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OpenSolaris One Year On
daria42 writes "In June of last year, Sun Microsystems open sourced its flagship operating system Solaris. This article asks the question, where is the OpenSolaris project after one year of operation? It contains views from Sun itself as well as insights from an external contributor to the code." From the article: "Sun is yet to release some aspects of Solaris as open source software, although that process is due for completion by the year's end. Meanwhile, non-Sun programmers have to date offered some 165 code contributions to the OpenSolaris project, said Eagleton. Of those, 70 have been accepted into the project's code base, while another 95 are still in the review process. To allay early community concerns that the process of getting external code contributions accepted was taking too long, Sun has a temporary buddy system whereby external contributors are partnered with Sun employees."
Sun is new to Open Sourcing its proprietary products. Solaris is a good step and a few glitches here and there are likely to be minor youth problems. The important thing is to know whether Sun will find in this experience enough incentive to open source other stuff (Java anyone?)
--
Krazy Kat, George Herriman
Write boring code, not shiny code!
Why is this bit of "news" listed under Linix-category?
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
There is an awfull lot of commercial software written for Solaris or only supported on Solaris.
I've done a few console installs of Solaris 10 on some headless (and ancient) sparc netras. Here are some things that would make my life easier.
I had written a patch for ns_ldap.c to fix an obscure bug. After 2 frustrating weeks of dealing with online registration, which resulted in a heated exchange with one of Sun's adminstrators, I simply gave up trying. They've made it too hard to get involved in the project. For any normal open source project I simply download the tarball, run configure, make, make install, and submit patches to the email address of the most convenient maintainer. With OpenSolaris it's like trying to pull teeth. Even building a binary from the source is a major mission that makes building XFree86 look like child's play. And that's a real shame, because I'd like to fix bugs in Solaris as I find them, but I am not going to go out of my way.
If they want more people to try out OpenSolaris they need to reduce the barrier to entry, i.e. an .iso file or even a bootable CD that folks can order for a minimal fee. The ugly, several step manual process they require now is just too painful.
I've used Solaris since...well, since before it was named Solaris, and I've used Linux since not long after the first experimental releases, and BSD for nearly as long, and I think all three are great systems, but they're not interchangable. They each have different strengths and weaknesses. If I had to pick just one, I'd probably pick Linux, as it seems to be the most versatile overall, but I'm very glad I don't have to pick just one, and can instead use the one that's best for a specific job or role.
To allay early community concerns that the process of getting external code contributions accepted was taking too long,
You're kidding, right? Solaris is one of the most mature operating systems out there. It runs some of the most powerful servers on the face of the planet. It is the core for a number of institutions, especially in the financial sector. I am not over-dramatizing when I say that Solaris runs a hell of a lot of crucial systems that make our lives easier in a lot of different ways.
That being the case, do these people really think that Sun is just going to say, "Oh, I see. You tested it in a limited fashion and we tested it in a limited fashion in the matter of a few months. Okay, we'll release it to the customers who run massive databases and financial applications on our servers because of a few months of limited testing." I would much prefer Sun take a year if need be to make sure that any modifications will be completely compatible with as many of their customers and equipment as possible, particularly the higher-end systems and major corporate environments.
I understand and share a lot of the aggravation that people feel when it comes to the lack of features, particularly device drivers, in Solaris. This is the one of the main reasons wy I think that Solaris has become so niche, particularly on the x86 side of things. If we're talking about modification to a common tool or enhancements to a graphical interface, okay, I don't see why it would take a year. But if Sun needs a year to make sure that a new device driver doesn't crash a SunFire 25K running a clustered Oracle server during end-of-month, transaction processing, then I'll grant Sun that year.
The Overrated mod is for reversing inappropriate, positive mods, not for voicing disagreement with a post.
Very good points. I for one don't want minimally tested extensions to Solaris (or any other O/S) to be on any system that controls my money! I wonder why no one mentions that IBM isn't doing ANYTHING to make AIX open source, nor is HP doing anything with HP-UX. And hell will freeze before MS does anything open-source with Windoze.
pkgadd, BTW, also supports quite a few URL constructs (e.g., pkgadd http://blah/blah). In this form, the other end of the pkgadd has to be a package stream, however, so that limits its usefulness with the DVD contents.
It's been a while since I've done the text install, but finer grain control has been there in the past. I'd be surprised if it was removed. That said, using Jumpstart combined with a profile will also get you finer grained control without having to do it manually for each install. Information on network-based installs and the like is available here and here.30-40 distros eh? Sounds like you're into playtoys and not mission critical.
Go back to the basement until your mother calls you for dinner, fool.
The Solaris kernel and core OS destroys anything linux can put out there. If you had a goddamned clue you wouldn't have used the default desktop and would have slapped something else on top of it, say XFCE.