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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?"
OpenSolaris
Won't a new one tear us,
Unless they first
Have Ballmer chair us,
Great documentation--
Now that could scare us.
Burma Shave
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
What's the point of an operating system when you've got Java running on top of whatever is there? The OS is just a bootloader for the Java VM.
Sun's interest in pushing two separate platforms is baffling.
The kind of Solaris penetration sun really wants is at the corporate
level. There are a lot of Sun Servers out there so they'd like to increase
that further in companies who want cheaper hardware than the sparcs.
From a TCO point of view, add Solaris X86 to your existing Sparcs isn't
that big of a deal and Sun has made pretty good progress in making Solaris
10 much more on equal footing with Sparc based Solaris so now you only
need admins who are expert at one OS, you've got easier compatibility
with your software etc. Then from there I see a push to companies who
don't use Sparc hardware.
I don't think so, but then again, I'm still holding out for an Amiga comeback.
Consider MS with IE and then Mozilla with Firefox.
MS Word vs WordPerfect 5.1
What about Linux, itself was probably considered "too late" or such at the time "Everything's been invented/done".
What about when Redhat was top dog - who'd have thought that Ubuntu would come along and change a lot of things.
The point is, it's [almost] never too late, just sometimes you have a harder job ahead of you.
What can Sun Micro Systems bring to the table that rest of the Linux could not? Its name, some kind of relationships with corporations and provide "not a bunch of amateurs in their spare time, this OS is backed by professionals" kind of sales talk. But that niche is already occupied by IBM. As for SUNW's vaunted professionalism, they fumbled the lead they had in unix and are struggling to keep up. As for their corporate vision, these guys never realized until it was too late, that Windows OS was the loss leader, in grocery store parlance, and the real deal is the vendor lock in office documents, email addresses and calender applicaions. MSFT might have fumbled many balls and lacked vision on the technical side of the market, but when it comes to business side, MSFT has been nothing less than visionary in gunning for monopoly and achieving it. Now SUNW is going to take on Linux? yawn. Nothing to see here, move along, folks.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
I was first going to write a blurb saying "Great! How can we lose! Let the best OS win!"
But on second thought, I can think of one bad scenario: OpenSolaris and Linux end up with different groups of users, where-as they previously would have mostly used Linux. This makes it harder for *either* open-source OS to get enough market share to attract ISVs, manufacturers writing device drivers, etc.
I guess the best of both worlds is if Linux and OpenSolaris kind of merge, resulting in a single OS with the strengths of both (for example, the goodness of getting dtrace into Linux).
No, I don't think it's too late at all. If it's a decent operating system and has certain advantages over Linux (regardless as to whether or not Linux in turn has certain other advantages over it), then it will eventually catch on. In the world of software, it's never too late to introduce competing technologies.
(Just missed the FP, but still)
this chance was missed a few times. The last one was when Nexenta was treated like a mother-in-law.
If SUN wanted acceptance instead of l33t, GPL(v3) would have been the order of the day.
As long as they dangle about with CDDL, they might as well pass away. Don't get me wrong, CDDL ('cuddle') is quite a good FOSS licence. But it has its problems with a coexistence side-by-side to GPL. And GNU is, love it or hate it, thousands of great applications; and moreover a licence accepted by the majority of FOSS developers.
I hope(d) Ian would have the power to apt-ing Solaris, but he doesn't seem to. And when you read the OpenSolaris lists, you find as much ego-tripping as on OpenBSD or Mac. They rather sink with pkgadd.
And I cry for them, yes, because SunOS is the greatest kernel around, with limited hardware support. Back to licencing and square one.
I remember when Solaris was going open source and everybody was saying how they would over take Linux... well, it hasn't happened... not even close. So why the optimism from Sun now?
Meh.
The Judean People's Front?
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
No its the Peoples Front for Judea
Old COBOL programmers never die. They just code in C.
Deleted
as long as Linux distros and Solaris play nice together. An open source solaris can only be good for the OSS community as a whole and will hopefully guarentee compatibility
Solaris has known stability in certain supportable configurations. Linux supposedly does too. I know that statement will get a lot of hackles raised but just hold on. I am a continuous Linux user since 0.99pl8 and I love it. But, as time moves on I see some instabilities creeping in as complexity rises and hardware moves on.
One of my boxes downstairs, a recent machine (less than 6 months old) running stock Debian (amd64) without a mod to the sources.lst has a slight instability (almost certainly in a driver) and crashes every week or so.
Now, one could say that I should replace the hardware which has the suspect driver (always seems to be on a disk access). Or I should get on the Debian lists and report it. If it was a Sun Solaris box I would know that the hardware I had was (or was not) supported. The word 'Supported' in the Linux world really (I am sorry) does not mean as much as it does to Sun.
Now I have other Linux boxen, (a little older) which have uptimes of over a year. No problems. But on odd occasions as this I would like to have stability and I can't find it. (Read, maybe don't have the time at the moment). And I need the box UP. I can't rebuild it AGAIN! I am on the 6th distro in an attempt to gain stability. That's an aside.
In Sun's world. You pay a little more for your hardware and 'Know' it is going to work.
...or *BSD, or Linux. I am working with Linux, I am developing under Linux. My programs compile for *BSD and for Linux. I am pretty sure they would compile and run as fine under Solaris. So why am I using Linux? It has the best driver support, the best documentation, the best software support. Would I change when *BSD or Solaris get the same quality of support? No, why should I? They have to be better and solve at least one problem, I have with Linux. Currently I have no problems with it. Would I change if there was a problem, which one of the others solve? At once. As I said, I could not care less, which one of the three I use.
So please could anyone tell me, what are the USP's of Solaris?
Java? Wide uptake? Surely, you jest.
No, hardly.
It's quite rare now to see any client programs written in Java;
Not in the business world, where Swing clients are probably second only after Visual Basic. Sun is also currently putting a lot of effort into improving the JVM desktop experience.
Being bitter is drinking poison and hoping someone else will die
After looking at newer Solaris offerings, one thing that struck me as a good option is to use Solaris as my Host/Hypervisor OS, and use Linux within Xen VMs on top of Solaris. You get Solaris advantages at the root { ZFS, Solaris Zones, Stable Unix platform, good management tools } while still running any instances of Linux I want, enclosing my services in lightweight Linux VMs.
Last time I checked, Xen was not fully ready for prime time on Solaris. But, that was quite a while ago. If it's Xen is stable, and has good management tools, Solaris would make a good hypervisor. For security reasons, I think it's also nice to have different OS's in the hypervisor and VMs -- making it less likely a single exploit can rip through all layers.
Wait a moment, I thought we were the People's Front for Judea?
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Splitter!
Help! help!, the termites are eating my DRAM!!!
I can do XFS too (I know you made a mistake, and mean ZFS). However, I will point out: /mnt/t/something 16T 1.1M 16T 1% /mnt/t/t /mnt/t/something 17100669952 1056 17100668896 1% /mnt/t/t
s ystems). I just have a hard time having enough storage to build such a filesystem. The biggest real block device (not sparse) I have readily available not on GPFS is an 8 TB ext3 filesystem.
$df -h .
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
$df -k .
Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
I just ran this on my laptop (an 'average' system, though I assume your system with 16 TB of storage is not really 'average'. I too can have big block devices with a single filesystem, big deal. Go commercial, ala GPFS and you can do bigger (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_file_
ZFS's power is not the filesystem size. It unifies a lot of things historically in different layers. I.e. software raid, storage pools, dynamic new filesystems, long term snapshotting. Most of these can be done without ZFS, but the creating filesystems and long-term snapshotting can be done with such ease and efficiency when all the 'layers' work together, and that is what ZFS brings to the table. I will say ext3cow would give me the single feature that most appeals to me about ZFS, and the rest I can do using LVM and such.
In the end, ZFS is the single point that tempts me in general about Solaris, but I'm not about to jump platforms when I know enough 'tricks' to get 'good enough' out of my existing platform.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Windows + .NET
Open Solaris + Java
Linux + ????
Basically leaves Linux as the bastard step-child with no framework of their own. They kind of have MONO...and they DO have java....but how long til "incompatibilities" start popping up, now that Sun is pushing into the OS market?
Sun has done an excellent job of astroturfing. I know a lot of technical people who have tried it once again, and got the 'neat' factor of ZFS, was not that impressed with DTrace (we know how to do most of this sort of stuff in linux already), and containers, well, are nothing unique to the platform. So ZFS remains the cool thing that, while Linux has facilities to kinda-sorta get there, can't get there as smoothly and flexibly. Meanwhile, they were bitten by a distinct lack of drivers, and their random whitebox platform they used to evaluate was being strangely flaky in the face of Solaris when it seemed solid with Linux.
So on the technical front, there remain kinks to work out. In the meantime, Linux has incredible momentum, incredible talent in the market, and from a business standpoint, is in an advantageous position. Linux has more corporate backing (you want serious software support for Solaris, you have only Sun to choose really, while in Linux, well, at least Novell and RedHat are serious software support contenders, and more hardware vendors embrace Linux than Solaris).
The other sad thing was the Solaris platform package management. Nexenta was a refreshing thing to evaluate, but looking at the community at large it seems Nexenta gets the shaft. It's all up to Indiana to see if they can pull off a well-accepted, decent package/repository system. I have to admit, this is by *far* the biggest thing Linux platforms have going for it (apt/yum) and very much outweighs the benefits of ZFS (it's like apples and oranges, true, but when you have to pick one or the other...). Of course, the Nexenta situation points to them not pursuing the other thing they need to be a Linux contender, they'd have to allow other companies to have control and be able to provide software support on their own without any help or money exchange with Sun themselves. The question is if they did that, would Sun's share of the Solaris market still be more than the current Solaris market in the face of a dominant Linux market, and I really have no idea. They might just have to lose out on Solaris to make it have a chance, and that really gets them nowhere. It's a fine line to walk and it wil be interesting to see what they do to try to pull it off.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Back when linus released linux as open/free software, there were no other choices for a free operating system:
- Minix had switched policy to 160$ for the diskettes.
- The BSDs said that they were going to go free, but the board of directors didn't want to lose potential profits and that was constantly delayed.
- MS-DOS is not an operating system.
We were in a deadend. Linux was the right thing at the time.
*After* linux took off, the others got scared and as a *reaction* to linux, started giving out open/free operating systems. The BSD alliance in fact went for "totally free -- you can rip it off and sell it and never give back".
But the thing is, all these moved happened in REACTION to linux. We wasted a lot of time and money hacking device drivers for linux without any documentation. Now that our efforts have succeeded they want us to give it up and go fix Solaris bugs and write device drivers for it? Or fragment the community of hackers?
Sorry. Been there, done that. Too late now.
Bloody Romans!
If OpenSolaris sees adoption on low end machines, it would provide an incentive to enterprise level customers to go the whole hog and buy Sun hardware to run it on. What could be better from a corporate point of view than having a single vendor to go to for all your support and other issues, not to mention that my experience of Sun support is pretty damn good.
According to Johnathan Schwartz of Sune twork_effect
".. Java runs on more devices than Microsoft Windows, Linux, Solaris, Symbian and the Mac combined. Nearly 4 billion devices at this point, from smart cards to consumer devices, DVD players to set top boxes, medical equipment, all the way up into the majority of the world's transactional systems and 8 out of every 10 cellphones sold."
http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/fueling_the_n
...After years of migrating most of our datacenter operations from Solaris & IRIX environment to Linux, we have pretty much migrated everything back to Solaris. Reasons? Cost - Solaris licenses are free. Support is good, and also relatively inexpensive. Cheaper than RedHat Enterprise. Stability - We're talking interface stability, backwards compatability, etc. Storage - Linux's storage subsystems are still a joke. A hodgepodge of filesystems, and don't even get started on enterprise storage technologies such as fibre channel & multipathing, where the linux solution requires a spool of duct tape, a pack of chewing gum, and some string. Compatibility - Solarisx86 has had no problems running on any enterprise-grade server hardware (Dell, IBM, Sun). Many complain about Solaris not having the "driver base" of Linux -- but the question is, would you really want to run that hardware in your enterprise?
Wake me up when Sun has:
* Has as much open drivers as Linux has;
* When it has ALSA (I know, it sucks sorta, but it works at least);
* When it has very vibrant and lively developer and user community;
* And when you don't have to release such PR to say 'momentum is building behind OpenSolaris'. I know hyping is sometimes quite cool, but it is just sick.
People hype about ZFS. But do really there are mass defection to OpenSolaris because of that? I don't.
user@ubuntubox:~$ stfu This server is going down for shutdown NOW!
1.) Ditch the inhouse CLI tools - they suck and will never catch up with GNU. Maintaining them is pointless. Use the full spectrum of GNU CLI tools.
2.) Use a pimped zshell as shell with a prime quality default setup and some good-looking, neat tutorials to get the Bash crowd in line for it.
3.) De-suckify the entire grafical desktop stack, unifing GTK and QT with the same, one and only default theme that looks good.
4.) Use APT as distribution system.
5.) GPL Solaris and remove the distinction between Solaris and OpenSolaris.
6.) Build a marketing army to push Solaris as "Mac OS X" for all non-Apple computers and 'the better open Unix variant / the better Linux' at the same time.
There's only one big problem in all this: Sun. They are a technology driven company. Gigs like Apple or Canonical (Ubuntu) are vision driven and have a single boss who's considered king. They have a vision and they convey it to any opinion leader in the industry they care about.
Suns staff wouldn't know a well designed desktop or a constently marketed brand if you showed it in their face. Just look at the video presentations from JavaOne. Anyone delivering such a presentation at Apples MacWorld would lose his job the next day. Sun is putting out CEO computable marketing babble and if at all they will only come through half way.
Mind you, Solaris overtaking Linux is possible. Theoretically. Solaris has the prime advantage of not having an image torn to tiny bits and pieces by a thousand distributions - if Sun would do all the things mentioned above they could seriously capitalize on this distinction to Linux. But as I mentioned allready, they lack the vision and conceptual consitency to really pull through with it. That's my experience anyway.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
It's been two years and still there is no self-hosting OpenSolaris distribution. Again, there is no self-hosting OpenSolaris distribution. Again, there is yet to be ANY self-hosting OpenSolaris distribution. Not Nexenta, not Belenix, not Schillix, and sorry but Solaris Express is not open nor freely redistributable.
Source or no source, if that damn thing can't even be made to be self-hosting, and the resulting product freely-redistributable, then it can't even be compared with Linux, much less overtake it. Enough with the smoke and mirrors already
I fell for this hype two years ago when all the rage about Solaris 10 came out. Here's the deal: ZFS - great. DTrace - amazing. The Solaris kernel - truly exceptional. The userland, installer, package system, and general feel of the OS - horrendously bad ... so awful that it sent all of us who tried it screaming back to Linux and BSD. And they are still going to stick with that awful package system -- even after Nexenta has done all the work to get Apt working, even after hiring Ian Murdock. And that's the amazing thing: Nexenta is a shining example of a budding community that has filled in almost every glaring gap that Solaris was lacking and rather than gobble it up, Sun has basically patted it on the head like a good little wannabe and marched right on by drunk in its typical, massive, NIH syndrome.
Not a chance. Keep the press releases coming, hire all the Linux people you want, but at the end of the day, I have at least two choices for a self-hosting, community-driven operating system with package systems, installers, and userlands that work now, not in years to come.
And Sun, please stop with the "we're gonna beat Linux" crap. Haven't you learned by now that that doesn't help you. The whole "us verses them" mentality has no place in the community, and just makes you look like an ass. Linux earned its place. Earn yours, with action, not press releases.
http://uncyclopedia.org/wiki/User:Steve_Ballmer
[To be read in that barely restrained anticipatory baritone half-growl so favored by TV and movie ad voice-overs]:
SATURDAYsaturday, at the WORLD SOFTWARE FEDERATION'S OPEN SOURCE WARS, see Son of Java take on the Mighty Herd of Penguins in a STEEL CAGE GRUDGE MATCH!
Watch as the up and coming challenger ROARS its defiance and CHARGES! Watch as the hoard of cute little defenders mass together TRANSFORMER-LIKE into the implacable foe we know and love!
Will OpenSolaris be able to take the away the WSF crown away from Tux?
Will the Penguin bide its time and then DESTROY the challenger with righteousness like it did with last week's challenger SCO?
Will the lumbering, slumbering giant from Redmond wake up and SPEW OLD CODE to join the fight or will it continue to snooze and pretend NOT TO NOTICE?
SATURDAYsaturday, see the UNMOVABLE FORCE take on the UNSTOPPABLE OBJECT at the OPEN SOFTWARE WARS from the WSF, where YOU the VIEWER are in... connnTROOOLLLLLLLL.........
(Offer not valid in any country according to Microsoft; side effects may include multiple reformattings, several competing discussion groups, too many vaporware announcements on Slashdot, flamewars, and paying different prices for different versions of free software; for external use only, your mileage may vary, do not taunt Happy Fun Ball).
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
... And the Judean Popular People's Front
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
...I'd give him a raise!
I see absolutely nothing wrong with that code, other than you have to be a decent programmer to hack on it...and understand many details about TCP implementation.
Which is totally reasonable, considering what it does! It's a not a recipe database, it's a freakin' protocol stack!
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
If you've ever worked with the brilliant engineers at Sun you know that some of them are top notch. Some very brilliant people there.
However, we also know that Sun likes to sit on their hands. They like to bask in their past accomplishments, sometimes for a VERY, very long time. Also, historically, Sun tends to drop things like a hot potato. Some example of these kinds of things are Solaris, which until 10, was pretty stagnant.... showing no signs of real functional growth, definitely NOT pursuing the desktop in any way. Also consider their Opteron workstations. For example, the w2100z, which is only a few years old, yet over a year ago, Sun pretty much dropped total support for the platform. Also, remember Sun's track record of support x86. 3rd time's a charm?? We'll see.
Sun is brilliant, inconsistent, unreliable, cocky, idle... there are a lot of bad qualities within the Sun culture. Unlike people in the Linux community, Sun engineers are more likely to live inside of a box. Yes, they develop some really neat things inside of that box... BUT because they can NEVER look outside of the box, they are totally unaware of what is happening around them. Up until a year or two ago, I'd say that >90% of all Sun engineers experience with Linux was with Red Hat 5.0. With that said, Sun seems to be interested in their platform again, and they SEEM to moving in the right direction. Will it last? History says no.
Internally, a lot of the brilliant engineers at Sun are very tied to the long standing Sun goal of global domination. If you remember the late eighties when Sun made their bid to capture all of Unix (and fortunately failed), then you know that this is a company that believes they are the ONLY player. This hinders Sun somewhat in that their platform isn't the best one for integrating with a whole lot of disparate technologies and platforms. Again, Sun is pretty clueless about systems outside of their realm. Sun's best friend is Sun. Their best partner is Sun. All is Sun at Sun. Very similar to another company located in the NW of the USA.
Sun likes to TALK. They will SAY just about anything at anytime... often contradicting what they said only a few months earlier. So... beware. Sun is a company of promises, but not highly valued promises.... cheap promises that aren't worth much.
Will OpenSolaris compete against Linux. Certainly. Do they have the technical know-how to pull it off? Certainly. Are they more technically savvy than Linux developers? I'd say yes. Are they lazy? Yes. Are the unreliable? Yes. Are they untrustworthy? Yes.
This is how I see Sun. I love them... but I love some of the Microsoft engineers as well (and IMHO, there's more to fear from Sun than from Microsoft... fear Microsoft's money, but fear Sun's tactics).
"Isn't it all a bit late?"
So you assume the wold is closer to it's end than it's beginning? No, there are thousands of years still to go. we are only just beginning with computers. It is hardly "late".
Most end users could not tell the difference between Solaris and Linux. Users interact with the graphical desktops system, web browsers and text editors. Most sys admins deal with the server software, like Apache or the shell. All of this is exactly the same on both Linux and Solaris. The differences are closer to the kernel and how each handles virtualization and the file systems. Thinks most users don't know much about.
Today I think your hardware drives the choice between Linuux and Solaris. If you need high end SPARC hardware Solaris is the way to go but Linux runs better on commodity PC hardware. And Linux has been ported to embedded processors and I doubt Solaris ever will reach for the low end
... on big servers but not on just about anything else. Solaris is the flat-bed 18 wheeler of OSs. It scales well are machines with a lot of processors, it has good supported drivers for "big" hardware like fiber drive arrays, there's good support from Sun and third party providers and, most importantly from a Linux prespecitive, it will be easy to GNU-ize the system to get "GNU/Solaris". But it will be very hard to supplant Linux on Pee-Cees. If you think you have problems with wireless and suspending on your laptop you can forget running Solaris on it. With Solaris you have to buy the hardware to fit the OS whereas Linux is the best *nix for commodity hardware.
Let me go kinda off-topic, I find it odd that when people talk of the wonders of Linux they are rarely talking about the kernle itself.
Take ubuntu for example, all what makes it "Linux for human beings" are actually things outside the kernel.
More and more the user experiences less of the kernel and more of other things like X or a DE
Everybody (In the linux world) seems to have an inclination about gnome or KDE or another de over windows' and name the advantage
Another big group prefers it for open source in general and not really for the Linux kernel itself.
I like "Linux" for most of these reasons, open source, gnome being customizable in a way I like, the unix file system structure and symlinks. None of this is specific to the kernel itself.
And solaris got symlinks, and is unix like, and can run gnome. This said if it gets a GPL license it will get more attention from the world and if it gets a GPLv3 license I might even consider switching.
Copyright infringement is "piracy" in the same way DRM is "consumer rape"
But it just may be slowing it down: