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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."
Is it me or has slashdot named today as National Upgrade Day?
being free (as in without)
Unpretentious Sydney reviews by unqualified Sydney reviewers
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!
It's not so much a matter of people developing for Solaris because that won't happen except in an expensive commercial setting; it's about Solaris becomming more and more like another version of Linux. That's a good thing. As someone who has to administer a variety of Sun hardware, I'm happy. The Sun product line is among the best. What I want from Sun is more compliance with OpenSource projects and that's what the company is giving me. From the Linux developer end, Solaris may become just another platform, more like Red Hat or SuSE than AIX or HP-UX.
Sun aren't a software provider. They're a solution provider.
Sun provide excellent hardware and software support and will work with you to reach a solution - but it's not cheap. Like most unixen, Solaris tends to be popular with companies which need the system to work (as in: the system doesn't work, the company ceases to exist in very short order) and are prepared to pay a lot of money for it.
A few thousand $ for OS licenses fades into insignificance when compared with a few million $ for 24/7/4 hour support across an enterprise, while at the same time making a decent evaluation of the system much cheaper (and thus easier to justify).
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.
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