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Why OpenSolaris Failed To Build a Community
xtaski writes "Ted Ts'o, one of the earliest Linux developers, points out some serious flaws in OpenSolaris. There is a severe lack of developers, for one. Apparently, after 3 years, the OpenSolaris 'developer community' is still struggling to get the proper tools for developers to develop! Ted also points out some other flaws which make it clear just how disconnected the executives at Sun are from what's really going on in their 'open source communities.' He notes, 'It was never ... Sun's intention to try to promote a kernel engineering community, or at least, it was certainly not a high priority for them to do so.'"
http://tytso.livejournal.com/
...serious flaws in OpenSolaris. There is a severe lack of developers, for one. Apparently, after 3 years, the OpenSolaris 'developer community' is still struggling to get the proper tools for developers to develop!
No developers or any tools?
At least we won't have to blame another Solaris bomb on George Clooney this time.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
The answer is: "They acted like a bunch of dicks."
OSS is a labor of love. You've got to want to work on the project, and you've got to be able to work on the project.
If you put a big chunk of your time into something and get rudely dismissed, then its hardly likely that you'll continue to contribute.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
I think Sun underestimated the importance of casual users. A lot of times the people choosing an OS for a project (be it enterprise deployment, inclusion with hardware, or just use within IT) go with what they are familiar with and also what their current interests are. When Sun open sourced Solaris, there was a lot of interest from the Linux and BSD communities. A lot of those people decided to download a copy and give it a try. The difficulty these casual users had in grabbing an installable copy and getting it running easily were significant. A lot of people just said, "meh" and moved on. The last time I grabbed a developer preview I still had to fill out a bunch of forms with my personal data then deal with Sun's "download manager" and then spend significant time getting it to install, even within a VM customized to run OpenSolaris in particular. That is still better than it used to be. I only have a success rate of about 50% in getting Solaris to install to date.
For most people I think it is just too much of a hassle and all the developer momentum is on Linux. I guess when Sun thinks about open sourcing Solaris, they see it as a way to try to stop their hardware customers from moving away from Sun, which is fine, but does little to leverage the real benefits of an OSS community such as Linux has been doing for a long time.
OpenSolaris is seriously convoluted as far as modern UNIX systems go. It's like a throwback to the early 90's when everything was a pain in the ass.
On top of that everything has been Javafied and sucks up resources like nothing else. I installed it on an old Blade that I have and it literally took 2 whole days to run the security updates because it was thrashing the machine so hard.
perhaps for many of the same reasons that OpenWatcom it not yet a serious competitor to the GNU Compiler Collection
You have to have a good product before you can have a community. Linux built its early community based on tinkerers and hackers who found it easy to play with. Early Linux distributions, you may recall, were all inclined to integrate well with DOS. Some of them could even be installed _in_ DOS. You could install Slackware and be up and running with an editor and compiler in half an hour. OpenSolaris doesn't follow this example. Using it is a tremendous pain in the ass. Its installer runs for 2-4 hours on the midrange PCs I've tried to install it upon. Once it's "installed" you still have to grope around trying to find familiar tools, which are maybe under UCB or perhaps under GNU subdirectories. It's hard to download software from the 'net and ./configure it. Hardware support is very thin.
To get a hacker community, you have to offer fun. OpenSolaris is simply not fun. It reminds me of work.
Another issue with opensolaris for me was the installation. Being a fairly experienced *nix user, years of sunos, aix, linux, bsd, etc.. under my belt and a fairly competent programmer. I tried quite a few times to install OpenSolaris and there was always some major problem. I never did get a stable system working and finally gave up. That said, this all comes as no surprise to me whatsoever.
"Computers are a lot like Air Conditioners" "They both work great until you start opening Windows"
I tried to download it. Well, it wants all your information, which I wasnt even going to jump through their hoops.. After all, Debian, Ubuntu, Redhat and the rest dont make you do this.
And the hardware support sucks, even for a virtualized environment.
Simply said, Linux works better than Windows, and I enjoy it more. Better hardware support, better fun apps, and things Just Work.
How are the GNU distros built on the opensolaris kernel though? I'm thinking of Nexenta specifically. Seems like it would be the best of both worlds if done right. World class UNIX kernel + world class userland utils. But then if it's just thrown together, it could suck too.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Linux had a community. It was the Minux community that was starting to had problems with patches. Since the base code had a bad copyright, and thus could not be freely transmitted. And patching patches or still more patches just got out of hand. The GPL that Linux used ended all that and allowed Linux to take off.
The OpenSolaris development community is alive and well, vibrant and resourcefull.
There have been a lot of great development work on OpenSolaris in both the x86/x64 and SPARC worlds.
OpenSolaris (much like it's big brother Solaris) does have a list of valid / tested hardware platforms that work out of the box without issue.
If your specific hardware isn't listed and it's fairly well mainstream, document what didn't work, submit it, and it will more than likely get fixed.
I've used OpenSolaris on IBM/Lenovo thinkpads, IBM xServer hardware, SuperMicro / Intel hardware, homebrew systems with rarely an issue.
I've enjoyed the support of the OpenSolaris community as a whole, and found them to be as resourceful as any *inux / bsd community.
It all depends on what you like / want.
For me, gaining the ability to work with Solaris during development cycles to help in some small way guide / assist with the efforts is worthwhile.
Who is general failure, and why is he reading my hard drive?
Yes, because Linux was such an instant success! Wait...no, it wasn't. Everyone forgets that any community, either real or virtual, takes time to build. I believe that counting OpenSolaris as a failed community is premature, at the least.
Oh, for the days when sig's didn't have to be cute...hey, wait a sec.
Schily
Licensing Solaris under the GPL might give it a chance and now is the time. Due to the GPL 2 vs 3 debate it has a good opportunity of becoming the second Gnu kernel.
Agree. One of my biggest problems with GPL v.3 is the rule to stop TiVoization of GPL products, yet the made sure there was a loophole for IBM do the the same thing. It really setup up a double standard, which is very scarry, it is one of those "I beleave in free speach just as long as you say I want to hear" type of thing. If you want IBM to be your friend then you need to allow TiVoization to continue, or if you really don't like TiVoization then IBM should choose wether they should go the FOSS route or not. But what we have now is a double standard. If you are a big supporter then the rules will fit you, if you are not a big supporter then you should punished for your lack of support.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Actually, no.
The lesson here is: If you're going to try to court people active in OSS development, then you're going to have to be nice to them, and you're going to have to let them take some ownership.
IBM is being smart; they're reaping rewards far in excess of their investment. Effectively they've outsourced their development, and while the terms of the "outsourcing" say that they have to share everything that comes out of the project, they're still in a position to steer, and support the product.
I'm not sure how you equate that with "control"; sounds just like more FUD to me.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Yeah, I tried it, but it didn't work with SATA, this was like a year ago...hello? I'm a developer and I can't release something that won't install, or is complicated to install. Why should I waste a bunch of time in 2007 (at the time) on an OS that doesn't support SATA (*cough* Windows XP) out of the box? I was pissed I wasted my time downloading it.
"There are some places man is not ready to go..."
Is it just my observation, or is eldavojohn an idiot?
How coincidental - I've just spent an hour trying to find out what would be the best card to use to support a bunch of SATA II/NCQ disks for a ZFS box based on OpenSolaris and I haven't come much closer to an answer. I decided to give up on it for a bit and read Slashdot for a few minutes...
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
OpenSolaris was an attempt by Sun to throw some sand in the gears of Linux, not to build an open source project. They are doing the same thing with OpenJava.
I mean, who is going to contribute to such a project if (1) Sun engineers keep calling the shots, and (2) anything you contribute needs to be given to Sun so that they can sell it to paying customers?
If Sun were serious about making Solaris and Java open source projects, they'd release them under a single, open source license only. That would probably have to be BSD.
And why not? Solaris was BSD licensed to begin with; it was Sun that made it proprietary.
The disconnection between Sun's executives and the kernel developers might be one reason why OpenSolaris is failing to build a community, but I believe a much larger reason is the lack of any substantial need for OpenSolaris in the market at this point. Currently there is so much development around Linux and the BSDs that these projects fulfill most of the users' needs and offer people looking for an OS something quite compelling, with a developer community in the millions of knowledgeable people. OpenSolaris is first and foremost suffering the chicken-and-egg problem that since there isn't much of a developer community, nobody wants to join, and secondly, since Linux and the BSDs can carry out nearly all the functions that OpenSolaris carries out, there's no compelling need for developers to join that community. Let's face it, Sun should concentrate their efforts on improving Linux and selling distributions and support for their custom distribution. Part of this improvement would entail porting the few advantageous features that Solaris has over Linux currently. OpenSolaris would eventually be phased out completely. Otherwise, they are simply throwing good money after bad.
McCain/Palin '08. Now THAT's hope and change!
You have no idea what's coming with Project Indiana. Installs are vastly faster, and the product is much, much better. Take a look once it's released in May.
Downloading is a royal PITA. The registration is usually a deal-breaker. Almost nothing I've ever run across that's worth anything requires registration for download. However, as a (former) long-time Solaris / SunOS user and major FOSS user, I felt compelled several times to try to circumvent that. But then there's no real way do a network install and othewise week download choice.
That gripe aside, the article is a bit premature. Though time is running out and it could become true if Sun decides to keep downloads off of anonymous FTP, AFS and Bittorrent.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
Only reason I ever used Solaris was for the Sparc hardware. Soon as Sun went Intel based, they where dead to me. Why spend more money for the same level of hardware when the OS has less support then Free(tm) options?
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
We ran Solaris boxes at the government agency I worked for and it was easy as heck to just replace Solaris with RedHat. OpenSolaris = one more free *nix initiative in a world with too many free *nix initiatives as it is.
I guess I disagree. I'm on several of the opensolaris mailing lists, and they're ALWAYS busy. And not just with people from Sun, people from all walks of life. To claim that opensolaris has failed is preposterous to me. I guess I don't quite understand what this mans idea of *success* is, but apparently having users and contributers from both sun and the public abroad isn't *success*.
Is his complaint that the majority of code comes directly from Sun? If so... let me just say *DUH*. If you have thousands of PAID programmers writing code, nobody is going to waste their free time re-writing from scratch. On the flip side, there's TONS of public side-projects, I can think of several around zfs like the automatic snapshots. Or maybe that little side project called nexenta.
I think I understand what his issue is... he doesn't even know what the opensolaris community is. By his definition, one distribution of linux is a measure if its success or failure. Last I checked, when we talk about linux, we're encompassing ubuntu, redhat, suse, slackware, etc, etc, etc... Guess what, the same holds true for Opensolaris.
So... basically, it sounds like a linux zealot casting a stone because he's most likely upset that Sun wont' release solaris under the GPL so that linux devs can start ripping code.
> Using it is a tremendous pain in the ass.
I agree. The structure may be close to the "original" UNIX, but where is all the comfort you are used to from any Linux distro off the shelf? The command line is positively hostile, unless you hunt down and install all the typical Linux tools. And on the GUI front things are not much better. It makes a certain kind of sense to write everything in Java, but unfortunately it is horribly slow, ugly and often difficult to use.
Solaris can be a nice system, but by the time you have added all the missing bits, it is hardly different from a normal Linux system.
A whole different problem which I encountered myself several times is that everyone was allowed to spout of several amounts of FUD without ever being told that they did so. Worse yet; the stories sometimes never changed, but it /did/ have a nice "opensolaris" URL attached which has confused people numerous of times. A classic example right: here.
/etc/default/dhcpagent. I've written the author, I've responded in an OpenSolaris forum that this approach is utter nonsense and I've even seen this URL pop up in a few newsgroups here and there.
I've seen several people rant about how it wasn't possible to tell (Open)Solaris not to automatically update the hostname and as such you had to change a whole lot of system scripts in order to get this behaviour. This specific (officially accepted so it seems) howto even described on several pages how to best approach the patching of the system scripts.
Total Madness! the only thing people had to do was to change
And this is just one obvious example... For me it was enough to stop taking the whole thing seriously (note: I am a veteral Solaris admin & user). And something tells me I wasn't the only one...
What's it going to do that's better than what I've already got with Kubuntu?
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
Nexenta works fantastically - I love it. I would definitely use it for any storage servers, or high availability servers that do your normal Apache/SQL/P* stack.
:)
However, for desktop and non-standard services, it still sucks. If it's not a web server, and it's not a storage server, don't use Nexenta, use Ubuntu Server. Or Debian if you know what you're doing
So where does OpenSolaris fit in? It seems to be an OS lacking a niche.
My blog
Sticking it to Microsoft is just a side-benefit of opening up source and using 'free' licensing schemes to get things moving. You should be in politics. I hear there's a huge void left when Karl Rove left.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
Every starter kit I ordered (3) did not show up at my doorstep. When I questioned Sun, they said it was either at the post office (which it wasn't) or it was "lost in transit, feel free to order another kit at no cost." Cheers, thanks Sun.
MTSBWY
Too Little, Too Late.
There is no need for it now. Linux had already supplanted Solaris
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Give it some time - it's still growing, and while there are some adjustments to be made, the situation is far from catastrophic for its stage of development. After all, there's a number of people contributing to it, and hopefully as processes and community contacts improve, the contributors will increase in number. You have to take into consideration that it's a huge chunk of code and some people are still just lurking to find their place under the sun (no pun intended).
OpenSolaris is an interesting operating system, I don't doubt it'll grow in popularity among developers, however slowly. As I said, give it some time, we have only just begun.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
Sun has an OpenSolaris?
This is news?
It seems Sun is screwing themselves, again, many times over.
-Wouldn't let the opensolaris board call the project opensolaris. Probably a legal quagmire of their own creation. The consequences of that lead to this resignation. http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/ogb-discuss/2008-February/004488.html
-There's this gem, most of which I don't pretend to understand. The punchline is on the bottom. http://cryptnet.net/mirrors/texts/kissedagirl.html
-There's this gem, where even Ian Murdock links in suggesting the difficulty is happening above his level. http://ianskerrett.wordpress.com/2008/02/22/a-solution-for-suns-os-community-problems/#comment-17418
As much potential as Sun continues to exhibit, they still can't turn it into anything.
You know, when Sun started shipping opteron hardware, the sparc stuff didn't vanish into thin air. It's still very much alive and well.
BTW, what white-box linux platform competes with, say, the Sun Fire X4500 + Solaris?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zQ5RLAyA7w
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
> So where does OpenSolaris fit in? It seems to be an OS lacking a niche.
The niche for OpenSolaris is the 64way mission-critical server. Unfortunately, even ultimate kernel hacking enthusiasts rarely have one of those at home.
Its still around, but its not progressed much or sold with the same fervor. Its a dead platform it seems. Course I'd still recommend it for a massive database platform. Nothing says sexy like hot swappable CPUs.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
NetBSD is for people who want to install Unix on their Ukranian made MIPS powered PDA like device.
OpenSolaris was supposed to be for people who really like Solaris but don't much care for official support or something. I've only ever used it once, for a precompiled application that was built on it. It's not really that bad to configure although it did require several trips to google to get everything set up properly. My subjective opinion was that it was kinda slow for the hardware we were running it on.
I read the internet for the articles.
Solaris is alive and well on both SPARC & x86 and this is a "failure"? On what planet? Have you stopped beating your significant other?
Thank God for Solaris. It's stable & reliable which is more than can be said for any of the many Linux distributions I've dealt with.
Contrary to what the Linux fan boys may think, having the system lockup is *not* acceptable *ever*. Linux may be better than Windows, but it's still got a long way to go.
One of the big problems w/ Linux is hordes of "kernel developers". I'd much rather have a few good engineers than an army of amateurs.
rhb
I'm looking forward to it. I like to give OpenSolaris a spin because ZFS isn't bad at all. If the default shell isn't shockingly unusable, I'll be happier than I was with Nevada.
Dude! Install early Slackware in 30 minutes? Surely you jest! Slackware was better than the other distributions (SLS, Yggdrasil) but you still needed to be Unix proficient and fix lots of small things. I set up a bunch of Slackware systems in the early/mid 90s, I know.
OpenSolaris installation today is about where Linux was with early RedHat -- a lot of the time it installs without a problem, but it's a crapshoot whether all your hardware will work. And if you have a somewhat non-mainstream motherboard you're hosed.
I know what you mean about Solaris not being fun. I'm a zealot from way back, I loved SunOS 4.1 which was a true Unix and fun to use. Solaris2 was a big drag and was basically unusable till 2.5 or so, and very un-fun. The upcoming version brings back a lot of that hacking fun: all the usual Gnu tools available, compilers included, better hardware support, etc. etc. And the installer is much better.
When you think about ZFS and DTrace, Solaris today blows everything else away. But it will never catch up with Linux/FreeBSD, for the same reason that Linux will never catch up with OS X (or That Other OS) -- non-technical reasons like network effects. And that's OK, more good OSs are always welcome, choice never killed anybody. (Now if we could just get rid of that one really crappy OS....)
(Posting anonymously because I work at Sun.)
"closing of part of mysql's source is just as big an indicator that they're not committed to being open."
You have that story all wrong. Nothing that previously was opensource is closing. MySQL has released open and closed-source products forever. The decision to make a native backup driver and compression/encryption as plugins to the open/public API had nothing to do with Sun's management. That was decided by MySQL prior to the acquisition.
There is 0 change there. It's an indicator of business as usual for MySQL.
The Tivo stuff is a problem because FSF thinks they can use the license to force a company to change.
That company will not change though, they will quit using the software if thats the only option.
In opensolaris (just like in openoffice) you need to give your copyright rights to Sun.
I can't imagine why anyone would want to take part of a community that requires the copyright assignment. Yeah, the FSF also uses a copyright assignment, but then the FSF is a foundation, Sun is a company. I mean, I write the code and Sun takes my rights??? (yeah, i can fork opensolaris and keep my copyright, but it just shows how community-unfriendly opensolaris is...)
I'm definitively not wasting time with a project that requires copyright assignment to a copmany....
I've used various builds of Project Indiana and I haven't been all that impressed. ZFS and dtrace are still the only big features that I'm interested in, and hardware support is still so far behind Linux and FreeBSD that I wouldn't make the switch for them. Most of the improvements have been focused on fixing deficiencies in Solaris and its archaic tools and don't really provide any incentive to make the switch from Linux or FreeBSD.
I have to admit that I feel the same way. Oh sure, there are some nice things (Solaris Volume Manager, once you get the hang of it, is actually not bad though I still have some gripes), but on the whole it ends up feeling like I have to go and reinvent Linux from scratch just to get the system working like I think it should.
;)
Good thing I used to run Gentoo otherwise that kind of thing might actually tick me off.
"Just a fox, a whisper."
The default shell is bash. At least for users. The default shell for root is the bourne shell sh. From what I've read I believe you can change the default shell for root to what you want without any problems. If I remember correctly this has been possible since at least Solaris 2.8. Somehow they set it up so that /sbin/sh gets loaded during automated tasks when necessary but when you log in as root you get the bash shell if I understood it correctly.
The reason is that sh will always be available, for example even in failsafe mode while bash cannot be guaranteed.
Though if you're logging into root all the time you might really want to rethink your security policy.
Meh. Having been a Solaris, HP-UX and AIX admin, IMHO, there is no better OS for high availability and high scalability than AIX. Solaris is okay, but it's not any better than Linux in that regard. Moreso now that most of the AIX code that counts for HA and HPC are included in the Linux kernel thanks to IBM. ;) In fact, one might (easily) argue that Linux is rather better than Solaris in the clustering department.
My blog
Ooh, we just got one of those in the machine room. If it performs OK during the 60 day trial, I guess they're gonna buy a whole bunch of fully-loaded units.
It's a sexy, if heavy, machine.
Klingon programs don't timeshare, they battle for supremacy.
I never heard of that project, so I google'd it. First hit was schwartz's blog.
"what is project indiana? I can't tell you!"
I closed that browser tab immediately.
Modding Trolls +1 inciteful since 1999
I agree. The structure may be close to the "original" UNIX, but where is all the comfort you are used to from any Linux distro off the shelf? The command line is positively hostile, unless you hunt down and install all the typical Linux tools. And on the GUI front things are not much better. It makes a certain kind of sense to write everything in Java, but unfortunately it is horribly slow, ugly and often difficult to use. try adding
Since Java 1.5 I haven't found Java slow. I've done some gui stuff but mostly work on web applications where I find the speed very good. Using my own home grown web application framework I've even clocked faster than PHP in a test I did where both apps did the same simple thing. Actually, the java application was doing more, like checking security constraints as well. Solaris can be a nice system, but by the time you have added all the missing bits, it is hardly different from a normal Linux system. DTrace, ZFS, predictive self healing, Zones, Crossbow, ability to use the Sun Compiler Tools for free which generate code that runs faster than gcc, especially in 64 bit mode, and more.
I'm using Solaris becauses Zones do what I need quickly and easily with hardly any overhead. The system auditing tools and resource management allow me to do things that would be very difficult or impossible to do in linux. ZFS is just awsome.
The last I checked in with the Nexenta project they were in violation of the GPL because the Sun license IP conflicts directly with the letter of GPL. When I asked on list, I got no response. Huh. Imagine that.
Here's a link to somewhat inflamatory summary of their license issues. Look for the comment titled "Nexenta devs = liars and thieves" http://www.osnews.com/comments/12569
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
> nobody really knows what NetBSD is about
Running on everything and having really elegant source code.
> So where does OpenSolaris fit in?
A stable ABI, with extensible kernel constructs that don't require rejiggering the ABI every couple weeks. You write your solaris driver once. Ever.
If Sun had chosen GPL, then direct code sharing with Linux.
If Sun had chosed a BSD license, then there could be direct exchange of code with a BSD OS.
Picking CDDL was design to keep the control, but I did not help spread its use.
I spent over a week trying to get Open Solaris build 85. Sun just doesn't get the free distribution thing. You have to register and log in to the Sun Download Centre, from where you can download the CD or DVD images. They try to persuade you to get the Sun Download Manager which is some Java app that gives you pause and resume buttons for the download.
I tried 5 or 6 times to download on different days with the download stalling at sometimes as much as 90%. On the 8th day, I got the whole image. So much for their download manager. You just have to overwrite the chunk you have and start again.
After all these years, they still haven't sorted out the auto-layout of the filesystems. There's not enough room partitioned to install their developer tools.
I went to build gcc-4.2.3. That took 5 days and about a day of CPU time. OK it's an ancient 500MHz USIIi that I got for nothing, but...
See, Solaris's /bin/sh is badly broken (archaic) and can't be used to build gcc. So you set CONFIG_SHELL to be ksh. Only the configure scripts in gcc are still broken from gcc-3.1.x days and two of the scripts it generates, bin/as and bin/collect-ld at each stage of the bootstrap are broken because they begin #!ksh instead of #!/usr/bin/ksh or whatever.
When I used to build gcc on Solaris, I just sed'd all the scripts to replace /bin/sh with /bin/bash or whatever.
So, for the casual SPARC/Solaris power-user/Linux developer myself, it's just too darn inconvenient.
And the stuff in /usr/sfw/bin, which is where the "Open Source migration" into Solaris proper was supposed to happen still looks like it did in 2005, 3 years ago.
Solaris has a brilliant kernel. Putting the DVD images on Bittorrent (officially) like OpenOffice.org, would be a great start. There are too many hurdles for the average user to go through who might have been interested in trying it out. I don't have to register to download Slackware, Ubuntu, KNOPPIX, NetBSD etc.
Sort out the default install so that the disk layout is sane and make it trivial to install the GNU toolchain.
But I've been through all this years ago, and it pains me to see that it still hasn't been fixed.
Stick Men
It seems Sun is doing everything in its power to alienate a developer community.
-Wouldn't let the opensolaris board call the project opensolaris. Probably a legal quagmire of their own creation. The consequences of that lead to this resignation. http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/ogb-discuss/2008-February/004488.html
-There's this gem, most of which I don't pretend to understand. The punchline is on the bottom. http://cryptnet.net/mirrors/texts/kissedagirl.html
-There's this gem, where even Ian Murdock links in suggesting the difficulty is happening above his level. http://ianskerrett.wordpress.com/2008/02/22/a-solution-for-suns-os-community-problems/#comment-17418
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
And are you going to actually tell us which part of the GPL3 commits this horrible act of treason?
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
> My subjective opinion was that it was kinda slow for the hardware we were running it on.
"They also called is Slowlaris."
http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/11/02/0418234
Don't forget this is Sun's second foray into Intel based hardware.
Circa 1990 Sun came out with a Roadrunner platform based on i386, indignantly declaring that the chip was too wonderful to be wasted on what MS was offering at the time.
It was that time, back when Linus Torvalds was also fiddling with releasing his Minix clone on the same hardware, that Sun should have released a GPL'd Solaris.
The OS landscape might have developed radically differently than it has.
Instead, they pushed forward as a hardware company with SPARC which, at the time, was a compelling chip. Too bad they couldn't read the writing on the wall with respect to the growth in fab costs and how it relates to business volume, how quickly Intel chips were catching up and overtaking RISC chips.
One of the things I've noticed about the computer culture on the internet is that these people like to read technical articles on cool new stuff. One of the reasons for the various BSD's increase in mindshare is that they've started doing more presswork, so that they announce stuff, here, on kernelthreads, etc, when there's a new feature or mechanism and how it's great. OpenBSD does this especially well. It usually starts flamewars about this vs. that, but the point is that it gets people to read about the product. If I read about the compelling features in the latest *BSD, or the newest Linux distro, and there's an easy link to download an ISO, I am much more likely to try it out than if I have to subscribe to a developer's blog or read an mailing list.
Think about it--what's the current status of DragonflyBSD (if you use it or are involved with it, you don't count)? I know the general status of FreeBSD and OpenBSD because they frequently announce their stuff, but I haven't heard more than a whisper about DragonflyBSD since the project started. I never see stuff on slashdot or other newsy sites about OpenSolaris, and if they want to build a community and encourage a following, they need to rectify this.
If anyone at Sun is reading this, tell your boss to pay some developer an extra $100 or so a month to write about the system online and post it to prominent places (even better would be a to have an unofficial 'community liason' who knows how all the stuff works, but spends his full time working with stories, comments, etc rather than developing).
Their OSS stuff is generally high quality production code: Java, OO.org, Solaris...
But the OSS projects themselves have problems involving people outside of Sun. In the case of OpenOffice, Novel had to fork to get their improvements in at a reasonable pace. NeoOffice had to fork to get a useable Mac OS X version at all.
OpenSolaris may head down the same path, with Nexenta having the better and more available build than the main project does.
It seems that Sun knows how to code. They just don't know how to be open. Websites with registrations and download managers are barriers. Projects that accept outside contributions at a glacial pace, if they accept them at all, are barriers. And these are typical of everything Sun.
If they could learn how to create vibrant open communities, while still retaining the ability to guide/control the projects as much as needed for their purposes, they'd be an even more incredible force in the OSS world.
"Apparently, after many years, the Linux 'developer community' is still refusing to include the Reiser4 while having no problem with the fresh ext4. :-D
It was never their intention to try to promote a kernel engineering community, like Con Kolivas for example. Devs showing appreciation and originality.
Yeah, Ted Tso is really the righteous one to judge, to 'point out flaws which make it clear just how disconnected' the main devs are from their 'open source communities.' Blah."
I'm running a world class Unix kernel right now and it's not OpenSolaris. Guess I have the best of both worlds too! (it's not Linux, though I do consider Linux to be a world class kernel too).
Not sure I see ANY benefit to running OpenSolaris. Well, excluding legacy issues of course.
Sun typically priced its x86 and "x64" hardware cheaper than Dell's and HP's.
Stick Men
> nobody really knows what NetBSD is about
Running on everything and having really elegant source code.
Linux runs on more architectures now than NetBSD and has for some time.
> So where does OpenSolaris fit in?
A stable ABI, with extensible kernel constructs that don't require rejiggering the ABI every couple weeks. You write your solaris driver once. Ever.
That sound horrible. Even Microsoft isn't that backwards. If what you say is really true, forget about refactoring when new hardware comes out and you want to make functions more generic. Just imagine the spagetti code that would arise from that kind of naivety.
Time makes more converts than reason
Oh please.
IBM is at every technical conference I've been to in the last four years. OLS? ISO? POSIX? GCC Summit? LSB? IBM people write for LWN, even though IBM published a ton of linux-specific documents on their own site. IBM people are active on all major FOSS lists, including kernel, gcc, glibc, they donated Eclipse, etc etc.
Intel is about the same.
Sun gets maybe 20% on this stuff. For the most part, they give the appearance of not caring to involve the community even on the software (openoffice, see build divergence, java, now mysql?) that they "own." Sun doesn't even test gcc on Solaris. Let alone actually try to fix bugs in native support.
Jeeze. And I don't even work for IBM.
Somebody with a mission critical server should be running real Solaris, not OpenSolaris.
...they've driven a great deal of people away in terms of hardware support. The way they like to kill hardware (ZX is dropped, but lowly cg6's are kept?) and entire platforms (especially sun4cdm well before OpenSolaris) has very little logic. Of course, it has economic purpose for them, but next to none on your end.
The only saving bit is that Sun has some openness - but they are still playing the same sort of game with their in-house video hardware.
Do you want to roll the dice with your hardware 2 years after purchase? Buy Sun. Otherwise, seek another hardware vendor with a bit longer EOL times(IBM or such).
All this adds up to a community that looks like a lot of Sun employees driving it while wanting to appear non-Sun driven.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
there is no benefit helping there
and
thus no thrust to get in
why someone love someone doesn't love in turn?
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
+1 about linux being better at HPC, the deployment mechanisms are better, as are the distributed management tools.
That being said, Solaris scales on single nodes like its nobodies business if you follow the best practices and know what your doing. I've seen big Sun boxes hit loads in excess of 300 and keep chugging. I *still* havent seen a Solaris box that was well maintained crash. (cant say that about Linux -- if anything its getting less stable).
AIX hasnt impressed me in the limited exposure I have had.
"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the the universe." --Albert Einstein
What about "Project Copy Linux"? http://www.regdeveloper.co.uk/2007/07/29/sun_projectindiana_oscon/
"Flags are bits of colored cloth that governments use first to shrink-wrap people's brains..."
I just got finished building and configuring a Openslowlaris machine for my QA lab.
Talk about a featureless, pitifully un-automated disaster OS. You practically have to hold it's hand to do anything that Linux will do automatically for you. I think Sun just got really really complacent munching their profits from their regular customers (who?) and decided to keep it as bland and useless as possible. Problem is that I would rather use a Chinese Linux distro than Solaris, and I cant read a bit of Chinese...
(yes I've installed and used red flag's distros before)
That is an indicator to me as to why there isn't much of a community of "Solaris lovers" that will improve Sun's drab and time-wasting OS for them.
For instance, try using the arrow keys in VI some time, or hit insert. It looks like they couldn't keep up with the level of improvement and innovation most Linux distributions have.
Go ahead and try and run topo, or do this command
mkdir
cp -Rv
or try adding a nic to a already installed system.... ipconfig -a plumb? hahaha
I think if they don't improve that pile of crap there will be a plethora of fat lazy over 40 software engineers and useless program/project managers getting laid off from Sun in the next 5 years... that will eventually flood the job market with idiots who think CDE is cool.
Hopefully I don't still live in the valley during that period of time.
Dj fuQ [url="http://djfuq.org"]djfuq urges you to listen to the beats[/url] [url="http://djfuq.org"]http://djfuq.org[
Thanks. IANAL either, but I can see that GPL3 seems to make a difference between consumer products and others. I will have to read up on where this came from and what it means.
It is very obvious, however, that it is not a clause that gives IBM any more rights than others, as you claimed. Were IBM to sell me a consumer product, they would be bound by the same rules as anyone else doing so.
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
Ok, there's a comment on the "user product" clause here: http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/03/gplv3-user-products-clause.html
I guess you can choose to see it as a RMS plot, as you did, or you can see it as a question of practical issues. I would tend to the latter, and I would think a company buying stuff from another company needs less protection than consumers, who usually don't have a legal department to negotiate contracts. But YMMV.
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
I think it depends upon why you're using the OS you're using. I personally don't need comfort in an OS I'm running for work -- I wouldn't be good at what I do if knowing where commands are located was considered "hard" for me. If knowing how to administrate more than one type of *NIX is too hard, I think these folks might want to find another line of work. While this has died down some, I had to be familiar with IRIX, HP-UX, Linux and Solaris and work between them all day long. Yeah, sometimes I'll type the wrong command, but really, no big deal.
How's it get up to 80? I've seen a eight core server hit hundreds.
Mind you that was after I made a mistake on a production server which essentially caused all the site's traffic to turn in to a DDoS attack.
Since then I've upgraded to the top of the line for socket 940, dual dual-core Opteron 290s (2.8 GHz), and with the recent per-user scheduling options turned on in the kernel, can watch the 1 min load average run to 180 or so (the highest it gets) without ever going unresponsive or stopping the 2-second ksysguard updates. Apparently with the extra speed and cores, the first jobs get worked thru and retired before it ever loads the last ones, so load average (and memory usage) never get anywhere as high.
What's great tho is as I mentioned the new (well, as of kernel 2.6.24) per-user scheduling/priority options. Set properly, you can have one user running multi-hundred load averages and it barely affects usability for other users at all, because they get equal CPU time (and with the proper I/O scheduler, I use CFQ which by default prioritizes I/O to match CPU priority, I/O to match) if they've got runnable processes, even with only fractional load averages. This is certainly one of my favorite new kernel features and one I regularly use to continue almost hitch-free internet radio playback and even visualization, plus of course general system responsiveness, even when compiling at multiple jobs per core load average. (I normally keep MAKEOPTS to "-j -l15" for general purpose compiling, which ends up running about a 16 load or 4 per core, more to limit memory usage to not run into swap (compiling with the workdir on tmpfs) than load average, tho.)
With a 120-ish day uptime... well, maybe it's a 2.6.24 kernel, but probably not. However, with that kernel or better, an 80 load average, or even a 500 load average, really shouldn't be unmanageable at all, as long as the scheduler options are set right, and if user-based scheduling groups are turned on, apache is running as a user other than root and other than the remote login shell would be running. As such, by default, root would get double the CPU cycles allowed other users (and appropriate I/O, assuming CFQ or similar prioritized I/O scheduling with priorities similar to the CPU priorities), and no matter what the apache user load average, the remote login shell should get equal cycles (assuming equal process priorities). It should thus be nearly impossible to DOS the machine to the point remote administration to get in and correct the problem becomes difficult or impossible.
Just in case it's not apparent by now, I *REALLY* like that aspect of kernel scheduling, new at least to the Linus kernel with 2.6.24. =8^)
Duncan
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master,
and if you use the program, he is your master."
R Stallman
How are the Niagara-based CPU's not being sold with fervor?
Don't get me wrong, but Solaris became the same thing as Linux was. Once upon a time, I could just buy a copy of Solaris x86, install it, run it, and develop for it. I used to write network drivers and loved messing with Display PostScript.
When Solaris went open, I stopped doing it because I didn't have the time or patience to dig through the different Solaris distributions to find the one I wanted/needed to work on a hobby project.
So, I just stopped bothering with Solaris. I always loved the platform since it was a UNIX with a fixed ABI, so I could write code that would run on all Solaris distributions for a single processor architecture once. Now, I don't even know if that's true anymore.
Sun have a grasping attitude and want to own and control everything they touch - as we see with OpenOffice - where they demand to control and abuse volunteer developers (cf. Kohei Yoshida) This is why they would not simply commit to using Linux, and sharing / co-developing the Linux kernel - as most other Unix companies have done. Also - what is the point of opening Solaris - loosing a chunk of revenue from that, while not getting anyone else to develop on it ? Shareholders must be interested to know. Everyone but Sun (HPUX, AIX, IRIX, etc.) appears to understand that having a vanity branded kernel yields no benefit to anyone. Hopefully Sun's software stack will be commoditised away, leaving them and their customers with a huge headache: migrate now before OpenSolaris fails.
As I posted up-page in the slashdotting discussion, I like to run compiles in -j unlimited "jobserver" mode just to see how far I can push the hardware. Back before I upgraded from the dual-single-cores Opteron 242s (1.6 GHz clock), jobserver-mode (Linux) kernel compiles would run up 480 on the 1-minute load average before the (KDE/X) ksysguard graph would freeze up and I couldn't tell how much higher it'd go.
After upgrading to top-of-the-line-for-socket-940 dual dual-core Opteron 290s (2.8 GHz), with the user based priority/scheduling in kernel 2.6.24+, I no longer see those GUI freezes so continue to get load average updates, but the system is fast enough it apparently retires the first jobs before the last are loaded, so now job-server mode kernel compiles max out at only ~180 or so on the 1-minute load average. (FWIW, both the dual 242 480+ load and the 290 180+ loads are with 8 gigs RAM, the 480+ load would run into swap, but the 180 peak I manage on the 290s never touches swap.)
However, the nice bit is that with the per-user or control-group (I use the former) scheduling available in kernel 2.6.24+, I can run practically unlimited load average compiling as a different user, as long as I don't hit swap too hard, while all the while maintaining hitch-free net radio playback and nearly hitch-free visualization (it's slightly jerky updating but I don't miss many frames). The limit isn't on the load average aka CPU cycles, but rather on real memory vs swap. If I'm not streaming, I can maintain "acceptable" if somewhat jerky interactivity several gigs into swap, altho that's certainly partly due to the fact that swap is 4-way-RAID-0/striped.
So the 300 load average on Solaris isn't really all that special on Linux either, as I used to routinely do 480+ load average "just for fun" compiling the kernel, and that was before the recent very dramatic scheduler improvements. And be sure to check out that 2.6.24+ per-user scheduling as it's certainly worth it.
Duncan
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master,
and if you use the program, he is your master."
R Stallman
DTrace, Solaris Containers, ZFS filesystem ....
Nothing of which you'll miss on your Kubuntu desktop but for production environments and development shops Solaris still holds the edge, I run Linux on the desktop and Solaris on the server myself, gnome on Open Solaris has issues as Linux is the target so it's not optimised for Solaris (proc issues etc)
"Linux is for noobs"-The new MS fud strategy
I remember back to when Linux was starting out...
There were lots of people messing around with floppies and definately not the crowd that it has today. I'm trying to think back, was it 1991 or 1992 when the 0.99 was about? And by 1995 or 1996, was it so much better? Or the community?
The proper time frame to judge whether or not OpenSolaris will be able to build a successful community is somewhere in the 5 to 8 year time frame.
It is still too early to decide if OpenSolaris has failed or not to build a community.
But the subject is irrelevant.
Sun doesn't want to give up control of OpenSolaris.
Just look at who makes up the OGB (OpenSolaris Governing Board): nearly all Sun employees.
Mistake or coincidence?
I think not (and that's not speculation.)
What Sun is afraid of and doesn't understand is that to grow a community that contributes, even peripherally, in a meaingful way will require allow the community to have some ownership. In this, the parent is absolutely right.
Well since IBM sold it Desktop and Laptop Line to Lenovo. IBM Doesn't have much in term of Consumer Product line anymore. But the point of this point was to stop "TiVoisation" and earlier version of the GPL/3 Draft. IBM had problems because they sell systems at different prices which are the same system the only difference is some software in the firmware that tells the processor what speed to run at, and turn on or off additional features, Section 6 would make it difficult for them to continue this and still follow the GPL and they pressured RMS and FOSS to allow them to continue. So they added the "Consumer Product" section to allow IBM to continue. Yes it doesn't say IBM and TiVo directly. And HP and other companies can use that clause. (however the definition of consumer product is very wide, allowing only Big Iron equipment to fall in the list of Big Iron is almost an IBM Monopoly while most other companies produce products that could be considered Consumer Products as well. Being the general use of most computers.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Bullshit. Binary drivers are what we already have in too many cases. Notice that the years where binary drivers were all the rage, hardware support was at its worst. If you want good 'hardware' support for peripheral devices, the device manufacturers just need to take Bill's dick out of their mouth long enough to publish the APIs to their products.
Binary-only drivers tie the peripherals to specific architectures and OS versions. As part of the deal you get security and maintenance problems along with the portability problems. At this point, moving more in the direction of GPLv3 will keep OpenSolaris from being slowed by the dragging weight of binary-only drivers.
Opening the drivers expands the market for the hardware.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
I don't even say that what you said can't be true, it's a reasonable though experiment. But you did spin the facts in you first post, and now your accusations really are very severe considering that you don't back them up at all.
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
Every week there is some community or tribe that critices another. Maybe this is caused by jealousy or fear.
The OpenSolaris community is not perfect, nor is the Linux community.
If we do a search for "why I left Linux" there wil l be the exact reasons critising Linux that are used here to criticise OpenSolaris. http://apcmag.com/why_i_quit_kernel_developer_con_kolivas.htm This bashdot article does not do anything positive for the IT industry. It only helps the proprietary vendors laugh and encourage the open companies and organisations to fight one another. Proprietary organisations are the only winners here, causing two like minded communities to fight, Linux and Solaris. Can Linux/Unix put it's efforts into being better than proprietary OSes e.g. Win, AIX, HP-UX etc. Making Linux and OpenSolaris fight is only good for the proprietary non-open source vendors.
Can Linus have dinner with Jonathon Schwartz what is there to be scared of, they might discover a lot in common and who the real enemy is.
We were using that in our labs to help in training and process documentation for the production Sparcs. Heck I even had my workstation using it. It had it's issues but it provided a viable alternative to having to spend alot of money on training hardware/software.
Recall when Sun said "Too bad, so sad" and discontinued Solaris X86 and left a lot of people wondering what to do? What we did was migrate to Linux, every proprietary piece of sun hardware has since been replaced and is Running RedHat. For the lab system, certification and process training systems we use CentOS.
Why would anyone trust Sun to not pull the rug out again?
I can say the same thing of Linux on the stability end. Again, the box must be well-maintained, admin knows what he's doing.
Also, a lot of it depends on hardware. A lot of people want to throw Linux on cheap whitebox hardware with bargain-basement motherboards and expect it's going to be as stable as Solaris running on an E-series server. Ha! If you want the stability of Solaris running on E-series server out of Linux, you gotta run it on similar hardware -- hardware built for high availability. Your typical BIOSTAR or even ASUS MicroATX PC desktop motherboard isn't built to do that. Try looking at real enterprise-class hardware from IBM or HP. Hell, I know for certain Solaris running on an E series can't touch the performance and reliability of Linux on the IBM z-series mainframes.
My blog
Why. I didn't spin it. I stated that the GPL had a loophole for IBMs advantage that was particuly put in. And I felt that it was unfair to have different standards for B2B vs. B2C for the GPL. If you are going to be a hard ass then you need to be equally so. Then I was asked to give me the section of the GPL that explains it. So I did. Then was stated that it didn't say IBM in particular just consumer devices, which it did. But who is the biggest GPL support who deals almost entirly of B2B... IBM, IBM has the most to gain from that section, without stating IBM directly. Sure EMC can take advantage of this or HP, and Medical Technologies and such. But IBM has the most to gain and people making consumer products such as TiVo have the most to loose.
I am actually very scared on how people will just happily change their feelings to match the new GPL states. It is like following a cult, when the leader changes his plans people happily adjust to the plans not really caring that it is a contradiction. I liked GPL/2 I don't like GPL/3 for that reason. I beleave there should be a consistency between B2B and B2C. If B2C has to keep all their data 100% open so should B2B even though it may cause big companies (like IBM) to loose support for the cause. Or if you didn't want IBM to loose support you should deal with TiVoisation and allow for semi-perfect freedom to allow better spread and support for the license.
What are you expecting the GPL to state except for IBM. No of course not it will just explain IBM not by name but by the nature of its business.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
You accused IBM to apply pressure and the FSF succumbing to it without a shred of evidence. While I can understand where you stand on the B2B vs B2C issue, you completely ignore that there are some valid reasons to draw the line were it was drawn, even though you disagree.
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
No I don't accuse IBM for dirrect pressure. IBM may not have said a word. But when you are in a room with a sleeping lion you don't want to anger it. IBM has been a big supporter of the GPL, the FSF likes the fact that they have a large ally on their side, they are not going to go out of their way to push IBM too far.
I didn't ignore the resons why they drew the line where they drew it. I don't agree with the line at all. Me personally was OK with TiVoisation, I felt it helped push GPL/2 out from the relm of just the techies free copy to a popular products that helped change the world. I understand that TiVoisation was against the spirit of the GPL/2 and FSF didn't care for it, because they would have prefered that it would be possible to make your own TiVo without buying a Unit, By coping all the code and put it in a differnt box, and building boxes and selling/giving those boxes away to others as a TiVo Compatible device, yes it would be nice. But if that was the case the TiVo wouldn't have used Linux as it Core OS and use OSS tools for most of it, and may have gone with Windows for its core OS, and TiVo has been hacker friendly, when my Modem Died on my TiVo I was able to fix it by changing the OS Settings and swapping some com ports. If it was windows based and 100% closed my unit would be dead.
Drawing the Line between B2B and B2C was a move to keep the hackers happy as well as its big supporters happy. But I personally don't like it, and I feel it is a contradiction because Big Iron has a golden pass while small plastic needs to follow rigid rules. Just because some Hairy Toes Hackers don't want to spend money on a cool device that they can't manupliate to get free sercvice or make blaten copies of.
You seem to think I am accusing colution no I am not. FSF is controled by Humans and Humans do stupid things and make mistakes, we all do, it is a fact. And I feel the line is a mistake. I am not saying the FSF and IBM are activily plotting. But I feel that IBM is to big of an influence on the FSF for them to make a decision rationally.
I am intitled to my opionions, wither it is true or not is a different Issue. I am not going to do a full investigation for every opionion I have. I am OK Being wrong if its wrong. I am not calling people into action to distroy FSF or IBM. I am just saying look at the facts and think for yourself and if the GPL has straight from where you personally think it should go then you should look elsewhere and not hang on to a changing Ideal that doesn't match your views.
Besides this is Slashdot there are conspericy theoris on top of conspericy theories. So it OK to assume that Microsoft is out to kill every Linux User and force them against their will to use Windows, and somehow the Bush Administration is behind it. But it is not OK to think that 2 Partners IBM and FSF don't influence each other and could come up with something that I feel is wrong?
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Dude, You must have been sniffing glue when you wrote this. I have installed OpenSolaris on a PIII 1.2 GHz with 1.5 GB of RAM in under 45 minutes. This machine is by no stretch of the imagination a "mid-range PC". I also use the same machine to develop on. While compiling the kernal does take time, it is no different from compiling the kernel in Linux. Quit your exaggerating.
I would probably choose Solaris over Linux on Sun hardware. FMA, ZFS and ldoms (depending on the machine of course) are pretty cool.
College-Pages.com - Online Colleges, Degrees, and Programs
The linux versus solaris argument will always go on. It goes back to skills and comfort level. In a large enterprise organization where support roles are highly segmented, Linux will be really tough to support. On the other hand, Solaris is very stable, reliable and works with minimal fuss. Having started of with Linux in my career and building my own distribution for personal use and then working on Solaris in a large enterprise organization, I have seen both the worlds. Linux has its advantages and so does Solaris. It all depends on where, how and what you want to deploy and who is going to support it. If you cannot draw that balance, then probably you should not be evaluating Linux or Solaris in the first place. It is so annoying to see how CIO's and such jump onto Linux thinking it is cheaper without realizing that the price is cheap not the cost.
Fair enough. Thank you! :)
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
I have one of the z-series boxes at the office, and I've in the past had sun E-series boxes.
Solaris on E series all the way. Linux just lacks the big iron feature set, the more complex task management set. The more complicated workload the more it falls down and cant get out of its own way.
"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the the universe." --Albert Einstein
Talking of community development, one can look at BeleniX and Nexenta.
Community driven, extremely promising,...
BeleniX has a focus towards desktops and the recent 0.7 release makes for an excellent distro to use on desktops.
bittorrent;
http://opensolaris.org/os/project/indiana/resources/getit/
Actually the fun issue is why I left Linux for Solaris. I wanted an OS that felt like it was built by adults.
I've got real work to do (some of it is pretty fun), and I want the OS to back me up. I don't want to play with the OS, I've done it to death and I've moved on.
I don't think the same type of community that likes Linux will like OpenSolaris. I'm thinking more of an Apache-style group. People who need to get things done, and are willing to send in fixes to make their stuff work.
Care about electronic freedom? Consider donating to the EFF!
Sun doesn't even test gcc on Solaris. Let alone actually try to fix bugs in native support.
Heh. Sun is quite arrogant in that regard.. however.. back in 2004 when it became apparent that Opteron was the way forward, they decided they needed an AMD64 port of Solaris 10. They went from 0 to up and running in 6 weeks flat but they had to use gcc to compile Solaris for AMD64 since their compiler only did 32-bit x86. They paid Code Sorcery to fix some bugs in gcc for them. That's the "gcc-3.4.3" that's _still_ in /usr/sfw/bin on Solaris 11. It's really gcc-3.4.2 with Sun/Code Sorcery fixes, not the real gcc-3.4.2.
They were not keen of having gcc with gcj enabled on Solaris. :-)
Stick Men
not the real gcc-3.4.2.
I meant "not the real gcc-3.4.3"
Stick Men
There is no chance in hell that Linux can scale properly for most companies (unless your name is Google).
With Solaris you have a clean path of scalability from a very cheap, simple machine to a fully distributed resilient solution without touching the binaries or the scripts involved.
With Linux it is not so easy, specially because it has limits to what it can handle (for multiple processors Solaris leaves Linux biting the dust, and ZFS is way above anything developed so far for Linux).
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
As long as you don't get this, you will continue to have the false impression that your Linux machines are a better business solution.
-You don't synchronize Solaris machines automatically. If you do that it means your application should be running in something else or that you don't know what you are doing. Solaris servers will run the basic services that keep your company alive and profitable. Those machines are not upgraded automatically. Never. Which makes the package management pretty irrelevant (what is wrong with pkgadd by the way? The interface is clean, all the information is stored in a clear text file for easy inspection, so I don't get the point).
Sun website sucks? Well, if you say so. Since all the manuals are there I beg to disagree, why do I need to google something if I can go to the corresponding manual and find 99% of the answers I need? And when this does not work then there is Google of course, but obviously even googling requires skills, some people are more proficient at this, some others, well, complain that they can't find things.
So yes, in my experience (Fortune 100 companies galore, worldwide) Linux is either an interim stage to Solaris or is used in different applications where a quasi appliance is needed (because an appliance is easily synchronized,at which Linux excels, as you correctly pointed out).
So don't laugh much, because the joke may be on you.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
... you would be in danger of losing your job.
I don't want automatic updates in a server that is providing support to all of the US, Western Europe or the Far East for thousands of users making money for us.
As long as you don't get this and other points made above by other people you simply are not understanding the place of OSes like Solaris in a modern enterprise.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.