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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.'"
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.
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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?
Speaking as someone on the inside -- you're right. There are a lot of big egos here.
I didn't come to Sun because I like the Kool-Aid, I came by acquisition. I haven't decided yet whether or not this whole "we love Open Source" thing Jonathan keeps plugging is real or a charade. I'm optimistic, but we'll see.
On better days, I like to think that the people way up at the helm really "get it" and are just waiting for the rest of the ship to slowly (slowly!) turn. On not-so-good days, I start to wonder if maybe someone's trying to pull a fast one.
There are lots and lots of people here who really and truly believe that Linux is just an upgrade path to Solaris. In other words... Once people start running Linux on Sun hardware, they'll "want more", and "step into the big league" with Solaris. It's kind of sad, when it's not irritating.
Anyhow... I could bitch for a while, but I won't.
A host is a host from coast to coast...
Unless it's down, or slow, or fails to POST!
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.
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The thing is, Andy's back, and as far as I can tell, he doesn't give a rat's ass about Solaris. He just wants to make interesting hardware. That's where the money is, after all. Software is a pathetic fraction of corporate revenues here. All the more reason to be mystified about the internal hostility toward Linux.
:P
So, for example, the Thumper is one of Andy's creations. It's pretty hard to beat the storage density you get for the price. Put a mess of those under a Lustre filesystem, and people start to take notice of Sun as a player in HPC. The recent TACC Ranger system is all Sun gear: storage, compute, and network (with sun-built Magnum switches). The OS? Linux.
There's more interesting stuff coming down the pike, and from my perspective, it seems that there's a shift toward making money on volume rather than margins. In other words, somewhat less awesome, but more of it.
I dunno. I don't profess to have much more special knowledge than anyone outside of the upper echelons. I'm hopeful, though. I read somewhere that many of the big Solaris egos were hired away by teh google. Hopefully they keep going. They can have our kool-aid-drunk sales and marketing people too.
A host is a host from coast to coast...
Unless it's down, or slow, or fails to POST!
Funny. It has been exactly the opposite for us.
We're running a bunch of xfires (14 boxes total, 4100, 4200, 4150) here
and initially started out with solaris because the wise guys said it's faster,
more stable, oh and no least you get that shiny "platinum support" badge...
Yea it was all that and the zfs hype, what could possibly go wrong?
Nothing much to be honest. We fell in love with the hardware immediately
and the machines hummed along without too much trouble. Postgres performs
well, java performs well, and ZFS snapshots are a blessing.
Despite all that superficial happyness we switched most of the hosts to linux
(and aim for 100% linux) after a few months. We still love ZFS (and can't wait
for a linux equivalent) but that alone couldn't justify sticking to solaris for us.
What broke it for us is the userland with all its subtle differences
to linux, or in other words: the learning curve. This may sound strange when
talking about a UNIX OS but as a linux shop we're spoiled by the GNU toolchain,
by dead-simple package management and all the little everyday things that just
work a tiny little bit different under solaris.
I'm not saying the linux-UI is better (actually, it is in many
places, but that's not the point here), it's just that we all grew
up with linux, so the solaris CLI "felt like a really old version of linux"
(to paraphrase a coworker) from the start.
We didn't slack, mind you. We tried hard to make that feeling stop. We read the
books and collected bigadmin bookmarks like trophies. We changed the default-shell
to bash and installed the GNU tools to keep our sanity but otherwise did our best
to treat solaris with respect and resisted the urge to dress it up to look more
like linux.
It didn't work out.
I could rant for days about the many little things that drove us away but
I'll try to focus on a few of the most significant points here:
1. Package Management (the lack thereof)
Pkg-add is bad joke when you're used to apt-get and emerge. JumpStart feels
like an insult when you're spoiled by FAI. I can only guess how Sun expects
us to keep our multiple solaris boxes in sync. Maybe they sell that as
one of their many enterprise service?
2. Google doesn't work well for solaris
Not really something we can blame on solaris or Sun but time after time we
were astonished as to how hard it is to find useful help for specific solaris
problems via google. Howto's and Tutorials about all things solaris are generally
very sparse. Due to this "learning by doing" doesn't work as well for solaris
as it does for linux.
3. The sun website SUCKS
Sure there is a lot of documentation, if you can find it in the pile
of rubble that sun calls a website. But even the stuff we found was
not always helpful. Sun documentation tends to be very verbose while
still often glossing over important details. Sun docs often feel like
they expect you to print them out and put them under your pillow.
We don't work that way. We're spoiled by straighforward howtos,
examples, stuff that gets us going fast. We're the impatient
youngsters.
Well, this got longer than I intended. I'll close with saying that
we'll keep buying sun hardware. The xfire series is the best piece of kit
(at a very competitive price) that I have ever seen and it runs linux
like a champ.
But linux as an "upgrade path to solaris"? Ha. Good joke.
In my world solaris has it's place on big iron and in areas where
the last bit of performance really matters. For everyone else the
natural choice is what they're familar with. And who grows up with
solaris these days?