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Ian Murdock Joins Sun
RLiegh sends us the second piece of news today featuring Debian founder Ian Murdock. In an entry on his blog, Murdock announced that he is joining Sun Microsystems as their chief operating platforms officer. As he put it in his opensolaris post, this "...basically means I'll be in charge of Sun's operating system strategy, spanning Solaris and Linux." In all likelihood one of his first priorities will be "closing the usability gap" between Solaris and Linux.
Im not sure where Murdoch is coming from here.
GNU tools are on one of the CS's that Sun ships, and I install gnu tools anyways. It's there and easy to use. Sun supports its SunOS well.
Unless Murdoch is reffering to the wonderful "usability" of old and haphazardly done Debian packages, well erm.. let Sun take care of themselves. I like relatively new user-based programs (like, not from the early 90's).
Typed on a Debian Testing machine. Debating to go with Ubuntu..
Didn't he recently talk down about debian?
Not that he wasn't right, but being the founder... doesn't that say something about what we might expect of him at SUN?
He probably forgot that Apple still makes computers and operating systems.
Like 97 percent of the rest of the computing world.
They "rest of the computing world" would sure wake up to a cold shower if Apple Computer licensed a few reference designs and developed an "Office Suite" as high quality as OS X.
I was hoping for a Solaris 11 release in my lifetime.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
-jcr Does Solaris userbase (real ones, the ones paying millions to Sun hardware or running mission critical) want "Usability enhancements" or do they want to race with Ubuntu or OS X? I know a genetic engineer who spends her life on Solaris, I didn't see her complaining about usability at all. In fact she lives actual problems on Windows XP desktop since she is not used to it.
Same went for Debian, some actual admins spoke their mind saying they want peace of mind and a stable OS instead of Ubuntu racing, Digg headlining Desktop.
Real apt-get with dist-upgrade for Solaris would be great. Blastwave seems like a stop-gap in comparison. Reinstalling from the DVD every time is a pain, and BFU isn't as comprehensive. In this respect OpenSolaris can learn usability from Debian, and I'd love to see it.
You people are really confused. Solaris actual userbase are happy with their stable/established workstations and servers. An OS not installed at your geek neighbour doesn't mean it is "dead" or "eclipsed".
You speak like Solaris Desktop was considered an alternative home desktop OS and Linux took all userbase.
Solaris is alive and well doing number crunching/CAD/Medical/Military work around the World. It is just not too easy to see it running in neighbourhood.
Yeah, except I'd pick Solaris to run a mission-critical app over Linux any day.
I started off as a Linux admin. Today I am a Solaris admin and I like it that way. Yeah, some of the user-land utilities could be improved, but overall Solaris is a solid operating system that handles some of our hefty applications admirably. Sun also has the best support money can buy. Our x86 vendor is a pain in the ass and there is nothing quite like your Linux vendor and your hardware vendor blaming each other while you wait to get your problem sorted out.
"Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives" should be a convenience store, not a government agency.
How about closing the usability gap between Solaris and OSX instead? ;)
As the Debian GNU/kFreeBSD project has shown, it is possible to port the Debian userland (including the excellent apt-get package management system) to other kernels besides Linux. I would like to see Debian/Solaris project come out of Ian's endeavors. If not that, then at least an upgrade of the current Solaris userland to make it more Linux-like.
Left 404: Why the RIGHT is WRONG
Zones, ZFS, D-Trace, real ability to use multiple cores and lots of RAM. Some awesome stuff there.
If Sun hopes that Ian will somehow make Solaris more attractive to the open source community, I don't think that's going to happen. Solaris is what it is, all the technical and legal arguments have been made, and people have made up their minds. Unlike golf-playing IT managers, people who pick open source software are generally not going to be swayed by figureheads.
What Ian can do, however, is effect changes inside Sun. For example, if he can convince Sun to drop dual licensing for Solaris, it could more easily become a mainstream open-source platform.
I knew chaos theory had a future in computers.
Libertarian Leaning Political Discussion Forum.
In other words, democracy has given people exactly what they want. Oh no, boo hoo, the largest portion of the population is comfortable and happy.
Who are you to say a football player is less important than a programmer? Typical geek chauvinism. Only our kind of talent counts. The world should bow to OUR agenda (witness the "you shouldn't be licensed to use a PC until you understand how one works crowd). And DAMN IT, Dr. Who is better than other TV, even if everyone else says otherwise. I say so, and I am so smart that I must be right.
You know what though? History has shown that dictatorships and eugenics don't advance the best and brightest, they advance the middle and average. Why? Because every dictator needs the support of a mob. Mobs only support people like them. And by definition, every mob member is on average,well, average.
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Crudely Drawn Games
There already is one. It's called Nexenta and it's a melding of Solaris with the Ubuntu userland. They have a LiveCD you can try out and everything. Worked pretty nicely when I tried it back in September.
At which point he stood up and threw his wheelchair at the wall.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Oh yeah.
I had the opportunity to be the first in our company to employ T2000s and Solaris 10. Awesome to work with and the performance with our applications running on them is incredible.
I can't wait for the Niagara 2 processors... twice as many threads running in parallel and one FPU per core... that'll let us branch out to stuff that is more FPU-heavy.
"Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives" should be a convenience store, not a government agency.
Debian isn't the best model for usability for non-technical users; glacial release schedules and lack of desktop environment coherence to offset your stability is, well, what you get with Solaris already.
Sun should poach Mark Shuttleworth if they want someone who can make a solid OS into one that you can give to random people to use without it blowing their minds.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled"
AC, thanks for the first "Mac fanboy" tag I've ever gotten. Your people skills are top notch!
Your ad hominem misses the fact I don't own a recent Mac or OS X. I recycled my 604 powermac clone (but kept the scsi drive with BeOS and System 7) some time ago. I did recommend a late model MacBook to my mid-fifties parent without a second thought however. She enjoys it.
I'll stick with cheap x86 hardware (and wish it was inexpensive PowerPC), thanks. I enjoy the wide range of capabilities of the most common platform.
Get on ruling the world with your laughable OpenOffice and awful attitude. Don't let me hold you up-- a few linux distros have enough sense to take some cues *from* Apple's philosophy, and are doing well because of it. I applaud them!
(someone has to soothe the savage zealot, hope your blood pressure is lower buddy)
And power efficient?
If I'm going to run my company's mission-critical code on Solaris, I need to have the developers running Solaris too, which means I have to have a nice desktop environment they will want to use. If Solaris gives me that, my life is much easier. If I have to spend a lot of time making gnome-whatever, all the Java tools they love, etc, run on Solaris, then my life is much harder. If the tools aren't shipped for Solaris, I'm SOL.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled"
There's a difference between having a democracy as a form of government and a democracy as a form of project administration.
In other words, it works for the former and sucks for the latter.
If Apple or Microsoft or the Linux kernel were run by democracies none of them would be as successful as they are today.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
Heh, posting anonymously isn't going to prove much.
:-)
But assuming you're telling the truth: Why don't you try to clarify what you meant by 'usability' as mentioned in other threads on the topic?
Here's what I'd like to see: A simple, elegant GUI with full 3d acceleration (perhaps beryl/compiz based) without gimmicky, useless eye candy. (Some gimmicky eye candy is useful). Perhaps with a GNUStep back end for running Cocoa applications like TextMate. And a great package management system. Something like a cross between apt and portage would be fantastic.
Sun has the resources to make this happen. Hop to it!
After all, I am strangely colored.
I ordered the media kit dvd on the 2nd and got it in the mail today.
At least appears greener than Debian.
I wonder if he'll be a capable exec though. The politics is rough and we don't know what kind of authority/reach he has. For example, budgets? hire/fires? or is it more.... Figurehead type meet-and-greeter. Every organization that can afford them has a stable of ponies just for this purpose.
Good luck to him. I really hope it works out considering the disparaging remarks posted earlier today.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
I think Sun should buy Apple and rename themselves as Apple. Then Mac OS X gets a much better kernel, and Sun gets all of Apple's nice unix userspace (Solaris 10's userspace is awful). Mac OS X server becomes Solaris 11 and all of apple's good ideas like OpenDirectory, their management GUIs for open source apps, etc become a part of solaris. Already technology transfer is happening. My local Apple rep said a lot of core technologies are being licensed from Sun including ZFS.
It would be a clear win for both companies. Apple gets instant access to the enterprise, and Sun will make sure the acquisition means that Apple's technologies will get the enterprise-level support they deserve. Currently Apple's so-called enterprise offerings are really not very serious, although they have improved their support with Tiger. Sun can finally sell desktop machines sporting an amazing OS and desktop (under the Apple Macintosh brand) and have a server OS that's powerful and easy to setup and administer and with the better BSD userspace that Apple has.
I reckon this is part of Sun's attempt at looking friendlier to Linux-o-philes.
Maybe they should change their company name to something more old-fashioned and homely, like Murdoch & Sun - Makers of software and other intangibles.
Do it yourself, because no one else will do it yourself. [beta blockade 10-17 Feb]
Enlightenement is cross platform and modular - you can turn the bits you don't like off and still keep the acceleration from the video card via evas.
Taking this a bit seriously are we? It's freaking SOFTWARE. Equating a person that thinks that a software engineering project might come off better if it is not done by a committee with a eugenicist? Get a grip.
I did about 5 or 6 years ago. I was running it on an old pentium pro machine.
The server was stolen on Christmas eve, including an old keyboard and 14" monitor. The thief was so dumb, he did not notice the 2 new IBM desktop machines still in their boxes, or the 17" monitors also in their boxes in the same room and climbed back out the broken window next to the door that was not deadlocked.
Must have been an exciting Christmas morning for some kid, getting a solaris server.
The smarter home exchange, http://switchhomes.net
Interesting mix of experience. I was thinking about Apple's recent ZFS addition after I posted. What other Sun tech are they licensing? Sounds like potential for both...
As an experienced admin with both OSes, I'll sum up what I think the biggest abstract difference is between the two.
Solaris assumes you know what you're doing. Linux, to a much lesser degree.
Linux has been open source since its inception, but as an admin on a Solaris box, the system definitely feels more 'open' to you. More is possible, more data is gatherable, more settings are tunable. A Solaris admin generally has more power over the system without digging into source code than the Linux counterpart. That's the major difference I've always seen. If you want both flexibility and stability, it's hard to beat.
I will say though that Solaris' defaults are generally less reasonable than the enterprise linux distributions' are. There is more tuning and such to do before you'll have your Solaris system running the way you want it to. At least there's Jumpstart.
And the difference is?
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Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
Yes, I'd love see Sun learn all they can from RPM, DEB, apt and yum, and come up with a package format and delivery system that blows the doors off of what's available at the moment.
Heck, I'd love to do the job myself.
Did you know that some electricity companies are giving a rebate when you by a Sun T1000/T2000 server, because saving electricity that way is for them cheaper than building a new power plant.
Browsers shouldn't have a back button!! It's all about going forward...
You people are really confused. Solaris actual userbase are happy with their stable/established workstations and servers. An OS not installed at your geek neighbour doesn't mean it is "dead" or "eclipsed".
Is it "eclipsed" if I install an open source IDE on it?
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Usability enhancements might mean making the Solaris /proc system as usable as it is on Linux, thereby cutting the size of the Oracle installation guide by an order of magnitute....
Everyone always wants usability enhancements. They may not agree on *which* ones they want however.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Nexenta may be of interest to you, then.
"All you have to do is be fragile and grateful. So stay the underdog." Chuck Palahniuk, Choke
Apple is severely crippled on the desktop as well, their remoting sucks...
I think Sun should buy Apple and rename themselves as Apple.
You're a couple of years late with that idea. Sun's worth $22.4 billion Apple's worth 78.54 billion.
It would be a clear win for both companies.
Nope. Sun's not what it used to be. If they have anything left that Apple wants, Apple can buy it for a lot less than 22 billion dollars.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
I know a genetic engineer who spends her life on Solaris, I didn't see her complaining about usability at all.
Your friend needs to get out more. I know biologists who switched to Mac because of the price/performance advantage, and were just blown away by the ease of use. They had no idea what they were missing.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
We cannot allow a usability gap!
Apologies to the late Mr Kubrick.
I've experiments to run, there is research to be done on the people who are still alive.
Sorry. I see the word "Murdock" and I have to yell the name. Or act crazy and fly a helicopter.
I'm not a troll, but I play one on Slashdot.
Nevermind...that was a stupid reply I just made. I re-read your posting and you are correct in your statement. I mis-read your post. My apology.
I'm not a troll, but I play one on Slashdot.
no need to order cds anymore, sun will gladly let you download iso images of solaris 10 (and 9. can't find 8 any more on the site, but then again haven't put much effort into it).
just hit sun.com, and hit the get solaris section. you will be asked to make a login.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
It's interesting to see how this argument is going. If you replace every instance of Linux with Windows, Solaris with Linux, and wind back a couple of years, it's a familiar slashdot discussion.
Solaris is rock solid, performs extremely well under heavy load with lots of users (i.e. very different to the situation most home hackers see), and those of us using it like it. But that doesn't mean it shouldn't have a polished UI for the folks using it and not administering it.
I work in MRI research. Many of my colleagues are psychologists with little computing experience, trying to run some pretty heavy data processing. They want to know what their data says, not how to make Solaris work. A clicktastic GUI is part of that. Linux has heard it's potential users and is trying to catch up. Solaris could do the same. It's also interesting to note that Macs have made a big leap in this area, because they provide the nice GUI with a real Unix back end - they satisfy the users and the programmers.
Market capitalisation of Sun Microsystems: $22Bn.
Market capitalisation of Apple, Inc: $79Bn.
I think it's more plausible that Apple buys Sun.
1729 = 9^3 + 10^3 = 1^3 + 12^3
For years people were pushing Apple to do "tabbed windows" in Finder interface and enable "Cut" feature. Apple was clever and ignored them for a long time. You could do a defaults write tweak to enable cut if you are an advanced user.
As they decided the common (majority) OS X user really wants it, they will feature tabs on Leopard possibly in Safari fashion that you have to enable them first.
"Snapple"? No, too fruity...
Cool funny t-shirts for geeks, gamers and everyone else
If I'm going to run my company's mission-critical code on Solaris, I need to have the developers running Solaris too, which means I have to have a nice desktop environment they will want to use.
KDE and GNOME have been running on Solaris for years, and there are official builds. Sun's JDS is GNOME with Java applets (to slow it down a bit).
Stick Men
Apple should buy Sun, then. Either way, the combined company could be in an incredible position.
I think you're the one doing the squealing, sunshine. Apple Xserves are driving the cost of bioinformatics down drastically, particularly when it comes to running BLAST searches.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
I completely agree. The Leadership Principle is the only effective way to steer the ship of state. The Leadership principle is older than civilisation itself, going back to the first organised tribal society - yet it is also effectively practiced by all modern corporations. It simply means having a leader at the head who directs and plans the best interests of the whole group. He has authority to command, yet must also be entirely reasponsible to the group. The army is organised this way also. Starting with the Commander in Chief, there is a chain of command and rank right down to the private. Through this there is a unity of purpose, a rapid execution of orders, and the most efficient and effective organisation designed by man. Imagine the army using the democratic method, voting amongst themselves as to what action to take! "Should we go over the top and engage the enemy, or should we go on a picnic?". Can you imagine the useless mob such an army would become? They would undoubtedly be slaughtered by any enemy that used the Leadership Principle. Thus it is with the ship of state. Only those who wish us to be destroyed would advocate democracy. And another thing: leaders who are of their own people (and not driven by their greed for financial reward) are most likely to do what is best for their people. History has shown this to be the case.
http://www.corrupt.org