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SCO Fiasco Over For Linux, Starting For Solaris?
kripkenstein writes "We have just heard that the SCO fiasco is finally going to end for Linux. But Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols at DesktopLinux.com points out that the favorable result for Linux may cause unpleasant consequences for rival open-source operating system OpenSolaris: 'At one time, Sun was an SCO supporter ... Sun's Jonathan Schwartz — then Sun VP of software and today Sun's president and CEO — said in 2003 that Sun had bought "rights equivalent to ownership" to Unix. SCO agreed. In 2005, SCO CEO Darl McBride said that SCO had no problem with Sun open-sourcing Unix code in what would become OpenSolaris. "We have seen what Sun plans to do with OpenSolaris and we have no problem with it," McBride said. "What they're doing protects our Unix intellectual property rights." Sun now has a little problem, which might become a giant one: SCO never had any Unix IP to sell. Therefore, it seems likely that Solaris and OpenSolaris contains Novell's Unix IP.'"
Don't forget ...to pay US your $699 licensing fee you cock-smoking teabaggers.
HA HA HA HA!!!
Sorry, but that's beautiful poetic justice. While Sun have some nice technology, they've never really been too keen on Linux eating into their Unix marketshare.
The only problem is that if Sun did not exist, I think the open source community would be compelled to invent Sun.
Now that the Novell ruling has been handed down, reaffirming that Novell owns the copyrights Caldera Systems claimed and wished to have had, most of McBride's public statements are now worth less than zero. Before the judgment, there was some intangible value in the FUD factor, especially for Microsoft (and maybe SUN Microsystems).
Just because you get modded "insightful" on Slashdot doesn't mean you actually are in real life.
For some reason, I can't help but feel a little smug about that. If your going to choose a side, Make sure you know your side is going to win.
Restore the madness of youth's lechery
novell officially owns the copyrights on Unix and whatnot, who's to stop somestar capital from offering to pay them to restart something similar against other linux vendors? it isn't like they aren't already in bed with microsoft blah blah blah (donning my triple-layered gold-plated tinfoil hat ... and let the conspiracy theories begin)
Does anybody actually run OpenSolaris in production on non-Sun hardware? Open-sourcing Solaris seems more of an end-of-life abandonware move than a product line.
Linux and Solaris come from different code bases. Linux is Linux and Solaris is UNIX System V R4.
Secondly, Sun didn't "license unix" from SCO. Sun bought some device drivers.
There, settled.
Stick Men
...can Microsoft buy Novell?
I mean like 'em or hate 'em thats one firm with awfully deep pockets and the ownership seems to be settled now. Please, please tell me that I have missed something and I am being naive.
Not so fast! Solaris' roots go back to before UnixWare. UnixWare wasn't released until 1992. The SVR4 code that went into Solaris split off before then, according to the UNIX History Timeline. The sale of UnixWare to Novell took place later. And don't forget that a lot of the Solaris code was supposedly taken from BSD-based SunOS, plus there's no doubt that a lot of it was also written by Sun or for Sun.
Somehow, I don't see Sun and its top-notch legal team making a mistake on this matter. This isn't the sort of scenario that would have been overlooked.
- John
Two, actually.
Remember, they also bought a license. I wonder what Novell IP made it into Microsoft products, and if that wasn't the REAL reason Microsoft wanted a deal with Novell - not because of Microsoft IP in linux, but Novell IP in Windows?
Plus, if Novell and/or IBM and/or Red Hat manage to piece the "corporate veil" surrounding the PIPE invenstment, there's another problem, which will be much worse for the convicted monopolist.
I am in the middle of building a X86 server that I intend to run OpenSolaris on. Trying to find a board that I know in advance is supported has been frustrating. However, I *think* the major problem is the lack of updates for documentation and not that new devices are not supported.
You'll know how it went if you see me trying to sell a server, cpu, RAM combo.
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
Every time I see that name, I think SCrOtum.
I honestly don't know why.
If Sun has to deal with Novell, it's not the same as anybody having to deal with SCO. SCO didn't care if it existed or not at the end of its legal battle with the rest of the world. Their strategy was all about monetizing their precious IP. Sun and Novell, on the other hand, think of themselves as ongoing businesses. They have no desire to run up huge legal bills. If there is an issue between them, they will negotiate like adults, money will change hands and everyone will go about their business.
Bottom line: Novell isn't going to sue Sun.
Novel has a tool to destroy Sun. It looks like Solaris is doomed to die slowly.
I'm just some grad school kid setting up a server in his apartment, but within a few months I'm gonna get a new desktop and move my current one to a server. I'm debating between FreeBSD and x86 Solaris for it.
Whats this IP in every Unix they keep talking about ?? 127.0.0.1 ?
bah
True, SCO had no "IP" (as Darl would like to put it, frequently) to sell. However, they were Novell's authorized agent for handling licensing for UNIX. The deal was that ALL money from such deals would go to Novell, and a 5% administrative fee would be remitted back to SCO. Furthermore, SCO had no authority to initiate new deals with SYSV without Novell's authorization.
However, Sun bargained with the authorized agent. It was not Sun's job to make sure Darl was fufilling his contractual obligations.
Novell has asked for the money from this and the MS deal. THis means they are not trying to kill it.
paper towel5
Yes, many people actually do run Sun Solaris 10 on non-Sun hardware in production. What would you rather be running for your production on your brand new HP Opteron or IBM Opteron server: Redhat Linux or Sun Solaris 10?
Please note that you can actually buy Sun support for non-Sun hardware and that vendors are certifying their hardware for Sun Solaris 10.
Sun *NEVER* bought their rights off SCO - they bought drivers. Sun bought their rights off who ever owned SVR4 20+ years ago - IIRC Novell who bought UNIX Labs. Sun bought the most extensive rights to the code one could possibly have.
The issue in question *SHOULDN'T* be Sun but Microsoft who purchasing IP rights to UNIX for their Services for UNIX. Sun already bought them 20 years ago. The issue at play are sales of IP by SCO to third parties.
While SCO didn't own Unix, it did have a right to sell licenses. The recent court order seems to regard the sale to Sun as valid:
Finally, the court concludes, as a matter of law, that the only reasonable interpretation of all SVRX Licenses includes no temporal restriction of SVRX Licenses existing at the time of the APA. The court further concludes that because a portion of SCO's 2003 Sun and Microsoft Agreements indisputably licenses SVRX products listed under Item VI of Schedule 1.1(a) to the APA, even if only incidental to a license for UnixWare, SCO is obligated under the APA to account for and pass through to Novell the appropriate portion relating to the license of SVRX products. Because SCO failed to do so, it breached its fiduciary duty to Novell under the APA and is liable for conversion.
It's possible that Novell could act as Microsofts legal sockpuppet, but as we have seen, those who act as Microsoft proxies are doomed to failure.
The management of Novell should now deal aggressively with Sun's dirty triangulation. Novell should demand huge royalties on any UNIX code that Sun is using in Solaris. The royalties should be sufficiently large to ensure that any Sun server solution using Solaris is more expensive than any generic non-Sun x86 server solution using Linux.
Sun went to SCO for a SysV license because SCO WAS NOVELL'S AGENT. Want to bet Sun paid for that license for the express purpose of being able to open Solaris source up?
Sun probably just didn't want to get involved in the SCO/Novell/IBM war, so they paid the money for the license and just kept quiet. Anything else would have been misinterpreted in some way. Obviously.
Open-sourcing Solaris seems more of an end-of-life abandonware move than a product line.
That's the classic FUD statement that has been made with regard to many other formerly 'closed' projects which went Open Source. Several previous examples:
Mozilla (Netscape)
Open Office (Star Office)
Just because you think such a FUD campaign may now 'benefit the community' (whatever that happens to mean at any moment) doesn't make it less of a dirty FUD campaign than it has been in the past.
Microsoft says legacy (serial/parallel) ports are bad. They don't obfuscate the hardware enough.
I would be gratified if you could direct me to evidence that a vendor has successfully certified their hardware.
Recently!!
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
SCO possibly sold something to Microsoft and Sun that they didn't own, which is fraud. I'm not sure exactly what the agreements were (some vague unix licenses), but Sun and Microsoft might be able to sue them for that in addition to criminal charges.
Of course, I believe that Sun and Microsoft really didn't buy anything, they were just funneling money to SCO.
Do you have ESP?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Microsystems
Sun is most well known for its Unix systems, which have a reputation for system stability and a consistent design philosophy.
Sun's first workstation shipped with UniSoft V7 Unix. Later in 1982 Sun began providing SunOS, a customized 4.1BSD Unix, as the operating system for its workstations.
In the late 1980s, AT&T tapped Sun to help them develop the next release of their branded UNIX, and in 1988 announced they would purchase up to a 20% stake in Sun.[42] UNIX System V Release 4 (SVR4) was jointly developed by AT&T and Sun; this partnership triggered concern among Sun's competitors, many of whom banded together to form the Open Software Foundation (OSF). By the mid-1990s, the ensuing Unix wars had largely subsided, AT&T had sold off their Unix interests, and the relationship between the two companies was significantly reduced.
Sun used SVR4 as the foundation for Solaris 2, which became the successor to SunOS.
Whoa there... completely off target...
Solaris has had more innovation in the last 5 years than Linux I'd say.
D-Trace, ZFS, Containers - 3 HUGE items - all developed by Sun, then converted to opensource.
Trust me, Sun's got no plans of going anywhere. Solaris will not be abandoned any time soon.
Who is general failure, and why is he reading my hard drive?
Not sure about the x86 world, but Fujitsu have been selling Solaris 10 on their SPARC64 machines for a while. Some of the high-end Sun machines contained Fujitsu SPARC64 chips for a while, but I'm not sure if they still do.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Novell is asking Judge Kimball to force SCO to give the money Sun paid to SCO to Novell. If Novell wins this point then they cannot accept the Sun money and not give Sun what they paid for. So in this case Sun should be OK. Another option for Novell would be to repudiate the SCO-Sun agreement. In this case Novell could not collect the Sun payment, Sun would have no rights to the Novell UNIX code, and Sun would have to sue SCO to get their money back. --------------- Steve Stites
Just like the old 'threat' to BSD that SCO was spouting.
yep. Runs great on my Dell desktop.
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
Hooray for open source software - code that builds our cultural heritage! Hooray for justice.
If Fujitsu runs a Solaris newer than 8 I'm not aware of it.
Besides that's regular Solaris and I'm looking for hardware that will run X86 OpenSolaris.
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
"Does anybody actually run OpenSolaris in production on non-Sun hardware? "
I'd run it if they sent me the DVD I requested.
Man is but extension of the 9/11:11\6, four corners, four simultaneous 24 hour days. Cubeless god, jewish god, jews did 9/11:11\6. I have IRREFUTABLE PROOF. Ignorant dumb asses laugh at me, they do not know. 9/11 tragedy was caused by JEWISH LIE and CONSPIRACY.
ZOG means students are EDUCATED STUPID with CUBELESS LINEAR TIME LIE. I have uncovered the truth, the spirit guardians have alerted. 11:11. I DEMONSTRATE IRREFUTABLE PROOF.
* New York City has 11 letters.
* Ramsin Yuseb (The terrorist who threatened the Twin Towers in 1993) has 11 letters.
* 'George W. Bush' has 11 letters
* New York is the State # 11
* The first plane crushing against the Twin Towers was flight #11
* Flight # 11 was carrying 92 passengers Adding this number gives us: 9+2=11
* Flight # 77 who also hit the towers, was carrying 65 passengers Adding this: 6+5=11
* The tragedy was on September 11, or 9/11. Adding this: 9+1+1=11
* The date is equal to the emergency number 911. Adding this: 9+1+1=11
* The total number of victims inside the planes were 254: 2+5+4=11
* September 11 is day number 254 of the calendar year: 2+5+4=11
* After September 11, there were 111 days more to the end of the year.
* The tragedy of 3/11/2004 in Madrid also adds up to: 3+1+1+2+4=11
* The tragedy in Madrid happened 911 days after the tragedy of the Twin Towers.
Better yet, Novell should assign the UNIX copyrights to the Free Software Foundation or the Linux Foundation. Perhaps then they could begin to earn back the trust of the FOSS community.
I hope Novell will take advantage of this and threaten to sue Sun.
I think a good compromise settlement would be to force Sun to place Solaris under a Linux-compatible license so that Linux can reuse whichever bits and pieces of Solaris seem useful.
You'd pick Red Hat over Solaris simply for the sake of package management? I hate to tell you this, but it's not exactly rocket science to figure out how to keep a Solaris system up to date and manage third party software packages on one of those systems.
Solaris, especially on Sun hardware, is a very solid operating system.
You certianly don't live up to your name here, "Professor UNIX".
Fujitsu runs Solaris 9 and 10. I've used them both on Primepower servers. As a matter of fact, in Solaris 10, There was no "Fujitsu" distribution... it was just Solaris. Also, the new APL Line (Replacing the Sun 15-25K line) is a joint venture between Sun and Fujitsu and uses the best parts of both of their high end platforms and is sold by BOTH companies.
Speaking of Sun adding open source to Linux...
Isn't NFS a Sun project? What implications would this have for Novell? I'm not sure if NFS has ties to the original Unix from Dennis R. and co., but it would hurt just about every Linux server distro if somehow NFS were to be entangled to this whole thing. Along those same lines, I just started an OpenSolaris NAS using ZFS, which will probably be connected to my Linux server over NFS (or SMB, depending on the complexity of directory services). Should I be weary that in the future these might not play well together? It would be a shame as we just got ZFS via FUSE, and from what I can tell ZFS really does seem to be the "last word in file systems", as Sun has put it. At least for the near future. Any thoughts from those who have a good grasp on the issues and licensing involved?
If I mod you up, it doesn't necessarily mean I agree with what you've said, sorry.
I'm running OpenSolaris on an IBM x305 file server attached to a 1.6TB RAID array (buy yourself a 10 megapixel camera that also shoots video and you'll need one of those, too...), an x335 DNS/LDAP/Samba server, an x335 DHCP/SunRay server (yeah, my kid's first computers are SunRays...), and an e326m with two dual-core Opteron 280s that I use for programming. For some reason, IBM X-series servers are dirt cheap on EBay as they seem to sell for about half what a comparable HP or Dell goes for, despite the fact that the IBMs IMO are engineered a whole lot better. I picked up an x335 dual-core 3.06GHz Xeon with dual 36GB U320 disks for about $250 including shipping. Hell, brand-new e326m's still sealed in the IBM box are going for under $500, and ones with dual-core Opterons can be had for $600 - and like I said, that's new, sealed in box.
My third x335 runs CentOS 5, but I'll probably convert it over to Win2K3 server, run turdball, er, terminal server and convert the wife over to a SunRay. You can get SunRay's on EBay for about $5. Put a keyboard, mouse, and monitor on it, plug in the Ethernet and go. Animation over the SunRay sucks, though.
As for Sun hardware, the E3500 in my basement now runs OpenSolaris, too. When it's running anyway, which isn't often because it sucks something like 15 or 20 amps. The Sun 250, would, too, if I were to bother replacing its bad hard drive. But it's a power hog, too, and an old UltraSPARC II or eight just doesn't cut it against dual-core Opterons or ~3GHz Xeons.
As for what OpenSolaris is, it's the next version of production Solaris. The latest version of OpenSolaris that I have (Nevada, build 66) calls itself SunOS 5.11, with a date of October 2007. It's not end of life abandonware, it's beta testing the next version of the production OS.
If those were my only two choices then I'd pick Red Hat. I've never used Solaris 10 for more than anything but messing around, but I've used Solaris 9 and below extensively and frankly, their package management system sucks ass.
My experience with packages on Red Hat has left me of the opinion that I'd rather find the original distributions from wherever Red Hat got them and roll my own distro than deal with the Red Hat Package Manager or anything that uses it ever again. If I didn't have experience with better free UNIX packaging schemes (which, as far as I can tell, means everything else) I might be inclined to assume the whole idea was a scam.
HP: http://h71028.www7.hp.com/enterprise/cache/492635- 0-0-0-121.html?jumpid=reg_R1002_USEN
b s/
EBS supporting IBM x86: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/09/07/sun_ibm_e
OF course, you can always check Sun's HCL, to see whose systems they will support...
http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/hcl/
Solaris 10 Hardware Compatibility List
Solaris Express Developer Edition (OpenSolaris, basically) Hardware Compatibility List
And just because it's not on there doesn't mean it won't run Solaris.
It's said that H-P boast that they have more customers running Solaris on their hardware than on Sun's x86 hardware. Not surprising given that H-P have been in the x86 game much longer than Sun, so have a much larger installed base of x86 systems. H-P (and others) will need Solaris to make good use of their systems.
For all the claims that Linux is a modern and superior OS, Solaris is much more scalable under heavy workloads. Solaris runs happily at 100% utilization for things like big transaction processing systems, whereas Linux on the same hardware collapses under the workload. It's no mean feat to build an OS that can handle big workloads on big multiprocessor systems, and this is becoming more apparent with multi-core/multi-socket systems - something the likes of H-P, Intel and AMD are probably beginning to recognize.
On big systems, Linux has only worked well for high-performance computing applications, e.g., on SGI; in these cases, the OS hardly has any work to do and things like contention in the kernel are much less of a problem. Before someone mentions IBM mainframes, Linux is running in multiple virtual machines on those; it doesn't handle the whole machine.
Tried installing on an older X86 laptop (for experimentation/understanding) today morning. Did not succeed. Successfully installed and used (Novell) SUSE. I think I am losing interest in OpenSolaris after this experience. One more failure to install on good hardware and it is bye bye for me.
Sun paid SCO $10M for those "rights". SCO owes most of that money to Novell (and more). Novell will likely never get their money from SCO and they should make Sun feel some of the pain too. After all Sun failed in their due dilligance with regard to the IP rights they bought. Any competent lawyer can plainly see that there was no written conveyance of the copyrights to SCO. Sun should have known what they were doing. Now they should pay for their mistake and offset some of the huge legal costs that Novell had to bear.
*Weebit does the happy dance!*
Sun paid in full back in 1994, the rumor was that the price was $140 million paid to USL/Novell.
b rowse_frm/thread/75df829a49e688f9/426a4d8b1d3c933e ?lnk=st&q=sun+usl+purchase&rnum=3#426a4d8b1d3c933e
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.unix.solaris/
If you inquire about a Solaris contract for a non-Sun machine, they'll be happy to sell it to you, but you'll also get a pretty good offering on the Sun hardware at the same time. :-)
The support contract is remarkably cheap, and it's clear that they want you to take it so that they can sell you their hardware. Nothing wrong with that, the deals are pretty good, and it's not like you have to buy their machines.
Just because you don't know about them, doesn't mean they don't exist.
This is the real problem with Dell hardware. You never really know what you get. You have to double- and triple-check with the salesman when you place the order so that you get the correct components.
Or, you can get the Sun Opteron servers. A bit cheaper, but much more robust and you know that the hardware will work.
If the desperately litigious SCO, thinking it owned the copyright to Unix, could announce that it found no reason to sue Sun over Solaris, how does it make any sense that the less litigious Novell would sue Sun?
Just because SCO was found to not own the rights to Unix does not mean Sun's OS is suddenly at odds with Unix copyright. In fact, that seems to make no sense at all. Am I missing something huge?
Sun has built more core technologies and released more code open source than almost any other organization.
Sure, but quantity isn't the same as utility or significance. Because of claims like yours, I looked at Sun's actual contributions to the software I use daily, and I know that they have not made any big contributions that are useful to me. Without Sun, Linux would look pretty much the same (only that we might actually have a decent network file system).
Eg. systrace and Andrew Morton's claims that Sun is fracturing the non-windows market. Hey Andrew here's a clue for you, Sun was shipping a non-windows product before Linus ever started work in Linux.
You are so right: Sun was shipping a non-Windows product long before Linux. Now, what did Sun do back then and what was the result? They turned BSD into a proprietary product, talked a lot about openness and how superior their technologies were, and then they fractured the UNIX market and helped Microsoft to market dominance.
There are many indications that Sun is heading down the same path again, only that this time they are targeting Linux. I don't want to repeat that history.
Sun provide a device detection tool which will scan your hardware and should give you an idea of if drivers are available for the various bits of your system.
t .html
http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/hcl/hcts/device_detec
I notice that some nimrod has marked a number of posts "trolling" when they are most definitely not trolling at all.
I think we should definitely all point and laugh at Sun for being stupid enough to be intimidated by SCO. As the previous poster commented, indeed this is poetic justice.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
See the Solaris 10 HCL - in particular the OEM vendors page:
v iews/oem_and_system_vendor_products_all_results.pa ge1.html
http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/hcl/data/sol/systems/
There is plenty of Compaq/HP gear on there, not to mention IBM BladeChassis machines etc. Probably not that interesting for
those on a budget or the slasddot "my whitebox is teh leet" crowd, but for real IT shops it is a reasonable list.
"If everybody is thinking alike, somebody isn't thinking" - Gen. George S. Patton
i hate to bust your bubble pal, but package managment is the least of any big company's concerns when choosing a unix system. specially because is a ROYAL PAIN IN THE ASS to even change a simple configuration on those boxes.
lots of planning and preparation goes on top of this. it involves filling change request forms, getting management approval (implying explaining to a non-techie boss what that thing does), meetings with managements, supliers and users, you need a full backup of the server in some cases, other departments must be on stand by just in case... it's burocracy gone mad.
the result is that patches and fixes are not installed that often, even security patches only get installed when there's a clear and present danger and no workarounds (disabling the service, changing configs, etc.) are found.
if you ever get to work for a fortune 100 company, (like my last 3 jobs as unix admin) you'll understand what i mean.
not to mention that your comparison was the most unfortunate one. RPM sucks even more than solaris pkg tools. if you have to wade through dependency hell during a change and it ends delayed, you're toast. the next change you'll be making will be to your resume.
What ? Me, worry ?
The issue in question *SHOULDN'T* be Sun but Microsoft who purchasing IP rights to UNIX for their Services for UNIX. Sun already bought them 20 years ago. The issue at play are sales of IP by SCO to third parties.
And with the ruling Novel has the UNIX license, and SCO does not this is why Microsoft went for a Novell alliance. They know SCO is on it's last legs and yet need to keep enough alliances going for the next concept Microsoft borrows.
Microsoft knows it's kernel is a PoS, they are just milking it for what it is worth. Even they know in their think tanks that someday they need a clean kernel with full memory protection and pre-emptive multitasking. They know the message passing is a '60s kind of thing and shoe horning in stability will fail in time as the current windows kernel is a nightmare mess.
Heh, SUN paid for a bridge, Novell might even get that money as it is rightfully theirs. They cannot take the money AND sue SUN. If Novell doesn't let SUN to do what they want for that money, Novell must give back the money they didn't even take from the corpse of SCO.
Patents Drive Free Software as Hurricanes Drive Construction Industry
1. Those lists have been updated recently.
2. You apparently want some vendor to suck your dick while you piece together a machine out of random parts.
So, yeah, you're an idiot. And a rude one at that.
They bought the rights FROM ATT (prior to the sell off to Novell). I believe it was a 100 million. And yes, IIRC, the press said that Sun had full rights to the source code for THEIR use. It was a 1 time fee. BUT ATT had just concluded a lawsuit with BSD and ATT was trying to close the source code, so I SERIOUSLY doubt that it included the right to distribute the source. In addition, it is VERY doubtful that McNeally paid SCO 20 million for some USB drivers. So I am guessing that Sun had it set-up to allow them to open the source (as well as fund anything anti-linux). All in all, Sun will surely be working closely with Novell, either in a deal or in the courts. They will also have to explain their actions shortly to Novell, as in why did they fund SCO on this? I do not like the deal that Novell cut with MS, but it was not designed by Novell to undercut Linux or the other distros. OTH, Sun OBVIOUSLY was funding SCO to knock the legs out from under Linux.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Actually the company I work for is running a little over 50 Solaris10 boxes in production running on x86 hardware, and as time goes on we look to replace all our Linux boxes with Solaris. Yes I am a long time Linux fan and yes I still think it is a great OS. So why the change? It is easier to manage in a data center and has a lot of tools and features that Linux doesn't have like zones and the zfs file system. Also the EOL policy for Solaris is longer. I would rather not have to rebuild an OS on a box because of lack of updates before the hardware is either outdated or dies.
Yes they are lacking in the driver department but they are working on that and have made big improvements in the last two years on that.
No I am not saying that one is better an the other. Yes I am still a big fan of Linux. All I am saying is yes we use it and love it and for our needs it fits best.
Please remember that over 25% of the code in your Linux box was given freely to the Linux Community by Sun Systems. Remember they are buying up the IP patents that are owned by others and Open Sourcing these patents.
Yes a long time ago they were worse than MS about being propriety but you have to give them respect for their change it heart. They have seen the change and changed with it. Something MS has failed to do.
You could look into D or Python (or Ada, or possibly even C++...but I'm less sure about that). They all support the kind of overload that you want, with differing advantages and drawbacks. Except for speed, Python is the best choice. If you want speed, then of the languages that I know the best choices are D or Ada (and I prefer D).
... but there's no way I would know.
... but I don't think you would find the syntax acceptable. So I left it to the end as well. I'm not sure about the speed of various Schemes, but it would have essentially the same syntax problem as LISP.
N.B.: There's more than one D, so the particular one that I mean is: http://www.digitalmars.com/d/index.html
With Python you might get the speed that you need either via Pyrex or NumPy (or possibly it's now PyNumeric). This actually operates via calls to C libraries, but they get hidden by syntactic sugar.
D and Ada are type sensitive to varying degrees. (Ada tends to be verbosely fanatic about it.)
I'm not familiar with Mono, because I don't trust it not to have embedded MS IP of some sort (patents probably, if anything). It's probably safe enough...but I tend to be nervous. That's also why I won't have anything to do with Novell unless through an intermediate who has their own lawyers. Probably there's no MS IP
And since I won't let MS products be installed, (Not since I read the last MS EULA!) I can't speak WRT C#.
Another possible choice is ObjectiveC or ObjectiveC++. That gives more flexibility at run time than C or C++ (well, unless you wriggle and turn a lot) with good compatibility. (C libraries are directly callable, and I believe that C++ libraries are as well.) I'm not sure that you could redefine the primitive operators over class operations...but I believe that you could. The major problem with ObjectiveC/C++ is that there doesn't seem to be any significant amount of tutorial material. Still, every legitimate c program is a legitimate ObjectiveC program, so you could learn slowly. And it transfers easily to the Mac. (I'm less sure how well it runs on MSWind.)
I didn't yet mention Ruby or Smalltalk. Both of them can do what you want (though the Smalltalk syntax is peculiar...and might be unacceptable). Unfortunately, Ruby is slower than Python, even though I like the language design better. Smalltalk comes in a variety of forms, but tends to be faster than pure Python code. Unfortunately, it's far easier to link to an external library from Python. Smalltalk tries to be a closed system. So I basically left both of these out of the discussion.
Then there's LISP and Scheme. A good LISP would be essentially as fast as C
If interpreted Java is fast enough for you (you didn't mention speed as a consideration), then you should probably give Python a look-see. It's a bit slower when you're using pure Python code, but a lot of stuff is done via library calls, which are generally optimized C code...and thus quite fast.
Otherwise I'd give D strong consideration.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Don't debate. Try both. Then choose the one you like best.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
I believe since Sun and AT&T jointly developed SVR4 back in the late 80's that Sun bought the full rights back when AT&T still owned the whole smash; before UNIX Labs, Novell, etc. You better believe Sun has the ability to point out they or AT&T wrote every line of possible conflicting code.
Sun has 2 trees for Solaris, the OpenSolaris tree has been picked over with a fine tooth comb by the lawyers. The second tree is proprietary code that only goes into Solaris where Sun tracks who owns what. The second tree is getting smaller as they replace encombered code with freely developed replacement.
See opensolaris.org for details.
slashdot is the home of the linux fanboys, remember ;-)
Sig out of date
Oh man, don't!!! Most people here are parent-basement living kids who's religion is Linux... Your well-balanced, and informed comments won't go down well here!
Sig out of date
As I remember it. Altos was hired by USL to merge Unix System. Sun was hired to merge Berkeley code into Unix. Finally Sun was hired to merge the resulting code and that became SVR4. USL was only a management front and did no coding. Novel bought that management organization.
http://techupdate.zdnet.com/techupdate/stories/mai n/Could_Sun_hold_a_key_to_SCO.html/ as an example. For those too busy to read, Sun purchased "expansive" rights to Unix from USL shortly after it was acquired by Novel ... long before the deal between Novell and SCO. So Sun's rights predate SCOs. No doubt the legal team imaginative enough to craft the last lawsuits won't let a little matter of time and priority deter them ... but one imagines the Courts would.
Is that MIT X11r5, X11r6, XFree86, X.org, MetroX? Do you use just Gnome libraries, or do you have Qt and some KDE libs for certain applications? What window manager do you use: Evolution, WindowMaker, AfterStep, BlueCurve, GNUStep? Is your X framebuffer with a card-specific driver in the kernel, or is your card driver in the X server?
c /k3b/CUPS+hplip/vim/bash/VLC/VLC/Kghostview/Kghost view/KOrganizer+Karm/urpmi/gcc3/startitup/iptables /Basille+SELinux+custom/ALSA/kernel.org/AfterStep/ KDE/X.org/Apache/Postfix/MySQL/Postgres/Samba/gpm/ GNU+BSD+Mozlla+Apache+Postfix+CCL-SA+Commercial/Li nux.
That still leaves out browser, email client, news reader, office applications, text editor, file manager, cd/dvd burning software, printing system, firewall management software, shell, video player, audio player, Postscript viewer, PDF reader, PIM, and a bunch of other end-user options that could be named if one was particular enough.
I guess you could also specify the package manager you use, the compiler your stuff is compiled with if you compile packages yourself, which system init option you use, firewall kernel option, hardening options, and which audio driver platform. Whether you use a distro kernel, a stock kernel.org kernel, an Alan Cox kernel, or a locally customized kernel might be worth noting, too.
One of my systems is a Firefox+Opera+Seamonkey/mutt/tin/OpenOffice/vim/m
Now let's see you get a magazine to put that much detail in an article every time a system is mentioned.
ASUS K8N-DL is supported out of the box. Everything in it works with bundled drivers except for possibly the nVidia SATA controller (I haven't tried.) But no worries, as there is also a SIIG in there, which is.
I currently run this board in production with 2x Opteron 265's with 1GB RAM per core. It's quite nice.
I used to be a ubuntu user earlier, I still maintain my ubuntu environment but the default has long been replaced by Solaris Express since a year. It is an amazong OS. Give it a shot. -Shiv
Solaris package management may not be the best or cleverest, but it gets the job done.
Companies with thousends of machines (cough, cough, cough) can happily manage their packages in Solaris, so not chosing Solaris for this particular reason sounds like a lazy excuse for not doing your homework.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=SCOX
Whoever bet that SCOX would be below 50 cents before noon has won, even before the market opened !The announcement this monday morning before the markets opened was:
In Soviet Russia, our new overlords are belong to all your base.
It's one thing to be a rabid fanboy, but something else to be THAT ignorant. ;-)
Sun actually purchased the rights in 1991.