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Solaris 10 to be Open Source
An anonymous reader writes "It looks as though Sun is going to open source their new Solaris 10 operating system. It seems to include eveything except some device drivers. They plan to model the Darwin and Fedora projects. Sounds very interesting."
Can anyone explain why someone might choose to use Solaris over Linux other than for legacy reasons?
Is this a desparate move of a company trying to regain relevance or a brilliant shrewd move?
Agile Artisans
What is better is how can you Model Darwin and Fedora????
Darwin is the just the Basic OS, you can't run any OS X apps on it without Apple's software.
Fedora is pure Open Source, it just changes regularly, and has trademark restrictions on Red hat's images and such.
How are these the same??
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
Unlike Linux, Solaris is a derivative of UNIX. I am sure SCO will be keenly looking forward to the day when Solaris is open source. ;-)
Remember, if you hack on Linux (or plan to), you best not review the code.
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
*coughLinuxATINVIDIAalltheotherproprietaryhardware drivesinLinuxcough*
In other words, Linux is no better in this regard, get over it.
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Mod me down, you fucking twits. Go ahead. I dare you.
(I read with sigs off.)
Open source is one thing, but I'm wondering how useful to us Sun's move really is if the code will not be put out under a GPL-like or BSD-like license
... lately I sense that "open-sourcing" is more an attempt of big companies to get some work done for free and get some PR at the same time, BUT with little real use to the community as GPL'ing the code would provide. Am I right?
When you make your source open then I'll be interested but until that, this is just a bone for the community to do work for Sun and not actually get a full fledge open source solution.
They are, that's what the article is about. They are not opening source they do not own. Your comment could also be directed at Linus for not opening up the Cisco VPN drivers for example...THEY ARE NOT HIS to do so. Also, I am sure that your market analysis is based on a lot of research but just one flaw. How would having less revenue force them to get rid of established drivers which work well and are mature and instead hope that the community will make them fast? Seems that would ultimately cost more and be counterproductive.
will they sue them too?
/ss
I'm waiting to see the license terms before I celebrate.
"I object to doing things that computers can do." -- Olin Shivers, lispers.org
Just because it's "open source" (as opposed to "Open Source") as in "you can read the source" doesn't mean it's Free. And that may be all they do: let you read the source. If they don't use the GPL or BSD or some other well known FOSS license I doubt this will really help them all that much. If they come up with their own license (which a company as big as Sun is wont to do) it will probably be quite complicated and your average hacker won't understand it.
They do everything they used to do.
Just cos they're taking advantage of what people want now (Linux, Opteron, Open Source) doesn't mean they're not also working on stuff that's cool that we don't know that we want yet, or even stuff that's not cool but is still worthy.
This is where Sun, IBM, SGI, even HP, do more for us than Dell and Microsoft. Though at least, and I hate myself for saying this, Microsoft are trying.
Cleary being first or having the best idea ever are no guarantees of esteem or profit - often the opposite, so kudos to Sun for slugging it out and continuing to bet on innovation. Ditto to IBM and AMD.
...an Englishman in London.
So does this mean that Sun is going to give up trying to squeeze $20,000 from me just for upgrading my 10-proc Ultra Enterprise from Solaris 7 to Solaris 10?
Reality Check available here. Heh!
Life is pain. Anyone who says otherwise is selling something.
Looking at this, it looks like the kernel will be open source, and some 3rd-party device drivers will be non-open. I see no difference, without knowing whether Sun is planning a 'free' license or not, at least. Solaris is not those drivers, just like Linux isn't ATI's drivers, so get over the bitching about some aspects not being open-sourced.
My point was that complaining that Sun won't open-source certain proprietary drivers is totally pot and the kettle, given that Linux relies on similar things in many circumstances.
Since we don't know what license things will go open source under, and we don't know what things will go open source, show some restraint before applauding or complaining.
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Mod me down, you fucking twits. Go ahead. I dare you.
(I read with sigs off.)
The new systems by IBM run Linux atop a Power5. Proprietary Solaris 10 atop a Niagara simply cannot compete because Linux is debugged by a small army of developers and made rock solid by IBM's 6 sigma commitment to reliability. So, in a desparate move, SUNW has decided to put Solaris 10 into open-mode in order to bring the SUNW Niagara-based servers closer to parity with the Power5.
The bell tolls for SUNW.
... I have my hands on the install media, while reading the license it comes with. Sun says _many_ things. They rarely follow through, and when they do, it always falls short.
They run out of swap space, and they crash.
What ancient mummified version of SunOS did you work with? Just recently, I had a program go wacko and suck up every bit of virtual memory it could. My Sun workstation slowed down, of course, but I eventually got to an xterm to kill the offending process. No crash.
The book, Solaris Internals, details exactly what Solaris does when resources become scarce. It is designed to degrade gracefully by speeding up page scanning, for example, at certain thresholds of memory usage.
I think the crashing you saw was due to a specific program that you depended on (not Solaris) that was very poorly written.
-- "Makes Little Debbie look like a pile of puke!" - Moe Szyslak
How exactly do they run out of colors?
They don't, as pretty much every Sun graphics board since the Ultra 1 workstation was 24-bit (Creator boards and onwards). Older SPARCstations had 24-bit boards, too, but they were very expensive and not common.
-- "Makes Little Debbie look like a pile of puke!" - Moe Szyslak
Or rather undead. The good thing is the Sun realises about it. Opening closed source is a positive way to afterlife for software.
There you are, staring at me again.
What makes you say "certainly not"? And what makes linking that phrase to marketing propaganda insightful? Ultrasparc is running out of gas, folks. It's not scaling up and instead of finishing and releasing their new core they actually had to scrap that effort and release a multi-core processor instead because the ultrasparc is getting left behind badly by POWER5. Even Opteron seems to be faster; from what we know about its processor interconnect technology it should scale well, and the 4-way Opteron in the above-linked benchmark looks like it would beat the UltraSparc III with half as many cores. (It's only compared with 1/4 as many cores as the sample USIII system.) USPARCIV is basically a dual-core USPARCIII since they couldn't manage to bring their actual new core out. Put another way, an 8-processor (16 core) USPARCIV should be no faster for CPU-intensive tasks than a 4-processor (8 core) Opteron when such a beast becomes available - which will be soon.
Hence, unless Sun comes up with a new UltraSPARC soon, which seems unlikely, SPARC is done. It's over. There's no reason for Sun to keep flogging this particular deceased equine when it can just buy Opteron processors and build systems around that.
Of course, there's no reason to buy such a system from Sun, either, once PCs start getting onboard peripherals that lie along a PCI-E bus. Right now you're lucky if your onboard peripherals that need more than 133MB/sec of bus bandwidth are even on 64 bit or 66MHz PCI buses internally. I'm not sitting at my workstation just now but some of its hardware is on one or the other type of PCI bus, but not both...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
They may be late, but they are bringing the hot blond that everyone stares at. She might just have a few makeover tips for the unibrowed linux kernel. :)
Douglas P. Price