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Sun's Linux Killer Examined
gnaremooz is one of several users to mention Thomas Greene's look at Sun's supposed 'Linux Killer'. From the article: "If Sun gets very serious about Solaris 10 on x86 and the Open Solaris project that it hopes will nourish it, Linux vendors had better get very worried. That's because, in the many areas where Linux is miles ahead of Solaris, Sun stands a good chance of catching up quickly if it has the will, whereas in the many areas where Solaris is miles ahead, the Linux community will be hard pressed to narrow the gap." However, he goes on to describe many more difficulties with an install of Solaris than I seem to remember having with just about any recent Linux install.
You can't kill something that's non-commercial
Open Solaris is Free Software, yes? So if it becomes a "Linux killer", then the Linux vendors will simply become Open Solaris vendors. It doesn't matter if Linux dies if what is replacing it is just as free. Hell, the user-space applications are 90% the same anyway.
If Linux isn't successful because something else is better at doing the job and just as free, then that's a cause for celebration, not worry. The only people who need worry about this are the zealots and PHBs who have latched onto Linux for its buzzword value and not its merits.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
I already posted this on TechNudge.com:
I'm not a big reader of The Register, and having just finished the article, I remember why. The article's premise: Solaris didn't crash *as much* as Linux, so Linux had better look out.
Oh, but he couldn't even detect a NIC without the manual editing of conf files, and wasn't really unique or remarkable in any discernable way.
How tone-deaf is the writer to the PC world, anyway? It doesn't take a Bill O'Brien to see that the OS market is supersaturated, and anything short of the second coming of MacOS X will be greeted with a great big yawn from the collective computing community. (Well, a very small band of users will love it and sing its praises. I mean people are still clinging to Amiga OS, for crying out loud.)
This is aside from Sun's remarkable in its ability to ruin every good technology it creates through corporate nonsense and heavy-handed tactics (read: Java), and really, Solaris wasn't really all that thrilling on Sparc. (I spent my entire undergrad shackled to it.)
Neither the article, nor Sun, answer the most critical question in the OS world today: Why should x86 users switch? Why should I leave my comfortable XP or Debian or Red Hat or SuSE for Solaris?
Wait, let me guess: because Sun is including (insert Java widget here).
Note to Scott McNealy: the magic Java dust has lost its power.
Pomme de Terre!
I guess this just seems like a non-issue. Linux Killer? No way. Linux's Friendly Competitor? Welcome to the club!
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
I was taking the article seriously until I got to this line:
KDE is certainly more popular than Gnome among Linux users, and most would agree that it's by far the better of the two desktops.
We've experienced a number of application crashes since we began playing with Solaris 10, but none capable of pulling the kernel down with it. On the other hand, we've had sloppy JavaScripts immobilize totally, and at times actually re-boot, our Linux box (especially with 2.4.x series kernels); we've seen X oddities do the same, and have experienced several wacky incidents using Microsoft bugware with Wine that required a hard reset. While we haven't taken a systematic approach to blowing up our Solaris 10 installations, one gets the impression of a pretty bulletproof kernel and shell.
That's basically it. The article goes on to basically say driver support sucks and it was kind of a pain to configure, make sure to use the Xorg server and app support is ok. But that kernel, rock solid! Without really mentioning what is happening in 2.6 kernel development or how that argument extends outward toward a better development platform overall.
It's a lost cause, there can only be one. Read all four pages of the article, and ask yourself... would I be interested in creating a disk partition or two and running Open Solaris just to see? I did... and the answer was no... I'd rather spend my time working on my Debian system.
If Linux isn't successful because something else is better at doing the job and just as free, then that's a cause for celebration, not worry.
You're making the mistake by assuming that everything to do with linux is free, open source, and can be ported by a simple recompile.
Do you expect hardware vendors to ever write drivers if the community switches a few times over a few years? What if a commercial vendor says sorry, we don't support that OS, either stick with Linux or lose our product (contrary to some of the opinions here you don't just switch products at the drop of a hat in the real world, a product doesn't just have to be better, it has to be better enough to warrant the pain of migration)
There's a fine balance of amount of choice that's good, and an amount that's counter-productive.
> ...in the many areas where Solaris is miles
> ahead, the Linux community will be hard
> pressed to narrow the gap...
After all, it's not as if Linux had the backing of a major computer company with a three letter name.
Oh. Wait...
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
My feelings exactly.
Think of it this way:
Linux is free. That means if you dont like the direction, just fork it and improve it. You can still call it Linux. The better fork will win in the community.
Now Solaris is free (kinda, I have reservations about the license). That means people have Solaris code available to them. If Linux is generally good, except for some solaris features, they'll just port those features to Linux. If Solaris is awesome except for some Linux features, the same will happen. In the end we'll have code that is good, does cool things and is free. Whether you call it Solaris because you think it was 'descended' from Solaris or Linux, is a political matter. Linux wasnt threaded or ran ELF in the beginning. It wasnt SMP. Now its all those. Can we say it is a Solaris with the Linux name?
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
Meanwhile, Linux has been around since 1991, and it still isn't ready for the desktop. If upstarts like Firefox and OS X can increase their market share so much faster than Linux, why not a revamped/free-as-in-beer Solaris x86?
Probably because almost all of the desktop software available in Solaris x86 is exactly what is used on Linux: Xorg for X11, GNOME (or possibly KDE if you so desire) for a desktop environment. StarOffice (which is to say OpenOffice.org) for office applications, Firefox as a web browser, Evolution as an email client... the list goes on. What does Solaris 10 offer that Linux doesn't? DTrace and excellent developer and server performance tuning tool. Zones, and excellent server security and partitioning system. Really crappy hardware detection and configuration. A severe lack of drivers for standard consumer hardware. A packaging system that's great for updating servers but even worse than what Linux offers for desktop use.
Solaris 10 will be ready for the desktop a sometime after Linux is ready for the desktop and not before. The desktop software stack is the same, and Solaris offers nothing new for desktops at the lower level. It does have nice features for servers, but then so does Linux. I would expect Solaris to gain back some ground in the server space slowly, but I don't forsee how it could manage to somehow shoot up in market share any faster than Linux already is.
Jedidiah.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
IBM discovered the hard way in the nineties that a hardware manufacturer trying to get competing hardware manufacturers to support their OS is a dead end. Discussions between IBM and the other PC vendors sounded a lot like similar conversations will if Sun tries to get PC manufacturers onboard the Solaris wagon:
Sun: Hi, HP, what do you think about preloading Solaris on your workstations?
HP: Yeah, right! Why would we want to license or support our competitor's operating system for our hardware?
Sure, Sun might be able to get a few PC peripheral vendors on board. But, honestly, what kind of target market can Sun tempt them with? Solaris x86 has a smaller presence than Linux and you've already said that these same vendors aren't getting on the Linux bandwagon.