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.'"

Comments

mirror

[asv108]

http://tytso.livejournal.com/

Re:mirror

[tytso]

Yeah, sorry about that. Thunk.org is a rather ancient machine (> 5 years old) living in a colo facility, and this is how I figured out I had been slashdotted. (The two uptime commands were about two minutes apart):

    14:21:06 up 121 days, 16:47, 2 users, load average: 40.47, 12.41, 4.55
    14:23:05 up 121 days, 16:49, 2 users, load average: 81.43, 36.97, 14.52

  Fortuantely I'm still mirroring my blog onto my old Livejournal account; please read it there for now! The two articles that you want are this one: What Sun was trying to do with Open Solaris and this one: Organic vs. Non-organic Open Source, if you can't get through to thunk.org.

Re:mirror

[tytso]

Not so ancient Chinese saying: "It is not enough to install wp-cache2 and activate the plugin; you must go to options->wp-cache and press then "enable" button to REALLY enable wp-cache."

Doh!

(Once I actually really enabled wp-cache, my server seems to have been able to keep up, for now...)

Re:mirror

[tytso]

How's it get up to 80? Lots and lots of apache daemons. :-)

I've never seen the load on a Linux machine rise above like 6, and by then its unresponsive to anything. I was disk-bound, because wp-cache wasn't enabled even though it should have been, so it didn't take me that long to recover once I managed to run shutdown the apache server. Then it was just a matter of setting up a firewall rule to only allow access from my home IP address, restarting the server, figuring out that I needed to enable the wp-cache plugin, then remove the firewall rule, and pray.... :-)

But yeah, I was pretty impressed that my 1 GHz Pentium III with only 512 megs of memory running 2.6.16 linux was able to not only survive, but recover from a slashdotting without needing to reboot. If I had only checked earlier to make sure that wp-cache really was enabled, but as the old saying goes, "no one expects the Spanish Inquisition!"

For those too lazy too read the article:

[SatanicPuppy]

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.

Re:For those too lazy too read the article:

[JerkBoB]

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.

Re:For those too lazy too read the article:

[JerkBoB]

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.

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. :P

Re:For those too lazy too read the article:

[afabbro]

Where I work we have two sun mainframes;

Um, no you don't.

Re:For those too lazy too read the article:

[Kent Recal]

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.

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?

Re:For those too lazy too read the article:

[SoupIsGood Food]

Umm. I'm more than a little dismayed that you gave up containers, ZFS, SMF, dtrace and JumpStart for... GNU shell tools and apt?

As a cross-platform sysadmin with a decade-plus of experience, dude. Just... dude. My "Ineptitude" sense is tingling.

I mean, how much messing around on the command line do you really need to do on a daily basis? If the answer is "A Lot" - then I can sort of see Linux taking the advantage. Kinda. Yet, most, if not all, command line wrangling on modern servers is to munge shell scripts, and that's mostly been supplanted by python and ruby these days, anyhow. You've never even heard of JumpStart? "pkgadd -d" is too hard for you? You can't find anything on Solaris administration by googling the problem keywords with "sun Solaris administration" appended after? Really? Wow.

Not to be mean or anything, but seriously. If you can't handle Solaris, you shouldn't be in the sysadmin game. Only OpenBSD us easier for Unix wonks to tinker with. Stuff like AIX and NonStop would =break= you into a quivering pile of goop. Based on your post, I have doubts you'd be able to hack the more challenging Linux distros, too, like Slack or Debian.

There are good reasons to go with Linux on Sun hardware - pure speed, cross-platform compatibility (esp. with LAMP stack stuff), the need to tinker with the kernel to meet project objectives, or stripping down the OS to a bare minimum for performance or security advantages, re-purposing old hardware with an up-to-date OS that demands fewer resources. Then there are the reasons you gave.

I suppose if you really wanted to re-orient your entire computing platform around the needs of the sysadmins to play with the shell rather than the needs of the project to utilize its very expensive hardware to its fullest with modern OS features not yet available on Linux, your reasons are valid. Stupid, short-sighted, luddite and likely to get you fired at any other Unix shop of any size, but valid. I guess.

Re:For those too lazy too read the article:

[ryanov]

I would probably choose Solaris over Linux on Sun hardware. FMA, ZFS and ldoms (depending on the machine of course) are pretty cool.

Re:For those too lazy too read the article:

[Skrynesaver]

I kinda agree with you, but I'm over 40 too ;)
Most of the younger staff here take a few months to get used to Solaris, it's the little things, netstat doesn't work as they expect (Why can't I just see the PID/binary name), ls doesn't have the switches they expect and to perfectly honest, while pkgtools is familiar to anyone who's used Slack etc kids today are spoiled with apt and they're right to like it, it "Just works"
We can't over modify the system as they need to be able to provide advice to clients with production Solaris environments so they have to learn for now , but I guarantee that all those shiny GNUisms will be available on Solaris in the medium term because Linux has given people an expectation of usability from the CLI that Solaris doesn't have @ the moment.

Re:For those too lazy too read the article:

[Kent Recal]

Hm, I'll go through them one by one.

Zones are indeed amazing but we don't have a use-case for them on our
production hosts. Maybe we could have used "zone-images" to deploy our
stuff but that'd really only be an excuse to use zones for a task
that seems to be better suited to apt (dependency tracking, controlled
distribution of updates etc.).

ZFS, no doubt, is something we miss.

SMF. Well, as often with solaris I love the concept but hate the implementation.
Yes, it beats sysv-init hands down. But, gah, XML, and many of the pkgs on solaris
freeware don't even support it yet. We learned how to roll our own pkgs (with SMF etc.)
but the lack of a package-manager akin to apt turned this into a time sink.

DTrace is a similar story. Ofcourse it is powerful but on a every day base we simply
don't need that power. We prefer the simplicity of strace which has, so far, been
good enough when we needed it and never forced us to wade through documentation
for supposedly "simple" tasks like dtrace did. Dtrace alone seems to be basically
useless until you wrap it up in a fairly elaborate script for the task at hand.
Yes, "DTraceToolkit" provides these scripts for many common tasks, but not for all.
Looking back at the first dtrace tutorial that I found (http://developers.sun.com/solaris/articles/dtrace_example.html?feed=DSC)
I can still only shake my head about the effort it takes for such a simple task.

About messing on the command line often: No, we don't need that "often" but regularly.
We install stuff, upgrade stuff, like everyone does. The major gripe was: We don't want
to repeat ourselves for n hosts. Ideally we want to roll packages and distribute them
in a controlled manner. Solaris left us out in the cold here and implementing a 3rd
party framework like puppet feels wrong when linux never even made you think about that.

No, pkgadd -d is not too hard for us. But manually downloading each dependency from solarisfreeware
or whatever source and installing it on each individual host is. Not too hard as in "we can't do it"
but too hard as in "dude, that feels backwards".
Feel free to enlighten me. How do *you* upgrade curl (random example) on 8 solaris hosts?
In debian we review the distro pkg and roll our own when necessary, test it, push it to the
mirror and the nightly update pulls it to all hosts. What tools did we miss that enable
an equivalent workflow for solaris?

Generally I wouldn't say we weren't able to handle solaris. I'd say it turned out we didn't *want* to.
It's very well possible that AIX would break us into a quivering goop. For that precise reason I have
no intention to ever touch it? It has nothing to offer that interests us, so why should I even
consider it?

Well and finally, your last statement makes you sound strikingly similar to the Sun sales reps
that we had. They also kept trumping the horn of "use our modern OS with features not
yet available for linux" to "utilize our kickass hardware to the fullest".

The problem probably lies in the definition of "utilizing our hardware to the fullest".
For you and Sun that probably means to squeeze out the last 10% of performance.
For us it means being able to fluidly run and maintain the hosts (that includes
a sane update-procedure etc.) with a minimum cost in terms of manhours.

In other words: The time we saved on "solaris administration overhead" since
we abandoned it quite likely paid our last 3 xfires alone.

You may blame it on our lack of solaris expirience or even on your perceived
"ineptitude". Still it was the right decision for us.

Bureaucracy

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

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 fails to build community b/c it sucks

[Jeffrey Baker]

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.

Installation problems as well

[gearloos]

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.

Re:OpenSolaris fails to build community b/c it suc

[Hatta]

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.

Linux community

[bobs666]

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.

Hmmm - Linux Fan Boys speak out....

[GuyverDH]

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.

Re:Hmmm - Linux Fan Boys speak out....

[keithjr]

As it turns out, Linux development community members are critical of competing operating systems. How is this news?

The point of picking and choosing your operating system is so that you can pick the best tool for the job. If that tool is Solaris, then use it. If not, so be it.

Since Sun actively develops Solaris (and thus parts of OpenSolaris), do they really need individual contributors?

Re:Hmmm - Linux Fan Boys speak out....

[catmistake]

I have to agree with parent and grandparent posts... Seems to me the community is thriving. I'm sure I'm missing the point of OSS somewhere, but with OpenSolaris I see it as an attempt or ambition to get the rock-solid stability of Solaris and Sun hardware for free on most any hardware, and the ability to initiate experience with Solaris on the cheap (however, Solaris itself is a free download, just licensed propietary, so why practice street ball when you can play stadium? OK poor analogy).

Instant success

[mooreti1]

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.

Re:Instant success

[nrozema]

I guess success vs. failure comes down to what your initial expectations were.

If you were looking for Yet Another Open Source Linux Replacement, and have failed to receive it from a barely four year old project, then sure, I suppose to you that project has "failed".

If, like me, you saw OpenSolaris as a sandbox and open dialogue with the community to shape the next version of Solaris, and not a Linux replacement, then perhaps you aren't so disappointed at the moment.

The development of ZFS in particular has come a long way in later builds of OpenSolaris vs. what you'll find in Solaris 10. The previous development model would have seen that happen in a vacuum, without community interaction and contribution. That alone is a success in my mind.

Gnu/Solaris

[obender]

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.

Re:Gnu/Solaris

[BrainInAJar]

Dear $deity no!

GPL was a reactionary statement to the BSD licenses' freedoms being taken advantage of by corporate powers. The license OpenSolaris is under now ( CDDL ) is much more balanced. It keeps the code under a viral clause ( change it? share it! ) but it doesn't spread to the surrounding code like the GPL does ( link to it? share it! )

The GPL illustrated some fine points about giving users too much freedom, and now it's time to lay it to rest with Marx and pure Smith economics as political tools that were found to be unworkable except in a modified form.

That Linux is successful and also GPL is an anomaly rather than a general rule, and even in that case it serves to illustrate that the hardware manufacturer's unwillingness to write GPL drivers is holding Linux back. Were Linux under a more permissive license, with the market share it has now, hardware mfrs would be rushing to write drivers for it

Re:Not welcoming your Scott McNealy overlord?

[SatanicPuppy]

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.

of course not

[nguy]

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.

Re:of course not

[nguy]

Solaris >=2 is based on SunOS 5 which was derived from closed source system v. SunOS 4 was indeed based on some kind of BSD, but got killed by Solaris 2 long time ago

Solaris >=2 still contains plenty of BSD code. Furthermore, System V contains stuff derived from Berkeley as well.

Without BSD, Sun wouldn't even exist.

Re:of course not

[GuyverDH]

Incompetence?

Dtrace?
ZFS?
Zones / Containers?
Ultra SPARC T1, T2, T2+?

They took their source code and chip designs, opened it up with their version of opensource license, while keeping control of what gets put back into the distributions for the OpenSolaris and Solaris projects, and it's working - quite well.

If opensource were all on an even playing field, there would only be one opensource license.

Considering the numerous versions and variations, there's obviously some things that everyone just can't agree on for a licensing model.

Reasons for this failure.

[suck_burners_rice]

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.

Download barriers

[SgtChaireBourne]

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.

Re:Download barriers

[Anonymous Coward]

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.
I agree with that last bit, the article is way immature and innacurate.

If you read the comments of one of the blogs cited, you will see OpenSolaris members clearing up the situation and showing how she was a bit hasty in her comments. At least that's my opinion.

Like signing and NDA for a OpenSolaris User Group meeting. Turns out, even by the blogger's own statement that The NDA was for confidential information in case for instance something got left behind in the meeting room. Since OpenSolaris related information is obviously not "confidential" I don't see the big deal. But if shee happens to notice a binder labeled "x5500 new petabyte server runs on 2watts and this is how we do it" then that would be covered by the NDA. From the comments it seems that this is not uncommon when using corporate/government facilities though it is not always the case. Simon Phipps also seems to be eager to get it resolved.

There were some other issues as well. The funniest is that the original governing body that Sun set up to run the project in the period before the community had a chance to elect their own members was mostly composed of non-Sun employees, but when the community actually elected their own board members, it was mostly Sun employees.

The trademark issues might be a different matter and I can't really comment on them but it sounds like something that should be resolved.

I think this guy is just yelling "the sky is falling" because he wants it to.

Re:Support Some Hardware?

[sethmeisterg]

Any AHCI-based SATA controller will work. Marvell-based SATA controllers (models 88SX5081, 88SX5080, 88SX5040, 88SX5041, 88SX6081, and 88SX6041), nvidia nforce sata, silicon image 3124. AHCI and Marvell are good choices. There's also a ton of SAS support (e.g. LSI, Adaptec).

Too easy to replace Solaris...

[i_want_you_to_throw_]

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.

As a member of the community...

[saleenS281]

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.

Re:As a member of the community...

[tytso]

Please let me make this clear. I was not disparaging Open Solaris as an operating system. And I was quoting Jon Plocher, a Sun Engineer working on Open Solaris, when he admitted that Sun didn't get the community they were hoping for. So it you can call it failure in terms of Sun being to get the results that it had hoped for when it released (most of) Solaris under an Open Source license. Other people who were major Solaris fans, and who were excited with whatever scraps Sun might throw from the table, might be mightly pleased with what Sun did. But nevertheless, it is interesting that Sun hasn't achieved what they hoped to accomplish with Open Solaris after three years.

The reason why I found Jon Plocher's candidate statement for the Open Solaris Governing Board so interesting was that it was first that I had seen someone from inside Sun comment about the what Sun had been hoping to achieve by release Solaris under a Open Source license that didn't appear influenced by Sun's marketing/spin machine. I don't believe Sun's officially stated reasons (that show up on the CEO's blog, for example) because after three years their words have not been matched by their deeds.

So for me, it's more about correcting the marketing spin. If Sun salescritters want to pay analysts to create Total Cost of Ownership white papers which compare the cost of the most expensive get-someone-on-the-phone 24x7 Red Hat support with a support-by-email Solaris support subscription, I might mock their desperation.

Similarly, if Jonathan Schwartz wants to talk about how wonderful it will be that Open Solaris is Open Source, and how they will reap the benefits of having Open Source developers, but three years later still have processes that result in 0.6 patches/day being accepted into Open Solaris, then I think it's only fair that to point out the chasm between his words and his company's actions.

Re:OpenSolaris fails to build community b/c it suc

[dotwaffle]

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 :)

Re:OpenSolaris fails to build community b/c it suc

[morgan_greywolf]

Not only that, but many people will simply ask "why?" There are already several fabulous free/open source software communities gathered around several fabulous free/open source operating systems, each having its own niche:

• - Linux, which is geared around being the UNIX-like Swiss Army Knife OS for PC people, built around good hardware support and solid application support.
• - FreeBSD, which is geared around bringing genetic UNIX on a PC (note the not-entirely-semantical difference), which aims for pretty good hardware support and concentrates on being the best UNIX it can for the PC, built around being a good, solid, tested and stable server software
• - OpenBSD, which aims to be the most secure OS on the face of the planet, built around solid, stable security mechanisms
• - NetBSD -- Well, nobody really knows what NetBSD is about except for those nutty NetBSD people ;)
• - ReactOS, which aims to be a complete free/open source Windows replacement OS
• Haiku and co., which are aimed at reviving the BeOS community

So where does OpenSolaris fit in? It seems to be an OS lacking a niche.

My answer

[Archangel Michael]

Too Little, Too Late.

There is no need for it now. Linux had already supplanted Solaris

OpenSolaris is a very young opensource initiative

[blind biker]

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.

Wait

[ISoldat53]

Sun has an OpenSolaris?

Linux Partisan Disparages Non-Linux OS

[planetralph]

This is news?

Re:Because Solaris without Sparcs isn't that great

[multipartmixed]

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

Re:OpenSolaris fails to build community b/c it suc

[thsths]

> 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.

Re:Not welcoming your Scott McNealy overlord?

[Anonymous Coward]

"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.

Re:I though it was just because it sucks

[harry666t]

Why? Last time I tried to install Solaris 10, I couldn't do it in graphical mode because it needed at least 400 (not 384, installer said 400) megabytes of RAM. And even with 256 megs the full install (something like 5 GB of stuff on one DVD)... It took around 8 hours. Damnit, it's just a few gigs of data to be copied from a disc to a hard drive, and then (possibly) set up a little... About 8 hours just to copy some data from one place to another. Even after that, Solaris was slow like a... Vista of some kind. Booting the system took 4 or 5 minutes (compared to Linux on the same machine: 30 seconds? Something like that). When I got the DVD burned I was really excited, since I heard many good words about the OS and stuff, but after trying it out I was just... Really disappointed with its hogginess. Not to mention crappy userland (very old Gnome, no VTs, many minor annoyances, the way stuff is organized within the file system is a total mess...). I really see no real gain from choosing Solaris over Linux (except if you just LOVE the CDE).

Copyright assignment

[diegocgteleline.es]

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....

Re:OpenSolaris fails to build community b/c it suc

[FrozenFOXX]

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. ;)

Re:I though it was just because it sucks

[rumith]

There is some truth in GP's words. While Solaris is full of great ideas, and most of them are pretty well implemented, one must admit that the native userland hardly differs from what it has been in early '90s. Of course, the GNU environment is available, but it hasn't replaced the default one so far. Once that happens, I expect Solaris user base to boost.

Re:OpenSolaris fails to build community b/c it suc

[morgan_greywolf]

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.

Re:I didnt bother.

[segfaultcoredump]

Linux just works? Yeah, maybe for a small system running a simple app stack.

I had to setup an oracle cluster: Thanks to Oracle's support policies, we could not use Solaris x86. Nor could we use RHEL5 (no Oracle 9i support), so RHEL4.6 it was. Should be easy, right? Well tested "enterprise" class linux that can do everything the big boys can do.... We took the hardware we were going to use for solaris and switched it to linux. A pair of Sun x4600M2's, 128G of ram, 4 Dual core AMD's. Sun fully supports linux on this box and RedHat lists it on their HCL. Should be easy.

The basic OS install was more or less easy, once we battled through the serial port redirection setup (guess most linux users never used a serial port before. After all, why bother when the box sits under your desk). I stil like serial ports over video for one major reason: issue resolution (when bad things happen, having that panic string saved by a console server can really save the day)

Ok, so the system was kickstarted and now it is time to set it up for use as an oracle DB. This is a production system, and we need lots of space (4TB) and High Availability. This means redundant connections to everything, mirroring and clustering.

Issue #1: multipathing drivers for the SAN. With solaris, you just plug the thing into the san and all of the storage that the host has access to just showed up. Multipathing was instant and I didnt have to do jack. I could see what devices mapped to which physical array with a simple command. I didnt have to guess which array /dev/sde came from vs /dev/sdf. When you have 20 luns mapped to the same host from two different arrays, its kinda important to know which drives come from which array and what the corresponding lun numbers are. That said, most linux admins I've talked to didnt have a clue about what I was talking about since they never had a san.

Issue #2: dynamically add luns: With solaris, you just change the mapping on the array and the host picks it up and auto creates the dev links. That was easy. On Linux? you've got to be kidding me... You get to echo some crazy strings into several spots in /proc and watch the fun start.

issue #3: IP Multipathing. With solaris, dladmin is used to create a bond (if it is going to the same switch and the switch supports bonding) or use the built in ip multipathing to do an active/failover setup if you are going to multiple switches. Very well documented and very easy to do. With linux... yeah, bonding is a fun task. Need to go to multiple switches? no such luck, you are screwed. I eventually used VCS to take over the systems main IP and uses its IPMultipathing agent to do the job for me. VCS on solaris just hands the task off to mpathd since the OS already does it for you.

Issue #4: zones: dont get me started. I dont want to run another entire OS, I just want name space isolation and chroot is so primative it is not even funny. Zones gives me everything I want with minimal overhead. It would have been nice to have since there are a few oracle products that dont play nicely with clusters (*Warehouse Builder*) because they imbed the host name everywhere. We could put it under Xen, but this is an app that moves huge amounts of data around, not exactly a good candidate for virtualization. Zones let us get around Oracle's brain dead use of the hostname, no such luck with linux.

Issue #5: 3rd party drivers vs the new kernel patch. If I install a 3rd party device driver in solaris and upgrade the kernel, I dont have to rebuild/reinstall the driver. Linux (even redhat 4.x with their "back port") forces me to rebuild/reinstall every damn time. Its great if the driver is standard with the kernel, but if you need something outside of that (lsi multipathing drivers to get around #1 and 10G NIC drivers in my case) and you are screwed. No wonder up2date ignores all of the kernel* rpm's by default.

Issue #6: Whats the system doing? Solaris: `mdb -k` and dtrace. Linux: still trying

It's Difficult to Download OpenSolaris (rants)

[turgid]

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.

What about all of the burned bridges?

[mpapet]

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

Re:I though it was just because it sucks

[turgid]

Yes, it's a hog, and I say this as someone with a couple of dozen SUNW^H^H^H^HJAVA shares.

I have some old Sun boxen, one of which (Sun Blade 100, 512MB, 500MHz) I used to play at 64-bit big-endian RISCs running Solaris. All of my other boxes are Linux including an old Ultra 1 with splack.

Nevada build 85 only took about 2+ hours to install from DVD on my Sun Blade 100. The previous one I tried (78?) took 3.5. The GUI is unusably slow, and the disk thrashes like mad. I use it headless over my network normally, so I don't mind too much. There are suspicious java processes running all the time, too. I sometimes run SETI@Home on it and it gets just shy of 330MFLOPS, which isn't bad considering its age.

I remember when Sun started the Java desktop thing. It is a port of GNOME, but they insisted on writing a lot of replacement applets in Java for it. Why have XMMS for audio when you can write a lame mp3 player in Java, for example? *sigh*

Typical Sun

[codemachine]

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.

Re:I though it was just because it sucks

[Anonymous Coward]

> There are suspicious java processes running all the time, too.

Solution:

svcadm disable webconsole
cacaoadm disable
cacaoadm stop

Re:OpenSolaris fails to build community b/c it suc

[Secrity]

Somebody with a mission critical server should be running real Solaris, not OpenSolaris.

Re:CDDL

[BrainInAJar]

Picking CDDL was to keep people from taking the code like they did with the original 4.xBSD series, while still allowing people to write closed-source drivers for it when it gets popular enough to attract people to do that.

Imagine how good the hardware support could be on Linux if Linus had just picked a license that lets people link in to the kernel with non-GPL code, and kept a stable ABI so that it made sense to do so. THAT'S what Sun was after

Re:I didnt bother.

[segfaultcoredump]

Here goes:

1) We did it as part of the finish script in the kickstart script. It was more than just adding it to the grub.conf, you also have to tweak a few other files to actually get the damn thing to start a login prompt on the serial port. Compared to solaris where I just add a console=ttya in the add_install_client script (yeah, we jumpstart everything) as a boot param and the installer takes care of the rest.

2) I ended up loading the lsi mpp drivers. Using a combination of veritas dmp debug commands and the mmpUtil command, we can map which lun it comes from. the vx commands give us the uuid of the lun, and the mppUtil commands tell us what lun has that uuid. Oh yeah, and we use VxVM for the fast resync capabilities since we run a campus cluster. ZFS offers a similar function of only copying the changed blocks over when (not if) something goes wrong. I hate waiting for a 2TB volume to fully resync, and so do the DBA's who then bitch about the performance hit.

3) We first tried the magic that redhat suggested (echo "bla" into a bunch of /proc files). Then we tried the mppBusRescan utility that comes with the lsi drivers. Noe worked because they were only operating at the scsi level, not the FC port level. The missing magic? we have to first force a lip on the FC ports by echoing more stuff into more /proc files. `cfgadm -c configure` is so much easier since it does everything in one shot, and that is only if you turn off the autoconfigure option.

3) 802.1ad is bonding, aka EtherChannel in the cisco world (truning to everybody else). I mentioned that we are running between two different switches and bonding is not supported in that config. This is the problem with linux. I say I want to do something, and everybody jumps on the wrong answer. (yes, cisco will support it between 6509's running the not yet out Sup 1440's.... like I trust that to work, 10G is just easier for the bandwidth)

4) linux-vserver... its close, but zones takes it to the next level. And I hate patching the kernel since you are just asking to get something to not work since you are now one of a very small group doing it. If i wanted to do that, i'd work for redhat/suse/oracle/whoever. Yeah, it was fun in the early days of slackware when you had to more or less build a new kernel from src to do anything, but I really dont have time for that anymore.

5) ps and top are good for easy problems. Here is an one that those tools didnt spot: I had to figure out what was eating a system alive and sending it into a tailspin. Turns out that oracle's enterprise agent was spawning thousands of sub jobs that lived and died in under a second. dtrace spotted this in an instant. top and ps will never saw it. (once you know the problem, strace will also spot it, but you first have to know what process is causing the problem) Yeah, when somebody says the system is 'acting funny', I reach for top, ps, ptree and the like. If nothing shows up in 30 seconds, its time to dig deeper. That requires tools like truss, snoop, dtrace and mdb (for the really nasty problems). I dont get paid more than everybody else in my group to solve easy problems. I get paid more because I get to solve the nasty ones.

As for zfs, the first release was cool, but had a few 'issues' that needed to be sorted out. At least the sales engineers I talked to warned me to wait for an update release or two before I used it in production. That was then, but this is now, and it rocks. We now use it as the base FS for all of our zones and as a failover fs with Sun Cluster. The damn thing just works. I would not put oracle on top of it due to a few minor strange things oracle does, but for everything else it is great.

And dont feel so bad, I think poorly of HPUX and AIX too :-) Talk about two vendors who have not really bothered to advance their OS in the past 10 years, linux is awesome compared to those two. (of course, my experience with those two have been helping the poor admins try and do half of what linux can do)

Re:Not welcoming your Scott McNealy overlord?

[Knuckles]

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.