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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?
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.
That should be: Hello Sun/Microsoft patent cross licensing deal!
Read and weep!
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)
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!
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!
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.
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
I took "free as in speech" to mean "sure, you can speak freely now, but we'll exact a stiff price from you at some point in the future".
Yes it does. If it's not Free (as in speech) then it's not Open, it would be closed.
Simply because you can see the code does not make it open source, you have to be able to modify it and also share those modifications for it to be open.
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.
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
The Zope Corporation did something very similar to this with their Zope product, and it benefited them a lot. But of course, the scales are different. I am curios about the outcome of Sun and I hope that they succed in what they wish to achieve, seeing as they are supporters of open source and a cool company.
I'll do the stupid thing first and then you shy people follow...
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.
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.
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
A free OS is nice, but you need software to run on it. Is there anything like BSD ports for Solaris, or do we have to do everything by hand?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
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.
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.
This provides some level of isolation from Design Despots inside academia or corporations and especially from the marketing departments of corporations, for whom no feature is too silly. Anyone who wants a concerete example of this just need to look at the Java implementation of Regular Expressions or Date-formatting.
For years I used to oppose DEC sending only marketeers to DECUS and to encourage them to invite a cross section of engineering 'nerds'; in retrospect I suspect that this helped prevent the capture of design exclusively by marketing
The failure to include many GNU products, by default, in Solaris Distributions, is the same thing. Without Linux Perl would still not ship with Solaris; ingnorant design despots within the cathederal would have continued an effective veto!
Anything that runs on linux will run on solaris!
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.
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
You have it the wrong way round. Java is certainly free (you don't have to pay money to obtain it), but its not (according to some licenses) 'open'.
Sun's Java is not supplied with some Linux distributions because these distributions have very specific licenses. These distributions often ship with other Java implementations (such as SableVM).
If Solaris is open source, it becomes a strong Linux competitor. Small businesses can deploy it onto cheap hardware. Who are they going to pay when they need support? Sun. When they need faster hardware, who are they going to buy it from? Sun. I don't know if this will actually happen, but I suspect this is what Sun is hoping.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Everybody knows you don't buy beer: you rent it.
Anything that runs on linux will run on solaris!
I think that falls into the "...or do we have to do everything by hand?" category from the parent-post ;)
There is a package-management system for Solaris, it's probably some way from BSD's ports, though. Checkout pkg-get - it'll go some way to saving you from hand-compiling every single piece of software. Blastwave also have a selection of pre-built packages.
This is where the serious fun begins.
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
Comes in two flavors: SPARC (Sun & Fujitsu) and X86 (most PCs). The PC version is only 32-bit currently.
I acquired build 71: it comes with Star Office 7 and Java Desktop.
Had an old 500 MHz with 500 MB RAM laying around, and it loaded very smoothly. The OS didn't recognize the Diamond Viper video card after installation as it did during the install (strange). But no worries, put an Nvidia card in (GeForce2) and it runs better (faster) than my Sun 1500 at work. Sun and Nvidia have teamed up to support each other, so good news all around. It comes with native Linux compatibility, but haven't tried it out yet.
I downloaded Apache and set up a quick and dirty guild site for Worlds of Warcraft with it. I have no complaints. Very polished. Just wish they would post some OS patches at sunsolve.sun.com.
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!
Hang on a second. Don't get too excited. Just because something becomes open source, does not mean it will have an open license which benefits anyone other than the licensee.
They could very well open it and apply a license that prevents their code from being used with any other code which uses another license. Or even allow license compatible code (BSD? We'll have to wait and see their licence) to be included into their code, but not the other way.
I really doubt that Sun would have a really open license that allows the features that make them stand out, just get copied over to Linux, for example. Especially since AMD 64bit gear is such good value (Linux and commodity AMD64 gear could eat into their workstation and low-end server market).
[Paranoia mode: HIGH] Perhaps they are intentionally setting themselves up for future litigation. Hoping that their code will creep into some big name code bases, so that they can sue. [Paranoia mode: OFF]
War crimes, torture, lies, illegal spying... Would someone give Bush a blowjob, already, so he can be impeached?
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.
Someone already said this quite eloquently. I'll be short and simple and maybe folks will read it:
Sun doesn't sell OS software so much as high end solutions. You pay them a buttload of cash for a mission critical-can-never-fail solution and it's just icing on the cake if they make any cash from the OS.
This is to increase mindshare and leverage open source as much as anything.
http://request-header.info
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.)
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.
Do you really mean Goodbye SCO, hello linux?! Last I checked redhat has had about 5 full releases since the gap of solaris 9 and 10. That's not including the Suse, mandrake, debian and many other versions that will do 90% of what Solaris does, and do it faster on x86 hardware for less.
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
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.
If Solaris is open source, it becomes a strong Linux competitor. Small businesses can deploy it onto cheap hardware.
Well, Linux has already some (though not yet much) competition from the BSDs. SUNW's one asset is that they can sell support to companies who feel uneasy with Linux and BSD community support.
Their other asset is still excellent, rock-stable server hardware.
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
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
All true, except how does Solaris being open sourced effect that situation at all? IMO the important step for those small businesses was Sun's decision to make Opteron machines a first-class Solaris platform, and sell good Opteron machines at a competitive price. Those businesses probably don't care about source code for the OS much at all, or even whether the machine runs Linux or Solaris (except as far as price is concerned).
Now before I get modded down, I be to remind whoever might read this that what I am saying is FACT. - bogaboga
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.
-SteveI 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 think you're confusing free software and open source software. i think "simply" seeing the code *does* make it open source. if you can modify and redistribut it, that makes the software free.
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.
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..
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."
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..
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.
Do you actually work for a corporation? Doesn't
sound like it. The corporations I know (and I
include universities here) do care about
quality, do care about stability, and
do care about support.
Because they care about support corporations also
care about OS release cycles -- if their app
vendor has not certified on a newer release of the
OS, then the customer does not install it.
Sun's management has said (if you'd followed this
story) that Sun will almost certainly not
be releasing Solaris 10 under a GPL or BSD license.
The licensing is being worked on. Don't make
pronouncements about it until you see it or you'll
look more foolish than you do now.
The comments that I've heard (from people who
are in the know re opensourcing solaris)
are that it is definitely coming, it's not just
a marketing gimmick.
Isn't "marketing engineers" an oxymoron?
/usr/bin/perl no less
BTW, you have no idea why Sun decided to
include Perl in Solaris (as
rather than on the freeware cd).
There are engineering costs associated with
having GNU and other open-source projects
included in Solaris. Don't assume that their
absence is due to design despots. Think about
engineering processes from a cost-of-maintenance
point of view and you might get moving in the
right direction.
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
No, Sun is finding that removing licensing restrictions
from other companies is quite tedious.
http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/hcl should help. If
your laptop's features can be found on the list
the Solaris should just work on it.
You could just give it a go anyway and see whether
anything breaks. If nothing breaks, add it to the
HCL. If something breaks, then let Sun know so
their engineering teams can fix it.
From what I've heard (from friends who work at
Sun) the old wifi(prism) cards should work but
I'm not sure whether the driver is available
externally to the public yet.
Sun paid SCOX money for x86 device drivers. Quite
clearly, this means that there is no basis for a
lawsuit by SCOX against Sun because there is a
valid license agreement for which money has changed
hands.
Depends on how much work you and Theo want to
put into it.
If you have the source, what's stopping you?
I'm not. The definition of open source, as stated by the Open Source Initiative (opensource.org) are:
1. Free Redistribution
2. The program must include source code
3. The license must allow modifications and derived works
4. The license must explicitly permit distribution of software built from modified source code
5. No Discrimination Against Persons or Groups
6. No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor
7. The rights attached to the program must apply to all to whom the program is redistributed
8. License Must Not Be Specific to a Product
9. License Must Not Restrict Other Software
10. License Must Be Technology-Neutral
As you can see, it takes quite a bit to comply with open source.
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 ?
You're just going to have to wait until the official
version of Solaris 10 is available for download.
There won't be any "official" benchmarks available
until it's released for real (what I believe is
known as General Availability or GA).
And I really don't think there's going to be any
sense in wanting to see ZFS up against XFS and
Reiser4 because ZFS isn't available on linux.
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.
you have cited a definition with which i do not agree. we will have to agree that to you, "open source" means something more than to some others, such as me.
you know what? the Wiki explicitly mentions the disagreement we are having; it appears that you are a strongly-disapproving member of the OSF community, whereas i am a common user.