Sun Says OpenSolaris Will Challenge Linux

E5Rebel writes "Sun Microsystems has ambitious plans for the commercial and open source versions of its Solaris operating system. The company hopes to achieve for Solaris the kind of widespread uptake already enjoyed by Java. This means challenging Linux. 'There's an enormous momentum building behind Solaris,' according to Ian Murdock, chief operating platforms officer at Sun, who was chief technology officer of the Linux Foundation and creator of the Debian Linux distribution. Isn't it all a bit late?"

Comments

Too late, too irrelevant

[KiloByte]

Java? Wide uptake? Surely, you jest.

I see how much Sun loves Java -- they rename everything to "Java This" or "Java That", like, an ancient version of Gnome they ship suddenly became "Java Desktop", their stock ticker is now JAVA instead of SUNW, but this doesn't mean Java means anything more than another pet language of choice. Python, Tcl, Ruby, etc, etc -- they do have their use, have their own niche following, but neither is well-fit for a client language.

Java tried this, and failed. It's quite rare now to see any client programs written in Java; it's a bad idea to install a huge framework just for a single program (yeah, Azureus, but that's pretty much the only big one), and Sun doesn't have as much clout as Microsoft, so there's no pushing .NET in the core OS. Java is quite widely used as a scripting language for web servers, but this doesn't make it any more important than PHP (bleh), ASP (bleh*2) or anything of the kind -- everyone uses what he feels most comfortable with, and Sun invested quite a lot into pushing Java into schools.

For Solaris, they slept for the last ~10 years, I'm afraid. Having met a couple of Solaris servers then, and having taken a look at their much-hyped gratis mailings, I hardly see any difference. On the other hand, getting used to a new version of a Linux or even BSD distribution makes you feel like the older one is all musty, obsolete and unusable.

Oh, and Sun still didn't put a POSIX-compatible shell as /bin/sh