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Sun Developers Refute OpenSolaris Vaporware Claims
daria42 writes "It looks like an anonymous post on OSNews.com claiming OpenSolaris is vaporware was the last straw for two frustrated Sun Microsystems developers. They have responded furiously on their official Sun blogs, saying that they are currently working 'feverishly' on the project, and that it was taking so long because of the need to get rid of legal encumbrances to releasing the code. 'OpenSolaris certainly exists,' Sun kernel developer Alan Hargreaves says on his Sun blog. 'You only have to speak to anyone involved in getting it out there. There are a lot of us out there who both do and do not work for Sun.'"
Is it clothing?
Seriously who would need to refute claims like that? The sooner they get this thing out, the sooner the rumors will vaporize automatically. The rest is just a waste of time.
Tell me which one would you believe more - Microsoft claiming that they're working on patches to fix some exploits "as we speak", or they're asking users to download the patches now?
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
The more time you spend "responding furiously" to "anonymous posts on OSNews.com", the less time you're spending actually being productive.
... yadda, yadda, yadda.
You'd be better of ignoring the cynics, the nay-sayers, and the anonymous blowhards, and continuing doing something productive.
Arguing on the internet is like
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
Hey, give these guys a bit of time, will you? Sun developers, don't take it too personally, osnews is known for being the trolling site bu excellence in free software land.
While I'm inclined to believe that Sun is really try to open up the source to Solaris, the fact that they've only been able to put up a website (which notably has more links to press releases and news articles than source code) and the source for DTrace in the months since they've stated their Great Plan to open-source Solaris, it's no wonder that members of the community are calling an open-source Solaris vaporware.
I'm Trappped at Berkeley.
twelve thousand monkeys furiously coding for 3DRealms posted that Duke Nukem Forever should be out anytime soon...
Following the standard FOSS policy "release often", release some parts of the system that are ready - some demon, some apps, and keep adding. Linux wasn't built in a day, and the first versions required Minix to compile it, it was a long process of creating it. Why not release OpenSolaris piece-by-piece, so people interested in it could start working on the non-encumbered parts?
Imagine this: I'm running commercial Solaris. I have some app provided by the system, that does the work in a realy kludgy way, with some of my custom wrapper scripts to let it work at all. I know I can fix it and make it work as it should with a few simple changes to the source of the app. I don't need whole OS. I need sources of this one single component. And they lay there on the harddrives of SUN employees, ready to release, waiting till some completely different parts are finished, and in the meantime I lose $1000 a day because the kludge doesn't do its job well enough. So why won't they release it?
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
It's a bit unfair to start calling something vaporware two months before the scheduled release.
(I don't work on Solaris/OpenSolaris, so I have no special knowledge about the project, except that I know people are working are working on it.)
Disclaimer: I work for a company, but I don't speak for them.
So what's the big deal?
Why not take some substantial CHUNK of partly-finished code, some chunk for which the licensing issues HAVE been resolved, slap on a disclaimer about it being pre-alpha, buggy, etc, and post it somewhere?
If it's open source, there shouldn't be Apple-Steve-Jobs-like issues about maintaining secrecy until the actual moment of release.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Sounds about as official as a Slashdot post to me.
We all benefit when companies allow and encouragew their employees to blog. Calling blog posts "official" may sex up a
"There is no OpenSolaris," read an anonymous post on operating systems news Web site OSNews.com. "Show us the code or quit mentioning it."
Who gets infuriated by anonymous comments with no substance at all?
You shouldn't spend too much brain power responding. The proper response is to respond anonymously with some stock comebacks:
"Says you!"
"Your mom!"
That'll learn'em.
I'm a big tall mofo.
> There are a lot of us out there who both do and do not work for Sun
Wow! Quantum programmers!
"Vaporware" refers to software which the publisher never intended to release, news of which was intended to have an effect on the market.
Slipping on your release date would make just about every software product "vaporware", you retards.
Now before I get modded down, I be to remind whoever might read this that what I am saying is FACT. - bogaboga
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Well obviously they have been working hard, since their brain cells have been overworked, causing them to produce Zen sentences like this.
Wikileaks, no DNS
The problem with OSNews is that it seems to attract the "bottom feeder" users who have little real experience and tend to bitch and whine like children rather than to respond with well thought out arguments and present facts. I have caught people using FUD and outright lies to support their "positions" that Linux is better than Solaris. Well see ...
Look at Blastwave's article http://www.blastwave.org/articles/BLS-0026/index.h tml for a good glimpse of OpenSolaris.
Of course the cynic in me might suggest that Sun preannounced the effort far too early, hoping it would sabotage enterprise adoption of Linux. And encourage more people to try out Solaris 10, even if Solaris 10 & Open Solaris are not the same things.
It's not like Sun has actually released anything. That's because it IS VAPORWARE.
...
No. That's because it's not released yet. You didn't read the article, right? Or even the postings in the blog(s)?
So according to you everything that is announced to be released, but not released quickly enough, is vaporware.
Who needs to chill out? The people of Sun defending their product, or some kid yelling at a forum for the code to be released because he/she is getting impatient.
*sigh* indeed
I wouldn't say "Open source sucks."
It's more of a case where the open source way of life has turned many people into self-centered brats who refuse to understand any situation outside of what they personally desire.
and they said that the reason it's taken so long was that they had to buy some IP that they'd previously licensed but couldn't release. They're in the process of finalising that now.
Anyway, it's not my problem any more, thank goodness.
Stick Men
Sig Replye | grep "IANA - Reserved"
:-)
--
Shortage of IPv4 addresses? lynx -dump http://www.iana.org/assignments/ipv4-address-spac
Whoa - that's freaky... No wonder there's no real incentive to go to IPV6....
Although to be fair, thats only 89 class A's (or should I say, "/8"s) which means that it represents only 35% of the total address space. We don't have enough room to double - and with the exponential growth in network-capable devices, the doubling time is steadily getting shorter...
FWIW, a good read on the matter is at http://bgp.potaroo.net/ipv4/. Geoff's analysis concludes that we run out of addresses somewhere between March 2014 and February 2022.
"Go to CNN [for a] spell-checked, fact-checked summary" -- CmdrTaco
He never said that, well, not five years ago. It's RedHat he views as an enemy. Schwartz is the real fool. The engineers at Sun are far more clued-up and many of them are contributors to high-profile projects on a personal level, besides official projects like GNOME and OpenOffice.org.
I'm afraid the Pointy-Hairs don't see the value of community. To them it's all Wall Street, Java and "Kill RedHat." They very nearly missed Opteron.
Opteron could save Sun.
Let's face it, would Sun even consider making Solaris open source if Linux didn't exist?
I doubt it. But then the competition would only be Windows, not RedHat.
People forget that "Solaris 1.x" was BSD Unix. Sun was behind all the major innovations and standards.
Like I said, I couldn't care less any more, my only concern is for the great friends and colleagues still at Sun forced to toil under the pointy-haired regieme that still doesn't quite get it.
Stick Men
For details: Click here
And here
--Eric Boutilier
When NeverWinter Nights came out, it only had a Windows version. Originally it was slated to have versions for MacOS, Linux, and Windows, at the release, in the box. I bought it anyhow, but there were some (vocal) Linux people who pre-ordered it, and were very upset.
:)
Still, BioWare tried to make good on their promise to those people by at least eventually releasing a Linux port of the game (but not the toolset). However, this took them quite some time, and in the meantime, some people were very upset due to the lateness, the promises, the lack of the toolset, etc., etc....
However: months before they had released anything, I was already playing the game on Linux, (thanks to wine!) and a fork of wine (NWWine) was created just to run the toolset. Some people will complain about anything; others manage to get things done instead.
Now, on to Solaris. It has been available for free (as in beer) (WARNING: Scary sumo-wrestler-looking dork in pajama bottoms--I think they're trying to scare people away!) for some time now. So if you just want to run Solaris, (and why would you...) that is not a problem.
Also, Sun distributes copious amounts of freeware, and there's a free alternative (with source) to just about anything you could want on Solaris. Except the kernel, which would necessitate running another OS on the same hardware (Linux? NetBSD? Still many choices here).
So--given all this--what's the real market for OpenSolaris. Solaris kernel hackers? Gentoo Solaris? Honestly... not much. And: it isn't behind schedule, and it will be free--no one is pre-ordering it. So what's the big deal? Some people will complain about anything; others manage to get things done instead. And in the first category, I include both anonymous posters, and OpenSolaris developers.
One of my good friends (still in college) is a PHB in training. (He's much more technical & intelligent than the one from Dilbert). And yet he thinks the same way as the rest of them, when it comes to OSS. Stuck in the "crufty old ways" of software development.
The problem with OSS, as he sees it, is it has yet to show that it can be consistently (and largely) profitable (stock wise). To do that, you need to show consistent gains, and have marketing plans. OSS doesn't do consistent gains and marketing plans. It's not directed enough. Also, when you create OSS, as soon as you release a new feature, all of your competition knows how you did it. That is something that really deters businesses from creating OSS.
Overall: The most successful PHBs are in it for the money. And big money doesn't exist in the OSS world. Stable money is there, if you leverage it correctly. But the PHB doesn't want stable. He wants tons. At least, that's the way it seems to me.
I have other ideas, though. I feel that there are several ways to benefit from OSS. I hope to gather a group of like-minded people, and create something truly wonderful for the OSS community. It has given me so much over the past years, and it would be wonderful to give something back.
I actually didn't know the official release date until I saw this, I guess I don't obsess about release dates as much as some:r d&idnum=425
http://www.oetrends.com/news.php?action=view_reco
So, don't hold your breath but fairly soon, you will all be able to start bitching about the existence of an abhorrent competitor to Linux which you will never even consider using, rather than bitching about the nonexistence of an abhorrent competitor to Linux which you will never even consider using.
Now before I get modded down, I be to remind whoever might read this that what I am saying is FACT. - bogaboga