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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?
How many had seen this coming for a while?
No sig for the moment.
Is this a desparate move of a company trying to regain relevance or a brilliant shrewd move?
Agile Artisans
If it's truly an open source license, this is only good news--Linux and/or the BSDs will be able to use the best bits. If it's just a "shared source" head-fake like Microsoft has tried to pull with some of their stuff, well, then Sun will solidify their position as Grand Moff Tarkin to Microsoft's Vader.
What does SUN do anymore? If they're open sourcing Solaris, obviously they're looking to get the community involved in developing it. They're also starting to ship some x86 servers (Opteron and Xeon), so are we eventually going to lose the Sparc processors as well? What does that leave Sun with? Java?
"It seems to include eveything except some device drivers."
So like linux it will work great if you could only find the drivers for your printer.
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.
I wonder how they'll handle the Unix(TM) code in there and all the various other contributed stuff from Samsung etc.
I guess it's easier if they forget about CDE/X11 etc but it will be interesting to see what open source licence they use and how they handle 'other peoples' code in SOlaris 10.
Of course they could have removed all the Sys V R5.4 code, but without doing this unsing clean room conditions SCO could have a wondrful time in court.
Just wondering??????
*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.)
If this is indeed true, I don't see any real need for linux anymore. If solaris is going to run all linux apps and it is going to have features like dtrace and a 128-bit file system and it runs on x86 AND it's free, I'm moving.
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 predict that the main thing of interest in Solaris to most people is the thread model. The main thing about Irix, IIRC, was the graphics capabilities and XFS, and SGI's opened XFS up and it's now ported over.
On the other hand, isn't that part of why they call it Slowlaris?
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.
It seems to me that this is a good move, and will benefit the OSS community a great deal. After all, if SUN goes open source, then the PHB's of the world will finally recognize the cost savings, efficiency, and general intelligence of using OSS.
"Teleporting Rodents with D-Cell Battery Displacement" theory -- IgnoramusMaximus (692000)
I wonder if Sun (who helped fund SCO's attack on Linux) has worked this out with SCO in some way that we'll only understand when the license comes out.
Otherwise, this is in violent conflict with the bizarre SCO derivative theory.
Last announcement about this was proven false by Sun's own CEO statments..
This will be the saem way with this announcement..
Don't Tread on OpenSource
1) Open Source 2) ???? 3) Profit! First Microsoft, now Sun. I never thought I'd see the day I had to compare Sun to Microsoft, in terms of gimmick...but it seems that I was wrong. I sincerely hope I'm wrong, incidentally. Unfortunately, most companies are too pigheaded to realize that, while open sourcing a project costs little and can reap great benefits, there's a difference between, let's say, a proprietary crap license that doesn't allow integration with other OSS, and a BSD or GPL variant. Microsoft's stance on the GPL, for any who were unaware: "The GPL's viral nature poses a threat to the intellectual property of any organization that derives its products from GPL source..." - Craig Mundie, "senior vice president of advanced strategies at Microsoft" Source
It's only an insult if it's not true.
Just like Darwin, Sun will only open the parts that will ultimately benefit Sun. Just like Fedora, they hope to get a boost from loyal Solaris (RedHat desktop) users that have been using the "Solaris Free Binary License" (yes, I qualify here on both counts).
I hope this helps.
Kinetic stupidity has a new brand leader: Allen Zadr.
The Non-disclosure terms for any protocols that can interoperate with Microsoft's Client or Server software would seem to restrict a lot of functionality from being released under an open source license by Sun..
Certainly not.
Stick Men
Okay, maybe I'm biased (I've used a NeXT Cube as my main system for over a decade now), but we finally got back a Sparcstation 5 here at work, and I've just finished installing OPENSTEP 4.2 on it.
I'm looking forward to running
- tetex (not sure which version, trying to find a version w/ otp2ocp which doesn't crash)
- Dmitri Linde's InstantTeX and TeXView Hyper w/ hyperlink support
- Cenon (a NeXT-era CAD/CAM program making the jump to DTP illustration on Mac OS X, OPENSTEP 4.2 and Linux running GNUstep, see http://www.cenon.info )
and a couple of other nifty quad-architecture things, (the Lighthouse office suite) or stuff I can manage to get compiled.
Under Solaris we used this box to run Miles 33 (a proprietary typesetting system), which I couldn't even tell was taking advantage of Display PostScript --- is there something nifty I could do with this under Solaris that I'm not seeing?
How 'bout Linux?
William
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
Sun intends to include a software addition called Janus with Solaris 10, which will enable Linux applications to run on Solaris unchanged. If Janus isn't ready for the Solaris 10 deadline, Sun will release the addition shortly after, Weinberg said.
Isn't Janus the name of the Microsoft DRM scheme?
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.
If we're going to get pedantic, then it should be "GNU/SunOS," not "Solaris." To put it into Linux terms, Solaris is the distribution that's built on the SunOS kernel, just as Mandrake (for instance) is a distro that's built on the Linux kernel.
Accountability on the heads of the powerful.
Power in the hands of the accountable.
*Whew*.. I'm glad you cleared that up. Because, for the life of me, I couldn't find any adequate metric that defines security using an agreed, quantitative metric within the Information Security industry.
Oh wait, that's right, there is none.
Shoo! Go back to marketing.
Guess what stood before that, as it was modded up as insightful.
a) Linux is more secure than Windows
b) Solaris is more secure than Linux
If it had been a), this would be at -1,troll or -1, flamebait. But I guess it got +2, Irrational pro-Linux argument to flip it to positive.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
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.)
Sun has an excellent single place to search for all service calls on their equipment and OS, along with resolution information. So, it's a lot of information, yet more importantly, it's a single place for all of that information.
Personally, I have both Solaris AND Linux on my resume - and have to go with Solaris as the more impressive during interviews (less market share - more "serious").
I had a Solaris machine that ate itself running Solaris and Oracle. It turned out that one of the CPUs (StarFire E10000) was not torqued down properly. You should really have Sun take a look at your 450 - full tear down and rebuild if necessary. Otherwise, in my experience, Linux is slightly less stable, but I've been migrating to Linux because it's cheaper to run two Intel/Linux boxes (hot spare) than a single Solaris box with the same load capacity as one of the I/Linux boxes.
That's to say - you've both got valid points.
Kinetic stupidity has a new brand leader: Allen Zadr.
After D. Robbins left Gentoo he has spent much of his time consulting with Sun. It appears one of his key strategic recommendations was to open source the OS and then infuse Sun's installation/package management system w/ portage. We all know portage is based off of BSD ports (at least in concept). So clearly, Sun is hoping to send Solaris down the path that Gentoo and BSD have already been down. The path to oblivion. By devaluing their intellectual property they can write it off and use that as means to boost their profitability (like they did w/ the Microsoft settlement).
Slashdot... news reporting and commentary on par w/ CBS.
I would love to be able to practice more admin stuff on Solaris. With the exception of production servers -- which are not ideal "hey, i wonder what this does" testing conditions -- I don't have access to any Solaris boxes; I'd like to run it on a laptop but drivers are a fucking nightmare (yes, i know there are solaris sparc laptops like SPARCle but I don't have that kind of money to just toss around.)
My job at a university entails working with Solaris and migrating everything that's ON solaris OFF it, over to linux or BSD or windows or "anything but solaris". Management has lost faith in SUN in general and solaris specifically, and they want it gone gone gone. This is good for me, because I get to practice doing Cool Shit with linux and FreeBSD (FreeBSD being the only distro I've tried that doesn't require setting up stupid sunlabel partitions and lots of tweaking to get right: slap the CD in, install it, tweak it a bit and then forget about it. Even my beloved Debian wasn't that easy on a sparc arch machine.) At the same time, I'd still like to get more familiar with the Solaris way of doing things, for sundry reasons (more impressive skillset, more theory and better understanding of the internal workings of the OS, etc.)
I slapped the Sol10 beta on a single-proc netra that we found lying in a gutter begging for change, and it wasn't too bad. Of course, I haven't used it for more than 10 minutes, but that's the price you pay for having fun at work, I guess.
FreeBSD for the impatient.
From what little I've seen of Solaris, it seems that it's basically a Unix-like OS based around a monolithic kernel and conforming more to the System V way than the BSD way; but up to now it has been closed source.
..... it's surely a matter of tick-tocks before someone has a workable decompiler together. OK, so you might not get back your variable and function names, unless the compiler left them kicking around some spare blocks at the end of the binary; but these are things we can put up with.
The operating system on every PC I own is also a Unix-like OS based around a monolithic kernel and conforming more to the System V way than the BSD way. And it always has been, and always will be, Open Source.
AFAICT the main difference is that Solaris has earned itself the reputation for slowness by insisting to write everything to disk before saying ready, whilst Linux never writes anything to disk until one of the following happens: (a) a process asks for more memory and RAM is full of cached disk data. (b) shutdown. But default caching policy -- which almost certainly can be changed -- is no more an adequate criterion for judging an operating system than shoes are for judging a sexual partner.
I, for one, like to think I have some principles. I prefer manual methods over closed-source software. As it happens, I have reached a position where I can exert some influence: I instituted an almost total GNU/Linux migration in the company where I work There is only one department which is still using Windows, and that's accounts -- for reasons beyond my control, namely to be compatible with Group Head Office's legacy systems. I can't be the only idealistic young IT manager in the world. As awareness of Open Source -- and its benefits -- grows, closedness of source is becoming a criterion for rejecting a software product.
But the real point runs much, much deeper. Sun aren't stupid.
Closed source, however much its proponents bluster, is going to become a thing of the past soon anyway. Remember it was James Watt who put one of the nails in the coffin of Slavery. Sometimes, a technology comes along that enables, or even forces, great political change. Decompilers are going to kick off big-style any time soon, and will do for closed source what steam engines and electric motors . The problems of decompilation are, mathematically, very similar to those of shape recognition (and the US authorities are spunking their pants over systems claimed to be able to recognise a face in a crowd from a photograph taken from a different angle; it's Not Quite There Yet though). Now, I can buy something barely half the size of a DVD box that can decipher my handwriting -- and it does so using just a piddly little low-power RISC processor. Scale up the power a lot, and re-render the image
Like it or not, in a few years' time, all software, to all intents and purposes, will be open source. And Sun know they're better off inside the tent pissing out, than outside the tent getting pissed on.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
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.
" Won't many of the features that make Solaris great be ported to Linux before you can say "Holy GPL, Batman!""
;).
It works the other way too, now that Solaris is going open source, and if its GPL say, then Solaris can port things from Linux and the rest. I suspect Sun thinks it will get a lot of developers to this for free for them
The problem is that Sun is late to the party, yet again, and is playing catch up. I think they waited too long but what choice do they have...
I'm sorry, I seem to have had some hypocrisy stuck in my throat.
All better now.
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Mod me down, you fucking twits. Go ahead. I dare you.
(I read with sigs off.)
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.
A wine glass has three distinguishable stable states (upright, upside down and on its side), and a plate only has two (upright and upside down).
It takes a lot more effort to get an upside down plate the right way up, than it does to get a wine glass on its side the right way up.
Does this mean it's much easier to get a titsup linux box up and working again than a titsup Solaris box?
...that they'll GPL their source, or use a license anywhere close to the GPL. From the article is sounds like they're going to 'share-source' their stuff in the Microsoft fashion, then use doublespeak to call it 'open source'.
I doubt anything they call 'open source' will legally be able to be used in Linux.
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
How exactly do they run out of colors?
Sounds like either an older graphics card (cg3?) or an X11 configuration where the default color model is pseudocolor rather than trucolor. There could be good reasons for that (eg heavy use of a graphic application that modifies the LUTs for highlighting or animation effects) but it can have psychedelic effects on windows belonging to a different application, depending on the hardware.
-- Alastair
Instead of RGB phospors, the display is based on CMYK toner, so if someone uses a lot of, say, yellow in their on-screen graphics, it will eventually run out of yellow and develop a bluish tint.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
You can also download the ISOs for Solaris straight off Sun's website, if you don't want to pay for media.
Another thing to note is that the "License" is probably nothing more than a sheet of paper that says "You're legally allowed to run this software on that machine". Solaris itself has absolutely no enforcement of licensing.
If you put 8 CPUs in that SS1000, and installed Solaris 8, it would work just perfectly fine with all the CPUs. (Support for sun4d machines SS1000/SC2000 was dropped in Solaris 9)
I'm not sure which way the tits point on a wine glass.
Or a plate, for that matter.
-- It only takes 20 minutes for a liberal to become a conservative thanks to our new outpatient surgical procedure!
The question is: will it be free or is it only "open".