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Will Open Source Solaris Kill Linux?
Scott_Blayney writes "This guy contends that now that Sun is releasing Solaris 10 under an open source license, Linux will begin to wane in popularity. To quote, "Linux will probably not grow much beyond its current market share of about 10 % leaving Red Hat and especially Novell with a big problem."
"
And, you know Sun still hasn't open-sourced the thing. And, Sun still don't have said what license they'll use or explained how they'll get around SCO /Novell's IP claims on the Unix core of Solaris.
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I, for one, have gotten as tired of hearing about wonderful open source Solaris will be as I have about how wonderful Longhorn will be.
Until, I've got the open-source code in my hands, I really don't want to hear more about open source Solaris.
For more of my ranting on the subject, see:
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1645508,00
Steven
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John
We have yet to see what the open source license for Solaris will be like. If Sun licences Solaris much in the same way they treat Java, there will not be other "Solaris-like" distributions, unlike there is in the Linux world. Linux has, and will likely always be, the people's OS. Written by the people, for the people, and distributed with or without cheese, lettuce, tomatos, and onions. It's doubtful there will be a mass migration to Solaris, just because they are touting it as being open. I do, however, see the ability for a better interoperability between Solaris and Linux due to openness. I think linux will continue to expand in the lower end server market, and pick up more of the desktop eventually, and Solaris will continue to make an excellent high end platform.
Until today, the discussion around Linux pushed by Red Hat and recently by Novell after it took over Suse has been around the risks and opportunitites of the open source model versus the costs and slow adaptation of the proprietary model.
Opponents of open source software always argued that due to its nature there is a risk that version control, compatibility, future development and support is not guaranteed and could leave companies who use it at some point with a free but outdated system that is difficult to maintain.
Companies like Red Hat and Novell and on occasion other big players have tried to take away these arguments by committing to the open source model and vowed to make it work. Despite their efforts and some success, there still is a lot of skepticism within corporate IT departments and as a result Linux is not taking the market by storm.
With the decision by Sun to give away their latest version of their software, Solaris 10 for free all of these concerns have evaporated in one blow in favor of the now open source and compatible Solaris 10 supported by Sun.
Looking at the advantage of going the Sun route versus the Linux route it is hard to see why any IT executive would chose to switch to Linux.
- The Solaris software is of proven quality and at least equal or better then Linux and the open source model will assure that it stays up there.
- By making it work with competing hardware platforms, there is no reason anymore to switch software to facilitate lower hardware costs.
- Sun with Solaris has already a large installed base and by becoming free and open source there is no reason for existing Solaris users to switch to Linux.
- Sun has a proven reputation in terms of quality of support. This should be at least as good or better then that of the Linux supporters.
- Because Sun by default is the only designated party managing the open source software, there will be no risk of a version bonanza with multiple incompatible versions.
Again as a non technical person, the decision for me would be simple, I would go with Solaris unless I was already using Linux; Why take risks when I can choose a proven, high quality solution at comparable costs?
As a result Linux will probably not grow much beyond its current market share of about 10 % leaving Red Hat and especially Novell with a big problem
Of course I might very well be overlooking something here, if so, please let me and other readers know by posting your opinion in a reaction (see below).
Their server is slow as all hell right now (big suprise), so here's the text of the article:
Let me start by saying that I'm not a technical expert. Although this might be a handicap it could very well be a positive in looking at the issue of Sun versus Linux in the server business from a decision maker's point of view.
Until today, the discussion around Linux pushed by Red Hat and recently by Novell after it took over Suse has been around the risks and opportunitites of the open source model versus the costs and slow adaptation of the proprietary model.
Opponents of open source software always argued that due to its nature there is a risk that version control, compatibility, future development and support is not guaranteed and could leave companies who use it at some point with a free but outdated system that is difficult to maintain.
Companies like Red Hat and Novell and on occasion other big players have tried to take away these arguments by committing to the open source model and vowed to make it work. Despite their efforts and some success, there still is a lot of skepticism within corporate IT departments and as a result Linux is not taking the market by storm.
With the decision by Sun to give away their latest version of their software, Solaris 10 for free all of these concerns have evaporated in one blow in favor of the now open source and compatible Solaris 10 supported by Sun.
Looking at the advantage of going the Sun route versus the Linux route it is hard to see why any IT executive would chose to switch to Linux.
- The Solaris software is of proven quality and at least equal or better then Linux and the open source model will assure that it stays up there.
- By making it work with competing hardware platforms, there is no reason anymore to switch software to facilitate lower hardware costs.
- Sun with Solaris has already a large installed base and by becoming free and open source there is no reason for existing Solaris users to switch to Linux.
- Sun has a proven reputation in terms of quality of support. This should be at least as good or better then that of the Linux supporters.
- Because Sun by default is the only designated party managing the open source software, there will be no risk of a version bonanza with multiple incompatible versions.
Again as a non technical person, the decision for me would be simple, I would go with Solaris unless I was already using Linux; Why take risks when I can choose a proven, high quality solution at comparable costs?
As a result Linux will probably not grow much beyond its current market share of about 10 % leaving Red Hat and especially Novell with a big problem
Of course I might very well be overlooking something here, if so, please let me and other readers know by posting your opinion in a reaction (see below).
I was told that I could listen to the radio at a reasonable volume from nine to eleven...
That's a really stupid question. It's like asking if proprietary software will kill Microsoft. Of course open source won't kill Linux. Linux is part of the open source movement. Plus Solaris is still controlled by Sun Microsystems, so it really won't be open in the sense that Linux is. Until there is a distrobution of Solaris that isn't from Sun, there's very little reason to make silly statements like "will Solaris kill Linux", or "will open source kill Linux".
It's probably shared hosting, chill out.
Alito: A vote for Alito is a punch in the eye to put that bitch back in her place!
You can still go ahead and pick your own. Most of us do...
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
/lib and /usr/lib are separate for similar reasons. /lib holds system libraries, while /usr/lib holds user-installed libraries. It makes threat containment easier.
This is the sort of stuff Schwartz is talking about when he mentions military-grade security. Linux has stressed usability over this sort of security (which I don't mind), and, interestingly enough, linking sh to ksh and linking /lib to /usr/lib makes Solaris more Linux-ish. Also, many hardcore Solaris admins would regard it as a security hole and, if you're running the servers for the NSA or Wall Street, it probably is.
Another one bites the dust
Sun's main strength is that many commercial users (Ford, Boeing, ...) want a single vendor to support all the hardware and software used by projects that are scheduled to last three years or more.
As commercial CAD users, they will only consider hardware that is officially certified by the 3D CAD application developers. That usually requires a strict combination of memory chips, CPU's, motherboard, and graphics accelerator. They're not concerned about legacy hardware being supported, so long as E-mail, video conferencing and the required applications run on competitively priced systems with 24/7 support.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
FWIW, maybe /bin/sh is ksh on Solaris 10, but for 8 and 9 its the same as 'jsh' and 'pfsh'.
/bin/*sh |sort /bin/jsh /bin/pfsh /bin/sh /bin/hash /bin/csh /bin/pfcsh /bin/zsh /bin/tcsh /bin/remsh /bin/rsh /bin/bash /bin/ksh /bin/pfksh /bin/rksh
/bin/*sh | sort /bin/ksh /bin/pfksh /bin/rksh /bin/zsh /bin/hash /bin/csh /bin/pfcsh /bin/tcsh /bin/ssh /bin/bash /bin/remsh /bin/rsh /bin/jsh /bin/pfsh /bin/sh
Solaris 8~% md5sum
0aa519c150a641a2f0866f7ec2a81c79
0aa519c150a641a2f0866f7ec2a81c79
0aa519c150a641a2f0866f7ec2a81c79
26da69be334032474540bd7fba23922d
3978b31fe3b6f4fbdc7acd945b9a7423
3978b31fe3b6f4fbdc7acd945b9a7423
643c4ec5daffb9338ffa68f85929645c
8c4e65a677d13878aac992f27e5351c4
b6ee7579f76c5a1ed52d6f37b4295832
b6ee7579f76c5a1ed52d6f37b4295832
c784b19d0034235fbf6de2accc6e86b6
f2c98edc629467f3c345ee3509c7a156
f2c98edc629467f3c345ee3509c7a156
f2c98edc629467f3c345ee3509c7a156
Solaris 9:%~ md5sum
10433da819587b7fa048aa9def39b830
10433da819587b7fa048aa9def39b830
10433da819587b7fa048aa9def39b830
2c85535533d77c5757fc142576c5b620
2fb1c3bc52d8dcc697ed739dc199887a
311eca11e7b1db0268627154021253f9
311eca11e7b1db0268627154021253f9
d0b3a22ce2d1a0fd121ca638e28c3193
d19fcb5721f174c04452e2f745ca444b
d4addcaa023939d52b642ae188f91a3d
eee4155f2b21587a8b6313eabcbcf00d
eee4155f2b21587a8b6313eabcbcf00d
fccecdca8a2543f7b8f7b306a9365f9a
fccecdca8a2543f7b8f7b306a9365f9a
fccecdca8a2543f7b8f7b306a9365f9a
Also, I believe that ksh is significantly different enough from what is expected from sh that this is unlikely in any Solaris release. Unless there is some argv[0] checking and compatability mode enabled, but what is the point of that?
Anyway, Here's a copy of the article on linuxtoday.com.
"Teleporting Rodents with D-Cell Battery Displacement" theory -- IgnoramusMaximus (692000)
/lib and /usr/lib are separate for similar reasons. /lib holds system libraries, while /usr/lib holds user-installed libraries. It makes threat containment easier.
The "usr" in "/usr" stands for Unix System Resources, it's not short for "user". User-installed binaries and libraries belong in "/usr/local/".
"/" should contain only the binaries and libraries that are needed to boot the system, and "/usr" should contain all other vendor-supplied binaries and libraries.
Linux has stressed usability over this sort of security...
/lib and /usr/lib. As does the RHEL VMWare image I'm working with here at school.
Erm...My Debian box at home has separate directories for
On the RH box, bash and sh are the same, though. I'm not sure about my Debian box.
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
sh and ksh are separate for a reason. Solaris sh (more so than other sh's) is *very* stripped down -- no tab completion, no command history, etc. -- so that there are no side effects.
/bin/sh might break countless customer shell scripts, so you better don't mess with it.
Side effects aren't the reason. The explanation is backwards compatibility. Any change to
That is simply not true... /sbin/sh and /bin/ksh are seperate for a reason. The reason is that /sbin/sh is statically linked, while /bin/ksh and other shells in Solaris are dynamically linked. This is because if you create a seperate /usr partition, its corruption won't prevent you from logging in. In other words ld.so.1 is in /usr/lib, so if that is not available any dynamically linked shell will not work. Also, please note that /lib and /bin are just symlinks to /usr/lib and /usr/bin respectively.
- Andrew
Actually /bin/sh is *not* stripped down - there wasn't anything to begin with! The shell is so bare-bones because it is the original Bourne shell (+- some fixes). There was no readline, not tab completion, not even proper line editting at the time when the shell was created.
Yes, it's et cetera. So named because it's all the host-specific configuration that doesn't have a permanent home from box to box so it's just miscellanous "et cetera" that comprises all things configuration that may or may not be on any given host depending on what the host does.
Alito: A vote for Alito is a punch in the eye to put that bitch back in her place!
\No, "usr" stands for "user". In fact, the three letters came around because K&R couldn't stand to type "user", "source", "binaries", "shell", "list", "copy", "move", or a billion other little things. I submit to you, sir, that someone has royally yanked your chain.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Sounds to me like you're describing Ubuntu Linux, a great new distribution with awesome hardware autodetection, a single standard desktop built around Gnome 2.8, and only a single best-of-breed application installed for each type of application available - Firefox for web, Evolution for email, OpenOffice.org for office tasks, etc.
:)
If you want anything beyond what Ubuntu's core distribution offers, you're welcome to install it from their universe repository, which is derived from Debian's massive set of packages. This means that while the core distro might be desktop-focused, you can pretty easily tool Ubuntu up for just about any task. Best of both worlds really
Yeah, but they'll be sitting with their wings up their ass trying to get Linus to accept the changes back to the kernel that are needed for all the cool stuff...
As examples of where that "stockholder" mentality shows up:
"man syseventadm", -v vendor
The string specifying the vendor defining the event. Events defined by third-party software should use the company's stock symbol. Sun-defined events use SUNW.
"man pkginfo",
PKG* Abbreviation for the package being installed. All characters in the abbreviation must be alphanumeric and the first may not be numeric. The abbreviation is limited to a maximum length of 32 characters. install, new, and all are reserved abbreviations. It is customary to make the first four letters unique to your company, such as the company's stock symbol.
The "usr" in "/usr" stands for Unix System Resources
Sorry, but no.
"values of beta will give rise to dom!"
Completely unremarkable.
Windows is the exception, not the rule when it comes to failing to migrate OS installs from machine to machine.
Just about every distribution of Linux is capable of being configured to autodetect hardware, but in the case of taking the harddrive and all the expansion cards out of the old machine like you did with solaris, it wouldn't matter if it wasn't configured to autodetect hardware.
Mac OS X is another example, probably a fairer comparison because both Apple and Sun manufacture the OS and the hardware. A friend booted his G5 directly from my PowerBook's hard drive through a Firewire cable, it booted perfectly on the G5, and on my machine after he finished playing. The only difference was it took about 15-20 seconds longer to boot since OS X was unable to use some of it's quick startup trickery because some drivers had changed.
I've seen/done OS migrations on machines running DOS, AmigaOS, Red Hat, Slackware, Debian, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Windows 9x, Mac OS 9 & Mac OS X. Windows NT is the only OS that I've ever seen that throws a hissyfit when you move it from machine to machine. Sure in a Linux disto without hardware detection it might not work perfectly after the move, but at least it's in a state where with a few magic commandline incantations you can determine and install the correct drivers.
It's just another example of the shit Microsoft's victims are willing to accept from their abusers.
Agreed. It's more than just OS capabilities. It is also an emotional thing. And I believe on that issue Linux has the mind-share.
And what's more Linux finally has really good hardware support.
Linux has made absolutely GIANT leaps in driver support in the last five years. It all finally works. I have analog NTSC video in and out, firewire (with dvcam support), 3d acceleration, USB hard disks, RAID, CD burner, sound card with SPDIF, printer, etc. etc.
Heck, even my TI-calculator link cable has linux drivers. Sun is not going to be able to get that kind of hardware support overnight.
(If you want to prove this to yourself go around sticking a Knoppix CD in random PCs.)
Additionally, SUN is going to have to prove themselves all over again in the x86 market having very abruptly cancelled their x86 Solaris version not all that long ago.
I was just starting to get interested in it myself, and then Sun killed it. When they killed Solaris for x86, the also simultaneously killed their place in the x86 market. Companies don't want to invest in something that may turn out to be just an experiment. Sun is going to have a tough time proving their seriousness.
Life is too short to proofread.
sh and ksh are separate for a reason. Solaris sh (more so than other sh's) is *very* stripped down -- no tab completion, no command history, etc. -- so that there are no side effects. When you hit tab, you get a literal tab. That makes it harder for hackers to place little "easter eggs" and make "!!" expand to "rm -rf /". /lib and /usr/lib are separate for similar reasons. /lib holds system libraries, while /usr/lib holds user-installed libraries. It makes threat containment easier.
/lib linked to /usr/lib and /bin linked to /usr/bin.
/bin/sh.
/lib to /usr/lib makes Solaris more Linux-ish. Also, many hardcore Solaris admins would regard it as a security hole and, if you're running the servers for the NSA or Wall Street, it probably is.
/lib to /usr/lib. Solaris does.
WTF are you talking about? I have a sparc solaris 8 server (set up by Sun people) and it has
I also have tens of linux computers with several distributions and none of them have those directories linked.
This is the sort of stuff Schwartz is talking about when he mentions military-grade security.
You do not know what you are talking about.
Military grade security is support for mandatory access control and other features that may grant the system a B1 or higher rating by the US government.
AFAIK, the only Solaris version that claims to have military grade security is Trusted Solaris 8, and I do not know if those features are being open sourced.
I don't even know if it is even certified as B1 or higher.
SELinux (developed by the NSA) includes extensions for supporting MAC and other military grade security features.
Military grade security has nothing to do with having a stripped down version of
Linux has stressed usability over this sort of security (which I don't mind), and, interestingly enough, linking sh to ksh and linking
Linux distributions don't usually link
My heart is pure, but make no mistake, it's pure evil
Having worked with unix for over 20 years I can assure you that originally /usr WAS short for user and that all user home directories were indeed in /usr. As a previous poster pointed out Unix shipped on two 1/2 inch tapes one was the root and the other one /usr with "userland" software. As Unix has grown over time user homedirs were moved to /home and /usr took a more general place and /usr was re-identified as an acronym for Unix System Resources.
There was, on the other hand, a few hackers forced to use TTYs. Real ttys. Ever used on of those? You know, 3 characters per second output and a serious noise, and a keyboard that feels more like doing kung fu than "typing". If that's all the "user interface" you have, you wan't to minimize the number of keystrokes you have to do, and the amount of output you get.
That's what gave the nice and quiet unix we all love. That and a fondness on the part of its creatores for saying only what is absolutely necessary.