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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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
... 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
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?
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