Slashdot Mirror
OpenSolaris Indiana Released
Lally Singh writes "The Linux-friendly OpenSolaris Indiana has been released! A new, modern package manager and all the goodies of Solaris: ZFS, DTrace, SMF, and Xen on a LiveCD that was designed for Linux users. 'Why use the OpenSolaris OS you ask? It's pretty simple, you'll find it full of unique features like the new Image Packaging System (IPS), ZFS as the default filesystem, DTrace enabled packages for extreme observability and performance tuning, and many many more. We think you'll be quite happy to came by to take a look!'"
Without all that free crap.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
I assert that it's too little, too late. If Solaris had been freed in the early part of the century, it might have made some headway against Linux. As it is, it'll be stripped of anything useful and portable and will be as irrelevant as HP/UX or OpenVMS for all but locked-in legacy users.
Everything I needed to know about life, I learnt from Blake's Seven
Anyone here know what's so special about the Image Packaging System? I found the homepage, but it didn't really explain how it differed from traditional packaging methods. (More annoyingly, it didn't even explain that intriguing name!) A quick check of Wikipedia doesn't offer much help, either. Anyone know the scoop on this (new?) system?
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
I'm tempted to tinker with ZFS just for its snapshotting abilities. You don't have to run a server to find that useful.
Java is platform portable? Oh wait this is a platform :[
They employ sexy-code formatting monkeys. The solaris kernel is a hack of a lot simpler to understand than the Linux kernel - I hege this on my comparison of the sources a while back.
There is still no mighty IOKit killer on the horizon tho... Apple (and libkern, the cpp runtine) wins.
Matt
...a hat and bullwhip?
What if I do the same thing, and I do get different results?
With ZFS you can smash a hard drive and keep the system running:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=CN6iDzesEs0
DNA in your Linux: DNALinux
If you're looking for an easily maintainable desktop platform for web browsing, chat and stealing music, use Ubuntu. Solaris isn't like Linux; no one is going to start ranting at you or calling you an M$ shill if you don't run it on everything from your server to your blender.
For someone who has been using OpenSolaris (SXCE) as a server platform for Apache, ZFS, etc for awhile now, I welcome an easy to upgrade and improved userspace Solaris. Will try this one out. Solaris has had a relatively poor userspace experience for someone used to Linux machines. The kernel is top-notch though.
I've played around with ZFS, it's very cool. I mean very very cool.
It's a crying shame the licensing issues keep it from being ported to Linux as part of the kernel
I came to the datacenter drunk with a fake ID, don't you want to be just like me?
Show me dtrace or zfs on ubuntu.
As for hardware, the solaris kernel doesn't change its ABI every couple of weeks. Drivers written once continue to work.
Um, what repos do I need to enable to get ZFS or DTrace functionality? Perhaps the ones powered by pony magic, because last time I checked Linux has neither of these very very cool (and useful) technologies available (and ZFS-Fuse most assuredly does not qualify as 'available' yet).
But perhaps your zealotry does not allow you to try new things...
ZFS on Linux won't happen. But Linux on ZFS is possible today. Solaris has a LX BRANDZ container which emulates the linux system call api. So you can create linux container and install RedHat in it.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
> The solaris kernel is a hack
You were correct up to this point.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Solaris has its strengths (ZFS, etc), but it also has its weaknesses (why would you use it on an average desktop system?)
But maybe Solaris comes with a spell-checker! That should be a major selling point for you.
Klingon programs don't timeshare, they battle for supremacy.
The darn thing never even boots successfully on most all of my machines - on the one machine where it does - the network card (wired) is not detected making it unusable. OpenSolaris seriously needs a bunch of smart driver developers contributing drivers and general x86 workarounds - just not suitable for x86 hardware as of today (unless the h/w happens to be Sun).
...this version completely lacks support for Daylight Saving Time.
Not yet. When home network storage servers and easy-to-use file backup become a commonplace item, however, ZFS and similar technologies will become quite important.
A pair of Apple predictions: (1) OS X will at some point in the future move to ZFS, and use its snapshotting capabilities to improve Time Machine; (2) Time Capsule will evolve into a line of user-friendly home NAS units, with ZFS under the covers, that allow users to add more storage easily, and ready for online offsite backup right out of the box (which of course, will only be compatible with .Mac).
Has nvidia gotten around to allowing OpenSolaris to distribute their driver, or do you still have to download and install it manually?
Done with slashdot, done with nerds, getting a life.
As long as they don't employ sexy code-formatting monkeys! What a difference a - can make.
Klingon programs don't timeshare, they battle for supremacy.
Don't want easy raid/storage expansion on your desktop? You don't want efficient storage?
Dtrace doesnt offer me anything as im not a developer
You don't want to know how your system is performing in a way like never before? I'm not a developer, but a sysadmin and use dtrace every day to tell those pesky developers that yes, it's actually THEIR CODE that's at fault at not the server I setup for them. It's also neat to be able to easily see what process is using how much network bandwidth in realtime. That was difficult before.
SMF doesnt offer me anything i cant do with startup
I don't like the complexity of SMF, but it's self-healing for the stuff that's already built for it is cool as is it's dependancy checking.
IPS doesnt seam any better than deb or rpm
It's better than just RPM, but it's about the same as deb or yum. It's a big step foreward for what was a commercial OS.
I can tell you haven't even tried solaris 10, but give it a swig. Before solaris 10 I wrote (often rightly) wrote of Sun. Why would I pay a premium for something FreeBSD can do for free and outperforms it? The hardware is cool (see coolthreads processors...it's hyperthreading done right), it's affordable, and it's innovative. It may not be compelling enough to switch from linux or whatever if all you use from a desktop is firefox and thunderbird, but there is actually some VERY cool stuff in there. Don't write it off. There's a reason FreeBSD is taking in a lot of these features.
We named the dog Indiana.
I'm installing it right now. It looks like a copy of Ubuntu. It has a LiveCD, standard GNOME desktop, and an online package manager (called pkg).
Don't take that as criticism. Cloning Ubuntu is probably the best design decision an OS team can make these days.
Personally, I don't care whether it's Solaris or Ubuntu or *BSD underneath it all, so long as it supports my hardware and runs my applications.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
The first OS fully coded in Java!
I am not even sure I can get worked up about Solaris anymore even for "serious work".
That train already left the station.
It's not just good enough that you make something cool but you should also make it available when people want it rather than 10 years later.
Now Sun has to put on a good showing just to keep from looking silly.
Although this is ultimatey a good thing as it's one of the key benefits of free market competition.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
I'm missing g's and e's :(
As a proud LDD touting, LWN gazing, MSc wielding geek; the Solaris kernel is a heck of a lot better coded, structured and organised than the Linux kernel. But alas, it lacks the many new features that have truly driven linux over the last decade.
Naturally my opinions lie with the ease of code readability and ease of initial development - these are not the same as a lkml hardened pro
Really? Can you provide some links please? I would also like to know about performance etc.
"Some books contain the machinery required to create and sustain universes."-Tycho
Not bloody likely. Even a "clean-room" interpretation of ZFS will run afoul of Sun's patents, and those patents are only licensed under the CDDL.
Jesus is coming -- look busy!
How is OpenSolaris connected to this Indiana thingy and what is the difference between Indiana and Nexenta?
My take is that Nexenta is compiling the GNU software tools and providing them in their repositories. Is Indiana doing this as well or are they just trying to mimic the package management system itself but providing no GNU software?
Anyone know?
You don't think enough... therefore you better not be!
>> ZFS doesnt offer me anything as im not managing servers
> Don't want easy raid/storage expansion on your desktop? You don't want efficient storage?
ZFS is a marginal improvement at best over what's already available.
>> Dtrace doesnt offer me anything as im not a developer
> You don't want to know how your system is performing
At the level that dtrace provides? You might as well claim that most end users read the kernel source for fun.
Unless someone already has a yen for strace/truss/valgrind, dtrace isn't going to get them excited. HELL, they won't even understand what it's for.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
therefore, it is *not* Linux-friendly
Stanislaw Lem would be proud.
Given what's happening to SCO lately, how valid is the license that Sun purchased to allow them to release the source code to Solaris?
the growth in cynicism and rebellion has not been without cause
Well the only special thing I could find on sun.com is that thanks to ZFS I can now hook up
$59,889,696,578,085,169,569,553,930,907,991,205,216.26
worth of harddisks to my desktop instead of the puny $3,246,626,956,972,881,084.41 I can spend on a 64-bit filesystem.
from a BSD point of view. If good open source software makes into their distribution, good for them and all their users. Goal accomplished.
The best way to predict the future is to invent it
Then you don't really understand the file system. Seriously, I think this is the BEST reason to look at Solaris .. ZFS is amazing: snapshots; Z-RAID; Zetabyte file ssytem; prevention of bit rot ...
... you don't care about your photos, docs and music???
They have also forcibly crashed it over a million time and it has never lost data even once. Try doing that with your home PC.
And what
Dtrace doesnt offer me anything as im not a developer
SMF doesnt offer me anything i cant do with startup
IPS doesnt seam any better than deb or rpm
Is there any reason to switch? Well, for one, Solaris (and a few other OSes) support a new key just to the left of the "enter" key called the "apostrophe" key.
-Arthur
Cave ne ante ullas catapultas ambules
You should be running Windows.
According to this blogger at zdnet, OpenSolaris is what Ubuntu wants to be when it grows up.
Yeah the title is flamebait but the article is very informative and provides screenshots.
And when I say screenshots. I mean camera shots of the screen?!??!?!
Open Source Java DAO Generator
You, sir, are unmitigatedly fuckin' retahdid.
... under [patent claim(s), now owned or hereafter acquired, including without limitation, method, process, and apparatus claims, in any patent Licensable by grantor] ... to make, have made, use, practice, sell, and offer for sale, and/or otherwise dispose of the Original Software (or portions thereof)." -CDDL Section 2.1(b)
"Conditioned upon Your compliance with Section 3.1 below and subject to third party intellectual property claims, the Initial Developer hereby grants You a world-wide, royalty-free, non-exclusive license
Yeah, and you have to fsck that with a traditional filesystem. Plus, zfs takes care of bit rot (which is becoming a problem as HD sizes get larger) volume management (and makes it extremely easy). Well you can make fun of the theoretical limits, when your modern 1GB hard drive crashes or 1.5 tarabyte array crashes you'll be happy when you can boot without having to wait for the filesystem to be checked. Have you had to deal with volume management before? It was a pain in the ass.
Thanks SCOSource. Without Unixware 7.x, this release would not have been possible. The previous releases based on Sys V were really crappy.
is that ZFS, despite all its goodness, lacks some incredibly basic features compared to 99% of the hardware and software RAID and LVM systems out there. You can't grow (please pay attention here) a ZFS pool except by adding similarly-redundant vdevs, and there is no way to remove a vdev from a pool, unlike LVM2.
So. Got a 4-drive RAID-Z2 array, and you want to add more space by buying another drive to add in to your 5-bay hot-swap cage? You're shit outta luck. If you have a zpool with a vdev that consists of a pair of mirrored drives, you CAN add another vdev of two drives, then another, etc. You also CAN replace the drives in a vdev with larger drives. That's kind of half-okay, but still not on par with RAID cards of a DECADE ago. Even Linux's MD can grow RAID5/6 across more devices!
Someone suggested the ability to grow redundant pools by single devices, and the reaction amongst solaris ZFS developers (!!!) was "now why would you want to do that?", and then when THAT was explained, "well shucks, I wonder how they do that" (they = almost every hardware and software RAID solution on the planet.)
Absolutely astounding that a Solaris filesystem developer would not be able to at least guess as to how a RAID5 array would be re-striped to add a new drive.
Far as I know, they've been working on the grow capability for more than a year and we have yet to see it.
Please help metamoderate.
It's a common misconception that raid "prevents" data corruption.
RAID only protects you against (complete) hardware failures, and "noisy" IO errors.
Consider:
You have bad data on disk, but the hard drive reads the bad data without error.
With parity, (even assuming the parity is read upon each read request, which would be a faulty assumption), raid 5 has no way of telling which disk is bad, or whether the parity is bad.
Unlike raid, ZFS has end to end checksumming, so it knows when the data on disk is bad, and it knows which copy is bad, too.
Unfortunately though, from what I've heard, ZFS isn't stable enough for production environments yet:
http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2008/Jan/15/joyent_backup_services_down_for_three_days.html
read these comments
I fear the Y2038 bug
Dtrace doesnt offer me anything as im not a developer
SMF doesnt offer me anything i cant do with startup
IPS doesnt seam any better than deb or rpm
Is there any reason to switch? So what is it exactly that you do and what are you using now?
Open Source Java DAO Generator
The source code (which remaps linux systems calls to open solaris and fudges inconsistencies)
Info on installing debian (it's designed for RedHat based linux, so it's slightly painful ... though possibly out of date).
Brand Z info
Overview of linux support
I haven't tried it, but there shouldn't be much overhead/performance loss.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
No this is Debian.
Sun has a video out that I'm too lazy to search for here, where they run ZFS on a bunch of pen drives, plugged into a USB 2.0 Hub. Faster, and fault tolerant. Pretty amazing. ZFS is not for just servers. Think of apples "time machine" software. Also, ZFS includes lots of Metadata and checksums, to prevent bit-rot of your files.
What are we going to do tonight Brain?
My home servers are in screaming need of ZFS (A NetApp Filer for home use). I want ZFS implemented in Linux, like everyone else. Moving to a OpenSolaris based distribution just feels awkward and wrong, especially when ZFS has made it into FreeBSD 7.0 as an experimental feature.
I'm eyeballing the FreeNAS project daily. Sooner or later we will have a ZFS appliance, free as in beer at least. Sun have to work harder to win me over but things look promising. (Ubuntu on Sun hardware [+], trying to release Java under an Open Source license [+], closing some MySQL features [-])
Girls are strange. They don't come with a man page.
-- Michael Mattsson
While ZFS is cool, it will someday be ported to Linux (the market forces are such). The advantages over ext3 etc. are simply not compelling enough for me to abandon an entire universe of software and hardware I have gotten used to with Linux distributions.
I see no use for Dtrace as I use nothing more fancy than Matlab for analyzing my data. No fancy number crunching or developing here. I used to do a lot of heavy duty Fortran 95 programming, but that is history (which will not be repeated).
So, Sun wants me to trial an OS that is about 5 years late, and has major hardware problems while offering no compelling reasons for the switch. Sorry, but Microsoft beat Sun by a year or so. Its called Vista.
I used to be a Solaris user (on Sun hardware) - used it for about 5-6 years. The image of pricey hardware that worked at half the speed of commonly available Intel/AMD hardware running Linux has sort of stayed with me.
Ha!
/usr/ucb/bin /usr/local/bin /usr/debian/bin
That's great. I don't know I'd ever bother with this - it would have lit my mind on fire around 2001 or so!
I bet it gets a lot farther than the Debian-on-BSD-kernel efforts. Still, aside from trading away great device support in exchange to get ZFS, I can't see the point.
You could always do something like that!
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
(I work for Sun)
These days we see a lot of performance related calls being logged by customers
DTrace is a massive leap forwards
I would really not write off Solaris, it's far from dead
I see nothing compelling in there. Solaris is an unpopular kernel with few drivers, a bunch of second-rate command line utilities, and Sun software engineering behind it. Now, tell me again: why do I want that?
Shhh AC your just jealous cuz you didn't get 1st post with some troll link. :P
IranAir Flight 655 never forget!
Awesome, thank you.
"Some books contain the machinery required to create and sustain universes."-Tycho
Forgive my ignorance, but
Huh?
Huh?
I don't understand either of these statements.
Heck, in my experience, FreeBSD has better device support than OpenSolaris, and it comes with FreeBSD. It's really the best compromise, if you want that file system.
The difference is they would actually have a leg to stand on (they actually own the patents, ( you'd think you'd get your lawyers to actually check that before you sue somebody btw))
:(
However it would still go fairly badly for them, i guess the linux kernel devs just dont want to risk it
IranAir Flight 655 never forget!
Dtrace doesnt offer me anything as im not a developer
SMF doesnt offer me anything i cant do with startup
IPS doesnt seam any better than deb or rpm
Is there any reason to switch? If you do not use it, than you probably don't need it. Funny how "insightful" that statement is.
-Em
RelevantElephants: A Somatic WebComic...
I think that's probably a true statement, as long as you include the equally true converse, "Ubuntu is what OpenSolaris wants to be when it grows down."
And "up" isn't where the action is these days, so I'd place my bets on Ubuntu.
From the article: Beauty is not only skin-deep. OpenSolaris employs the very same enterprise-proven high-performance Solaris 10 kernel that powers the biggest and baddest Sun boxes, and has the stability and monolithic scalability to match, something that commodity Linux desktops and servers â" while far more stable and sprightly than Windows OSes â" lack in comparison. In addition to the Solaris 10 kernel, OpenSolaris makes use of Sunâ(TM)s advanced 128-bit Zetabyte File System or ZFS, which permits âoepoolingâ of storage on networked Solaris-based systems, as well as Solaris 10â(TM)s native âoecontainersâ for OS-based high performance virtualization. Like its Linux cousins, OpenSolaris and Solaris 10 is also Xen-hypervisor enabled as both a virtualization domain and guest. a bunch of second-rate command line utilities Open Solaris comes with the same GNU utilities I commonly use in CentOS and Debian in the
Open Source Java DAO Generator
(/sarcasm) We think you'll be quite happy to came by to take a look!' Unfortunately, I couldn't find the part that allows me to build a sun4m compatible image. Of course, documentation would go a long way for some of that "nonexistent" hardware.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Open Source Java DAO Generator
sudo apt-get install x-window-manager-openwin mailtool
Lol!
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
http://xkcd.com/37/
http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2008/Jan/15/joyent_backup_services_down_for_three_days.html
read these comments From that same article you linked to: UPDATE: See our follow-up story for more. Joyent was using an older version of ZFS, and the bug in question was fixed nearly a year ago. From that article it seems that patching/updating OpenSolaris isn't the same as patching/updating Solaris. I have no personal experience in updating OpenSolaris though. OpenSolaris does seem to have the smpatch utility.
Open Source Java DAO Generator
You misuse the semicolon. A semicolon is not used in the same contexts as a colon. Instead, it is used to join two sentences (which would otherwise be complete), or to separate items in a list when the use of a comma would be ambiguous. Therefore:
"John was ready already; Anna made him wait."
"They offered lasagne; hamburgers, chips and salad; tacos, enchilladas and burritos; or fried frogs legs."
In no circumstance can you write "As a proud LDD touting, LWN gazing, MSc wielding geek; the Solaris kernel is a heck of a lot better coded..." without looking like a semiliterate try-hard. In general, the best advice for using a semicolon is "don't, unless you know you're sure".
As a self-confessed geek, you should know the importance of correct punctuation. It's not just helpful to compilers.
Look out!
The real killer for end-user ZFS is it's lack of expandibility. Let's say you buy 4x500GB externals and set up a RAIDZ on it. Later on prices go down and you get yourself a nice 2TB drive for $150 but don't have the cash to get 3 more of them just yet. So you swap a single 500GB HD for the new 2TB you just got and total pool size remains at 2 TB until you get the greens to replace the other 3, then your pool size will grow.
Sun ZFS devs have even stated that they'd love to add the ability to grow a set of disks but since they're focused on the enterprise they won't be focusing on this for quite some time.
Until they make it easier to add storage to a RAIDZ pool it's going to limit home user adoption.
Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
ZFS IS FUCKING FREE. some of us DO run servers at HOME and don't like/want to pay NetApp, Pillar, etc. Actually, can't even afford it.
If that's all you want (and since you'd have to switch OS's anyway), you might want to check out ZFS-in-FreeBSD, as FreeBSD supports more hardware than Solaris. For example, FreeBSD supports PCI IDE controllers (useful for adding old disks to ZFS). Last I heard, Solaris only supported the IDE controllers on a motherboard; PCI IDE controllers did not work.
Is there a version of this for sparc? Anyone have a link?
OpenSolaris is a development project and a production-quality (supposedly), commercially supported operating system. Indiana was the code name for the first release of the OS.
Sorry, I'm calling you on your B.S. Sun fanboy.
ZFS is *not* ready for production.
I'm a working Solaris admin. I can point to several ZFS raidz arrays that have had to be recovered from tape due to ZFS bugs losing & corrupting data.
This is clearly a case of ZFS marketing outstripping ZFS reality. They have implemented all the cool features, but have dropped the ball on robustness.
Do a sunsolve search for ZFS panics or ZFS corruption. There are a half-dozen major bugs that are still un-resolved, and won't be until Sol10u6 - if then. [u5 was just released in the last week or so]
rho
It will -- and is already happening (ZFS on FUSE). What can't happen for licensing reason is ZFS in the Linux kernel, rather than as a userspace file system.
Naturally, performance will never be as good due to the additional overhead, but another FUSE filesystem driver, NTFS3g runs tolerably fine.
Michel
Fedora Project Contribut
Unless of course, you expect to use it in production. Even freebsd zfs developers say it is not ready on freebsd yet.
Solaris : I aint'ed dead yet
Linux : Yes you are
Solaris : I'm feeling better !
Linux : You'll be stone dead in a moment
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
He's talking about SCO.
And what
Last time I lost data to a filesystem problem must have been to a FAT disk, which means it must have been 10 or 15 years ago. I did lose data to hardware failures though. Several times. Recovered most of them through backups. Not all.
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
Crap. gnome?! WTF is wrong with people?
That doesn't sound right to me. Most onboard IDE controllers are hooked to the PCI bus, even if they're not in a physical slot.
Not a typewriter
GNOME is also the default for most mainstream linux distributions that Sun would want to position OpenSolaris against. RHEL, SuSE, CentOS, Ubuntu, Fedora.
You should be able to compile KDE, or you can get a precompiled package on blastwave.org.
Open Source Java DAO Generator
Upon reboot two devices in the array came up with bad magic in the superblock and all was lost. The consensus seems to be that filesystem corruption caused enough confusion that the md driver decided to overwrite the superblocks. No hardware failure required, and there probably isn't enough info from the failure to find the bug. The bug is still there, and this will happen again to somebody.
Support SETI@home
The OpenSolaris OS replaces many of the traditional Solaris tools with GNU equivalents. It also has a new packaging system, which isn't especially like apt.
Indiana was just the code name for what is officially OpenSolaris 2008.05.
All of the projects I mentioned maintain repositories of GNU and non-GNU software.
things not looking so good after reading the transcripts of the Novell/SCO trial, Novell wasn't properly involved nor paid in SCO's granting to Sun the ability to open source System V technology in OpenSolaris. Uh oh, what SCO lied about Linux might be 100% dead on with OpenSolaris, stolen Unix IP!!!
Is it just me, but it seems that stories related to Sun, at least the ones that aren't bashing it in some way, always seem to come late in the day. Even when the submission was a lot earlier than that.
Open Source Java DAO Generator
The only people writing it off are people who have never had to maintain real production environments where downtime is money. I trust Solaris far more under load than Linux.
I believe your evaluation to be incorrect on several levels. Firstly, the issue you point out is true for RAID-anything, as the filesystem has to be able to survive the loss of one of the disks for RAIDZ. RAID5 is no different in this regard.
Secondly, with RAIDZ (or RAID5) and 4x500GB, you wouldn't end up with 2TB of disk space -- you'd end up with 1.5TB due to the overhead of the parity data.
Thirdly, you don't have to replace all of the disk drives with RAIDZ to increase the amount of disk space dramatically. You seem to be thinking of RAID5, not RAIDZ. With RAIDZ replacing one of your 500GB disk drives with a new 2TB disk drive would indeed still leave you with only 1.5TB of disk space, due to the requirement for redundancy, but if you bought a pair of 2TB disk drives to replace two of your 500GB disk drives, you would increase your disk capacity from 1.5TB to 3TB, and if you just added the pair of 2TB disk drives to the pool as a mirror, as opposed to replacing existing drives, then you'd increase your disk capacity to 3.5TB.
Fourth, no one is forcing you to use redundancy with ZFS if you don't want to suffer the redundancy/reliability overhead. You can add non-redundant disk drives to a ZFS pool.
If you want extra reliability, you have to pay for it somehow.
|>oug
Ah, I thought so, but I had confused Ransom Love with Robert Love. How embarrassing.
I still don't get the implication about Sun "buying" the right to open Solaris. They couldn't really be stupid enough to do that (buying something they already had from some one who couldn't sell it to them anyway), could they?
Of course, but you know what's better than failing over? Not having to fail over.
Every mans' island needs an ocean; choose your ocean carefully.
Novell taking on SCO is one thing, Novell taking on Sun is quite another. Sun is a much bigger company than Novell and a lot more money. It's not worth the fight.
It seems like SCO stiffed Novell by not giving them their cut of the licenses, but that doesn't mean the licenses they gave were invalid. If that was the case, the issue would have come up already.
Novell gets some good publicity in their fight against SCO, but in reality, they're not much of a player in anything. SuSE isn't that popular, at some point their revenues for their legacy products will dry up, and then what's left? There revenue has been declining for years and their profits have been iffy. All they're going to get out of the SCO trial is some pats on the back since SCO doesn't have any more money.
While there's no arguing that what SCO did was messed up, I don't really see Novell in a good light either. Novell purchased the rights to Unix for $300mil. The transaction between Novell and SCO was for about $120-150Mill. So SCO paid about half of what Novell paid and only gets 5% in licensing fees and no patent or copyrights according to Novell.
This just doesn't seem right to me. Either Novell seriously screwed over SCO and they were too stupid to know it, or something else is going on. Ray Noorda, who was CEO of Novell, left to start Caldera. Noorda is undeniably the reason Novell was who they were. From what I could gather they did have a good relationship.
Bottom line, I don't understand how Novell can claim they pretty much just sold a 5% commission deal for 50% of what they paid and act like their shit doesn't stink either.
According the wikipedia Up to his death, Noorda owned the Canopy Group. One of its holdings, Caldera Systems, purchased the Unix assets in 1995 from the Santa Cruz Operation, which had acquired them from Novell. In 1996 it also acquired the Digital Research assets from Novell and immediately brought a lawsuit against Microsoft that largely duplicated the claims that the FTC and Department of Justice had pursued in the early 1990s. The lawsuit was ultimately settled in 2000 with a $275 million payment to Caldera. Every time one of Norda's companies purchases something that used to belong to Novell, they sue. Usually Microsoft (Noorda hated MS).
Sorry but it just seems fishy to me. How would Novell not expect that SCO/Caldera would ultimately sue. Maybe Novell was aware of a possible lawsuit to attack RedHat while they were making moves with SuSE?
Open Source Java DAO Generator
I think ZFS might mean something to some home users with large video or music collections. Want to build a cheap and safe raid system with no special hardware? ZFS will allow this.
I use ZFS on production systems at work and it's already saved my bacon. I don't see any reason why not to extend it to the home/personal file server space as well.
How is ZFS performance in BSD?
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
Fedora, RHEL, SUSE, etc. don't have a default. SUSE, and Fedora have been advertising KDE 4 pretty heavily.
Ubuntu is the only one on your list that defaults to Gnome.
And even with Ubuntu's soaring popularity, many Ubuntu users are switching to KDE, and surveys consistently show the majority of Linux users use KDE.
Sun may prefer Gnome, but you shouldn't generalize that every major distro defaults to it, because that just isn't true.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
How many home users go with RAID in their home box, and want to expand it as well?
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
read the comments on the blog below that first link.
I fear the Y2038 bug
I haven't run any formal tests, but it only seems a tiny bit slower than vinum.
I did find it odd that this story made it on to the front page so late in the day considering the official release was in the morning. But then again, this is Slashdot where it's fun to hate Sun. :-P
zfs is light years beyond typical raid environments... software or hardware...
most raid environments don't do checksumming at every step of the data write / read process.
most raid environments cannot detect silent corruption (bad cache, bad sector, flipped bit, etc) once the data has been read or written.
most raid environments don't offer double parity.
most raid environments require that the entire raid array be initialized at once, wasting potentially hours of time for the formatting/initializing to be completed.
most raid environments when using off the shelf SATA/PATA drives can potentially go bad, even with parity... If you were doing a RAID 5 array with TB size drives, there's a potential that the MTBE can be reached while regenerating data on a replaced volume from parity causing the entire array to be toasted.
All of these things are not issues with ZFS....
ZFS is easily expandable, automatically realigns that data as you expand the pool, can have multiple sub-mount points (mounted anywhere) that can have different attributes - like compressing/shared/extended permissions/iSCSI and more on the way, like encryption, multiple compression algorithms, etc....
I've played/worked with ZFS now for over 2 years and have never lost a single bit of data - even though I've tried...
Build your RAIDZ pool on 20 drives, in 2 disk expansion units attached to 2 channels of a single SCSI card (10 drives per channel)... now shut the box down, remove all the drives, move them around between units, add an additional scsi card to the box, split the disks up between the scsi cards so they are now split 5 per channel, take one drive back out, and erase it... hold onto it for later...
Bring the box back up... the pool will come back online without problems, running degraded as one drive is missing.
now put the erased drive back in, and issue a resilver command, wait a while (not as long as a standard raid controller would take) and voila - all data that was stored on that erased drive is back and in place, and the pool is no longer running in degraded performance mode.
try any of that with a standard raid controller and your data is f0rked!
Who is general failure, and why is he reading my hard drive?
I'd hope this isn't a dead/doomed OS. I'm on the summer internship team to port Indiana to SPARC. Would be a complete shame to see a full summer of work flop >.>
Nothing against KDE, just my rationale for why I think Sun went with Gnome.
Open Source Java DAO Generator
How easy is it to UPDATE applications and, more importantly, the operating system with the latest patches?
This is a big deal.
Every time I've looked into OpenSolaris before, it wanted me to subscribe to a pay service to get system updates.
I consider that to be pretty basic functionality (even Microsoft doesn't charge for their update service), so this was an automatic no-go.
Admittedly I may be way off-base since I am much more familiar with Linux and FreeBSD than with Solaris.
Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. --E. W. Dijkstra
Nevertheless, the number of times I've seen people use semicolons when they mean colons you would not believe! I don't know ... it's as if they have an inferiority complex and they can't bring themselves to use a full-fledged colon.
Look out!
Read the transcripts. Novell sent Sun a letter before they open sourced Solaris to warn them that their license from SCO was invalid. Now they're asking the court to rule that this is the case, and Judge Kimball has given every indication that he's willing to do so.
I imagine that the folks at Sun have been pretty nervous since last August. Imagine, paying millions of dollars to put your product in exactly the position you've been (erroneously) proclaiming your competition is in. Not smart.
Linux is far from being up to par with a Solaris or AIX, or BSD.
...
... I just say "configure script", GNU autotools and other strange things that aren't properly documented.
... ;-)
For users, Linux is great; but for administrators and developers, it's not.
Does Linux support true AIO (asynchronous I/O) now? That's the most basic feature in Solaris or AIX, and required for some high-performance applications. Not to mention the threading and signalling quirks in various Linux kernel versions
No, for programming, Linux is a nightmare
It takes a proper UN*X platform to write a proper UN*X application. After it works on everything else, it can be ported to Linux
Last time I lost data was because Windows Vista destroyed itself, after I installed FreeBSD on a spare partition. Apparently, Microsoft has changed the partition table layout again.
It's not Debian. Debian has had the ability to fully encrypt the root partition during installation since Sarge I think. Etch for sure. Ubuntu can do it too with the alternate installer. OpenSuse and Slackware have excellent docs on how to get / file encryption. Disk Encryption is essential for laptops and removable media in 2008. If Solaris wants to get adopted by government and financial sectors for use on laptops it will need to have some form of serious disk encryption. To be fair to the OpenSolaris people there are two teams working on encryption solutions but I think they lag well behind Linux or even Windows (Truecrypt) solutions. Two in development projects: Crypto in the lofi(7D) driver (a bit like dm-crypt on Linux or FileVault on MacOS X): http://opensolaris.org/os/project/loficc/ due to integrate soon. and ZFS Crypto which is still in development but due to integrate this summer. http://opensolaris.org/os/project/zfs-crypto/ However neither of these provide for an encrypted root filesystem as they aren't full disk encryption solutions. However with ZFS Crypto all of your home directory and other datasets (filesystems) with sensitive data can be encrypted. I for one welcome my Sun Microsystems overlords...actually I am glad to see another alternative to Windows becoming more accessible to the masses. I have my copy in bittorrent now ready to install in my [Sun Microsystems] Virtualbox 1.6.0 Congratulations to the Project Indiana Team!
"Flags are bits of colored cloth that governments use first to shrink-wrap people's brains..."
Can you be more specific because and include any links because I don't plan on reading all the transcripts. It is also contrary to what Novell has openly said before, which makes it kind of a dickish move in my book.
I do know that SYSVR4 was jointly developed by Sun and AT&T before Novell bought any rights to it and that Sun had certain rights even before purchasing anything from Novell.
Open Source Java DAO Generator
Are you on crack? 2.6 came with an AIO api and there are even patches around for AIO on 2.4. This is years old.
You seem either grossly uninformed or you're simply rude.
You get the Blackberry answer because I'm remote.
stupid enough? I don't know about the characterization.
They had the rights to SVR4 that Solaris is based on to use it, to develop their own OS based on it, to sell it under trade secret and copyright protection but not to make it open. They then bought that right for a song from SCO because at that moment the latter needed a cash infusion to continue their jihad against Linux.
The judge in te SCO V Novell case ruled last August that SCO does not own the copyright to SVR4 and it follows had no right to sell the right to make it open. Novell owns that right and reserved it in a document called th APA. You can read about it on groklaw.
The reason why Novell reserved that right - and why the rights to unix were split so badly as to make it irretrievably dead had to do with Ransom Love's hubris. Hubris is the arrogance of pride.
Mr. Love was president and founder of one of the earliest commercial Linux companies, the Santa Cruz Operation (not to be confused with SCO). When his IPO went bizarrely huge for no good reason its treasury stock was worth several more digits than he was used to dealing with. Paid in equity grew to half a billion and they never sold the majority of treasury stock. Marke cap was several times that early on. Of course he bought all the toys the bubble millionaires like and threw huge company parties, but he was also an old school geek like you find here on slashdot now and then.
It happened that at that precise moment the company that had purchased the rights, code and business of unix from bell labs in their breakup (but not the trademark oddly enough), Novell was finding no success with unix and needed a cash infusion to retake ownership of the network, which had been their genesis. (Some will get the irony of this!). Being an old school geek Ransom wanted to "buy unix" as a trophy for having built a successful Linux business.
Unfortunately he didn't have enough to buy the whole thing and being as he was still wet behind the ears in corporate goverment and his company had never ever turned a quarterly profit, Novell insisted on terms. Here's where the hubris come in. He bought the right to market unix for 5% of the gross with the rest going to Novell plus the right to develop a new and better unix he could keep all of the profits from. For rhis he paid in company stock that I hope Novell sold right away because within a year it was nearly wothless. I think he really believed he could mix in GNU/Linux and come out with something like this Open Solaris and buy up the rest of the rights and take over the server market. It didn't work out because he didn't have the rights to open it fully to attract open developers, his ipo money bled out too fast and eventually his company was bought out by an investment group (this one is the SCO we know and loathe)
By making the attempt he fractured the rights to unix in such a way that the OS languished for over a decade, much to the glee of Microsoft which spent that decade taking ownership of the desktop network client and nearly half of servers. In software a decade is a very long time.
I hope this explains it well enough. My thumbs hurt now.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Well, it appears it's you who's grossly uninformed: If you read the proper specs, you'll see that the initial AIO implementation in Kernel 2.6 was performed synchronously. I don't know if this has been fixed now, but it was a major annoyance when I had to code for it.
We had an old A1000 we wanted to hook up to a Solaris 10 box but guess what.... Sun dropped support for that driver in Solaris 10! And the Solaris 9 one doesn't work!
Eat your own dogfood first.
Because the APA was secret until extracted in the SCO V Novell trial, there was no way for Sun to know SCO didn't have the rights. That wasn't settled by the court until last August.
Sun could know, though that they were creeps that it was dangerous to do business with them. That much was clear by the way they were running aruond suing or threatening to sue everyone who had ever done business with them.
Sun is not blameless in this.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Any idea if they borrowed that from FreeBSD, which also has generally good Linux emulation?
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Linux 2.6 Kernel AIO (and its flaws) Support for kernel AIO has been included in the 2.6 Linux kernel. (...) On ext2, ext3, jfs, xfs and nfs, these do not return an explicit error, but quietly default to synchronous or rather non-AIO behaviour (...) AIO read and write on sockets (doesn't return an explicit error, but quietly defaults to synchronous or rather non-AIO behavior) Linux kernel AIO to do list.
Google is your friend!
(BTW and it was 2005 when I needed it; it killed the performance of my code because it was executed synchronously instead of asynchronously)
And to add to that: Linux was light years away from a proper AIO implementation in 2005 (perhaps still is). I consulted the man pages, and found nothing unusual until I saw the performance results. The signalling was also broken. I thought it was a common UN*X feature, being used to it for years of Solaris and AIX programming. That really shattered my belief in Linux. I had also assumed Linux had proper threading, but not so until 2.6, and on a totally unrelated note, in 1996 on Kernel 2.2.x (or was it 2.0.x), I found out that SYS V messaging was broken. Nice!! Talk about a hobbyist OS. No industrial-strength OS can afford to have those flaws, and that's what people are doing when they compare Linux to Solaris, and find that Linux would kill off Solaris in an instant. Not so, by far.
wrt dtrace, your last statement makes you an idiot. dtrace is a powerful tool lacking in linux.
XML causes global warming.
Also, how can Novell claim they're owed money from the Sun agreement and claim that SCO didn't have authority to execute that agreement at the same time? That doesn't make any sense.
Open Source Java DAO Generator
From the article:
/usr/sfw directory.
That's not from the article, it's from Sun's marketing blurb. Those capabilities fall into two categories: those that Linux already supports at least as well, and those that are irrelevant.
Open Solaris comes with the same GNU utilities I commonly use in CentOS and Debian in the
Well, then they should just delete their own crappy utilities and also replace their kernel, and they are all set.
To many this is a plus to have a large company that has been around for a long time behind a product they use.
That depends on the track record of that company, and Sun's is that when Sun workstations were actually popular, people would replace Sun's utilities, compilers, and window system with the GNU and MIT versions.
Um, what repos do I need to enable to get ZFS or DTrace functionality?
The standard Ubuntu ones: there are multiple kernel tracing facilities and multiple enterprise file systems in there. ZFS and DTrace are just variations.
The big plus of Nexenta for me is that it is based on APT, whereas OpenSolaris (the distro) has invented yet another new package system (IPS). APT just works so well on Debian and Ubuntu that I don't want to use anything else, and for end users there are nice tools like Synaptic and Ubuntu's Add/Remove tool (which shows popularity ratings for packages as well). At least PCLinuxOS adopted APT while still using RPM as the package format...
My only real interest in Solaris is to use ZFS on a home NAS - having all that checksumming looks a lot more attractive now that disk sizes are getting so huge that, according to some, RAID 5 will stop being useful in 2009, due to the scenario of one disk failing and another one having an unrecoverable read error (URE) during the rebuild - see http://blogs.zdnet.com/storage/?p=162. Without proactive scanning of the disk media for read errors before any failure, and checksumming that can hopefully correct some such errors, RAID 5 rebuilds after failed disks will increasingly fail due to UREs. See http://www.nber.org/sys-admin/linux-nas-raid.html as well for a much more technical view of the issues with RAID 5.
Why an enterprise-grade Linux server installer should default to runlevel 5 is a mystery to me, but that department where I work is 100% Red Hat, so I just work around it.
How about FUSE?
Open Source Java DAO Generator
I'm still early in this game, and a desktop Solaris user.
In your opinion, how far/close is ZFS from being the end of all other FS's? Is it just Sol10u6? Are these bugs fixed in SXDE/SXCE?
Care about electronic freedom? Consider donating to the EFF!
Just use LVM snapshots. It's not like snapshots are a particularly new technology.
Have a look at btrfs. It's getting there, and has quite a few exciting features and is well integrated with the linux kernel:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Btrfs
SCO was the licensing agent for Unix according to the APA. All SYSVR4 licensing had to go through SCO. This is not in dispute.
Novell is currently suing SCO to get their 95% of the fees paid by MS, Sun and some other smaller fish. How is it that Novell can say SCO didn't have the rights under the APA to license what they did, and then on top of it claim SCO owes them 95% of what Sun paid because it was under the APA? That doesn't make any sense.
If Sun gets sued by Novell over this it would be very funny. Firstly, Novell has had plenty of time to contest the matter with Sun since OpenSolaris had been announced such a long time ago. Secondly, Novell claimed that they will not be pursing any claims against Unix. "We're no longer in the Unix business" I think was the direct quote.
If you understood the history of SYSVR4 it would paint Novell in a very bad light to squabble over this with Sun. If Novell does take action against Novell it would be similar to what SCO did. A last desperate attempt by a once profitable company with a good product trying to keep themselves afloat. Sun is no SCO.
SCO's UnixWare had probably the best i386 support of any Unix out there at the time. Part of what Sun bought was related to that since they needed to add better support for Solaris on x86 after fumbling around with x86.
To say Unix has languished for over a decade is wrong. UnixWare and the base of SYSVR4 may have but others like Solaris and AIX have not. Solaris has been making many improvements over the years. Some major ones at that.
Personally, I have my doubts about how this whole thing was started, McBride used to work at Novell, Raymond Noorda was also the CEO/founder of Novell and he has strong ties to Caldera and the group that bought SCO I can't remember the name of.
Every time I can remember that Noorda bought a significant IP from Novell he wound up using it to file lawsuits. Primarily MS. He hated them. So that one of his companies suing over Novell's IP is nothing new.
Open Source Java DAO Generator
...IPS were better than apt?
It's designed by (deb)Ian Murdock, with 15 years of hindsight.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
....greatly enjoyed the hearty and vicious debate between Linux fan boys and Sun fan boys. But of course since Open Solaris doesn't run San Andreas, I'll probably be sticking with Windows x64 a little while longer. :)
Though I do enjoy mucking around on my other systems.....
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
The code has apparently gotten a bit cleaner although BSD still remains more legible.
Still it doesn't change the fact that for the time being Linux is *it* (whatever that is). It's the system that has the mind share (apart from Windows of course). And for the most part it works just fine.
So while there certainly are other more advanced solutions, I don't see them taking Linux's place in the sun (ha ha) any time soon.
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
FUSE requires kernel hooks, so I imagine that the usual incompatibilities would get in the way.
Jesus is coming -- look busy!
ZFS doesnt offer me anything as im not managing servers
Are you using content of any sort (images, documents, mp3s...)? Do you care about the longevity or integrity of any of your data? Have you ever lost data? Slap a GUI on ZFS, call it "time machine" and you don't have to be "managing servers" to appreciate what ZFS can provide to Joe user.
Dtrace doesnt offer me anything as im not a developer
If you think dtrace is just for developers, you don't understand dtrace. Developers have always been able to scatter printfs in the code and set breakpoints in debuggers to glean what their piece of code is doing. The beauty of dtrace is that it allows anyone (including users, service technicians and even managers), to see what is happening on a system-wide basis without compiling or even having access to the any of the source code of processes running on that system. dtrace will prove itself far more useful for system administration and post-deployment troubleshooting than it will for developers.
But what about Joe user? Have you ever encountered an application hang? Have you ever encountered a sluggish system where "top" shows and "top" as the top process at only 3% CPU usage? Have you ever wondered whether any of your applications (e.g. spyware) are doing something they shouldn't be doing? Have you ever wondered why doubling CPU clock frequency hasn't made your environment any faster, and whether it is possible that other bottlenecks (I/O, paging activity...) might be responsible for a performance problem? Dtrace is the tool which allows you to see all of this.
SMF doesnt offer me anything i cant do with startup
Oh come on. I supported GNU/Linux long enough to know what a kludge rc.* startup scripts are. I know how non-deterministic it is and how many race conditions exist in a typical startup which work most of the time only by chance. While this is fine for a single user laptop, for enterprise looking for 6 figure reliability on massive clusters, rc.* doesn't cut it. There is a very good reason why GNU/Linux is moving towards what Solaris already has.
IPS doesnt seam any better than deb or rpm
Well, I suppose you could say the same for other *nix features: "Rsync doesn't seam(sic) any better than cp..." "tar doesn't seem any better than cpio..."
The biggest advantage for the enterprise user is that IPS is backwards compatible with the thousands of existing SVR4 packages and patches. RPM and Debian APT never will be. RPM and Debian APT do not know about zones, nor know how to handle package installs and upgrades across zones nor will they be able to ever take advantage of zfs snapshot/rollback features for seamless install/uninstall.
I find this interesting, as I just had an issue related to this last Sunday. I tried to play a video from my Ubuntu fileserver running software RAID-5 and found the video was corrupted. It would jump and skip with no sound. In fact *all* the files on the RAID array were corrupted, videos, images, mp3's and everything else. /proc/mdstat and it said everything was fine. So I checked each drive with fdisk and found one of the 5 drives had no TOC, so I wrote a new TOC to it and tried to re-add it to the array, only to find the new TOC didn't stick.
I checked
I dropped the drive off the array, and reassembled it, and all my files were fine afterward. I am currently mirroring everything to a 1 TB external drive.
That's from the zdnet blog I posted a link from.
Yes, and they essentially copied it from standard Sun marketing language.
Were you even around to use sun workstations "when they were actually popular"?
Yes. But if you actually think that Sun software is any good, you apparently weren't. Sun succeeded because they were the first to deliver affordable 32bit workstations, and they succeeded despite their operating systems, not because of them.
As for using GCC, that was usually because Solaris didn't come with the Sun compiler tools. You had to buy those seperately. And at the time, and still to this day, they tend to compile code that performs better than GCC.
You say that as if it's a good thing.
BrandZ is a combination of two technologies. One, system call translation, is present in most *NIX systems for foreign-ABI support. When you issue a system call, you raise an interrupt (or issue a special instruction) and jump to the kernel. The system call to execute is determined by the value in a register (typically EAX on x86). Two POSIX systems are likely to have similar system calls, for example both will have open() which return a file descriptor. These, however, will not necessarily map to the same number. On one *NIX open might be system call 2, while on another it might be 4. They might pass the arguments in different ways too (on the stack vs in registers, right-to-left vs left-to-right argument order). The system call handler gets the arguments and calls the function inside the kernel which handles the call. It's fairly easy to set up a separate handler which gets the arguments in a different way and performs a mapping from foreign to native system call numbers. This adds a few dozen instructions to each system call (if that) for cases where the internal handlers are compatible (most of POSIX). Linux and *BSD can do this for various foreign ABIs. I've not tried it on Linux, but on FreeBSD you run the brandelf utility on the binary which marks it as using a different system call handler (the same technique is used for backwards-compatibility if the behaviour of any of the system calls changes).
The second technology is Zones. These are similar to FreeBSD jails, which are basically chroot on steroids. It's quite common to use system call translation in conjunction with a chroot environment, because most Linux applications (for example) depend on libraries and a filesystem layout not necessarily found in other systems. Zones (and Jails) add to this the ability to have separate users (including a root use which can't escape the Zone) and separate network addresses. I think Zones also do finer-grained quotas (limits on memory and CPU time for the Zone).
BrandZ works by creating a Zone and setting the Linux system call handler to be used for every process in it. It basically gives you something that looks like a Linux machine running in an isolated environment on a Solaris machine.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
With ZFS, I thought the point was that the disk is in the pool, and you use raidz on it in an LVM type fashion.
I can create non-raid images in a ZFS pool, and raid1 raid5 raidz images in said pool if I have enough spindles?
Am I misunderstanding this?
I'm not so sure.
I've never had Linux in a VZ or Xen guest fail to run postgresql::initdb like Solaris Zones do. Granted my Solaris Zone server *IS* running in a VMware Server guest. Who knows.
And I do know that for real loads (except perhaps IO), Solaris on Sparc cannot compete with anything on Intel. Time and again, in my own experience, real customers with real business loads have moved from Solaris on Sparc to Windows or Linux on Intel, from CAD software to massive J2EE servers.
T2000 may be a great webserver platform, but it's not a good compute platform. OpenSolaris on Intel has promise, I'll probably be using it for my NAS heads and webservers, but not my dbs, for that I'll continue to use Windows and Linux.
Running _any_ program seems to require kernel hooks (syscalls), not to mention, for example, the nVidia proprietary driver, support for loading Windows binaries with Wine, and so on. I haven't been playing too much with FUSE (python-fuse in my case), but it seems that from the programmer's point of view it has nothing to do with the kernel itself (dunno how the userspace library is licensed, though). Linus has been stating at least a bazillion times that merely running a program on his kernel is not derivative work of any sort... So from the GPL / Linux perspective, everything seems to be doable.
ALTHOUGH I'm certainly not an expert on the topic of the CDDL.
Wow, thanks for that lucid explanation. I had never put all of those pieces together like that before.
apt-get is not perfect. In fact, you may call "a hack." I don't think there's any real "theory" behind it. apt-get may even remove a user's kernel package, as one of the 600 traces in this study reveals:
OPIUM: Optimal Package Install/Uninstall Manager
http://pho.ucsd.edu/rjhala/papers/opium.html
Also worth reading are:
Search heuristics and optimisations to solve package
installability problems by constraint programming
http://www.info.ucl.ac.be/~pvr/report_ingi2800_C.pdf[pdf]
Maintaining large software distributions:
new challenges from the FOSS era
http://pauillac.inria.fr/~xleroy/bibrefs/EDOS-FRCSS06.html
where they mention "Theorem 1 (Package installability is an NP-complete problem). Checking whether a single package
P can be installed, given a repository R, is NP-complete." (result is to be published elsewhere, though).
Main difference between the BSD license and the GPL license: one is from California and the other is from Massachusetts
OpenSolaris: What Ubuntu wants to be when it grows up
Main difference between the BSD license and the GPL license: one is from California and the other is from Massachusetts
Can't slip anything past this crowd...I was referring to the feature of being free and open, not common Unix features.
"Novell is currently suing SCO to get their 95% of the fees paid by MS, Sun and some other smaller fish. How is it that Novell can say SCO didn't have the rights under the APA to license what they did, and then on top of it claim SCO owes them 95% of what Sun paid because it was under the APA? That doesn't make any sense."
:) In any event, I'm sure that if it came to legal action, who owes who what amount for what bad action will surely be a contentious point.
Sigh. Yes, it does. The point is, Sun needs to deal with _Novell_, not SCO. Sun has been warned by Novell that they do not regard the deal as valid. What Novell is doing is demanding that SCO give them the money that is rightfully theirs from an invalid deal. Once that money is in hand, Novell will decide whether or not to pursue Sun for violation of their original contract.
I imagine that the first step in such a case might be to give Sun their money back. Maybe not, though. Dealing with high finance makes my head hurt.
SCO is required by contract with Novell to inform them for approval prior to such deals. Really, you need to plug into some authoritative news sources. There is plenty of "Unix" which Sun does not own, which they had to license, and the means by which that was done was in violation of contract. That includes many things in OpenSolaris. Get your butt over to Groklaw and start reading transcripts instead of popular blogs and cheesey rag popular computer news sites.
"And what ... you don't care about your photos, docs and music???"
No, not really.
But my porn on the other hand...
With ZFS, a pool is a collection of "vdevs", and you can add new vdevs to the pool at any time to increase the capacity of the pool. A vdev is either a RAIDZ (which is kind of like RAID5), a RAIDZ2 (which is kind of like RAID6), a mirror (which is kind of like RAID1), or a bare disk. The pool is then is kind of like a RAID0 over all the vdevs.
|>oug
Oh, I get it--I misread the parent post...
"Not an actor, but he plays one on TV."
I downloaded OpenSolaris 2008.05, tested and installed it:
:) (Hell, I'm posting this using OpenSolaris! ;) )
:)
The LiveCD booted up very quickly, with a 64-bit x86 kernel on my Pentium Dual Core processor. Clicking on the driver info icon revealed that OpenSolaris recognized apparently all of my hardware correctly, including my USB MIDI interface. (printer was turned off, no scanner attached, so I don't know about them). One point of criticism about the LiveCD is that it doesn't initialize the network (network chip is recognized tho).
Next, I tried to install OpenSolaris on a free space on my second hard drive. The installer has a graphical user interface, and appears to be user-friendly. The driver selector panel is at first a bit weird to use, but its concept is easy enough to understand. After installation, however, I couldn't get Solaris to run, because I had the NeoGrub bootloader on the first hard disk (running GRUB4DOS), and I couldn't get it to mount the Solaris partition to boot from it. It also appears that the installer didn't install GRUB anywhere on the second drive (not in MBR, not at beginning of partition).
Then, I shrank my Windows Vista partition (which has to be on the first drive anyway), removed NeoGrub, and installed Solaris in the free space. That worked; BCD area is still intact. The Windows boot manager can be selected from the GRUB menu. I yet have to try to incorporate my Ubuntu and FreeBSD drives into the GRUB configuration.
After booting from hard disk using GRUB, Solaris comes up and boots into GDM. After logging in, I'm on the GNOME desktop. Testing the screen savers revealed that I have accelerated 3D (on an i915 compatible chipset; actually it's an i945). Compiz also seems to be installed somewhere, there's a Compiz configuration tool in GNOME. I didn't manage to use the cube, or anything, so I guess it has to be enabled first. Everything seems to work so far, I'm quite pleased with it!
The only thing so far that doesn't work is an external USB drive that had been EFI formatted by Windows Vista. Disk sync errors are printed on the main console during boot. I haven't tried to mount the NTFS partition yet.
I'm curious about Solaris' stability. I've tried it 2 times already (Solaris 10 x86, two different releases, don't remember which), and the second time GNOME decayed to the point it was unusable, but that was GNOME 2.6.8. On OpenSolaris 2008.05, GNOME 2.20.1 is included. Let's see how well it works over time. Really, thanks guys, for making this release!
We've used ZFS in prod for our file servers as well as some small external prod stuff. We've had no problems so far. There's an ISP in Japan that has a *huge* install with an earlier opensolaris build and it has apparently been running beautifully. These are early adopters, though. It's really all about how secure you feel with it. I'm not afraid to use it for some of the simple often used features. Some of the more non-trivial/new features I'm leaving out. Long story short, just as you still get filesystem corruption and whatnot with traditional filesystems (we've all had to run fsck or recover from backups at one time or another) there will always be surprises. They'll just be different.
Syscalls come from POSIX, and explicitly are *not* derived works. Binary only kernel modules, OTOH *are* derivative works becuase they go above and beyond the syscall layer. FUSE uses a shim in kernelspace and puts the majority of the driver in userspace as a sort of workaround, so it's in the same boat as a kernel module.
Jesus is coming -- look busy!
Yes you are right. For the longest time Linux missed really important stuff like POSIX IPC, and still does it klunkily.
Thanks, Grammar Nazi!
Main difference between the BSD license and the GPL license: one is from California and the other is from Massachusetts
The reason why SuSE lost customers, is because they didn't test their packages. I cancelled my subscription after SuSE Linux 10.1, which had so many problems that I considered it worthless to use it any longer. SuSE does have some nice features, but they're useful only if they work. Also, I expect all packages in the repository to actually function, not crash when I run them. It makes no sense to include a package if it doesn't run. Other than to advertise "we have x packages in our distro". That's why I don't use SuSE anymore.
If you are going to spread this tripe, at least get some recent experience.
Linux easily is on par with Solaris or AIX for robust high performance applications.
This is why Sun needs to add stuff like dtrace and zfs since Linux has already
successfully supplanted older versions of Solaris.
Despite all of your rhetoric, Sun finds itself in the position of fighting
it's way back into old Solaris Sparc shops (that went Linux).
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
> The only people writing it off are people who have never had to maintain real production ...been there, done that. Been told by Sun Support what to go do with myself.
> environments where downtime is money. I trust Solaris far more under load than Linux.
I've seen amateur hour type bugs in Solaris Sparc bring it to it's knees and I've
seen Linux handle all of the sort of high stress, high throughput loads that Solaris
has. Sun is only special if you've drunken the cool-aid. Once you get around a little
bit and been around a litle bit the attachment fades considerable.
Ultimately, the support you get from your app vendor is MUCH MUCH more important.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Then let me just chuckle back as I've been in those Fortune 100 companies and seen their Linux deployments.
...it probably has to do with finger pointing and the Fortune 100 corporate
Big Iron doesn't run Unix btw.
Now why Fortune 100 companies insist on running overpriced NUMA hardware (what
you are probably mistakenly referring to as big iron) I am not quite sure about.
It's costly and causes different business units to be stuck with the same SLAs
and you STILL end up with some stupid common component bringing things down.
Except it will bring multiple domains/servers down all at once.
That's a great value for your dollar...
culture of avoiding being responsible for anything.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
If they can be a Xen guest out-of-the-box, that makes it pretty easy to try out. More importantly, that makes OpenSolaris' lack of drivers (relative to Linux) unimportant. OpenSolaris wouldn't need any real drivers at all; just conform to some Xen software spec. ;-)
I can sort of imagine someone setting up a system where an OpenSolaris guest with ZFS serves all the files, and Linux does everything else. But Linux's filesystems and LVM are nothing to sneeze at, so one would really have to be excited about ZFS.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Linux might be - in some cases - easier to administrate (like when people just unpack the boxes, install the OS and a couple of packages and that's it, then never touch it again until it breaks), and might have lower TCO at first (you can run it on cheap custom or off-the-shelf boxes, OS license costs nil - although, Sun has been onto that for some years now - and you don't need special training for some administration tasks), but OSes like Solaris or AIX still have their place.
Once I set up an IBM pSeries server running AIX myself, just by using the awesome smit (and smitty) admin tools and by reading the manuals, in just a couple of hours. I admit Solaris is hard to admin if you don't find the right articles and documentation right away, but in my experience, Linux can be much more of a pain (except modern Ubuntu versions perhaps, but there are cases of updates that break the installation still, sometimes).
My favorite UN*X is AIX, followed by Solaris, then OpenBSD, then FreeBSD, then Fedora, then Ubuntu, and then Debian, and finally Slackware. You see from that, that Linux ranges for me on the end of the spectrum. I simply had too many problems with it. I'm glad I tried out other Linuxes after SuSE, btw. Otherwise, I would've abandoned Linux completely.
As a developer, I was deeply dissatisfied with some Linux systems. I decided not to program on Ubuntu in C or C++, for the time being, because I simply don't want to install all the documentation that I need manually (on Ubuntu, they're all single small packages). On FreeBSD and OpenBSD for instance, the entire documentation gets installed with the OS. The thing I hate most is when I type "man something" and I get a "file not found" message.
You see, this is not a "rhetoric", I'm not an affiliate of any organization. It's just my experiences as a user that formed my opinion.
Linux used to be very bug-ridden, and if that changes (or has changed), I'm glad. Linux is getting better every day, but that doesn't mean I have to program on Ubuntu, I'm content with using it as a multimedia platform. I prefer to program on Solaris and BSD (and AIX, if I could afford my own AIX box).
I understand your reply, but this is an often requested feature that ZFS devs are aware of and would like to add if they had more resources.
:-) If you read the blog post above you'll see that it's not entirely unreasonable and it may end up added in the future.
http://blogs.sun.com/ahl/entry/expand_o_matic_raid_z
Having a RAID with parity arrangement does not require equal disks sizes, it's simpler and computationally easier to design but not set in stone.
Let's say I have the $$ for 4 hard drives at this time, and later on want to add a 5th equally sized HD to expand the pool. Or as I suggested before adding larger replacement drives one at a time until the whole pool is replaced.
It would be NICE if RAIDZ could redistribute the data and grow the pool without requiring the large investment of purchasing a whole new set of drives at one time.
A common scenario is a home user has wanted a RAID setup for a long time but can't afford a nice enclosure and a set of disks. What ends up happening is they get a slowly growing collection of external HDs that they buy as space requirements demand it. So maybe a 160GB here, a 200GB there, a 400 and a 500 in a stack.
In dreamland what someone could do is a buy a fresh set of 500GB or so HDs, format them ZFS. Then copy some data onto it, format another HD as ZFS, add it to the pool and continue until all their HDs are part of a RAIDZ.
That's quite a pony isn't it?
Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
I get it, you don't manage a lot of servers, you're not a developer, you say a lot of stuff with out backing it up, you don't make much sense, you're an MBA. Fun game. Thanks for letting me play.
Open Source Java DAO Generator
Yes, the features that you want have been among the promised improvements to ZFS for a couple of years now. RAIDZ2 was one of the promised features, and it became reality a while back. Some of the other improvements have not yet materialized.
Despite any of this, however, ZFS is not worse in any of these regards than any other common filesystem/volume manager/RAID device.
Regarding adding disks to a pool, ZFS doesn't yet support adding additional disks to a RAIDZ, but it does support replacing a disk in a RAIDZ with a larger disk (and the space will be used if it can be, modulo redundancy requirements) and it does support expanding a pool by adding new RAIDZs, mirrored pairs, or individual disks to the pool. Individual disks, however, add single points of failure, so it will be very nice when you can add a disk onto a RAIDZ, and it will also be nice when you can remove a disk from a pool if you have enough space elsewhere in the pool to absorb the loss. These two feature-requests are still on the ZFS to-do list.
|>oug
I get it, you don't manage a lot of servers, you're not a developer
Another mistake on your part.
you say a lot of stuff with out backing it up
I'm an amateur compared to Sun shills like you, or Sun marketing.
I actually read the transcripts now.
It still doesn't make sense. An example I used previously was that if you walk into a store, buy a product and pay the cashier, but the cashier pockets the money instead of putting it in the register, you can't expect someone to take what you bought away from you. The issue the store owner has is with the employee not you.
Someone countered that with the analogy, you walk into a store, the cashier sells you the register, which he is not authorized to sell and then pockets the money. Well, the store owner can't claim the money and get the register back.
By arguing that SCO owes them the money because the transaction should have been covered by the APA, they're asserting the transaction was valid under the APA.
Novell's argument seems pretty weak. If you could backup your claims with direct quotes or line numbers and links to the appropriate day of testimony I'd be interested in seeing it.
Sun along with IBM bought out their Unix licenses a long time ago. Sun paid close to $90million for that. Since 1994 they have been developing Solaris mostly in house.
In addition, the original SYSVR4 was developed jointly by Sun and AT&T. Parts of BSD were also included in SYSVR4. And as you probably know, Sun and Bill Joy (a founder of Sun) had a lot to do with the writing of BSD. So I think it's safe to assume that Sun probably wrote more of than Novell.
AT&T and Sun transferred the Unix code to Unix Laboratories to license, so that other companies could benefit from their open standards. Eventually Novell bought Unix Labs for around $300mil so they could try and save NetWare which was dieing now that Windows had some server capabilities. That never really worked out for them. Then they sold SCO the licensing rights for $120-150mil in stock.
Imagine Linus moves all the rights for the Linux Kernel to some separate entity, then years later that entity gets bought and sold a few times. Then that company sues Linus for using the kernel.
Open Source Java DAO Generator
Sigh. Yes, it does. The point is, Sun needs to deal with _Novell_, not SCO. Sun has been warned by Novell that they do not regard the deal as valid. What Novell is doing is demanding that SCO give them the money that is rightfully theirs from an invalid deal. Once that money is in hand, Novell will decide whether or not to pursue Sun for violation of their original contract.
You're wrong. Sun does not need to deal with Novell. SCO was the licensing agent. Nobody could go directly to Novell for any sort of Unix licensing. That part is clear.
An analogy I made in a previous article was that if you walk into a store, go to the counter and buy something, the cashier takes the money and pockets it, you're not at fault. You did what you were supposed to do and the store owner has to go after the employee for the money, not you.
It was countered by someone giving a different example. You go into a store, the cashier sells you the register, which isn't for sale.
Lets assume the cashier works on commission. The store owner can't demand that the employee give him the store owners cut, then go back to you and get the register back. The store owner cannot and should not be remedied twice for the same violation. If you get in a car accident and your insurance company pays your hospital bills, you cannot sue the driver at fault for your hospital bills as well.
Sun worked with AT&T to create SYSVR4. SYSVR4 also contains a bit of BSD of which Bill Joy (founder of Sun) was one of the leading developers. According to Schwartz. Novell suing Sun over SYSVR4 is like someone suing Linus over Linux.
Schwartz: We took a license from AT&T initially for $100 million as we didnt own the IP. The license we took also made clear that we had rights equivalent to ownership. When we did the deal with SCO earlier this year we bought a bunch of drivers and when we give money to a company oftentimes we get warrants, which is part of the negotiations. I have warrants in 100 different companies, we have a huge venture portfolio. I cant do anything about the perception thats out there and to be blunt, I dont care as those people arent going to drive our futureâ"customers are.
The APA seems to be a poorly written contract. In one way it helped Novell, but in another it shot them in the foot by the provisions it made for UnixWare.
The CEO of Novell has been saying a lot of stuff regarding OpenSolaris. It's all FUD. Novell claimed they would not pursue their rights to Unix previously (I have a link to the article somewhere else). Now they're claiming they are going to?
Novell is a desperate company. Much like SCO was when they started all this. If you look at their quarterly reports, you'll see that most of their revenue comes from legacy products. Their revenues from SuSE is a small fraction of total revenues. Their Identity Management Solutions do pretty well but lately revenues have been flat.
So basically, Novell tried to purchase Unix to defend NetWare against MS, then they tried the same with SuSE and while their Linux lines is growing, the company isn't really doing much better financially.
One thing I read was that Ray Noorda, who started Novell and was CEO for a long time, resigned his post at Novell when Novell decided to purchase Unix instead of moving to Linux. I don't know how accurate this is, but the fact that he provided the startup capital for Caldera does give some weight to that comment.
Novell may also be a little pissed because back when they were competing with Sun to buy SuSE, Novell had to fork over a lot more money to counter Sun's bid. They even had to get $50million from IBM to be able to do so. And now Sun owns MySQL which Novell relies on for some of their products and services.
Novell may be saying certain things in court to strengthen their claims against S
Open Source Java DAO Generator
You say that as if it's a good thing. Running code faster is not a good thing?
Open Source Java DAO Generator
You don't think Ubuntu is more usable than Solaris? You haven't tried Solaris then.
Please, anonymous coward, stand by your assertions and tell me where I used quotations incorrectly; I would rather be told why I'm wrong than insulted. Also, "let he who is without sin cast the first stone" is perhaps a good guide to use when you're about to kill someone, but if you're merely telling someone why they're wrong and how to fix it, you're doing them a favor. Notice that most compilers don't abide perfectly by the standard and almost certainly have bugs, yet they're quite happy to tell me when I've made an error, and I'm quite happy to know about it.
Look out!
Ok, if you work for Sun, maybe you can point me in the right direction.
I'd like to try out OpenSolaris. I'm a pretty experienced linux user.
So, is there ANYWHERE (for free) that has a bunch of steps that you can follow to put Solaris through its paces? I've gotten it working in vmware just fine, but now I'm in this really foreign environment where just about everything is other than what I'm used to. I take my out-of-the-box config and type in df at the command prompt and see about a dozen devices mounted that seem to be all really storing data on the same filesystem (I read about this ZFS feature - but it isn't really obvious what it is doing).
I'm really interested in playing with zones, dtrace, etc. So, how do you do it?
I found a guide online but it left out a lot of steps and died not long after I started creating a zone because the ethernet device it instructed me to configure it with didn't exist, and not knowing anything about solaris I couldn't figure out what the correct interface is. Ifconfig yielded nothing - perhaps it doesn't like the vmware ethernet card.
I'd be really interested in a simple step-by-step tour of solaris where you maybe setup apache and a mail server and just play around with the system. That would go a long way to introducing those who are already familiar with linux to this foreign OS...
This was pretty interesting as well. http://www.google.com/trends?q=redhat%2C+suse%2C+ubuntu
Now, I'm not knocking Linux as a desktop but I think it is fair to say that the real value of Linux, at least where money is changing hands today, is on the server. And the number of server installs greatly outnumber the desktop installs. RedHat has always dominated server linux installs. I wish Netcraft kept freely publishing statistics like this as they are very interesting. When companies are talking about deploying Linux, they generally mean RedHat. At least here in the US.
And even if I'm wrong about SuSE's popularity, Novell hasn't monetized it the way RedHat has. Compare the two companie's quarterly reports to verify.
Open Source Java DAO Generator
I don't work for sun but I've been playing around with zones a bit and found a lot of useful information on zones. Haven't looked into dtrace much but I did find some good references online. Google for one line dtrace scripts as a start.
As for zones. I found this page useful for describing sparse root and whole root zones and how to implement them. Before I really understood what I was doing I had a zone running.
http://www.solarisinternals.com/wiki/index.php/Zones
Open Source Java DAO Generator
Read the comments on the blog (below that link, they are totally unrelated).
Also, if I'm not mistaken, sun is selling the thing with an "non-production" version of solaris: http://www.sun.com/servers/x64/x4500/
(read the heavily bolded line containing the words "Open Solaris")
Of course, I'm not saying that ZFS isn't a bad thing. I'm a ZFS root on one of my (non-production) systems right now.
I fear the Y2038 bug
Running code faster is not a good thing?
You have to trade that off against the costs: licensing, porting, incompatibilities, potential bugs. For most people, the tradeoff never made sense.
And it's the same with Solaris, DTrace and ZFS: no to small benefit for most people, some design problems, big switching costs, and big long-term risks.
I don't develop compiled apps c/c++ apps that get distributed. All I ever compile is software that is installed and run on the servers I'm using. So maybe I'm not getting the difference. For me, having my local apps run faster is a good thing. And it's the same with Solaris, DTrace and ZFS: no to small benefit for most people, some design problems, big switching costs, and big long-term risks. Design problems, big switching costs and big long term risks could be applied to people thinking of switching from Solaris to Linux. And there are still quite a few people out there that are still running Solaris. Solaris 10 has helped people stay with Solaris.
For me, the reason I like Solaris is that I've found I get less memory usage and better performance out of Apache/Tomcat. One webapp that was running well over 200MB on RedHat now runs in less then 50MB of memory on the Solaris setup under load. The performance benefit wasn't negligible either. A few years ago I remember Linux knocking the socks off more expensive Sparc hardware with the same java apps. Haven't tested any recent sparc systems but on x86 Solaris has been doing better than Linux for my apps.
I've only really been testing with Solaris 10 but have been playing with OpenSolaris more and more. I'm posting this right now from OpenSolaris running in VirtualBox.
I don't like Solaris because it has DTrace, ZFS, Crossbow, Zones, etc. I like it because it's developed by people that can come up with those technologies. They also have some pretty neat x86 hardware. I never really liked IBM servers, I always regarded the Proliant line well and I think Sun's x86 gear is on par with that.
One thing I noticed, is with other Linux Distros and even the most recent Ubuntu LiveCD, the fonts in Firefox have been horrible. What I'm seeing here now is nice and easy to read in comparison.
Anyway, we're not going to agree on this but as an aside, I never understood the animosity Linux proponents had towards Solaris. If you do a search of lkml you'll find more references to Solaris than AIX, IRIX or HPUX combined. And not all of them negative. The EU study that showed Sun was the biggest corporate contributor to Debian put Sun's Code in Debian to about 26%.
Open Source Java DAO Generator
IANAL, but you can indeed expect to have the goods taken back from you. They do not belong to you, they are stolen property (stolen from the store owner by the cashier). The goods still belong to the store owner because they have not transferred ownership to anyone else and nobody bar the owner (and the courts) gets to transfer ownership. That probably doesn't happen much with store-bought items, but it happens all the time with cars. If you buy a stolen car it can be taken back by its owner, leaving you out of pocket. You then have to recover your money from the person who "sold" you the stolen car.
As an extreme example, if I sold you the Statue of Liberty (which I don't own) do you think you'd get to keep it?
Chernobyl 'not a wildlife haven' - BBC News
Open Source Java DAO Generator
Except that you're missing one point: Novell claims that SCO never had the authority to make the deal that it did, and they so informed Sun last year once they got hold of the agreement between SCO and Sun. Odds are very high that the judge in the case will agree with Novell and rule in their favor. They've certainly built a much stronger case, as evidenced by the continual stream of decisions in their favor to date.
BTW, you're taking the APA out of context. It only amends the original agreement, it doesn't replace it. That's why most observers believe that no matter how SCO tries to frame the conversation, the clear language of the full contract can only be interpreted one way. That's why they are all predicting a slam dunk win for Novell.
I make no predictions as to how Novell may proceed in relation to Sun once they've crushed SCO. I'm simply pointing out that Sun has to deal with Novell _regardless_ of what SCO told them. What SCO may or may not have told them is no longer relevant, and only a fool at Sun would think otherwise at this point. I'd be very surprised if Jonathan Schwartz isn't spending a few hours with his lawyers framing possible strategies to deal with whatever Novell decides to do.
My guess? Novell will either let things lie, demand that OpenSolaris move to GPL/LGPL (opening up the possibility of blending the best of OpenSolaris with OpenSuse), ask for a token payment of some kind, or some combination of the above. I just don't think it's in Novell's best interest to pursue action aggressively. However, they do have every legal right to do so if they choose.
For me, the reason I like Solaris is that I've found I get less memory usage and better performance out of Apache/Tomcat. One webapp that was running well over 200MB on RedHat now runs in less then 50MB of memory on the Solaris setup under load.
And that doesn't make you the least bit suspicious? Are you naive enough to think that the use of Solaris gives you a fourfold reduction in memory usage in your web server because... it has a better kernel? Don't you think Google would switch over all their machines to OpenSolaris in a jiffy if they could shave off a few percent in memory and CPU usage, let alone a factor of 4?
I'm sorry, but the most plausible conclusion is that you simply can't read your VM stats or have some configuration difference in your web server.
I don't like Solaris because it has DTrace, ZFS, Crossbow, Zones, etc. I like it because it's developed by people that can come up with those technologies [...] Anyway, we're not going to agree on this but as an aside, I never understood the animosity Linux proponents had towards Solaris.
Probably because many of them were long-term Sun users, like myself. Until the mid-1990's, Sun workstations gave good cost/performance ratios and were fairly inexpensive, and that's why people bought them.
But Sun software always sucked: NFS, SunView, NeWS, the SunOS kernel, and Java were badly designed and had buggy implementations, all the while Sun marketing touted them as the best thing since sliced bread and Sun engineers went around writing academic papers left and right. Please, no more crappy Sun software.
Architecturally, the Linux kernel isn't going to win any prizes. But at least the Linux developers concentrate on stuff that matters, as opposed to Sun engineers, who are trying to set themselves yet another monument in software.
As far as I know, Google doesn't use Java for it's search platform. They do use Solaris and I believe Java for parts related to their billing for AdWords or something like that. Java is also used for some of their other applications. There were also some rumors a couple years ago that they were testing out OpenSolaris. Regardless, the app I'm running is using some specific libraries that I doubt Google, or anyone else uses that much anymore.
SPARC has it's performance problems, but Sun's SPARC systems offer some advantages that x86 hardware can't. Sun x86 line is pretty good and benchmarks well against similar hardware from HP, Dell, IBM etc from the reviews I've seen. In Some cases Solaris 10 is faster than RHEL and SuSE. In some cases it's not.
While Sun is putting new features into Solaris that get a lot of press, it doesn't mean that the core components, including the kernel are not getting improvements.
Sun's marketing is no different than Linux fans that were claiming it was better than commercial Unix kernels back at a time when that was far from the truth. I don't follow kernel development much but there was a time in the past where I was curious what was going on. And I remember a lot of comments in the lkml that basically something like Solaris seems to do this better, how can we do it like them.
NFS is widely used, I know that linux had some bugs related to it.
Java is also widely used and accepted, while it has it's criticisms, it has come a long way. Architecturally, the Linux kernel isn't going to win any prizes. But at least the Linux developers concentrate on stuff that matters, as opposed to Sun engineers, who are trying to set themselves yet another monument in software. As for the kernel, linux developers concentrate on what matters to them and their users and sun developers on what they feel is important for theirs.
Open Source Java DAO Generator
Doesn't really make me suspicious. For one, the Linux number may be inflated because of the way Linux treats threads as procs and some of the tools used to gauge memory usage don't know how to tell the difference
So, you go around claiming that switching from Linux to Solaris reduces memory usage from 200MB to 50MB, and then you admit that you can't even read the VM stats properly. That's pretty dishonest.
They do use Solaris and I believe Java for parts related to their billing for AdWords or something like that.
What difference does it make? That's not where Google spends their money. You claimed that OpenSolaris brings big performance gains, gains that would save Google hundreds of millions of dollars a year if they were true, yet Google sticks with Linux for their compute platform. Since Google isn't stupid, that's just another indication that performance claims for Solaris are bogus and that it does not perform significantly better than Linux.
NFS is widely used,
You know, if you don't understand what a piece of shit (pre-v4) NFS really is, you really have no basis on which to evaluate Sun's engineering competency. Sun marketing and engineering were touting the many advantages of the NFS design. In practice, NFS managed to be unsafe, slow, complex, hard to manage, and unreliable all at the same time. Sun's own implementation corrupted data for years. NFS probably has corrupted and destroyed more data than any other piece of software in existence. The fact that Sun managed to establish it as a de-facto standard has damaged UNIX more than just about anything else.
As for the kernel, linux developers concentrate on what matters to them and their users and sun developers on what they feel is important for theirs.
Those criteria are important to everybody. Unfortunately, Solaris is not demonstrably superior in those areas, it merely has a lot of code and ideas that claim to help without anybody actually having demonstrated that they do (in fact, software like ZFS is probably harmful).
You say that you buy Sun because you have confidence in their software developers. I don't, based on 20 years experience with the company and their software.
In fact, the Solaris code was opened under the SCSL in 1999 and I don't remember Novell saying anything.
What Sun was lacking was support on intel and amd hardware. UnixWare was the only Unix to have really good i386 support. To be able to offer Solaris on x86 they needed drivers from UnixWare and if you search most of the news stories I have seen regarding SCO/Sun's deal it talks about drivers. Solaris was heads and shoulders above UnixWare other than in it's x86 support so I doubt that anything in SYSVR4 code that Sun would want that they already didn't have.
What Novell is doing in regards to OpenSolaris, is basically what SCO was trying to do to Linux. They're just trying to make waves and scare people.
Really, lets look at SCO and Novell closely. SCO was a company that had a legacy (UnixWare) product and a linux product. They're legacy revenues were declining and their linux product wasn't generating much interest and revenue.
Now lets look at Novell. They had a popular set of products, NetWare and derivatives that are still their biggest source of their income. Quarter after quarter revenue from these products is steadily declining. They have a linux product, which they need to compete against RedHat but doesn't have anywhere near the market and really hasn't shown any signs of getting anywhere near the acceptance RedHat has. We're talking server deployments here, not the miniscule linux destop market. If I remember correctly they're making around $12mil per quarter or year from SuSE while RedHat is making 10x that. They wouldn't have even been able to buy SuSE since Sun was bidding for it as well until IBM threw them $50mil. I wish I could find that chart that showed RedHat vs SuSE deployments. If you didn't look close you couldn't even see that SuSE was on the chart.
Novell has no moral right, in addition to legal right, to demand anything from Sun. What the hell has Novell contributed to open source? Have they open sourced a lot of their products? No. They tried Hula but that died. They bought SuSE and Ximian but most people think they bought SuSE because IBM couldn't buy it and they didn't want Sun to buy it. Look at this rebort from the EU that shows Sun has the most contributions to Debian. Novell's not even on that table. Ximian is but it's minor
If it wasn't for the whole SCO thing, most people in the open source world wouldn't even know about Novell.
Ray Noorda was behind the Canopy Group, which funded SCO. The whole SCO, Santa Cruz Operations, Caldera thing can be confusing, but Noorda plays a role in Caldera and Canopy. Noorda was the founder of Novell and CEO for a long time. Noorda's companies have a history of purchasing IP from Novell and using it to sue mainly Microsoft. More details are on Wikipedia's page for Noorda. That seems to me like Novell is trying to keep it's hands clean while Noorda's company does the dirty work. So now, when Caldera/SCO/SantaCruz/Canopy tries to sue with Novell IP we're supposed to think nothing of it? And recently Novell has this deal with MS?
Though let me say, I mean no disrespect against Noorda (RIP), his target was mainly MS. I remember reading that he left Novell because they decided to pursue Unix as a way to save NetWare instead of Linux. When he left Noorda focussed on Linux.
Open Source Java DAO Generator
You should read this thread, it has more information http://in.opensolaris.org/jive/thread.jspa?messageID=146731𣴫
Open Source Java DAO Generator
Anyway, I'm done debating the issue.
I think Sun was resting on it's laurels for a while but because of Linux, MS, x86, things have changed. With people like Andy Bechtolsheim and Richard Green coming back, Ian Murdock joining Sun (I guess Bill Joy is happy being a VC) it looks like things have been changing. Although not completely. How a server with 48 drive bays is not considered a storage product is weird but Bechtolsheim doesn't seem to care. He makes the products he thinks make sense and doesn't care what they are labeled.
Marketing is marketing anywhere. Sun's not alone. Even linux proponets promised more than they could deliver. Since 2.0 and 2.2 people were claiming it was as good as Unix and could be more than just an edge server. 2.2 the kernel was less than 2mil lines of code, 2.0 wasn't even a million. Now it's at around 10 million. You're going to tell me that's 8 million lines of device drivers and innovation and not catching up to provide the Unix features they were saying the already had? Not knocking Linux, it's come a long way.
Open Source Java DAO Generator
Different tools on linux were giving me different numbers. I used the smallest one. It wasn't something I was really testing, just something that I was surprised to see and it was on my mind as the transfer was recently.
Look, you stated publicly and clearly that OpenSolaris resulted in a reduction in memory usage from 200MB to 50MB when you knew full well that those numbers were wrong. Again, I consider that dishonest.
That may not be where they spend their money but it is where they make their money.
That is where they spend their money; they've talked about that many times. And the fact that they use Linux there tells you that the other possible choices (OpenSolaris, BSD, etc.) can't be significantly better performing or significantly more reliable.
I claimed I got better performance and memory usage in this one application. That has nothing to do with Google.
You said that performance in general was a reason for using Solaris and gave your experience as an example. Turns out you never clearly determined that Solaris performs better and neither has anybody else. You have the same kind of Voodoo approach to choosing an OS that has allowed Sun to flourish despite their lousy software: Sun engineers tell you that their system has whizbang feature X, which results in a big improvement in Y, and you believe them.
Marketing is marketing anywhere. Sun's not alone
That's not the point. The point is that Sun has a long-standing pattern of producing lousy software and making people believe that the software is what they need with a particular kind of claim of superiority that's not rooted in empirical data. And the pattern is repeating itself.
You're going to tell me that's 8 million lines of device drivers and innovation and not catching up to provide the Unix features they were saying the already had? Not knocking Linux, it's come a long way.
Of course Linux is getting better, and at some point in the past, Solaris was the superior operating system, but that was then.
And in the future, Linux certainly won't be getting better by following in Solaris's footsteps. Linux has its own approach to the problems that ZFS, DTrace, containers, etc. are trying to solve; a better approach, as far as I'm concerned.
Where Sun technology could really benefit google is if they started switching some of their servers to Niagara based servers. They'd could probably save 10's of millions of dollars a year.
Anyway, this was an interesting thread but you're arguments are making less and less sense. You don't like Sun.
Open Source Java DAO Generator
In fact, the Solaris code was opened under the SCSL in 1999 and I don't remember Novell saying anything.
What Sun was lacking was support on intel and amd hardware. UnixWare was the only Unix to have really good i386 support. To be able to offer Solaris on x86 they needed drivers from UnixWare and if you search most of the news stories I have seen regarding SCO/Sun's deal it talks about drivers. Solaris was heads and shoulders above UnixWare other than in it's x86 support so I doubt that anything in SYSVR4 code that Sun would want that they already didn't have.
All true. However, all of that may may or may not be relevant in the context of the legal and contractual issues at hand. I still haven't seen the agreement between SCO and Sun. Have you?
What Novell is doing in regards to OpenSolaris, is basically what SCO was trying to do to Linux. They're just trying to make waves and scare people.Maybe. That would certainly make sense from one point of view. I still think that it would be a bad move on Novell's part. However, there are certainly plenty of examples of mis-steps in their past. :)
I see your link and respond with another? :) Cross examination of Andrew Nagle, "Senior Director of Product Development." He's been associated with UNIX development since 1984:
Q. Let's talk about OpenSolaris again. OpenSolaris is released under a license that allows the public to see the OpenSolaris code, isn't that right?
A. Yes.
Q. If I wanted to, I could go to Sun's web site, download the OpenSolaris code and look at it myself?
A. Yes.
Q. And it's Sun's 2003 SCOsource license that gave Sun the right to expose SVRX source code to the public; isn't that right?
A. It's my understanding that it gave Sun the right to expose the UnixWare code as well.
Q. But it gave -- the answer is: Yes, it gave Sun the right to expose to the public the SVR 4.0 code that you have admitted is in OpenSolaris.
Isn't that right?
A. That's correct.
Q. And you and I can agree, can't we, that the right to release code under an open source license, the right to say to the public that you can come and download this code as you will, that's something that has market value, doesn't it?
659 (page number)
A. That's a debatable point, I would have to say. There are those who would say that the ability to expose code for people to download and review at-will does have market value, that -- and certainly Sun hoped that it had market value. Sun hoped to garner a better position in the marketplace by publishing their code. There are others that would say that it has no particular market value, that, in fact, protected code has as much market value or more than open source code.
So, I will concede that it might have market value but, that it absolutely does, I would probably side on the -- with those that would say that it has less market value than others.
Further on, we get to Novell's arguments in the case:
So, what Sun has done is they have taken 4.0, which is listed on the APA, they have made that the base of their Solaris operating system and they have stopped taking refreshers, or they have stopped taking new code.
And Mr. Maciaszek continued:
"Q. You are right. I didn't actually ask that quite precisely enough. In so far as the UNIX code is concerned, once they're frozen in time as of their latest schedule, that is the UNIX code on which they were relying, correct?
A. Correct.
Q. And as to Sun in that case, that UNIX code has substantial value, doesn't it?
A. Well, you'd to have ask Sun that. I mean, I can't answer that question."
And here's the telling part, Your Honor. Mr. Jacobs asks Mr. Maciaszek, who I submit was a very credible witness:
"Q. And if you went to them and say -- after the Asset Purchase Agreement, went to them in 1996 and you said; you know what, we want to strip out all of that UNIX System V Release 4 code from Sun Solaris. What do you think their reaction would have been?"
And the answer, and he got a chuckle from the gallery:
"A. It wouldn't have been favorable."
Sun has built their operating system on that code, Your Honor. For them to go in and rip it all out, it has huge commercial value to them, and Mr. Maciaszek confirmed that:
"Q. Because it would have been a substantial injury to their business, would it not, sir?
A. Yes."
In addition, Mr. Patterson(sic), when he realized what it was that Sun was able to do with the new license, when he saw this article in August of 2003, he wrote an e-mail to his boss, Chris Sontag and said:
"Hey, Chris, it looks like Sun intends to use its broader license to protect its Linux customers. That is fine, but I hope they don't decide to go after the rest of
Rather than read speculation by non-lawyers, how about
:)
I see your link and respond with another [groklaw.net]?
To be honest, reading Groklaw irritates me. Most of it is speculation. People there don't seem to have much understaning of the law let alone the technology. At least here, people understand the technology :)
No doubt that, in the 2003 agreement, Sun got the ability -- it contained the ability to open source their product. Jay Petersen, the deputy of SCOsource, tells this Court that that has substantial commercial value to Sun because they can now indemnify their customers. There undoubtedly is commercial value in that license, Your Honor.
No doubt, I don't see how they proved that. The most telling point for me is that Sun first released the Solaris source code in 1999 under the SCSL before the agreement with SCO. They didn't do it secretly. There was a lot of press around it. Novell didn't make a peep.
Q. And it's Sun's 2003 SCOsource license that gave Sun the right to expose SVRX source code to the public; isn't that right?
A. It's my understanding that it gave Sun the right to expose the UnixWare code as well.
Not a very strong statement.
Q. But it gave -- the answer is: Yes, it gave Sun the right to expose to the public the SVR 4.0 code that you have admitted is in OpenSolaris.
Isn't that right?
A. That's correct.
Can you say leading the witness.
"Q. And if you went to them and say -- after the Asset Purchase Agreement, went to them in 1996 and you said; you know what, we want to strip out all of that UNIX System V Release 4 code from Sun Solaris. What do you think their reaction would have been?"
They can't do that if what Sun says is true that they bought out their licenses giving them the right to distribute and relicense the source and binaries in 1994 in perpetuity. At the time, according to the transcripts, regular source licenses for SYSVX were in the $100k-$200k range. Sun paid around $100million.
Just because some lawyer says something in court doesn't make it true. Nowhere in the transcripts was there any reading of the contract that clearly showed SCO gave Sun the right to open source Solaris. In fact Novell's lawyer pointed out that it was pretty much just a copy/paste of the 1994 agreement plus some other stuff relating to SYSVR5 and UnixWare. When Sun first started talking about making an OpenSolaris in 2004, SCO was the first one to say they didn't think they could do it, at least not under the GPL.
Q. And that would have been a commercial -- that would have commercial value for Sun if they could provide indemnity to customers that were using their OpenSolaris product, right?
McNealy was mouthing off constantly about indemnifying it's customers who bought linux from them on their servers. There was no OpenSolaris at the time. Big Unix vendors like Sun, IBM and I believe HP had already paid a large sum to buy out their licenses to avoid having to pay royalties in the future and avoid headaches. Sun, probably because of it's contributions developing SYSVR4, secured more rights than the others.
No doubt that, in the 2003 agreement, Sun got the ability -- it contained the ability to open source their product. Jay Petersen, the deputy of SCOsource, tells this Court that that has substantial commercial value to Sun because they can now indemnify their customers. There undoubtedly is commercial value in that license, Your Honor.
I didn't see anything concrete in the transcripts that asserted that.
Well, we just heard testimony here this morning from Mr. Nagle that they don't know. Nobody knows. No one sat down and compared the two. There's no evidence before this Court that there is unique code in the Sun Solaris system.
From what I recall not a single person from Sun w
Open Source Java DAO Generator
"No doubt, I don't see how they proved that. The most telling point for me is that Sun first released the Solaris source code in 1999 under the SCSL before the agreement with SCO. They didn't do it secretly. There was a lot of press around it. Novell didn't make a peep."
I assume this is what you meant when you said earlier in this trail that Sun had released Solaris as open source in 1999? I don't see the SCSL on Opensource.Org's website. While granted, that is not conclusive in determining whether or not I always regarded the SCSL more or less as just exposing the source code without allowing people to actually do anything with it. In my view, that is not an open source license. It certainly doesn't meet the OSI's 10 point model, RMS's four freedoms, or even Lessig's 4 point model. Novell may not have had a problem with Sun's release for these reasons.
Yes, I know I was quoting Novell's argument and a _very_ short excerpt of the cross examination. I only did so because the thread that you pointed me to had only one or two people who seemed to know what they were talking about from a legal perspective, and they claimed that there was nothing "there" there. Worse, they provided no evidence, just assertions.
I simply trying to indicate that Novell's position is that there is plenty of "there" there, and I gave a link to a snippet of relevant statements from the legal records.
We are in agreement, I think, that we'll have to wait to see what the judge decides. That will either give Novell a solid foundation or not for any potential legal action against Sun.
If Judge Kimball rules that Novell should get some of the money, he is validating that the contract was valid and case closed regarding Sun. If he rules it was invalid, Sun's position has been that they were granted the rights in the 1994 contract and it doesn't mean anything. The fact that Novell didn't call anyone from Sun to the stand, hasn't taken any legal action means a lot.
Open Source Java DAO Generator
Sigh. You obviously care far more passionately about this issue than I do. I don't own any products from either company. I don't run OpenSolaris /or/ OpenSuse, although I will admit to trying out Suse about 6 or 7 years ago. I'm not even sure why I'm still replying. ;)
I haven't "bought into" anything Novell has been saying on this subject. If anything, my sole interest in this has been because of my obsessive following of SCO vs. Everyone through Groklaw. Unlike you, I have found it fascinating reading the articles and commentary on that site. It's the only site that I'm aware of which brings together such highly competent technical viewpoints such as Dr. Salus and lawyers of all stripes.
I still think we have to wait and see what Judge Kimball says. If he rules simply that Novell's case is invalid, then clearly the whole question is moot. This, however, is a highly unlikely outcome when you consider the entirety of the history of the case to date.
If the judge simply rules that Novell gets their money back and does not comment any further on Novell's other statements (unlikely), then Novell's other statements don't mean anything from a legal perspective. I find this particular outcome unlikely because so far, Kimball has shown himself to be a very careful and thorough man. He'll want to make sure that SCO has no chance of a successful appeal, so he'll have to explain his reasoning very clearly.
If, however, the judge also has some comments in his ruling about how Novell's case persuaded him (very likely), then it is possible that we may (stress the word, "may", here) see some statements in there that Novell can point to when it comes time to go after both Microsoft and Sun.
Will Novell choose to do so? I don't know. You have persuaded me that their case for going after Sun is weaker due to their lack of action in 1999. However, I don't think it's non-existent. Novell's next steps really depend upon what Judge Kimball says, I think.
BTW, don't forget that SCO vs. IBM is still waiting to move forward. That is the case that I'm far more interested in as it is the one that has the potential to finally see the GPL validated in a U.S. court case, which will in turn /finally/ put to rest one of the fatuous objections that I still run into time and again when talking to PHBs. That's because one of IBM's counterclaims is that SCO is in violation of distributing nearly 800,000 lines of IBM's code without their permission specifically because their actions and statements repudiate the GPL. (You'd think by now that those PHBs would realize that the reason no one has challenged the GPL in court /because/ it's so solid, but nooooo! >:( )
Sigh. You obviously care far more passionately about this issue than I do. I don't own any products from either company. I don't run OpenSolaris /or/ OpenSuse, although I will admit to trying out Suse about 6 or 7 years ago. I'm not even sure why I'm still replying. ;)
I care because I feel that Sun is a very important company in the open source community. They have donated a lot of time and money to different open source projects. They may not contribute as much to the linux kernel but as I mentioned earlier that EU study showed they were by far the largest corporate contributor based on code in the Debian project. This did not seem to count the OpenOffice.org code which was even more than their contributions in Debian. OpenOffice.org has been the first entry for a lot of people into open source, which has led some to investigate open source and free software more. They are a patron of the FSF, as can be verified on the FSF website. Though I can't say Sun has been perfect in the open source world, events regarding OpenDS being a big disappointment from what I've seen.
:)
I like Solaris too. While the linux kernel has made improvements, Solaris has the lead in some areas. Especially in scaling on machines with multiple processors and cores. Here's some comparisons with FreeBSD. Some applications work better when scaled vertically rather than clustered. There's a group porting OpenSolaris to IBM's Z series mainframes, apparently with IBM's assistance, and it seems that it can do a better job than Linux there since Linux seems to do better running a number of virtual instances vs one large instance.
Linux was a wakeup call to Sun so they got their asses in gear and kept innovating with Solaris and they have done a good job in terms of x86 support, performance and new features. OpenSolaris should do the same for Linux and back and forth until they can cure cancer, feed the hungry, and bring peace and harmony throughout the world. Or at least be really really good
Novell not only is not a patron of the FSF other than $5k they donated a few years ago, the FSF has stated that they wouldn't accept any money from Novell because of the deal they signed with Microsoft.
I still think we have to wait and see what Judge Kimball says. If he rules simply that Novell's case is invalid, then clearly the whole question is moot. This, however, is a highly unlikely outcome when you consider the entirety of the history of the case to date.
The genie's already out of the bottle and Sun has already had enough unwarranted bad press regarding the whole SCO deal. This is were groklaw really had it wrong. I mean, a Unix company, goes to the authorized licensing agent for Unix IP and purchases Unix related stuff. Yeah the timing was bad, yeah McNealy as usual said some stupid stuff. THough some of it was taken the wrong way. Just because Sun said they would indemnify it's linux customers doesn't mean they said Linux was in violation of anything. Just because they said Solaris couldn't be contested in the same way doesn't mean they were validating SCO's claims. Meanwhile HP who was probably the biggest UnixWare reseller and continued to resell UnixWare for some time after SCO started making a fuss, who also made claims that they would indemnify their RedHat and SuSE customers "if they didn't modify the source", received no such scrutiny on Groklaw.
There were a lot of things I read on groklaw that were just assumptions on top of assumptions that were used to verify their conclusions. Most of the comments were even worse. It's one thing for a lawyer to argue their case in a court with an opposing attorney there to defend against those claims with a presumption of innocence. It's another to do it on a biased blog. It just left a bad taste in my mouth. It's a good site to get the transcripts and exhibits but beyond that they really stretc
Open Source Java DAO Generator
Your analysis is sort of on target for how the case started. However, if you take a look at Groklaw's IBM timeline, you'll note that IBM's counterclaims (as amended) which have been waiting to be settled since March of 2004(?!?), lean very heavily on the concept of FOSS and the GPL in particular. The first 18 pages or so spend a great deal of time laying the groundwork. The specific counterclaims that I referred to in my previous post; the sixth, seventh, and eighth, start on page 33:
SIXTH COUNTERCLAIMBreach of the GNU General Public License
SEVENTH COUNTERCLAIM
Promissory Estoppel (basically asserts that SCO broke a promise to abide by the GPL and should be forced to meet their original promise)
EIGHTH COUNTERCLAIM
Copyright Infringement (asserts that since SCO is in violation of the GPL, they have infringed IBM's copyright)
As I understand it, all legal actions have to be settled as part of winding down SCO's affairs even if Novell forces SCO into chapter 7 bankruptcy. After IBM spent all this time and money grinding SCO's case into the dust, I can't imagine that they'll settle for anything less than a ruling from the bench on these points. I don't think that they'd be happy even if a trustee for what's left of SCO offered to beg forgiveness of the court's time.
I think that IBM wants to settle the legal question that the GPL is a valid license under U.S. law once and for all. I don't think they want anybody to try this kind of legal shenanigans against them ever again.
Of course, what do I know? I'm just some semi-anonymous poster on Slashdot. :)