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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?
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!
JDS (version 3) is present in the current Solaris Express builds, so should be in the final product.
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.
SunOS was in the mainstream before Linus began working on the Linux kernel, dude.
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
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..."
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
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
That is a link to Download Solaris Express (Solaris 10 Beta), not Solaris 10. Sun has been releasing (mostly) monthly builds of Solaris Express, and there have been quite a few advancements and improvements over Solaris 9. I think Solaris 10 is going to be a big release, but we'll all have to wait until later to download it: the announcement of Solaris 10 isn't until 12:30 PDT today, and the actual release of Solaris 10 probably won't be available until a later date. The most recent beta build (b69) says SunOS 5.10 December 2004 from either a uname or in /etc/release :(
-- Never hit a man with glasses. Hit him with a baseball bat.
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.
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!
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
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.
without a doubt, solaris has been the biggest pain to set up out of ANY unix i've installed
/me ducks
I agree. I spent a week fighting with Solaris 10 preview for all the wrong reasons. It was basically an experiment to see how much GNU software I could pack into it. To my horror, once I finally got the thing installed I learned that it doesn't even come with a compiler. Sure you can add GCC to it, but there must be some art to making GNU's tools work properly with Sun's libc that is beyond me. The biggest problem I had was libtool seems to be completely broken with respect to shared libraries on Solaris.
The good news is there are lots of repositories for Solaris binaries:
Sun Freeware (Sun sponsored - mostly GNU in Solaris package manager form, can be installed with pkgadd)
OpenPKG RPM OpenPKG Solaris 10 RPM's (Lots missing from here and needs to be compiled via the SRPMS)
OpenPKG SRPMSAlmost everything I use, I found here and compiled without problems
IbiblioThere's a bunch of binary packages here for x86 and SPARC Solaris, I didn't use any of them
Anyone else looking to venture down this road, you should be warned that Solaris is really no fun to try to use as a desktop. Out of the box, Gnome is at version 2.2 or something, and has many many bugs (like Nautilus crashes when you try to drag desktop icons for example).
Summary: Solaris is not ready for the desktop.
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
To my horror, once I finally got the thing installed I learned that it doesn't even come with a compiler.
True, but to be fair, no other enterprise UNIX comes bundled with the corresponding proprietary compiler, either.
Sure you can add GCC to it, but there must be some art to making GNU's tools work properly with Sun's libc that is beyond me.
This is a known "issue": AFAIU, the headers included in the GCC package you installed were meant for Solaris 9. Since Solaris 10 is still in beta, this ought to be forgivable, and the blame should go to the mainatiners of the GCC package you used, not Sun. However, Blastwave, the excellent Solaris package repository you missed, has GCC packages that work for Solaris 10/Express.
-- Never hit a man with glasses. Hit him with a baseball bat.
Just my opinion based on past experience of course.
-L
Don't Panic.
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!!!
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.
-Steveas 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.