaris' userland tools. All we want is some stuff in the kernel, and occasional user-space tool which is required for changing options and/or utilizing that kernel functionality.

With the amount of FSF-copyrighted GNU+GPL tools the average person puts on a Solaris system to make it enjoyable to use, it might as well be called GNU/Solaris already.

Re:Just what we need.

[bkhl]

Um, no, he wont do that. Not unless they also replace most of their userspace with GNU tools

Re:Just what we need.

[dasmegabyte]

He'd have to change the name, because Solaris Is Unix.

Re:Just what we need.

[harmless_mammal]

Many years ago, when the GNU/Linux crusade began, I contacted the FSF and told them that I had installed the GNU toolset on a Solaris system.

I then asked them if they thought I should be referring to them as GNU/Solaris systems.

They said "yes".

I was hoping to point out the absurdity of diluting Sun's trademarked Solaris just because of the presence of some third-party software, but they didn't recognize that issue at all.

Why does GNU get first billing in GNU/Linux anyway? The GNU Project does not contribute to the Linux kernel, nor do they distribute a Linux product (a la RedHat Linux).

Are we going to be as happy with this type of trademark dilution when Microsoft decides to sell MS-Linux? There's nothing to prevent it. Linus has already made it a practice of NOT defending the trademark... That's how we got GNU/Linux in the first place.

Re:Just what we need.

[Anonymous Coward]

Solaris already ships with GNU tools (though they aren't used by default).

In any case, even if Solaris were to ship exclusively with GNU tools, it could not be GNU/Solaris, because Solaris is an operating system (whereas Linux is not).

Re:Just what we need.

[cpghost]

Looks like they need a new acronym. SIU? (Solaris Is Unix). So everything will start with an 's', not with a 'g': scc, slibc, snumeric, the simp, slade, and the best of all: SNOME!

Re:Just what we need.

[Anonymous Coward]

Why does GNU get first billing in GNU/Linux anyway? The GNU Project does not contribute to the Linux kernel, nor do they distribute a Linux product (a la RedHat Linux).

Because the vast amount of software on a GNU/Linux system is GNU software, the linux kernel source-code is a relatively small part (apparently only 3% according to the FSF) compared to the GNU userland tools (28%) such as gcc, gdb, glibc, autotools, bash, emacs, etc. More info here...

Open source legal hassles?

[erroneus]

What if it opens them up to legal attack by the likes of SCO? "See those .h files? That's us!!"

Hopefully, SCO will get its butt kicked sooner than later.

Re:GPL uber alles

[Johnny Mnemonic]

Since you're in a candid frame of mind, let me ask a question that's on the minds of many Slashdotters: what fun is it being a troll? I'll stir the shit sometimes, just to see the kinds of reactions that I get. But what's interesting enough to you about trolling that you make a concerted effort to do so, enough that you know how to game the system? What have you learned from it? What's the payoff?

Should be - linux kills commercial quality os

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess that we will all be much better when we have less commercial quality software available.

I do not see a 5 year plan to make linux commercial quality in functionality, user interface, documentation, ease of installation, etc...

Those factors are the main reason why linux is not being used on the desktop and also why it is not replacing microsoft/apple.

SURE they are!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

More like they have little respect for any logical thinking within the FOSS crowd, and are simply teasing. Probably getting quite a kick out of it, about right now.

GPL'ing Solaris to gain the Linux kernel & dri

[NZheretic]

Now that Sun, like most of the IT industry, is moving towards commodity based hardware ( like AMD's opteron ), then Sun is going to need drivers to interoperate with x86 hardware and common peripherals.

In comparison to Linux, the range and quality of hardware drivers available to Solaris is pitiful.

If Sun manages to get out from under the SCO claims on the old AT&T code base and does manage to GPL the Solaris kernel then Sun would be free to port any and all GPL'ed drivers and Linux kernel code to Solaris.

The other alternative would be to add a WINE like MS-OS compatable driver emulation layer, to load XP compatable hardware drivers. In comparison to Microsoft XP, performance would suck. There is no reason why Sun, just like WINE could not have the layer running in user space instead of the kernel, which means that Sun could still use a GPL'ed Solaris kernel and not break the terms of the Linux GPL.

NEVER

[seppy]

If sun opened up solaris it would be a BSD style license. Fanciful rumor mongering...

Boon for Linux, death for Solaris

[Ossifer]

As others have mentioned, Sun can't GPL code they licensed. (Remember the first open source mozilla code?)

Thus we'd be given a nearly useless, incomplete operating system. If the Sun-owned Solaris code is truly GPL'ed, the Linux folks would pick all the good bits out of this carcass and discard the rest.

Thus nobody would use OSS Solaris, but Linux might be improved here and there. So, I highly doubt Sun will truly GPL their code.

(Apologies to Linus Torvalds for comparing him to a vulture.)

Re:Boon for Linux, death for Solaris

[drinkypoo]

And then Sun could run Linux and throw away the Solaris kernel, since Linux would then do all the things that Solaris does and more. (It already does plenty of things that Solaris doesn't do.) Not having to maintain the solaris kernel would be a big win for Sun. They're a hardware company, right? They'd end up selling their other ancillary software to run on top of Linux instead of Solaris, port their excellent (for generating SPARC family bytecode anyway) compiler to Linux, et cetera.

There is no compelling reason in this day and age for anyone who makes their money off of selling hardware, support, services, and additional software to maintain their own kernel and core OS components, when Linux exists, besides the investment that they would be throwing away. That should not be considered a good reason anyway, because sometimes you can only lose by hanging onto something just because it cost you a lot of money. Sun is attached to Solaris for sentimental reasons only, and if this report is to be believed, they are coming to realize it.

Re:Boon for Linux, death for Solaris

[Anonymous Coward]

(Apologies to Linus Torvalds for comparing him to a vulture.)

No need to apologize, he already looks like a vulture.

Re:Boon for Linux, death for Solaris

[dasmegabyte]

There is no compelling reason in this day and age for anyone who makes their money off of selling hardware, support, services, and additional software to maintain their own kernel and core OS components, when Linux exists, besides the investment that they would be throwing away.

Any company that makes their money selling customized hardware, support and software the way Sun does would still need to invest in their operating system. It's too risky not to. Somebody has to be there to fix things when they break -- you certainly can't go to your CEO and tell him "We're going to eschew supporting our own operating system, and rely on a community instead. Yes, a community!"

If Sun moves to Linux, it'll be a nearly Sun-specific distribution with Sun hackers doing maintenance, etc. So the only difference between it and Solaris would be that Solaris they can charge for.

Why lose the revenue stream just so some Linux hackers can cull your best ideas?

Re:Boon for Linux, death for Solaris

[cpghost]

Thus we'd be given a nearly useless, incomplete operating system.

Hmmm... wasn't BSD 4.4Lite useless too, because it was incomplete? Yet it mutated into FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, and Darwin nonetheless. Even an incomplete Solaris source code base would be great!

Re:Boon for Linux, death for Solaris

[drinkypoo]

I agree that they would be running Sun Linux, not Redhat or something. However, I suspect they would track the current Linux kernel pretty closely. They could always use all their existing utilities (Solaris has both SVR4 and BSD commands among others) with some port work on top of Linux and whatever libc looked good to them, though why maintain your own libc, either?

Sun won't be losing any revenue stream because they really don't make any significant amount of money by selling Solaris - it's bundled with servers. They make money by selling support contracts, which they still could do.

Re:Boon for Linux, death for Solaris

[shaitand]

"Any company that makes their money selling customized hardware, support and software the way Sun does would still need to invest in their operating system. It's too risky not to. Somebody has to be there to fix things when they break -- you certainly can't go to your CEO and tell him "We're going to eschew supporting our own operating system, and rely on a community instead. Yes, a community!""

I highly disagree, there is no reason for sun to maintain their own operating system. Linux is a great operating system, and would be stronger yet if the features of solaris were incorporated. The source is open, anyone can become a "vendor" level expert in the system if they take some time to study it. Nobody knows more about windows than Microsoft, because they have the code. Nobody knows more about linux than anybody who takes the time to study the code because EVERYONE has the code.

Sun would likely have their own distribution, but the kernel (aka operating system) would be linux.

It would benefit them to open source as much of their own distro as they can because then they gain the benefit of having the community work contribute and fix the code instead of having to pay for all this themselves.

It's not like they'll magically know less about the system, or lose the ability to custom tailor it to their needs. They'll be able to provide the same level of support with less development expense.

"go to your CEO and tell him "We're going to eschew supporting our own operating system, and rely on a community instead. Yes, a community!""

No it's "We're going to eschew supporting and paying out the arse to develop our own operating system, cut costs by 90% and support our own linux distribution that's as easy or easier to support and gives our customers better value instead!"

I seriously doubt the licensing gains on solaris could compare to the development, support, etc costs they'd cut going this route. Remember a sun specific distro is Linux and open source utils that someone else does all the work on with a couple sun preconfigurations and a few sun developed apps sitting on top.

Too little too late

[defile]

You don't just sprinkle "open source pixie dust" onto a project and see instant revitalization. GPL'ing Solaris is worth little if Sun still thinks like a proprietary software company.

Open source is about the long-term. Open source projects take years to become truly useful, but when they reach maturity they are more useful than any proprietary software offering because open source fosters a development culture that focuses solely on technical achievement. Contrary business motivations like lock-in and forced obsolescence are anathama, and no doubt Solaris is full of it.

This is the same reason I think MacOS X isn't worth using, there's source code but the development mentality is entirely different from Linux's, and all of the things that make using Linux convenient are not the high priority, MacOS X very much feels like a proprietary UNIX with some familar utilities added. Maybe some day it'll be more usable.

Maybe after 5 years of GPL Solaris it'll become usable. Unfortunately, GPL Solaris is in greater danger of forking because Sun would try to impose its direction on it instead of simply serving as a guide.

Re:Too little too late

[shawnce]

I cannot grok your definition of usable in the above. Do you mean usable as in more palatable based on some desire for some ideal of how software was developed?

If you are using usable, as in usability, in the traditional software sense then Mac OS X is extremely usable and in general consistently more usable then many current Linux distributions (and IMHO Windows) if you consider the breadth of individuals that can use it (non-developers, non-IT, etc. - yeah yeah you can not use it if you don't have the needed hardware but that is not my point).

Anyway Mac OS X is a proprietary OS based on BSD but with a large feature set the goes well beyond BSD which Apple developed themselves (aspects gained from NeXT). So if that doesn't turn you away, you should consider giving it a try (or more of a try).

Re:Too little too late

[defile]

My definition of usable is something that mass-market computer vendors aren't interested in.

My requirements are stability, speed, power, and transparency.

My system should never crash, it should respond quickly to my commands (moving a mouse around is not what I consider quick), it should allow me to control it fully to every last detail, and it should let me see what it's doing at every level and let me modify its inner functions.

Solaris and MacOS X offer a taste of these ideas, but they're not developed to the point where someone like me is happy to use them.

This is an abstract argument, most people say that Linux and MacOS X offer these same things, and on the surface they do, but in the day-to-day, it's clear that one system is meant to encourage the kind of use that I want from it, and one is just bundling it because it was on the list.

You can install Cygnus on Windows NT and get all of the shell commands you need, but it's not even close to owning a Linux system. You can install some GNU utilities on Solaris and get the familar commands. But at some point you hit a wall on these systems that Linux doesn't have, because Linux encourages you to interoperate, Linux wants you to understand exactly how it works, Linux begs you to modify its internals, Linux wants you to have 100% control.

To put it another way, Linux has never worked against me. There have been times where I've had a problem on Windows, or MacOS X, or Solaris where I simply could not resolve it because the system served a different master (for example, under Windows I couldn't fix a bug in the sound driver, and I knew what it was and I knew how to fix it, but I couldn't do the fix so I had to deal with a workaround and hope the vendor cared to read my bug report and fix it). Having the source code makes a big difference, but it still doesn't mean that my life is going to be as easy as it is under Linux, where the developers have the mentality that of course I'm going to modify a driver or replace some core package or do the things that I expect to be able to do.

Re:Too little too late

[Tarantolato]

I don't see how Open Sourcing a UNIX like operating system will have much impact on the market at all, since we already have Linux and the BSDs. Open Sourcing a Java implementation, on the other hand, could have a profound effect upon the market.

=If= this is more than just noise, which I am starting to doubt, it would indicate that Sun is placing their focus on middleware.

Take the Java Desktop System: it's basically just a hook to get you to buy the Java Enterprise Sytem infrastructure package. By GPL'ing Solaris and sloughing off their chip division, they would be getting really serious about this strategy: building their business around JDS, JES, Jini, SunRay server, etc. - proprietary services running around a free kernel.

The good news for Sun is that they can survive this way. The bad news is that they won't be making cash hand over fist like in the 90's, which I think a lot of Sun execs still hold out vain hope for.

But back to the parent post, the bad news for Open Source is that Java would be the linchpin of this strategy; a GPL'd Solaris actually makes a GPL'd Java less likely.

Re:Too little too late

[njcoder]

I don't see this argument working in the real world. Most people don't make their money tinkering with the internals of linux or gnu software. They make their money building things that run on top of these.

The OS and supporting software needs to be transparent as you say. It shouldn't want or need to be tinkered with. It should just work.

Developers jobs are hard enough building their own products, having to make the platform work right too doesn't make sense.

That's not to say that Linux doesn't fit many needs right out of the box because it does. A lot of it due to the people working on various distros.

There are some applications that need to scrape as much performance out of their systems as possible. They can directly modify and add extensions to the kernel to get the results they want. This is a great benefit of having open source software.

Just like there's some people that buy a car because they can add a whole bunch of aftermarket parts to it, the vast majority buy a car to get them from point A to point B and hope they never have to open the hood.

The commercial software and support provides this for them and their willing to pay for it. The biggest problem with the OSS community is that they don't see the benefits of proprietary software and wish they didn't exist.

The downside is that many (not all) OSS projects don't hold a candle to their proprietary versions. People should switch to OSS based on principles not only technical superiority. OSS doesn't have the market on technical merit (at least not yet) in most cases. People buy into OSS software because it's good enough and it's cheap (this is how microsoft got it's foot in the door).

Most people don't really care about the politics surrounding OSS. They want the tools they need to do their job and they want them as cheap as possible. If OSS doesn't fit their requirements then they will go with a proprietary system.

This could be disaster for linux, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

It would still be wonderfull for open source.

Think about it:
Solaris itself is based on BSD software.

The cost of supporting both linux and solaris would be much diminished. Interlopy between desktop (linux) and server (solaris) would be very clean and tight.

Does Sun make a living on selling software? Does it make a living on selling hardware?

NO! It makes a living selling complete systems, business solutions, and then providing support for them.

What does the clients care if Solaris is GPL'd or not? The only place you'd get Sun's support and hardware is from SUN! Why the hell would you want to run your infrustructer with Solaris on 400 dollar walmart machines?

Sun is losing out customers now, but doing something like this will enable them to retain those they already have and then open themselves up to more possiblities, more chances for long term survival instead of ending up a legacy support mechanism ala SCO.

Plus solaris is so complex anyways, only Sun would be in a position to support and improve on it for several years, while you have all the development base that has evolved around Linux and BSD to help out with bugs and evolutionary improvements. Like Linus to Linux Sun will always have the final word on what direction Solaris is going.

However all signs point to no, that Sun still doesn't get "open source" and "free software" stuff. So far they think people want a Linux OS with a bunch of closed source liscencing restrictions tacked on the top of it.

They don't realise that one of the major benifits of free/open software is avioding crap like that and that's what it makes it appealing to lots of people.

(not all, I realise that some people don't give a damn about freedom as long as they get their paycheck, but there still are people who realy care and understand that unbridled closed source liscencing can be like a ulcer that won't heal to a large infrustructure. Causing pain and extra costs and restricting the potential of a orginization.)

Re:This could be disaster for linux, but...

[swordgeek]

"Solaris itself is based on BSD software."

Um, no it isn't.

SunOS was based on BSD code. Solaris was a clear and distinct cut over, using SysV code.

(Keeping in mind that SunOS=SunOS 4.x=Solaris 1, and Solaris=SunOS 5.x=Solaris 2/7+)

Re:This could be disaster for linux, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

"Why the hell would you want to run your infrustructer with Solaris on 400 dollar walmart machines?"

I don't know....why don't you ask the folks over at Google?

Re:This could be disaster for linux, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

"Why the hell would you want to run your infrustructer with Solaris on 400 dollar walmart machines?"

I don't know....why don't you ask the folks over at Google?

Ummm... They aren't using Solaris are they?

Re:This could be disaster for linux, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

My understanding is that they are, or at least once were, the x86 version anyway. Could be something different now.

Re:This could be disaster for linux, but...

[MikeCapone]

Google has always been on Linux as far as I know.

Re:This could be disaster for linux, but...

[shaitand]

"This could be disaster for linux"

That was my first thought too. However on examination I realized this. Solaris on intel support is fairly pathetic, it's more than a little pathetic, it's alot pathetic.

I seriously doubt this will be a rebirth of extremely high priced sparc hardware. People aren't dropping solaris because of license costs, people are dropping solaris because there is a viable *nix running on intel boxes and intel boxes have become both powerful and cheap.

What I see coming down the road if sun does this, there will be two major efforts... taking sun's code and integrating everything good solaris has to offer into linux (unlikely a major undertaking all in all, by the time the next kernel version comes rolling around it would be done). And the other camp beefing up solaris on intel hardware. Either is a significant but quite doable project... what's the deciding factor? (There's also improving linux sparc support, I guess someone will care about this and it will just kind of happen.)

Well linux already has alot going for it that solaris does not, mainly in applications and Desktop stuff as you've said, but also in other applications with poor solaris support. If solaris just needed the drivers it'd be a different story, but it needs more than that. All this work is already done on linux. Linux would just need a couple things like ACL's from solaris (and improved sparc support) before it was ready to roll with everything solaris has to offer.

In the end both would end up viable systems and great choices and development on either would feed into the other. Much like linux and BSD co-exist today, instead it would be linux, *BSD, and Solaris. It would be a great thing. But what's critical to remember here is that *BSD is pretty much dead, linux has momentum and linux would have solaris' features first, thus the linux momentum would continue and I doubt solaris would take the field.

Bullshit quote

[cdc179]

It's forked because if you write to the Red Hat distribution, you can't go and run on Debian

What the hell? If you have the required libs and apps one can take a RedHat RPM and run it just fine on Debian. Sun is smokin some good stuff and needs to pass it along.....

Re:Bullshit quote

[ajs318]

If you write an application, you release it in source form. It's up to the distributors to make a package for their distribution. RedHat and others create RPMs, Debian creates DEBs, and Slackware creates TGZs, by compiling the source code against their preferred versions of the kernel and any necessary libraries; then archiving up the binary files with a machine-readable text file listing any dependencies, and a script to copy them into the right locations. {That is a bit of an oversimplification, but close enough}. If you write Open Source code, it should be able to run on anything physically capable of running it.

Re:Bullshit quote

[dasmegabyte]

Of course! Because random slashdot posters ALWAYS know better than Sun does! Obviously, it's as easy as PDQing the RDS and there's no associated support costs or hidden problems, and Sun is just lying!

Fuck off, man. Just because YOU can do X doesn't mean it's easy, doesn't mean it's consistant, doesn't mean it's reliable and doesn't mean it's supportable.

Re:Bullshit quote

[cpghost]

There's more to portability than just between Linux distros. Porting good software to, say, the BSDs, is not a problem. Porting bad software is always a headache, no matter where or what. Even within the same distribution, things break every now and then when new library versions are installed etc...

Re:Bullshit quote

[shaitand]

As much as I'd like to agree it's often not the case that you can take one rpm for a given architecture and install as is on all the different rpm based distros.

One of the big problems is hardcoded dependencies, redhat will call an rpm one thing, and another distro will call the same damn thing another. One example is core packages in Redhat vs Mandrake, NONE of them have the same universal names, mandrake has renamed them all. As a result basically no redhat rpms with deps will install on Mandrake and vice versa.

If you have the SRPM and know how to fix the spec file this isn't an issue, but if your a software vendor your looking for an answer a bit easier to deal with than that when it comes to end users.

Hmmmmm! What kinda impact you say....?

[Anonymous Coward]

It could be a boon to Linux ...or it could put Linux out of business, depending on what dyed-in-the-wool Linux developers can do with GPL'ed Solaris code. It would be nice to have alternative distributions of Solaris to the inflexible, bloated freeware you can download. Certainly, this would be a big plus for open source.

This could be a brilliant move

[starseeker]

Remember, they aren't pulling in huge $$$$ for licenses for their OS, the way Microsoft is. Sun sells hardware. They have been known to give away their OS at zero/low cost in the past - it's their hardware that makes them the money.

Linux is good, it is very good. But it is not as good as Solaris in a lot of situations - Solaris has been in high end trenches and mission critical situations for a lot longer than Linux. An open sourcing of Solaris under GPL means several things:

a) Linux can benefit from Solaris
b) Solaris can benefit from Linux
c) Extensive code review of Solaris by the world probably won't hurt efforts to further improve security.

TREMENDOUS positive PR for Sun from an often ambilivant open source community, and a rush to make sure all important open source software runs flawlessly on Solaris (harder to test now since fewer people use it)

Problems to be delt with:

a) Making sure they have the legal rights to open source everything (of course)
b) Export restrictions? Not sure how this plays out for Solaris - since Linux is out there already I can't imagine the use of restricting Solaris (which is probably also out there, just not legally) but the government is known for a lack of common sense in such cases.
c) Fear of management that giving up ultimate control of all versions of Solaris will somehow be harmful.

Issue a) was one of the major problems when considering opensourcing BeOS - don't know how Solaris stands on such an issue.

But I think on the whole it's silly for Sun to try and compete with Linux head to head with a commercial OS - what's the point? Sun sells hardware and complete solutions, and generally does very well. If they can say "well, Solaris is GPL just like Linux, incorporates features X,Y, and Z that users generally cite as reasons they want Linux, and is proven and stable to boot" they get to just support Solaris again, and not have to worry about figuring out Linux. If that makes Solaris more widespread, what harm does that do Sun? It's not like Microsoft is going to pick up Solaris and incorporate it. Infighting among Unix like systems I think is fairly pointless in this day and age. Linux has made high priced commercial Unix licenses non-viable. So for companies like Sun, who sell hardware and solutions anyway, why not go with the flow on this one?

Re:This could be a brilliant move

[cpghost]

rush to make sure all important open source software runs flawlessly on Solaris

Yessss, absolutely! It would benefit every software package's portability and quality at the same time! The more platforms are supported, the better!

What's worse than a great application, riddled with Linux idiosyncracies (/proc usage etc...)? Up until now, only the BSDs have been paying attention that 3rd party application developers stick to standards as far as possible. Having more (Open/Free/...) Solaris-aware users and developers would be great!

Re:This could be a brilliant move

[calidoscope]

Yessss, absolutely! It would benefit every software package's portability and quality at the same time! The more platforms are supported, the better!

A very insightful post.

I would contend that the most robust open source software are those packages that have been ported to many different platforms. Porting to a new platform can reveal a lot of previously unseen bugs.

All together now!

[Anonymous Coward]

It's my unix and I'll GPL if I want to,
GPL if I want to,
GPL if I want toooo,
You would GPL to if it happened to you!

...what?

Re:never happen - oh yeah? I see it differently

[IWannaBeAnAC]

No, Windows and Office are the two (the only two) divisions that make money. Their financial breakdown is reported in lots of places, for example :

For the period ended September 30th, the two cash cows of Client (i.e. Windows) and Information Worker (Office) produced operating income of $2.48 billion on revenue of $2.89 billion, and $1.88 billion on $2.38 billion respectively.

MSN lost $97 million on $531 million, CE/Mobility was out $33 million on $17 million revenues (always a good trick, this kind of stuff), and the home of Xbox, Home Entertainment, dropped $177 million on revenues of $505 million. Business Solutions, which includes Navision and Great Plains, and is a sector Microsoft hopes will contribute great things in the future, lost $68 million on $107 million.

Re:GPL'ing Solaris to gain the Linux kernel &

[ThisNukes4u]

Linux GPL or GNU GPL?

Have you looked at those drivers?

[Bensmum]

They can already use drivers from the BSDs, and the code is 10x easier to read and do anything with than linux drivers. Sun would benefit not at all from device drivers, they are a company with a closed source product and a name, they can just ask the hardware manufacturer for the docs, sign their NDA and write a driver. How on earth could you possibly think drivers are linux's big asset that sun would want, and how on earth could you possibly think sun wants or needs drivers in any way?

Re:Have you looked at those drivers?

[FyRE666]

How on earth could you possibly think drivers are linux's big asset that sun would want, and how on earth could you possibly think sun wants or needs drivers in any way?

You've used Solaris for x86, right?

Re:Have you looked at those drivers?

[Bensmum]

Yes I have. You didn't read my post did you? If sun wanted to support more hardware, they would ask the hardware manufacturer for docs and write the drivers. They don't want to support every random shitty broken piece of hardware, its not a concern. People using solaris are typically bright enough to buy supported hardware.

And again, they already can take bsd drivers if they want, being able to take gpl linux drivers too isn't going to add anything for them.

Re:Have you looked at those drivers?

[FyRE666]

If sun wanted to support more hardware, they would ask the hardware manufacturer for docs and write the drivers. They don't want to support every random shitty broken piece of hardware, its not a concern.

Terrible thing: envy... ;-) Funnily enough, I don't consider my 400ukp dual-head graphic card, DVD rewriter, SB Audigy, promise RAID controller etc "shitty" hardware. Although I can understand you trying to make excuses for Sun's feeble support for the x86 platform, it doesn't mean it isn't a fact. In fact, I'd go as far as to say that you'd only use Solaris for x86 if you DID have "shitty" hardware, which you didn't expect to perform particularly well... Or if you had good hardware, that you wanted to perform like "shitty" (or completely absent) hardware I suppose...

Re:Have you looked at those drivers?

[Bensmum]

I don't understand, who is envious of what? Regardless, I don't consider your sound card, video card, or dvd writer server software, which is where solaris is aimed. So of course they aren't supported, run a desktop OS on your desktop. And your promise raind controller is most certainly shitty hardware, if you want software raid, just run software raid, if you want hardware raid go buy a real controller. And I'm not sure if you realize this, but solaris performs quite adequately, maybe you should try it sometime instead of whining that its not linux.

Multiple versions

[Craig Ringer]

Unfortunately, this makes application packaging a nightmare, and support even worse. You either need to build packages of all the various dependencies for all platforms you want to support, or hope that the user does it right.

Additionally, it sucks from a package management point of view.

It'd be good if it was easier to have multiple versions of libs installed in parallel. It's not too bad right now, but some improvement would still be useful - in particular tweaking package management to make it easier to manage mulitple parallel versions.

Re:Multiple versions

[drinkypoo]

Some distributions have already tweaked (or in this case designed) package management to make it easier to manage multiple parallel versions :)

Re:Multiple versions

[SirTalon42]

Hey if you don't want to release the source you can (and probably should) do a static build, and not dynamic, so the end user doesn't have to have ur specific version of the libs installed, unless it has a fairly stable API, and is common on most distrobutions

Re:Multiple versions

[Craig Ringer]

Good point.

Acrobat Reader, for example, does this with some success (it's statically linked to Motif, at least). I don't know how well it'll work when you want to properly interact with the desktop (have the same file chooser etc as other apps), though.

It's not an issue for me directly, as all my development work is in-house, but I still find it concerning in general.

Re:Multiple versions

[jaavaaguru]

What are you talking about? I've got 3 versions of fontconfig installed right now and it wasn't a problem.

Re:Multiple versions

[Curtman]

You also see that with the binary 3D software around. They've got their own libc even. Its almost a jailed mini-distro in Softimage's case.

Doh!

[oldosadmin]

I was actually thinking of that song when I posted that!

Re:remote desktop performance ... modern processor

[TheRaven64]

With NeWS (and Display Postscript), the widgets are drawn using PostScript commands. When you click on a button in X, it sends a message to the app, which then draws the widget and sends it to the X server. When you click on a button in a PostScript display environment, the button redraw is handled by the interpreted script, and a single event is sent to the application triggering an event. Interface latency is a lot lower, since the interface drawing is all handled by the terminal.

Re:remote desktop performance ... modern processor

[mattyrobinson69]

i managed to improve performance using remote displays on ssh - turn off compression (on a 100mbps network, its faster if the remote host is a crapppy PII)

im not sure if XDMCP uses compression or not, but if you can turn it off - try it and tell me

Re:GPL'ing Solaris to gain the Linux kernel &

[Nuclear Elephant]

Why, so SCO could lay claim to Solaris too? I can't see Sun wanting to go anywhere near Linux until issues like SCO are resolved.

Re:never happen - oh yeah? I see it differently

[elgaard]

According to
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104-966219.html
Wi ndows bring in 61% of the profit for Microsoft.

Scott McNeally watching Friends now?

[o517375]

I think Scott McNeally is feeling lonely lately near the end of the line. It's tough trying to hang on to an unravelling rope. He's made friends with Mikersoft and now wants to do the same with the Gnu/Linux people, but really I don't believe either wants to befriend Sun because they don't want bits and pieces here and there. They both want Java now or forget it.

Netscape... Mozilla

[NitsujTPU]

Remember Netscape?

This could very well be Sun Microsystems assuring that their product line lives after they do.

They scrapped the Sparc V processor, and let Microsoft start marketting the MSVM again.

Re:Netscape... Mozilla

[Anonymous Coward]

I hope this doesn't happen.

Netscape is now "living on" in the form of an open source browser and that's it. The company makes no money and hardly anyone uses their product.

I would rather see Sun stay around and keep fighting than fading into obscurity like Netscape.

Why don't you..

[kunudo]

Pay some code monkey to fix the kernel bug for you?

But, doesn't sco own solaris ?

[terrymr]

surely nobody could write enterprise quality *nix without SCO :-)

Re:DESPERATION

[Anonymous Coward]

Other choices:

1. give the source code and let them compile it on their system.

2. write it in C# and use CIL

3. write it in a high level language (python/perl) and worry not about portability.

wrong date

[krokodil]

Soalris? GPL? Ha ha ha!
Today is 1st of May, not first of 1st of April.

Re:never happen - oh yeah? I see it differently

[Anonymous Coward]

Yup... think you're right and it would probably would help Sun. I think the OS's are being commoditized and the new price is $0. Apple know thinks, IBM knows this, and everyone else who uses opensource OS's knows it. Apple adds their value at the user interface and not at the underline OS. Don't get me wrong I think Darwin is great but it's just there to support their value added frameworks. I think Sun needs to open up the hardware to other OSs as well. They should make sure Linux runs on every box they sell, IBM is beating them on this front. Support the BSD projects by given them documents!, developer discounts, etc. Sun makes great hardware and they have a great OS too. But the market is getting use to paying $0 for basic OS functionality. Thats why Microsoft continues to develop API's and software that binds with their OS just to keep it afloat. Microsoft is in the business of selling the Win32 API and not an OS. I personally use MacOS, FreeBSD and OpenBSD. I could very well use one for everything but chose each one based on their strengths.

Too little too late

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't see how Open Sourcing a UNIX like operating system will have much impact on the market at all, since we already have Linux and the BSDs. Open Sourcing a Java implementation, on the other hand, could have a profound effect upon the market.

What's wrong with Sun? I don't get it. If I were on my way to the grave, I would be looking for the most powerful move I could make to save myself. Sun seems to be looking for the least powerful move they can make! "Hey everybody, let's Open Source our kernel! It won't make any difference so it's the perfect move!"

MS and SCO would throw a riot

[Billly Gates]

Remember SCO owns Unix, and MS owns %10 of SCO.

There is also large amounts of code from proprietary 3rd party vendors. You can not just opensource Unix, hence why GNU came along.

Re:MS and SCO would throw a riot

[Anonymous Coward]

I heard Novell owns UNIX?
I also heard there's a court case between Novell and SCO.
I also heard Sun ain't speaking about GPLing all of Solaris.

Re:GPL uber alles

[RLiegh]

I may be able to answer a couple of your questions. From a totally different perspective, of course.

What fun is it being a troll?
Great fun. It's rewarding to see a post that you've left blatant clues that you're trolling get both moderated up, and get a lot of flames from people who obviously couldn't be bothered to grab the clues. the more obvious they are, the better.

Other times, it's simply cathartic to tell a bunch of tight assed, unbearably obnoxious dorks to FOAD. I'm going to be here anyways (since I like the articals), I might as well make it bearable for myself.

But what's interesting enough to you about trolling that you make a concerted effort to do so, enough that you know how to game the system?
Well, at 'good' karma here, so I -myself- don't really know how to game the system effectively. But I imagine it's like anything else: it's a challenge, and the challenge is an end in and of itself (meaning that for some, the trolling becomes secondary to 'beating the game').

What have you learned from it?
Catharsis is an end in and of itself.
What's the payoff?
the pay off is the satifaction you get from either watching a bunch of dorks bite on your flame-bait, or from the rare and occasional comment you get from someone who is amused by your antics (generally, I'm trying to amuse myself -first and foremost, but it's always nice to be appreciated).

Re:remote desktop performance ... modern processor

[Craig Ringer]

XDMCP is just a protocol to request displays, set up authentication, and manage the display. All the actual X session traffic happens as normal - straight between the clients and servers using the normal X network protocol.

So no, XDMCP does not use compression, and I doubt there'd be much point compressing the occasional UDP messages it sends.

SSH encryption and compression would be quite a performance hit if we used it, but we don't, we use raw X sessions negotiated using XDMCP. Insecure: yes; fast: yes. The security issues are mitigated by the fairly secure network segment the terminal users are on.

Can anybody explain to me why IBM putting

[walterbyrd]

proprietary code into a GPL'd product is cause for a $5B lawsuit.

Yet sunw can GPL all of solaris, and it's a-okay?

Re:Can anybody explain to me why IBM putting

[kjd]

It's not. Sun didn't GPL all of Solaris. Jonathan Schwartz mused, "Maybe we'll GPL it." Then it got posted on Slashdot.

Can't happen because of other companies

[ValourX]

A while back I had a phone interview with the product manager of Solaris. I asked him if Solaris would ever be Free Software (or at least open-source) someday. He said that you can get the Solaris source if you need it, but it can never be under the GPL or similar Free Software licenses because they use so much code from other companies that contain trade secrets and otehr things that Sun hasn't the right to "give away." He specifically listed Kodak as one example because Solaris 9 includes code that Kodak wrote and licensed to Sun -- it had something to do with color matching or something like that.

I guess they could GPL Solaris minus the third-party proprietary code, whatever it may be, but then you're not getting the real Solaris anymore.

Novell ran into this problem when they bought the rights to the UNIX SVR4 source. There was some talk at the time of making it GPL, but there were so many agreements with vendors like Intel and Sun that prohibited opening up the code that it was impossible to accomplish.

Sun should have opened up Solaris years ago, if it were possible. Then people could have manipulated the source according to their needs and Sun would have sold more hardware as a result. Solaris adds value to Sun hardware -- that's its sole purpose -- and Sun missed the chance to really capitalize on that.

-Jem

Re:Can't happen because of other companies

[Geoffreyerffoeg]

It doesn't matter. Open-source the kernel and other core pars and get community development going, and package the compiled OSS kernel with its source (if GPL'd) and the proprietary binaries. Solaris binaries are already available free for non-commercial-ish users, so it shouldn't be hard to give away Sun's own code with it.

Old story...

[leandrod]

...by some ten years... Sun has being considering that for several years, there was even a paper by one of the Sun founders or Solaris developers from around 93 or 94. The proposal has been around, and consistently rejected, since that time.

What a lost opportunity... had they done that then, Solaris would have perhaps a similar if not better position than GNU/Linux today, provided they had good stewardship.

Re:Old story...

[Tarantolato]

What a lost opportunity... had they done that then, Solaris would have perhaps a similar if not better position than GNU/Linux today, provided they had good stewardship.

Let's all say it together: Debian...GNU/...Solaris

Re:remote desktop performance ... modern processor

[argent]

That's the point of NeWS, my friend. NeWS runs as much as possible of the user interface in the server, in uploaded Postscript applets that only pass completed operations to the client. So, for example, instead of managing a menu from your toolkit's library on the client with mnetwork traffic every time you twitch the cursor you upload the whole menu tree to the server and only send back "the user selected this item". There were NeWS applications, in fact, that simply uploaded the whole thing to the server and then waited for it to terminate.

When I refer to modern processors, incidentally, I'm including both GPUs and CPUs under that cover.

This won't improve X's issues with latency, of course, because it's not X. :)

Wow... the ramifications are mind boggeling

[bigusputicus]

Having worked at Sun for a number of years, and having some insight into business channels and OEM programs, this seems so complex an understaking

The impact to the commercial Linux distros would be significant as their domain expertise in operating system development is much less than that of Sun, i.e Novel, Red Hat

Right off the bat, it opens the door for storage providers that are ported to Solaris

Commercial users would benefit from all the software applications available on Solaris

Security is one of Sun's strong area's

yada yada yada...

What would the impact be to the commercial Linux distros if Solaris does GPL?
What would the impact be to the development community?

Trying to digest what the business and open-source impact will be is giving me a headache...

GigantanKramePithicus

Re:remote desktop performance ... modern processor

[Craig Ringer]

It definitely sounds interesting, though I'm not enthused about breaking compatibility with the current *NIX "standard" X11 GUI, which I presume would be required.

I'm watching developments like Cairo, DPS, and such with interest, as they allow incremental moves and improvements. None the less, I'd be game to try something entirely different if it provided a mechanism to 'wrap' X apps (for example, an OSX-style rootless and well-integrated X server).

I suspect things are going in the direction of incrementally improving X at present, though. There's still plenty of headroom left in X by the looks of things ;-) and the toolkit people are already working wonders. Compare qt3.0 with qt3.2.x over remote X - the improvement is astonishing.

That said, it would be really nice to introduce a way of doing higher-level widgets server-side, without locking apps into using a predefined set of widgets on the server (lest we find ourselves with another Motif situation down the track). It'd probably need to happen at the toolkit level, because apps wouldn't want to have to be aware of the fallback to client-side widgets if server support was missing.

I'll definitely keep my eye out for NEWS news, though - it sounds quite interesting.

Re:remote desktop performance ... modern processor

[argent]

Before Sun dropped NeWS they had the same server concurrently providing X11 and NeWS protocol services, so you could keep using your X11 apps while getting performance improvements from NeWS apps.

Isn't this illegal?

[Anonymous Coward]

I mean, isn't Solaris 100% SCO-encumbered, and didn't Sun embrace the whole SCO scam? They used to have the Solaris source available under a Java-style non-open source license, but it isn't there anymore. I assumed this was because having the complete source to a System V derivative online for free, at a time when Sun and SCO were accusing others of breaking the System V license by releasing only code they wrote themselves to the public not under NDA, was kind of contradictory. Are they admitting that this was all bullshit now?

Profit!

[Anonymous Coward]

1. Sun gpl's solaris
2. Sun incorporates linux device drivers
3. Linux incorporates solaris smp
4. Debian releases Debian GNU/Solaris
5. ???
6 PROFIT!!

One can only dream....

Well, *this* is interesting

[0x0d0a]

Wow.

I've pointed out before that with Apple's move to *IX, it's "Microsoft versus *IX" -- everyone else uses *IX.

With such a move, almost all the major OSes except Microsoft's would also be open-source.

I'm kind of amazed that Sun would take such a stance, but I guess they need to do what they can to retain market share...but still, how are they going to make money from Solaris then? Make most of Solaris GPL but retain some of it? Go totally into services?

It'd be an awfully big jump, with a lot of risk involved...

Also, I dunno whether I'd be comfortable as Sun trusting the FSF to have a huge amount of power over my IP. They didn't get the benefit of the GPL in making the software, but they would have the risk...I dunno.

Re:Well, *this* is interesting

[shaitand]

The FSF already has control over billions worth of development (if the software were sold as commercial instead of free that is) in the sense you speak of. I've yet to see any abuse there.

They can't do that

[jimfrost]

The whole idea of Sun GPLing Solaris is laughable. They cannot do that, they're based on SVR4 and most likely have a contract similar to that of IBM (you know, the one they're being sued over right now). So don't believe it.

Re:They can't do that

[cpghost]

Good point. But who knows which version of Solaris they will GPL? Perhaps they're in the midst of a complete rewrite, somewhat like the BSD 4.4Lite story a while ago?

It would be great if Sun GPLed Solaris; whatever version!

Re:They can't do that

[jimfrost]

It would be great if Sun GPLed Solaris; whatever version!

I'm not sure that at this point I'd care. It would have been more interesting circa 1994. Today what would that really get us? We have two completely open source OSs already and one of them has continued to mature. Why not just use what we've got?

Re:They can't do that

[TiggsPanther]

Why not just use what we've got?

Well, from what I understand of GPL and stuff, wouldn't it mean that there'd be a greater amount of resources available out there?
Plus as GPL code (correct me if I'm wrong) then Solaris source could be studied to see if anything would work in Linux.

Also, a third(?) open-source *nix is bound to help increase the software available across all three.

Tiggs

Fibre Channel is expensive

[tepples]

Performance figures should include the time it takes for procurement to flip enough burgers to afford a Fibre Channel interface card and Fibre Channel drives. Serial ATA is cheaper than FC and thus requires less burger flipping.

simple

[Karma Star]

gpl non-sys V code and just open-source (ala BSD) the rest.

my obligatory Sun statement

[SQLz]

Sun sucks. They should crawl off and die.

Re:never happen - oh yeah? I see it differently

[BitRandom]

Actually Microsoft made money on most of its divisions except for the option charges it took when it converted options to shares.

Here is a Seattle PI story on it 2 Microsoft units post losses"

They're profitable over most of their divisions, some more than others and there are thoses that are losing money.

Gosling's Blog...

[Anonymous Coward]

...seems to imply that in many ways Solaris and Sun hardware now are "commodity" products, and that Java is the value-add for both.

Re:never happen - oh yeah? I see it differently

[christophersaul]

It really irritates me when people describe anything that isn't Intel as 'proprietary'. Being the most widely sold processor, doesn't make something non-proprietary.

AHEM.

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't you mean Gnu/Solaris?

Re:I actually call it "Slowaris"

[tepples]

10 Let M$ = "Microsoft"

And will you please quit linking to Penny Arcade every time somebody uses a BASIC expression in a Slashdot post?

Re:GPL'ing Solaris to gain the Linux kernel &

[cpghost]

Sun is going to need drivers to interoperate with x86 hardware and common peripherals

That's an interesting point. So far, hardware manufacturers were reluctant to provide specs to Linux developers, but they happily handed over a lot of data under NDAs. Theoretically, Solaris (SPARC and x86) should have had an advantage over Linux here, because SUN would have been able to get much more technical informations on commodity hardware than the average Linux kernel hacker.

Contrast this with the reality? Solaris 9's hardware compatibility list on x86 is pitiful, compared to Linux. As long as you don't care for this market, things won't change that much. Support for new (x86-based) hardware was poor in every Solaris version, up until, and including Solaris 10beta.

So you may be right after all. Maybe is SUN trying to harness Linux' device driver code, and doing this is only possible if they GPLed their kernel (which won't be a bad move after all!).

Unfortunately, they'll lose a lof of their NDA-bility should they later wish to support more hardware peripherals under Open/Free/Solaris than Linux.

In other news...

[cpghost]

Microsoft (MSFT) is considering to GPL the source code to it's Windows(TM)(R) operating system.

Analysts suggest that the reason behind this revolutionary move is that Microsoft needs to use the very sophisticated Linux device drivers in order to support more customers. "Moving to the GPL is a very courageous move" because it will expose Microsoft to the fury of the litigation happy SCO, which claims that Microsoft licensed confidential Unix code from them and used it in the Windows(TM)(R) OS.

Bonus!!!

[Tarantolato]

If Solaris were really GPL'd with no games on Sun's part, I'd drop Linux in a *heartbeat*!

Solaris vs Linux

[apophenia]

I use both Solaris and Debian at work.
My servers are split about 50-50 with more going over to Debian everyday.

What i like about Solaris is that it is bulletproof.
There are a couple of 10 year old boxes that i inherited that still run fine!!

On the other hand patches are a pain, and a lot of apps are compiled from source, making updates a real pain to handle.

With Debian, i can update my systems with a few commands and be all patched up.

I would love to see an apt-get for Solaris as Suns package management is a real pain in the ass.

I love the piece of mind knowing i'm patched against the latest software bugs that Debian (or any other linux) can give me.
but i love Sun hardware and the uptimes that i have on some system.s

OS has nothing to do with it

[tuckericj]

I've been leading a move away from Solaris and to Linux for the last several years at a very large company. I've used 'Solaris' and 'Linux' only because these are the terms in the article. Truth be told I have been leading a move from UltraSPARC* to x86. While I am an ardent Linux supporter the biggest business reason to move to Linux is to be able to make use of a solid Unix-like OS on the much faster/cheaper/fill-in-you-favorite-er x86 platform. Sun has done a good job of reducing the initial purchase of many of their models, but there support costs are still astronomically high. I'd welcome the opensourcing of Solaris only because it would mean that Linux could incorporate the parts of the operating system that allow Sun to succeed in the high end market.

Re:remote desktop performance ... modern processor

[spitzak]

A huge advantage of NeWS is that the widgets were in effect "open source" because they were interpreted PostScript. Possibly more important, NeWS was written so that an app could easily define it's own widgets or replace widgets in it's namespace without interfering with other programs. This allowed experimentation and allowed perhaps 5 (or fewer) people to write in weeks the tNT toolkit, which is the equivalent of GTK at least.

Non-news toolkits would probably not use these widgets at first. However they can take full advantage of the postscript drawing environment to draw things, eliminating the copying of bitmaps that is most of the slowness of current X11 apps. The local namespace means a toolkit can easily write a Postscript backend, and change it over time, that does exactly what they need so the front end can talk to it. In effect they can invent their own communication protocol from client to server. They can then move widgets over, or perhaps decide that is not a good idea, and move lower-level drawing ops over (there are good arguments that widgets maybe should reside on the client, as long as the instructions to draw them are simple, in many cases the interface to a widget is far more complicated and thus slow than the interface needed to draw an image of the widet. The further beauty of NeWS is that it does not disallow this).

X11 apps would probably talk through an xlib emulator to a PostScript backend that converts the calls to NeWS. This is entirely practical on current hardware, though Sun botched things considerably by making the NeWS+X11 hybrid, which ran both NeWS and X11 slowly, and seriously broke the widget model by requiring you to use the built-in window object so that X11 window managers would work. I would completely ignore this merge and base any development on pure NeWS.

Re:GPL'ing Solaris to gain the Linux kernel &

[spitzak]

Unfortunately, they'll lose a lof of their NDA-bility should they later wish to support more hardware peripherals under Open/Free/Solaris than Linux.

Nothing would prevent them from writing their own closed-source drivers for such hardware.

I love the easy questions...

[Doktor Memory]

Question is: has that strategy paid off for Apple?

Looking over the last two or so years worth of quarterly statements from both Apple (wildly profitable) and Sun (bleeding cash from every orifice), I'd say that the answer is pretty clearly "yes".

Solaris is a respectable OS

[mnmn]

Its got maturity, got a strong binary base in the corporate and can juggle 64 64-bit processors. I thought its threading implementation is more robust than any OSOS, although I havent checked recently. Its also got a much wider driver base than any of the BSDs.

If it gets opensourced, it'll get more drivers and ports. It shall be one more OS in the collection to seriously consider. A while ago I tried to use Solaris x86 for a webserver because of its nice Zones, but it didnt have the SATA drivers needed (none of the BSDs did either I went for Linux). I think with GPL, Solaris will go on much longer, but Sun might go under.

GPL SOLARIS isthe only other OS a LINUX USER

[Anonymous Coward]

would use

so take that to the bank

I like the Dock

[repetty]

I feel it's necessary to offset you bigoted statements with regard to the Mac OS X doc only because someone who's not familiar with the Mac OS X environment might accidentally believe you.

So, for the record, the OS X Dock is just fine. It's handy, flexible, functional, and unobstrusive as you want it to be since it's also configurable. I've been using Macs since 1987, BTW, so it's not like I'm a newbie with them

I suspect you are pundit. Is "Minna Karai" a pseudonym for "John Dvorak"?

--Richard

Re:I like the Dock

[Anonymous Coward]

shut-up, please shutup... The dock is a joke.

Re:I like the Dock

[Minna Kirai]

It's handy, flexible, functional, and unobstrusive as you want it to be since it's also configurable.

There's a content-free sentence for you... those adjectives could mean anything.

Well, I'll agree that the OSX Dock is configurable. What's unfortunate is that you need to reconfigure it before it becomes useful. (Many, many programs are "configurable" because they allow users to script their own macros. But if users must do serious work to get something decent... what's good about that?)

The most important reconfiguration I need to do before using a new Mac is to create a folder in the Dock holding icons for all your programs, to imitate the old Apple menu. Although that doesn't work quite as well as the real Apple menu, for 3 reasons.
1: It changes position onscreen depending on how many documents you've opened.
2: You must click & wait to get it open.
3: It needs manual updating when new apps are installed.

I suspect you are pundit. Is "Minna Karai" a pseudonym for "John Dvorak"?

Close! But Dvorak still gets a paycheck for doing this...

Re:never happen - oh yeah? I see it differently

[Haeleth]

It really irritates me when people describe anything that isn't Intel as 'proprietary'. Being the most widely sold processor, doesn't make something non-proprietary.

You're missing the point. The reason an Apple Mac is "proprietary hardware" is nothing to do with the processor: it's that it's damn hard to run MacOS on anything but a genuine Apple Mac. Likewise, the reason Wintel isn't "proprietary" is that you can buy a machine to run Windows on from anyone you like, or build your own if the fancy takes you.

Does that make sense?

Sun BigAdmin

[Anonymous Coward]

BigAdmin Portal
http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/

for ones who want to tweak your Solaris box.

Re:Sun BigAdmin

[Anonymous Coward]

solarisx86@yahoogroups.com

A mailing list for those who actually want to learn something about Solaris x86.

Re:Sun BigAdmin

[PopCulture]

for those interested, this is a cool solaris resource too, as well as the software companion cd from sun.com:

http://www.sunfreeware.com/

Re:GPL uber alles -- Bravo!

[Anonymous Coward]

You've made my day, and you've made /. actually bearable for a change:) You've earned massive kudos and shitloads of those idiot "karma points" the linux/gpl weenies scrabble so hard for with their pithy commentaries, submissions and their stupid-shit "insightful" moderations.

Most of these morons wouldn't know "insight" if it buggered them, and stole their ssh private keys for good measure.

Re:never happen - oh yeah? I see it differently

[Anonymous Coward]

They might be misusing 'proprietary', but not in the way that you think.

When people describe non Intel processors (usually meaning non x86, not just 'not made by Intel') what they're trying to say is that said processor is not a commodity good.

what effect woudl this have on SCO vs IBM?

[josepha48]

Wouldn't SCO then say that Sun is giving away SCO's propritery unix code? They try to revoke their irrevokable license?

Read the COPYING file in the Linux source

[NZheretic]

The COPYING File in the Linux source distribution states at the start ...

NOTE! This copyright does *not* cover user programs that use kernel services by normal system calls - this is merely considered normal use of the kernel, and does *not* fall under the heading of "derived work".

Re:Read the COPYING file in the Linux source

[shaitand]

This is simply a clarification for it's own sake. It doesn't change the license which and I think most would agree that it's a non-issue anyway.

It's a pretty damn far stretch to claim that talking to an api makes you a derivative work.

Re:GPL'ing Solaris to gain the Linux kernel &

[shaitand]

Not true, there is nothing preventing sun from loading drivers in a fashion similar to linux module loading.

Re:GPL'ing Solaris to gain the Linux kernel &

[Kiryat Malachi]

Actually, and more interestingly, is the possibility of going the Apple route and open-sourcing the software to sell the hardware (yeah, yeah, that isn't quite what Apple is doing, blah blah blahbity blah).

Sun makes good hardware. SPARC gear is generally very well-regarded. If they GPL Solaris so that they can suck in GPLed improvements from Linux and the *BSDs (not that they couldn't do that before), they've just drastically improved the performance of an OS that already did quite nicely on their own hardware. If this helps them sell hardware, Sun has to consider that a good thing.

This all assumes Sun wants to stay a hardware company (which recent signs - cancellation of US5, specifically - indicate to be less likely). If they want to go software, I have no idea why they would do this.

Fuck you mods.

[Jonathan Hamilton]

Its wasn't a fucking troll, people who say
fucking OS X as a answer to everything, even when
people are clearly running x86 hardware are the fucking trolls, you fucking moderators suck, fuck you find a life.

Re:Fuck you mods.

[byolinux]

I didn't say it was an answer to everything, nor did I say I could get your soundcard to work.

If you look at the original comment, and my reply, you'll see that OS X fill the needs offered.

OS X needs to be run on Apple hardware, it's true. There are things about OS X which suck too.

I'm sorry you don't have a Mac for whatever reason you need for your Soundblaster card to work, but please get a clue. I can't get my cheap-as eMac to run Solaris natively, do you see me whining about that? No.

Also, don't take posts that are followed by ;) too seriously. Welcome to humour on The Internet.

Re:Fuck you mods.

[Jonathan Hamilton]

Did you read my post?
I said I have a fucking Mac.
It's a G3 Tower running OS X.

What is trying to be said is that apple hardware is nice, but it is much more expensive then hardware that is just as good as performance.

My Sound blaster card works find under my AMD Athlon 2600+ with 512MB of ram etc. etc. And I'm sure my Athlon runs much faster and a hell of a lot cheaper then a Mac of the same price.

Your post had NOTHING TO DO WITH HUMOR, and everything to do with OS X promoting hoping you'd be able to be a karma horror and other OS X groupies mod you up.

The point of my orginial post is this.
Why did you fucking reccommend OS X, when he never said HE HAD A APPLE, and you can be more then 90% sure he dosen't have one, cause if he did he fucking sound card would work.

THe new OS X on everything crowd are just as bad as the linux zelots, keep your fucking os X comments to yourself unless your sure the person can acutally run OS X better then their current OS without having to spend $1000 to buy a damn Mac.

The result would be simple and predictable.

[ninejaguar]

Solaris and Linux would each gain each other's best features that would be technically feasable to clone. However, Linux can already do or will eventually do what Solaris can. If it doesn't now, it will soon - it's inevitable. Marketwise, Sun would continue to lose their high-end hardware business, but their low-end commodity hardware business would continue to grow.

Sun would be better off GPL'ing their hardware, and Java than Solaris. If they could manage to get other people to pay them for certification services as Sun Certified Hardware and Java, they'll be the defacto standard for high-end computing. As their GPL'd hardware designs are improved through a similar process as the JCP, they will remain cutting edge. I doubt any other hardware manufacturer would hesitate to obtain a certification, since their competitors would be doing the same (VIA, AMD, Intel, HP, IBM, Motorola, TI, Cisco...etc). New design, new certification. But, all the R&D costs would be shared across the planet. Sun needs to start sniffing out those industry wide alliances right now to confirm if there are those willing to obtain cutting edge tech in such a manner to support administration costs of certifications.

Imagine universities and government contractors all over the planet able to improve Sun's designs and the best ones that match specific types of jobs are submitted for fabrication approval status under a community process.

Keep in mind, this is only worthwhile to Sun if their high-end hardware revenue stream continues to dwindle as it has, and they continue to post losses. They've remade themselves before, from workstations to servers to software company to desktops. Now, they also need to become a standards body to continue. A publically held clearing house of research and development, whose profit is based on building and servicing commodity hardware/software, and the integrity of their community and certification process. Their GPL'd hardware would eat into the profits of proprietary systems as Linux is doing to Solaris.

= 9J =

microsoft speculation

[goga76]

I heard a rumor that latest Sun-Microsoft settlement is infact MS buying Solaris to be the core of their next OS. With Solaris becoming open source a little later, MS will have an open source community working on improving next MS OS without even knowing so.

Too far fetched ?