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.

Comments

Re:a bit too dismmisive?

[MightyMartian]

> I think Linus is being a bit too dismissive towards Solaris. Sure it's not going to completely
> crush Linux like McNealy wants to believe, but if it ends up being good enough it could slow down the
> growth of Linux and become a major competitor on x86.

I think Solaris has got an uphill battle in this one, but my attitude is the more the merrier. FreeBSD, Linux and an open Solaris, all competing against each other, bettering one another can only do the end-user good.

I'm not surprised that Linus is dismissive, but he should know better than anyone the peculiar way that underdogs and unknowns can burst on to the scene.

At some point I may take a look at Solaris, purely out of curiousity. That's how I started with Linux.

How Linus Thinks...

[KJACK98]

I would recommend other Slashdot members to read this article, probably one of the best interviews I've had the pleasure of reading about Linus. The comments he made would benefit any open source project leader and stress once again that a successful open source project is one where "People need to feel involved...If anybody feels like somebody is just a passenger, that's bad for everybody." Other comments about incremental improvements and Not Invented Here (NIH) Syndrome are worth reading too. Don't let the title about Solaris confuse you, and its nice to know Linus didn't resort to mud slinging, which is very common from the Sun camp...

Somewhat disturbing...

[NemosomeN]

This, and some replies here seem to act like Solaris enters the OSS world as an enemy that we can now more fully pick apart and find the flaws of to mock them. Kinda disheartening, if that's the angle people are going to take on it.

Re:"Solaris/x86 is a joke"

[White Roses]

Back in the halcyon days when Sun was bar none the biggest UNIX enterprise player, Sun probably said the same thing about some little upstart OS cobbled together by that one guy from Finland that only ran on 386 machines and was described by it's creator as a "just a hobby". So really, I think this can probably be filed under "turnabout is fair play."

Linus shows one more time...

[MikeCapone]

Linus shows one more time that he's an intelligent and well spoken individual. A good spokesperson for open source, that's for sure.

Anybody can imagine Ballmer or Gates giving honest answers like that to an interviewer?

Re:Isolating your development...

[AusG4]

Solaris/SPARC and Solaris/x86 are, last I was told, 99% percent idential.

That said, the only problem with Solaris/Intel is it's driver support. If you have supported hardware, Solaris/Intel is the definition of production-ready.

At any rate, It still really bothers me whenever I see people on /. knock Solaris just because his holiness Linus said that Linux was better. A lot of people here rip on Solaris and have clearly never actually used it, and even more declare it "the sucks" because it didn't recognize their crappy AC97 sound card. Truly infuriating sometimes... though I can see how it all starts when Linus goes on the record saying that he doesn't even think that the Solaris source code is worth even peeking at.

Then again, Linus, though brilliant, is also rash, reactionary, highly defensive and an out-and-out ego-maniac sometimes... but like so many "rock-star" like figures, his fans don't ever notice this.

Solaris has been saving my (and a lot of other peoples) bacon for years and as much as I like Linux, Solaris is still my go-to operating system because it's just more reliable, regardless of what his majesty wants to think.

How much more reliable? We're talking, like, 99.9% reliable versus, say 99.1% percent... something so miniscule; irrelevant to most people, but paramount to me and the thousands of people who still prefer to spend hundreds and hundreds of dollars on Solaris licenses for a very good reason.

Linux is improving steadily and someday I'll have no reason to buy Solaris... but it surprises me it's come this far sometimes when I see ignorant things like this from Linus.

Re:"Solaris/x86 is a joke"

[arivanov]

It is a joke. It was a joke. I shall be a joke.

I have been forced to run the damn thing and it has always sucked rotten eggz.

1. Multicast broken on 60+ percent of the network drivers. Linux over the years has had a chance to accumulate workarounds for broken cards. Solaris has never had the mileage to do so and as a result even trivial cards like ne2k, rtl and even eepro100 and 1000 are broken. In some cases it simply does not work. In other your entire machine goes south the moment someone tries to use it.

2. DMA is broken and does not work or has corruption problems on many chipsets. As a result if you want to get anywhere you need to shell out money for SCSI.

3. Numerous small niggles all over the place. Video, IO devices, power management (or to be more exact lack of), ad naseum.

It may be better the moment they release 10, because sun has used the cheasiest and shittiest PC chipsets like ALI15xx in their servers so they have "appropriate experience" now. But it will still be a very mixed journey. I will recommend it only to someone who has a PC which has the same collection of hardware garbage as in a modern Sun: broadcom ethernet, ALI or Silicon Image IDE or an NCR/LSI SCSI. If you have classic "good" PC hardware like Serverworks + Intel you will be going up shit creek without a paddle all the way (possibly under water as well).