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Torvalds on Opening Solaris
An anonymous reader sent in a link to this interview with Linus Torvalds, where the questions center on Sun's movement toward the open source world (and Linus' dismissive view of the threat posed by Solaris), as well as a few questions about 2.7 and the future of Linux.
Exactly
I mean, I thought everything going open-source was something people would love, especially a popular OS like Solaris(dont give me garbage about Solaris dying, It is still a rather popular OS in many segments(for example my school's CS program uses Sun computers with Solaris))
This kind of attitude is rather how should I say, Arrogant.
Surely if you like the idea of standing on the shoulders of giants, there might be some handy ideas in Solaris. Why ignore it?
Because I personally don't think they have anything left worth taking after I've applied the general Unix principles. I really do think Linux is the better system by now, in all the ways that matter.
But more importantly, if I'm wrong, that's OK. People who know Solaris better than I do will tell me and other people about the great things they offer. To try to figure it out on my own would be a waste of time.
Just a paragraph below your quote. And it's not like he dictates every move for Linux. If there are (and on Solaris/SPARC there sure are) better things in Solaris than Linux, I'm sure he'd welcome any improvement suggestions.
We received a Sun Blade 2500 running Solaris 9 with an NMR that our company bought. I thought it would be cool to learn some Solaris. I was very disappointed. The software seems to make no sense, the provided applications are old ( it comes with Netscape 4.7x as the only provided browser). I was surprised to have been so under whelmed. Sun seems to be SO conservative in regards to their software that they seem to be paralyzed. I fired up Netscape 4.7x to find some answers on questions I had about the OS and when I hit a site that used JAVA the browser told me that the version of Netscape I was running didn't support the version of JAVA the Webpage was using!! This is what came with a standard install of Solaris? I am much more comfortable with Linux and so understand I am a bit biased, but I just don't see SUN and Solaris being a threat to Linux unless they really put out a better product bundled with more current software.
"We will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends. " Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/jimgris/20041221# torvalds_solaris_is_a_joke
You can relax now.
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
You must be new here. All Linux (and Unix) distributions are rated solely by how easy the installer is to use. This goes for pretty much all review sites as well.
Never mind what happens should you ever change any settings on the system, it gets five stars if it comes with OpenOffice preinstalled.
Trollish, I know, but it's true. It's mostly attributed to reviewers' unwillingness to run the OS for more than ten minutes.
It would be cool if it didn't suck.
That says nothing about IP theft. It implies that if there are better features in Solaris, then Linux will have people telling him what these features are, and that they should be implemented in Linux.
This implies that the features will be reinvented in Linux, not that the code will be stolen. This is to say nothing about whatever license Solaris ends up using.
I've tried solaris/x86. Yes, it sucks. It sucks big green donkey balls. It sucks big green donkey balls with hairs growing out of them.
-- I am. Therefore, I think!
I dunno man... I recently installed Solaris 9 on a dual opteron, 2GB of DDR 400, Adaptec AIC-7XXX SCSI. No messing around, worked fine.
This is brand new hardware, and although Solaris 9 was indeed running in 32-bit mode (and not the 64-bit Solaris 10 would enjoy on the same hardware), it worked and worked very well.
I've never had much of a problem getting Solaris to run on a wide variety of Intel hardware. The key, if you want to build a Solaris/Intel box, is to consult the HCL. Sun is pretty specific about what Solaris will and will not work with, though I've never found it to be as restrictive as most people imply.
bash-3.00$ uname -a
SunOS panda 5.10 Generic sun4u sparc SUNW,Ultra-2
Solaris is an OS designed for Sun hardware. It doesn't need drivers for Dell Optiplexes. It doesn't need drivers for IBM Thinkpads. It only needs drivers for Sun systems. The x86 version of Solaris is merely a sideline. If all you have is x86 hardware, then Solaris isn't for you.
Why is it the Linux community insists on denigrated every other operating system? It seems to me that an OS that continually puts down other systems must be compensating for some inadequacy.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
For example: GNU would not be where it is today if it hadn't been built on Unix, and particularly Solaris/SunOS for a long time before The Linux kernel was a sparkle in Linus' eye.
Lest ye forget, SunOS was itself a BSD derivative. In other words, Sun took an effectively open source OS, closed it up and called it their own. All perfectly legal under the BSD license, but certainly not very neighborly of them.
So, considering that Sun would not even exist were it not for OSS I think it is a little bit misleading to characterize OSS as being hugely dependent on Sun when Sun itself was at least as much dependent on OSS.
Plus, you have to wonder how much did gcc's existence help sell Sun hardware? For a very long time, gcc produced faster and more efficient binaries than Sun's own C compiler, and unlike gcc, you had to pay extra to get it. Without gcc, a lot of general purpose sun hardware would never have been purchased because less money would have been left over after paying for the C compilers.
Gotta watch out for that employer brainwashing.
Yeah, but the point you (and Linus) so quickly miss is that Solaris does indeed support a wide variety of Intel hardware, just not as wide as Linux. That said, everyone is hopping on the Linux bandwagon so it'll obviously have more extensive driver support, You're effectively criticizing Solaris for not being as popular, and how stupid is that?
I've had just as many hassles re-compiling Linux kernels to make hardware work as I have had trying to find drivers for hardware under Solaris Intel. That said, most servers have pretty standard hardware and Solaris/Intel does a reasonably good job recognizing the hardware. I suppose the fact that I recognize this and play within the spectrum of the HCL, rather then setting myself up for failure, is where you I take different paths.
I mean, sheesh.. Linus admits (though he obviously didn't notice) that he's talking out of his ass when he says "Solaris/Intel is a joke (so I've heard)".
That said, Solaris does indeed work with non-proprietary hardware, as well big iron SPARC systems (which aren't, as yo say, proprietary. The SPARC architecture is awfully open; it may not be commodity, but the opposite of commodity isn't proprietary).
bash-3.00$ uname -a
SunOS panda 5.10 Generic sun4u sparc SUNW,Ultra-2
It looked to me like this article paints Torvalds as somewhat full of himself.
I really do think Linux is the better system by now, in all the ways that matter.
Ever tried to set up multipath io for a clustered san with Linux? Ever try to spin down a drive in linux?
There are plenty of things that Linux could gain from a look at Solaris, and I hope it does.
It's not like NetBSD did it more than three years ago or anything.
Jeremy
Looking for a Python IRC bot?
$ psrinfo -v
Status of virtual processor 0 as of: 12/21/2004 19:53:16
on-line since 12/19/2004 18:00:57.
The i386 processor operates at 300 MHz,
and has an i387 compatible floating point processor
$ uname -a
SunOS mrhat 5.10 s10_74 i86pc i386 i86pc
There is Solaris 10 running on a 300mhz Gateway P6. I bought that workstation in 1998. Not enough to convince you?
$ psrinfo -v
Status of virtual processor 0 as of: 12/21/2004 19:57:36
on-line since 12/21/2004 00:11:10.
The i386 processor operates at 850 MHz,
and has an i387 compatible floating point processor.
$ uname -a
SunOS gobbles 5.10 s10_74 i86pc i386 i86pc
There you see the same Solaris 10 version running on my Dell Inspiron 8000 *laptop*, which I bought 3 years ago. Both of these systems are in my house. Pretty ghetto eh?
The really cool thing is this...I run THE EXACT SAME BUILD on a dual 2.8 Ghz x86 machine at work, as well as 4 domain Sun 15k SPARC machine at work, as well as my main workstation, a SunBlade 2500. The 3 Node Sun v880 cluster running Oracle RAC I do cluster and filesystem testing on? same stuff. The 8 node x86 cluster I'm about to build? same stuff. The Sun v100 Sparc machine I use to run my webserver and mail server at home? same stuff.