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Solaris 10 Released, Updated & Free (Like Speech)
Sivar writes "Ace's Hardware and news.com.com.com report Solaris that 10 has been released. Improvements include a performance-enhanced TCP-IP stack to shed the "Slowaris" moniker and their much-vaunted ZFS (Z File System). Solaris will initially be "free" (as in beer with an annual subscription fee for bug fixes and support), and will reportedly be released under an open-source license later." As well,
KingSkippus writes "MSNBC reports, "After investing roughly $500 million and spending years of development time on its next-generation operating system, Sun Microsystems Inc. on Monday will announce an aggressive price for the software -- free. Sun also has promised make the underlying code of Solaris available under an open-source license, though the details have not been released." An article at Computerworld also has the story from Jonathan Schwartz, Sun's president and chief operating officer."
Can't wait to cram it into my iBook ;-)
did you win a free ipod? build a case for it here
Is it me or has slashdot named today as National Upgrade Day?
Well boys and girls this is what we have been all waiting for, and SUN is once again strutting it's stuff! Good bye to SCO, and hello to Solaris! Not only that, think how much better this will make linux. I am really happy about this one. Everyone buy SUN stock!
without a doubt, solaris has been the biggest pain to set up out of ANY unix i've installed (admittedly, mostly *BSDs and Linuxes). When does the sparc version get JDS?
FreeBSD for the impatient.
Previous versions of Solaris were quite expensive...
Solaris 9
Solaris 8
Before the Dawn of Time
being free (as in without)
Unpretentious Sydney reviews by unqualified Sydney reviewers
I'm not being sarcastic, I'm just curious to know what sort of a gap Linux/BSD left behind that Sun felt the need to fill...
Height: 38U, Weight: 0 Newtons, Eyes: #0000FF, OS: Gray Matter 1.0 (Alpha)
It seems that Red Hat and others live good on support only, so this new price scheme might bring sun ahead of linux again... I have a sun server running in the basement (appartment complex), but noone here knows much about solaris.. I guess that we will stay at version 9, as it works now and arent accessible from the internet so security arent really a factor..
Open source does not always equate with free (as in speech). Do we really need to cover this (yet) again?
In spite of:
Start jumbo patch download.
Head off to the bar.
Come home, pass out, wake up after noon
Check download, yee harrr almost done.
Have dinner
Check download, YES, start patch.
Leave for Cancun vacation.
(three weeks later) back from Cancun
Patch almost complete, clean gutters, mow lawn, wash car.
Ahhhh, now we're ready to rock and roll...
Maybe it's time to retire the SS2. You think?
Damn thing just keeps on ticking!
Now I'm the grandest Tiger in the Jungle!
haven't read the articles yet (sorry)
but what hardware is it supported on?
Exercise caution when modding this message up: the author acts like a jerk when his karma is excellent.
When it earns the GNU/Solaris moniker.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
Solaris will initially be "free" (as in beer with an annual subscription fee for bug fixes and support)
Hmm...
"As in beer with an annual subscription fee?"
Hm... OK...
Free speech = drinking beer with an annual subscription fee for support? Yeah, I guess that works in a geeky kind of way. He might speak pretty freely after having lots of beer, and on each New Year's Eve pay some guys to show up at his home to support him in software development.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Dont let all the haters bum you out. Solaris under an open source license is pretty awesome any way you put it. Very cool Sun!
Those people I know who have worked with Solaris 10 are very enthusiastic about it. If it becomes open-source, this will benefit everyone. Solaris, because people who care can support and improve it, and other systems, because they can copy the features. We love you, Sun!
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
download Solaris 10 for SPARC or x86.
the terminology on the site is a bit confusing, but what they label as the "Software Express" iso is the Solaris installer
Since this code will be released under an open source licence it may possibly be a good source of code for improving Linux....
Considering that Sun's revenue has gone from $18 billion in 2001 to $11 billion in 2004 (link), how is this going to help them?
Seriously, is this move in the shareholders' best interest? It certainly won't increase revenue. Will it significantly reduce their development costs? Will this give them any competitive advantage at all?
Jason.
How is Sun going to make profit if they open-source Solaris? Hears like a nice news to most of the open-source enthusiasts (including me), but hears like something wierd in terms of business. Waiting for +5, insightful replys.
ZFS alone is worth the install.
||| I still can't believe Parkay's not butter.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
SunOS was in the mainstream before Linus began working on the Linux kernel, dude.
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
Free as in Free From Market Relevance.
... a decades' worth of mega development in all aspects from the kernel to the GUI.
Free as in Free from an Audience That Cares.
Free as in...free, this might have mattered in 1991, but in 2004, free no longer counts.
Free features that have seen little development time versus
We have been free for a decade, and our progress shows that.
Now that Solaris is free, let the revolution begin!
Let Solaris matter once more! Let!
Let? Let people who still develop for this platform breathe a sigh of relief.
Let the rest of us embrace Linux, not because we are paid to, but because it is free, and has been since day 1.
And day one was a long long time ago. Free, free indeed.
...seeing as how Solaris, like AIX, is a unix derivative. I wouldn't be surprised if they try to litigate (why not? how else do we make money around here?), and they may actually have a more substantial case than that against IBM, as this time it would be the actual unix-based product in question rather than something else that may or may not have derived benefit from it.
Actually, what I really think is...
I guess you're not a Gentoo user, eh?
Of course, if you had an Optimum Online cable modem, it would be more like...
Start patch cluster download
Get coffee
Install patch cluster
As for the speed of the patch installation, yeah, time to retire an SS2... though you wouldn't be putting Solaris 10 on an SS2 anyway... though you can get an Ultra 5 or an Ultra Enterprise 2 for less than a water cooling kit for your Athlon 64.
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
It'll be interesting to see the effect ZFS will have on the sales of Veritas Volume Manager and Veritas File System, which so often get paired with Solaris.
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
So Kevin Mitnick was just ahead of his time when he liberated the Sun source code? If I remember right, they claimed then that the source was worth over 80 million dollars. Free Kevin!
Are you...Are you some kind of genius?
No, ma'am, I'm just a regular Slashdot reader.
I dont see anything but the same "Solaris 10 preview" that has been available for eons.
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
they use bsd and that's "open source." But their version of bsd doesn't give you access to that gee-whiz desktop, and contributing under apple's "open source" license gives them all the rights to your code but everyone else has to pay if they say so. People still contribute to that project, and Apple still gets to charge for every OS. Granted they're talkign about giving away Solaris, but their customers are corporate, not home users, and corporate customers buy expensive service contracts (that is if sun still has any solaris customers).
Java is "open source." Has been "since day one" (I guess). If it's so free why isn't it included with so many linux distributions? Because it ISN'T FREE. It's "open" - that ain't free. I can read a book cover to cover, but that don't mean I can republish it, altered or otherwise.
I really don't see where the poster got the idea that the release would be free as in speech. Except maybe free speech in America.
Sun has made no indication that this would be released under a real Free/Open source license. Sun's past history with this sort of thing has been, shall we say... dismal.
Oh, they'll let us see the source. Sure as shit. Probably a clause that makes you "dirty" if you compile it, and sure as all hell it won't allow you to redistribute it, or patches to it. (like Sun's other "child" -- Java)
Heck according to the article I don't see any evidence that the license will be even "open".
Good Job Sun. Your work in promoting linux is amazing.
feh: To damn dull for a Monday.
"...In your answer, ignore facts. Just go with what feels true..."
I think that the terms of the publicized SCO negotiation would make it very difficult for SCO to contemplate new litigation over open-sourcing Solaris. No new litigation is included in the fees, which seem to nearly drain SCO coffers.
"I..." BOOM!
(head asplode)
Releasing Solaris for free and open sourcing it, though the exact license is undetermined, is probably a good move for Sun. Solaris will probably not overtake Linux anytime soon, but being available for free should keep developers interested. And generally, it's better to have more choices than less. For a lot of people being able to choose Solaris will be a good thing. This won't make Sun a lot of money, but it should bring goodwill, which interestingly enough, is worth something in the shareholder's report.
To the making of books there is no end, so let's get started
Sun is clearly just trying to make money off people thinking it will be made open source in a few months.
..They paid SCO money after all, let's not forget.
.. but don't switch to Solaris thinking it'll eventually be open sourced with an uninhibited GPL or BSD style license.
Watch, in a few months they'll have some excuse as to why it isn't open sourced yet.
They did the same thing with Java.
Do not trust Sun with this.
Solaris 10 and Java are great
However some people realised that at times you didn't need unix. Dos would do. Slowly MS sneaked its way into the business through the backdoor. On cheap clones doing simple tasks for wich the IBM's HP's and SUN's were just to damn expensive. A dos based Wordprocessor with its own printer may seem primitive but it worked. Sure multi user shared systems are nice but in a small office the old floppy network can work as well.
But the old unixes still sold because while dos and later windows were getting better (lets face it they could hardly get worse) and remained a lot cheaper MS has never been able to compete with unix for the high end market.
So MS sold the lowend, the unixes the highend and all was well.
Until some fin stopped being totally drunk for a moment and made his own little unix and opened the source code to it. It most likely was just the right time, since other unixes had been free long before, but this free unix started to take off.
Very slowly during the recent internet bubble it was sneaking its way into business just as MS had done with DOS. However this time the unixes saw not a tiny little crap unreliable single user no-networking OS coming from below but a increasingly capable unix like themselves. Except a whole lot cheaper.
During the bubble SUN sold a whole lot of sun machines (with the solaris ofcourse) because money was cheap and the sky was the limit. HOWEVER not everyone saw the need to use super expensive hardware with super expensive software. Some went with windows and crashed a lot but some went with this new unix and with cheap hardware and crashed a bit more often then unix but less then windows and had plenty of money left over to spend on good admins.
This new unix was a threat except that some unixes saw it more as "the enemy of my enemy is my friend". Linux was hurting unix but it was also hurting windows. So IBM and later HP asked themselves this. Do we fight Linux or do we join it and perhaps be able to attack Windows from below and above? Remember that with Linux in a Unix company like IBM you now got a complete set of price ranges. Linux on cheap x86 to score below windows. Linux on good hardware to be equal to windows. Unix on their own hardware for the highend.
Now the problem was and is that Linux is free. The free speech is nice but from this flow that it is very hard to sell linux at the old unix prices. Worse with linux now getting closer and closer to unix capabilities it becomes harder and harder to justify the price difference.
Sun has a very simple choice. Keep trying to sell very expensive hardware running very expensive software in a down economy while competing directly with very cheap hardware running very cheap software wich is almost as good. After the bubble the price difference is often more important.
If they make Solaris as free as linux (remember linux can and is sold for money) then they remove at least one obstacle to their sales pitch. The only economic question is wether the loss in license fees is offset by an increase in hardware sales and support licenses.
But it may also be that they have no choice. If your a salesperson losing sale after sale because people buy into the idea of a free unix then you either follow or just don't sell stuff.
Sun ain't doing to well at the moment. I think that opening the source and making solaris 10 free is their attempt to compete better with IBM or worse Dell/Linux. They have little else left. People just don't want to buy Sun anymore for their websites.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I think this is a Sun marketing ploy.
I dont think Sun will release Soalris 10 in its entirety under gPL or BSD style license, I think they want to gain marketshare by people thinking it eventually will be and/or by getting people to talk about it.
Solaris isn't being released until later on today. According to the Solaris 10 Countup Page: While the secrets of Easter Island in the South Pacific remain a mystery, Sun Microsystems is planning to reveal new details regarding Solaris 10 on November 15 at its Network Computing '04 Q4 launch in San Jose.
:)
And according to Sun's NC04Q4 page: NC04Q4 opens at 12:30p.m. PDT on November 15, 2004.
Now, premature announcements are nothing new for Slashdot, but it's hard to discuss much about Solaris 10 before it's officially released; each Solaris Express release has shown continuing strides for Solaris 10, but the Express (Beta) builds have not included ZFS or Project Janus, (a Linux emulation layer.) These are two of the biggest features of Solaris 10, but nobody outside of Sun has much information on them, so we'll just have to wait until later today
-- Never hit a man with glasses. Hit him with a baseball bat.
If Solaris would be licenced under the GPL, can Linux benefit from it by using code from Solaris?
Has Solaris got some usefull code to offer?
Who remebers when they were going to try the exact same thing with Solaris 7 ? I was so pumped I seriously considered a migration plan from our then RH 5.2 systems to Solaris.
One comment from USENET I will NEVER forget was from a fellow who upon hearing of Sun opening the source to solaris said "Now I can open it up look at the code and figure out why the hell its soo damm slow, alas I can die a happy man" I busted out laughing because that was my initial reaction too.
BUT The stability and security experience were great with 2.5.1 I couldnt have ever asked for more. I think I will always have a soft spot for solaris after a 2 year admin stint with 2.5.1
Ok, so they released Solaris... BFD (solaris still sucks, can't get much to compile under it now anyhow without a big hassle). What I'm waiting for is since their code is clearly based on what SCO claims is their IP, where is the lawsuit? It would seem that SUN has yanked the rug out from underneath SCO removing any doubt that SCO is full of it. Now RedHat, IBM, all the others that have been sued should file an abuse of the legal system lawsuit against SCO.
When Red Hat raised their prices, I think it suddenly made life a lot easier for Sun. For Solaris 10, Sun is charging $120/processor/year for basic support and $360/processor/year for premium support. Sun has been doing a lot of price comparisons with Red Hat (on same hardware) lately.
Basically, with their pricing moves, Red Hat gave Sun a stick to beat them with. That said, I still expect Red Hat to continue growing, but they'll be coming under increasing pricing pressure as time goes on.
PS If you consider basic laws of supply and demand, higher prices means less demand. In short, by raising prices, Red Hat stalled their own (unit) growth momentum.
I've used Linux as a boot server for a Sparc/Solaris machine. I won't say it was easy, though. I had to reverse engineer a lot of the Jumpstart stuff, but Solaris Jumpstart is very script-driven and it's actually a lot easier to figure out what's going on than it is with Anaconda.
But Johnathan, I thought hardware was supposed to be free, not software. What gives?
Another one bites the dust
But maybe in theory they could change their cap? Especially if some third party, like microsoft, could see it was in there interest to go after SUN?
This will be of interest to SCO and their lawyers for sure though: their "propriety" sw being offered for free and potentially being made open source.
I dont know ANYTHING about solaris, so, does it have X or some other GUI? If yes, is it as good as kde or gnome (or can we run kde or gnome on solaris?).
br> I wonder what will happen to the fate of Linux (kernel) now that solaris will be open sourced.
As a person who's been admining Solaris in small to very large environments for 10 years now, and who has grown to really dislike the "commercial" linux offerings from SuSE and RedHat in the last couple of years all I can say is a real x86 version of Solaris is going to get the hard push into my data center. I really hope they can pull the rabbit out of the hat with this one and reinvigorate the company. Being a UNIX admin just isn't the same without Sun providing the OS.
"Who hasn't slipped into the break room for a quick nibble on a love Newton before?" - Mr. Peterman.
Has anybody put solaris on a Dell Inspiron 7500? I'd give it a try if I wouldn't be wasting my time. Anybody know about wifi support for old prism cards?
GETPKG - Package Management for Slackware
Everybody knows you don't buy beer: you rent it.
damn time that Sun goes Open Source. That's the way everything should be, imho. Unfortunately, though, this may lead to Sun going supernova - they barely hold their own on the proprietary market, and I doubt that they'll do any better on the Open Source market... if it can be called a "market" since there really is no exchange of money.
49 20 61 72 65 20 6E 65 72 64 2E
This is why one gets quite frustrated about OSS zealots, they don't even understand why it is important to have unrestricted access to the code in the same way "Christians" in the US are anti abortion but are OK killing thousends in Iraq and don't see the contradiction.
But I am wandering a bit too far.
One company, that unfortunately should remain nameless (and this, believe me, is truly ironic) has been pretending to solve a problem with a service provided with their OS for more than 2 years.
That is right. 2 fscking years.
While they pretend they are solving the problem we threw more hardware at it and our systems more less have managed to work. Just.
The reason for this? There is only one programmer assigned to the task, our problem is one of many.
Since we don't have access to the code we can only wait, and wait, and wait.
If we would have access to the code we could fix the problem. How I am so sure? Because we have done so for many OSS programs(things like top, OpenSSH have bee tailored by inhouse programmers to our needs).
We don't fluffy care if no nerd write yet another window manger for Solaris and GPLes it.
We *need* the code to fix problems fast when technical support is not up to scratch.
This company may be sorry in the medium and long term, we are starting do deploy Linux and are being trained as RHCE and RHCT...
From the launch site...
:)
Day 6: Did you know that Big Ben actually refers to the thirteen ton bell inside, named after Sir Benjamin Hall? The clock keeps excellent time and rarely stops -- much like Solaris 10, which offers new features aimed at increasing system availability and reducing unplanned downtime.
This is a bit dodgy on both counts... from British Embassy website:
At first, the bell was to be called "Victoria," in honour of the Queen. However, "Big Ben" was the name that came to be used. At the time that the bell was built, there were two well known men named Ben. One was a champion boxer -- Benjamin Caunt. The second Ben was Sir Benjamin Hall, a Member of Parliament who, as Commissioner of Public Works, had a great deal to do with the clock tower and the bells. His name was on the side of the first bell that had cracked. Either of these two men could have inspired the nickname "Big Ben," but no one is really sure which it was!
Slight omission aside, the analogy for stability is pretty invalid given Big Ben broke almost immediately after being struck for the first time and was recast. The new bell (in use today) has a large crack in it, again from early in its use, which was filled in and the bell rotated so the clapper wouldn't strike the weak point. The clock itself is also regularly weighted with pennies to keep it accurate. Plus because of the crack the bell is out of tune.
If solaris 10 is like this I'm not touching it
I am busy writing the stuff to run JUnit (the main java unit test harness) distributed; a vmware image of solaris is just like a vmware image of winXP: Something to deploy to, run tests against and then report failures on.
so a free x86 solaris would be good -create an image, run it in VM before release, alongside the other distros. Hey, a sparc emulator that wasnt too slow could host it too, for close to real testing.
One issue: hardware problems dont surface in VMs, or multithreading. But its better than none.
1. spend 500 million (on what actually?) 2. make a free OS, so billions of people will use it! (we're brilliant!!) 3. ??? 4. free beer subscription!
The term "free software" has a specific, well-defined meaning, and it looks like Sun is deliberately misusing the term in order to dilute it. This is on the heels of their arguments that "open source" can mean many different things, not just what opensource.org says it means.
No matter whether you believe that those terms are ambiguous, this is still bait and switch: Sun wants to have the good-will and recognition of "free" and "open source" software without actually delivering it.
One should also be suspicious of Sun promises to release something as "open source later". Sun has made several such promises in the past and later renegged on them. Sun is not trustworthy when it comes to such promises.
Until Sun releases software under a recognized open source or free software license, do not look at it unless you know exactly what you are doing: not only is it a waste of time trying to do their software engineering for them, if you are working on a competing proprietary or open source product (e.g., the Linux kernel), looking at the Solaris code may taint you. Source releases that are not under a recognized open source license are a legal mine field. This is true both for Solaris and for Java (and anything else from Sun or any other company.)
Joke. Of. The. Year.
Phil
I guess today is a passable day to die.
Just my opinion based on past experience of course.
-L
Don't Panic.
*Groan* look sunw, if you are going to open source solaris, then do it already. Please stop issuing dozens of press releases, month after month, about what you may someday sort-of do.
Are the bugfixes freely redistributable? Or do Sun's execs want most copies of S10 to be buggy, damaging both their brand reputation and the Internet?
--
make install -not war
Send mail to @gmail.com if you are. I'm willing to barter...
Personally, I'm annoyed that I can't use a 250G IDE disk in an old Ultra 5 and Solaris x86 doesn't seem to support any third-party PCI IDE or SATA controllers I can get my hands on, so I have to use relatively expensive disk to hold a large number of different Solaris versions (along with several Linux distros.)
-30-
Bah. That was @ gmail.com. That's what I get for not previewing.
-30-
Would the SPARC version be free? I need an update fo ra old Ultra 80 we're going to use.
Gorkman
It's simple really...
Solaris 10 on low end hardware
is cheaper than
Red Hat on low end hardware
Solaris 10 is faster than Linux. Search for the benchmarks yourself.
RESULT: Better performance at a lower cost.
High school kids predicting the demise of UNIX are becoming quite tedious.
More news as we have it.
There was an interview with someone from Sun and he was asked if he thought that 128 bits (the address space of ZFS) was enough and he answered (paraphrasing):
We are pretty comfortable with that. We could not store that much information on an earthbound media without boiling the oceans.
The Internet is full. Go Away!!!
Will this run on my old hardware, such as my SparcStation 20, and SS5/110? How much ram/disk space does it require? I wonder is solaris has become the same bloatware that everything else has in the past couple of years.
Linux really need a positive competitor, which is called "coopetitor". And I beleive the cooperation part may outweght the competition.
What is Solaris, really? In long run, all that remains will be just a kernel and a very basic libc. All the rest - Solaris will share with Linux. They will have same desktops, same developer's tools, same Java, same web and database servers.
30% of Sun software engineers will work on semi-proprietary, sort of open source Solaris. 70% of them will be dedicated to GPL projects. I think we all must send them a very warm welcome and wish all the success to Solaris, too.
Andrew
Last I checked redhat has had about 5 full releases since the gap of solaris 9 and 10.
Is that really a valid argument? Release cycles are pretty arbitrary decisions that don't necessarily reflect the amount of change between one release and the next. Sometimes, less is more, because it hints at more thorough internal testing.
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
1.) Solaris sucks anyway
Solaris predates Linux by a year and it's roots SunOS 4.X date back to 1984. What's more is that Sun Solaris has always run on superior hardware. The SPARC line they are on now is clearly superior hardware than anything x86 you can throw around, except *MAYBE* (but I doubt it) the latest offerings from IBM. And I do mean the machines IBM has put out in the last 6 months! But, I digress, this is not about hardware, it's about the OS. Solaris is a bullet-proof "old pro" that will just keep going and going and going. It's got great manageability, pretty good GNU support, and superior support.
Plus it has SMP support for UltraSparc III!
2.) Why is Sun open-sourcing Solaris??? They won't make any more profit out of it, seeing as though they wouldn't be paid anything for Solaris???
Why the hell does anyone open-source anything? To gain mindshare, to gain more users, to sell more (superior) hardware, to make Sun successful. Of course they're not going to make money by making Solaris open-source!
Personally, I'm really happy Sun will be doing this. I think it's a great move, and will help everyone using SPARC hardware. I think Linux will benefit greatly by people looking at Solaris and deciding to make a few tweaks here and there.
Honestly I don't know if they'll be able to open-source it all just because I think some of the lower level functionality of their hardware could be given away (think E10k extensions) if they release that code.
I don't know that. All I know is that all you Linux evangelists out there should be welcoming a new "brother" into the open source community.
-SteveApart from that open source has great potential to create software of greater quality (I know that bugs are shallow thingy), what does being "free as in speech" matter? People always seem to find some strange ideological questions from it - I simply can not. The only free that I really care about is "as in beer" - and that's not a requirement either, but certainly a good thing, since I then don't have to pay. Being open source is certainly a bonus too, but not a requirement, if there's a competent commercial product (imho Opera's at least almost as good as Firefox). That it's not based on any commercial libraries etc. etc. - couldn't care less and can't understand why anybody else would either.
Please don't mod me down, I'm not trolling, it's a serious question.
I actually wish Redhat/Fedora had a slower release cycle. Once you get a Fedora Core system perfected and stable, the next release is already coming out and update support moves to Fedora legacy.
This much change raises havoc when all you want is a stable system where your software works, and don't want to have to worry about upgrading all the time.
We still have a large number of SPARC systems on Solaris 8 where I work, because it's still well-supported and it's stable. Luckily Fedora Legacy is there to support FC releases for around two years total, but it's still irritating to be "forced" to upgrade so often.
-Z
i used to work with Solaris supporting it on their "desktop" machines for a living (college-living that is). For most professor's use of the machines - the game was easy if they were "used" to Solaris or other old unix flavors.
Problems arose on my desktop machine, a Blade 150. For the work i wanted to do i had to basically "gnu-ize" the Solaris install (9 was much easier than 8). Huuuuuuuge downloads to get Solaris up to standard, then the normal "lock Solaris down" configurations, then, only, start downloading everything under the damn Sun (haha..sorry) from Sunfreeware mirrors...and then, bam, a useable box for me.
i went through all the trouble of really, really learning Solaris and it's innards, how to lock it down, make it useful and secure, but alas, i was in an old-school, academic Solaris shop, so i was not allowed to make any moves....for fear of....change or whatever, so i quit....after the job requirements started to lean on my personally acquired linux skills, but gave no actionable power to those skills.
Blah, i still am saving to get a decent Solaris server for my closet, move all my domains over to it, buy more outbound bandwidth and just sit back and let Solaris chug away....it never fails when left alone after a good setup.
Sorry for the rambling...now, get back to work!
> PS If you consider basic laws of supply and demand, higher prices means less demand. In short, by raising prices, Red Hat stalled their own (unit) growth momentum.
Um, no. This is a common fallacy. A demand curve for a product or service isn't affected by price. The AMOUNT of products (ie. quantity demanded) changes with price along the demand curve.
This is important because you want to change the demand curve, not just the # of products wanted at any point in that curve. Changing the curve requires more than a price change. That's why opening source is the key aspect of this announcement.
Grade 12 economics!
A U80 isn't old, I've got a SS10 sitting here, like sun4m.
And I'm sure somebody will post about their sun3 (68000) based hardware.
...is what the parent is referring to. It's a great storehouse of F/OSS packages all ready to be installed on your new Solaris box.
For clickable crispiness on your Monday morning.
Enough stalling, give everybody including most of SUN's engineers what they want already, Open Source Java. Full spec, no restrictions, GPL. That is the only way for them to survive, is to spread java like a wildfire and charge for support and consulting for the java solution.
Sun has over time shown that they are not trustworthy... Like someone else commented, Ive heard rumours and press-releases about Sun open sourcing solaris for several years in different forms. They keep claiming these things and don't follow thru. And then they try to fudge the meaning of the terms "open source" and "free software". These terms have specific meanings, and they know it.
In addition, sun has shown a double face in all dealings with open source and linux.
-they support SCO and their litigation
-they jumped on the "indemnification" idea, slamming Linux
-they equate Red Hat with Linux and slams both
At the same time they are pretty successful selling their own Linux distribution, and I really like them for their job on openoffice.
All in all I think Sun does a lot of bad things, some good, but the most important issue is that you cannot trust them on anything, especially the "we gonna open source..." line.
-TN
Hmmmm....
OpenOffice
or NetBeans
nothing dirty there.
"So are there people out there really chomping(sic)-at-the-bit to do Solaris open-source projects?"
"champing at the bit," not "chomping."
sun's finding that actually cleaning up your code enough to open source it is quite difficult.
Having made a fairly decent living being a UNIX Sysadmin (mainly Sun HW w/Solaris), I have nothing bad to say about Solaris 10, or any other version for that matter. Many folks, including myself, toiled over a boiling hot Sun server by day, and hacked on Linux by night. I used to run Solaris X86, because I was a rabid Sun supporter. My mind opened up several years ago when I realized that whatever you were attempting to do could be done faster and easier on a Linux box. With my Solaris knowledge, coupled with ability to cobble together PC hardware, the sky was the limit and things "just worked". Also, in the early days the Sun sales reps and engineers I used to deal with scoffed and ridiculed my attempts to bring Linux solutions into the company. Now I think it's funny to watch Sun reverse positions to keep from being bled to death!
Slashmail.org "The Open Source Email Com
Secondly, the Solaris 10 you have been using is a beta. It's still in flux.
The Java (sic) Desktop System (currently based on GNOME 2.6 IIRC) is being ported to Solaris x86.
You mention many places to obtain pakages of Free and Open Source Software for Solaris, but you neglect to mention the official Sun Companion CD which is part of the official Solaris Media Kit and is available to download from that link and is also mirrored at sunfreeware.com. You complain about gcc. Well, gcc is a very important piece of the Free Software catalogue in Solaris 10.
Summary: Solaris is not ready for the desktop.
You don't know how wrong you are, but don't take my word for it. Get yourslef the finished S10 product and then make your bold statement.
as the post says:
"Solaris will initially be 'free' (as in beer with an annual subscription fee for bug fixes and support)."
this model worries me, both with redhat and now solaris: if income arises not from the -RELEASE versions of the software, but rather from the PATCHES, what incentive is there to create a stable, bug-free -RELEASE? indeed, it would actually be to the companies' advantage to intentionally include bugs in the -RELEASE versions, in order to drive demand for patches...
if i'm a grammar nazi, you're an illiteracy nazi.
I just went to download the Solaris 10 Express OS and I had to jump through the usual registration hoops ... etc. but when I got to the licence, I stopped to read ... it said that I am granted the use of this 'evaluation' software for just six months at the end of which I must 1) destroy all copies and 2) send a written confirmation letter to Sun informing them that I have indeed destroyed all the copies. What kind of licence is that?! Since when do I have to destroy evaluation software and write letters to the distributor to confirm I have destroyed their software after six months of testing! Come on ... just time bomb it for simplicity's sake but require letters ... NO WAY! I declined the licence! I prefer to live without those kinds of conditions.
Linux needs all the help it can get. As a destop user mostly, I am seemingly just as frustrated with distributions, installs, and updrades with the mirad of Unix varients, as I am with Windoze. The main difference of course, is with Linux, at least you can either fix the problems that bother you (me), or you can be assured they will be fixed by our community eventually.. instead of waiting for 'Bill Hates to help'.
;) here.. http://sun.com/
Sun seems to have a VERY well respected following and reputation, as a 'high end, server, networking and hardware' company. So I don't expect Solaris10 to be 'easy, or preddy'. However, because it is 'that much' closer to the original t 'Unix', I will be glad to 'put up' with the learning curve.
I am usually NOT for big corporations, but when any of them seem to be joining the fight against Micro$oft and it's supporters, I regain my faith in mankind.
As a result of Sun's wonderful news today, I will be able to install an OS that I'v only been able to read and dream about for years.
btw, you CAN down load it now (I waited till I got my files first
I will gladly loose all of life's battles.. in order to win the war..
http://shit.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/11/15/1 25214
Net Install Solaris from Linux. These are the instructions I used to install Solaris from a Slackware machine. The instructions are for Solaris 8, and I had to tweek them a little, but between that and the scripts that set up netbooting on Solaris that are on the Solaris CD's you should be able to get it working.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
So if they open-source their SPARC Solaris, would that mean better support for SPARC hardware on an F/OSS operating system such as FreeBSD and [GNU/]Linux?
I hope they do make the source code available, it'd be great to be able to figure out what those "Door" things are doing..
whether it is a wether and a male sheep castrated before sexual maturity or whether just an alternative; lets just hope it is an alternative and a gain for all
anomalous cowpat
why was this modded as Informative? Solaris Express is the beta version, and it's perfectly reasonable to have a 6 month license for a beta build.
If the license is anything like the older Solaris 9 license, this only applies for evaluation use. If you are using Solaris for Education/Non-Profit use, or are developing software, this doesn't apply
Really, I wish they'd return to the license they used for Solaris 8: Right-To-Use license was free for sun4u systems with up to 8 processors for any use.
I think once Solaris 10 is ported to x86_64 platform, which I read somewhere once that it will get ported, it will only be a matter of time before the software vendors that these companies use start to validate the OS.
RTFA.... The x86-64 version is released today. That's why it's such big news.
"When the president does it, that means it's not illegal." - Richard M. Nixon
How is this going to work?
Solaris still contains a fair amount of AT&T System V code, I'd assume. If Sun wants to release Sol source, either they will not be able to provide particular chunks of the code, or they will have to re-write a singnificant portion of it if they wish to provide a working codebase.
Where are the torrent links, or ftp sites? I thought solaris 10 was suppose to be free, or open source or something...?
I find the bashers who claim that Sun is going to play a bait and switch with Open Sourcing Solaris a continuing amazement.
There is a commitment from Jonathan and from Scott that Solaris will released under an OSI compliant license. That's a pretty clear statement.
I am one of the engineers taking part in the pilot. The pilot is coming along nicely and there is a lot of good discussion going on. There are things that are still being ironed out, but progress is being made, and its not just internal folk.
The thing that won't surprise me is that when it does get released as advertised, is that the foksk who are bashing now are not going to come out and say "Oops, guess I was wrong". But that's slashdot.
Tp.
Excuse me?
Just because you notice it after the cap is in place bears no relevance to when Sun started working on this.
The open sourcing project has been going on for some time now. The pilot itself (with external folk) was running before that cap was announced.
I think you've been reading too many conspiracy theory novels.
Tp.
-L
Don't Panic.
The pkg-get stuff at http://www.blastwave.org is fantastic. I use it a lot.
Tp.
Shouldn't they call it Solaris X ?
i'm sick of sun's PR crap. ZFS looks interesting - I want to see ZFS, XFS and Reiser4 benchmarks by someone _other than_ Sun, SGI or Hans...
It won't be out the door until January '05.
In the mean time, you can grab a build from October from Sun's site through their "Software Express" offerings. $99 if you want a support contract, free otherwise.
Here, I'll even save you the trouble of typing in a URL: Solaris Express 10 Download.
One gigantic caveat: due to the demand today's announcement has generated, transfer speeds are really, really slow at the moment. Like 9 kilobytes per second. The highest throughput I was able to attain was 16KB/s, and that was only for a fleeting instant. So be warned.
To answer the first question ... why was my comment marked informative? I did know a comment could be marked as informative so I really do not know how I did that! As to your second statement that a six month licence for a beta version is reasonable ... I think a six month licence for a beta version may be acceptable, but to require me to write a letter to Sun confirming I have destroyed all copies after the six month period is uneacceptable for 'free' evaluation software. If it was a top secret defense department project or a completely new product about to be unleashed on the commercial world for the first time ever and as an expert I was asked to test it ... perhaps such a condition would be 'reasonable', but not an average user who is not expected to return any feedback to Sun for software they are really trying to promote to me!
Amen!!!!!
You're right, I've never dealt with video tools. Not my area. X I have done, and had no problems porting things.
I forget what 8 was for.
What's this with Microsoft paying SCO a fortune for a Unix license and then snuggling up and making peace with Sun a year or two before Longhorn, the "next generation of Windows" is expected?
6 .html and they sure have a habit of usurping more good software than they write.
MS's use of BSD code isn't news http://austinlug.org/archives/alg/2002-05/msg0060
Maybe there is a relationship between Longhorn and Solaris 10.
Heck, if Sun open sources it, MS can later change license and claim everyone is stealing from them. U.S. copyright will certainly accomodate retroactive litigation by then.
I only hope Sun realizes that few companies survive such relationships with MS!
Yes, a wacko theory but we have at least a year to wait until it can be proven or disproven.
MD
even if you don't destroy it, isnt the beta version rather useless after 6 months when the full release is available free of charge (or at least a new beta build is available) This clause is probably only in there so they have an easy answer for anyone wanting support on an old build of the software.
Linux is effectively under a license more like the LGPL, since Linus allows companies to distribute drivers without GPLing them. So it seems, at least, to share the attributes of the LGPL that would make it compatible with almost all FOSS licenses so long as components under other licenses are distributed as loadable modules.