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."

Comments

Solaris Vs Linux?

[Sanity]

Can anyone explain why someone might choose to use Solaris over Linux other than for legacy reasons?

Re:Solaris Vs Linux?

[Allen Zadr]

For most of the world... It's not one or the other, it's both. Solaris is a strong OS, despite losing some market share in the last 8 years. Open Source projects benefit from being listed on the solarisfreeware web site. As an admin I've always had a tendancy to use and support whatever project has the largest cross-platform capability.

Well, how better to support a Solaris solution for your OSS project than to _run_ Solaris. More importantly, the issues in Solaris that have long dogged OSS projects (can only be compiled with gcc - must use OSS version of malloc, etc) can be found and fixed by debugging and recompiling now-open-sourced system libraries.

Re:Solaris Vs Linux?

[dunstan]

There's more to implementing stuff in your kernel than just lifing a bit of source code from elsewhere.

The way the Solaris kernel is so scaleable across over 100 processors is not some clever hack, it's taken years of refinement of the kernel. I'm not a kernel hacker, but you won't just be able to lift bits of Solaris kernel code and drop them into a Linux kernel.

What I would expect to see fairly quickly is a "GNU/Solaris" distribution, where (as many of us have been doing for years) you get a Solaris kernel and basic libraries, and then put a GNU based set of tools on top of it. Couple this with the Niagara processors and you have an awesome edge appliance.

Re:Solaris Vs Linux?

[secolactico]

What I would expect to see fairly quickly is a "GNU/Solaris" distribution, where (as many of us have been doing for years) you get a Solaris kernel and basic libraries, and then put a GNU based set of tools on top of it.

Solaris is a sweet OS, but what I which the most is something like the FreeBSD port tree to be done for solaris. Sun already has niftly package tools, but a port collection would take care of dependencies and make updating easier.

Can they do this?

[AnuradhaRatnaweera]

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. ;-)

Open source != GPL

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Uh huh

[starseeker]

I'm waiting to see the license terms before I celebrate.

Re:Don't get tainted

[jpvlsmv]

And if you ever plan to write the Great American Novel, make sure you never read any books, magazines, websites, or other written work.

And if you ever plan to write music, never listen to any CDs or recorded music from any other musician.

Because you'll get "tainted".

--Joe

Re:Stability

[upsidedown_duck]

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.