Slashdot Mirror
OpenSolaris Or FreeBSD?
Norsefire writes "I am in quite a predicament. I decided a while back to branch out and use a new operating system (currently running Debian). After a bit of searching (trying Gentoo, Gobo and Arch along the way), I decided to use something that isn't Linux. Long story short: I narrowed the choices down to OpenSolaris and FreeBSD, but now I'm stuck. OpenSolaris is commercially backed by Sun, has nice enterprise-y tools in the default install, and best of all, a mature implementation of ZFS. FreeBSD is backed by a foundation, has a minimal default install and a rather new (but recently improved in the 8.0 release) implementation of ZFS, however it offers the Ports Collection (I quite like the performance boost due to compiling from source, no matter how small it might be) and a bigger community than OpenSolaris. That is just a minimal mention of the differences. I would be interested to see what the Slashdot community thinks of these two operating systems."
Those are commie Operating Systems you have there. Get some Windows 7 and be a good patriot.
Just think about what you're saying in the future.
Dual boot and use them both. Any other world endingly difficult questions you need answered for?
Rather than playing with just another un*x clone, try something like Haiku or FreeVMS or my personal favourite Plan 9
Andy Warhol got it right / Everybody gets the limelight
Andy Warhol got it wrong / Fifteen minutes is too long.
For instance, why are you switching from an OS with more support to ones with less support?
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
If you just have to pick one, I would wait on this decision until the Oracle-Sun deal is through and see what Oracle does. I don't think either is likely to go away any time soon, though, and if OpenSolaris is really open source it *would* be forked if Oracle tried to close it.
Given that you've already tried three different Linux distros, though, why not try both? You're going to be the best judge of what your requirements are.
Disclaimer: I'm an ex-FreeBSD-committer, so I have a dog in the hunt.
If you're looking to learn something new, OpenSolaris is the way I'd go. Lots of commercial enterprises use Solaris, so you're learning a skill that is of direct to a great many businesses.
Of course, that's not to say that Solaris is the only Unix out there - I'm certain that FreeBSD is used in commercial enterprises as well, just not at as high a level as Solaris is. And, ultimately, learning the idiosyncrasies of more than one Unix environment means that you're well placed to adapt if (for example) you find yourself maintaining an AIX or HP-UX host - you've already had the pain of dealing with the differences between FreeBSD/Solaris and Linux, so the next step won't be quite so difficult.
I am always surprised when people make this claim about compiling from source giving a performance boost. Why would code compiled on your system run any faster than the same code on someone else's system?
Unless you know how to tweak the compiler flags for this particular app (and know them better than the developer who distributes the binaries), the binary delivered with the distribution will be just as quick as the one you compile yourself.
To Terminate, or not to Terminate, that's the question - SCSIROB
When it comes to things like flash, acroread, nvidia drivers, fluendo (multimedia plugins, DVD Player), skype etc being supported, having the commercial entity behind OpenSolaris does seem to help...I think behind the scenes Sun offer some sort of incentive to these companies to support OpenSolaris. I do like that FreeBSD is backed by a foundation though, it is much more reassuring to an open source project to know that its backing entity wont dump them the next day.
You didn't say what's your specific need. If you are just testing out different systems and doing some studying, then the correct answer is probably "Both". If you have specific need then would have been nice if you outlined that. FreeBSD is more towards a desktop, Solaris is more for servers, but you already know that. So if you aren't just doing this out of academic interest, would sure help to know your requirements (and why didn't the Linux flavors work out?).
because you forgot to write down the most important part of your question: for which purpose is this server intended.
Goddamnit, is this /g/?
> gentoo, gobo, arch
You have been trolled.
> compiling from source no matter how little performance boost it gives
Still trolled by gentoo -O flag weenies, aren't we?
> using Debian
This is a good choice
> Switch to OpenSolaris
No, just no, not unless you have a specific reason to. As a desktop? They don't call it Slowaris for nothing, y'know.
> Mature ZFS
Well, it is Sun, after all. They did write the bloody thing. But don't forget that ZFS has its own overhead, so if you don't have a use for it, you're wasting your time and your system resources.
> FreeBSD
Why? Not unless you have a specific reason to. You're already running a stable operating system that works on your hardware. Have you looked to see if the drivers you want are available? If it supports your hardware, go for it. If not, why put yourself through hell?
> Corporation vs not-for-profit
Doesn't make any difference, bro, unless you are trying to start a flamewar. It either does what you want or it's crap.
8/10, would rage again.
--
BMO
I assume you are looking for a server. If it's for a desktop, more users and software help a lot. Although BSD and Solaris are more reliable indeed, the intricately, meticulously designed user-oriented design interface of Linux provides details and config files enough to entertain for generations. I have never tried out GnuStep, however an open source nextstep-like interface seems promising.
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
Make a VM of each system and see what you like. The other question is what do you want to do with your system? Run it on your laptop? Use it as a web server? A directory server? Or something else?
This is question is like being asked by a computer illiterate user "What kind of computer should I get?" I always ask "Well what do you want to do? If you want to surf the web, maybe type a paper or two, get a netbook, if you want to play games, get a desktop, if you need to carry it to school or work..." It all depends on what will best preform the functions you're looking for.
If your goal is to learn, try both.
I've been using FreeBSD since somewhere around 1999-2000 and I've also played around a bit with various versions of Solaris and the way I look at it is:
If you want to learn something that you can put on your resumé then Solaris is probably the better choice, likewise if you want mature ZFS support, other than that I'd have to say that FreeBSD is the better choice for most people but as a long time FreeBSD user I suspect I'm quite biased, FreeBSD has always made a lot of sense to me, it's well-organized and I just happen to like the simplicity and sane layout that it has. But yeah, neither OS is Debian/Ubuntu and you'll have to learn their little peculiarities (and there's no point fighting it, trying to dump all software into /usr and making /usr/local a symlink to /usr because that's how your Linux distro of choice did it isn't going to fly with FreeBSD, just accept that when you install software it goes in /usr/local and be happy with it :).
(Yes, I once (1998-ish) saw what was a large Linux distro at the time pull that stunt)
/Mikael
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
Whilst I don't agree with the profanity, I agree with the sentiment.
This site used to be such a haven for trolls and geeks, now it's full of wannabes for both :(
I quite like the performance boost due to compiling from source, no matter how small it might be.
While I generally agree... (I use Gentoo for years on multiple systems and love/hate it.)
What if the boost is smaller than the resources it takes to compile it in the first place?
If you once compiled gcc, glibc, kdelibs (or all of gnome) java (se) and ghc (with vmem requirements up to 8GB!) in a row, just to go from x.x.x.2 to x.x.x.3, you know what I am talking about. Here that can take a good day. And the gain from not simply keeping the old version is next to nothing, but often still required because of a security hole.
Here, a weekly update can consist of over 50 packages wanting to be re-compiled. For shit like going from -rc1 to -rc2, or a changed use flag (compile option).
I wonder if it wouldn’t be simpler, to just compile every combination of configure setup / architecture once, and put the binaries on a giant (and I mean bigger-than-google-by-some-magnitudes giant) server. ;)
(At least if you have multiple similar servers, you can save time by using ccache and "binpkg"es.)
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
I've used both as my primary desktop (each for a few months) and if you want to try something new, go with FreeBSD. OpenSolaris felt like GNU/Solaris, which it mostly is, with a few Sun coded things (I think it was libc and a few more of the libraries). FreeBSD was all about fine control: I found myself wanting to recompile the kernel and playing with rc scripts and asking my OpenBSD-using friend so many questions he demanded I switch to Linux:-D
Plus, when you've spent a whole night figuring out why KDE won't compile correctly on FreeBSD....it feels good, like you've accomplished something.
Does ZFS on FreeBSD still suffer from random kernel panics when it gets low on memory?
I'm particularly referring to this bit of documentation:
To use ZFS, at least 1GB of memory is recommended (for all architectures) but more is helpful as ZFS needs *lots* of memory. Depending on your workload, it may be possible to use ZFS on systems with less memory, but it requires careful tuning to avoid panics from memory exhaustion in the kernel.
Yeah, kernel infrastructure that can't cope with running out of memory. That fills me with confidence. Particularly I've run ZFS on OpenSolaris on a 48MB Pentium laptop and it coped fine.
Unfortunately the FreeBSD ZFS pages are a wiki, which means they're badly organised and out of date. I have no idea when the above was written or whether it's still valid. Does anyone know?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XOR_swap_algorithm
This maybe wasn't the best example since XOR swaps are rarely useful anyway. I suspect that other things like word (mis)alignment and varying cache miss costs may be a factor for different processors.
Gentoo claims that picking e.g. core2 over nocona can boost performance by 15% (which seems a bit much to me), so picking the right x86_64 variant is still something that is considered. Not something I worry about though, unless I am compiling from source anyway.
OpenSolaris is Sun's desperate attempt to keep up with Linux. Sun had a great history but they just aren't as relevant anymore, there is little they have that redhat ( for example ) don't. Solaris just isn't in a position to make any kind of comeback at this point.
It's pretty sad that Linux has taken market share from good companies like Sun at least as much as Microsoft.
You could try using pkgsrc (http://www.pkgsrc.org/) on opensolaris for third party applications. There are a lot of packages for opensolaris already but I think that pkgsrc beats them. Alternatively, you could try your hand at sourcejuicer and feed the apps you want into the opensolaris pool.
You are used to Debian ? Then try Debian GNU/kFreeBSD.
The Debian distro on top of a FreeBSD kernel.
Gentoo claims that picking e.g. core2 over nocona can boost performance by 15% (which seems a bit much to me), so picking the right x86_64 variant is still something that is considered. Not something I worry about though, unless I am compiling from source anyway.
Gentoo makes all sorts of outlandish claims which seldom stack up, in exchange for which you get an OS which if you don't keep it up to date religiously will ultimately suffer bitrot. Over time, emerge <package> becomes less and less reliable.
(Yes, I have used Gentoo. For several years. I concluded at the end that the amount of work was greater than the benefit.)
...is a good lightweight text editor.
From reading your post, it looks like you are looking to use a desktop OS (I may be wrong). Also it seems to me that you have tried various distros of linux but are rejecting them because it doesn't hhave ZFS.
Therefore if we are to restrict our options to OpenBSD and FreeBSD i would lean towards FreeBSD simply due to the large no. of apps available through ports.Also i believe driver compatibility is a little better in FreeBSD, especially recently with nvidia cards.
However as another poster said, the best judge is you. therefore install each and try them out and see which works best with your hardware. you may also want to compare desktop responsiveness with Linux, as I believe that recent linux kernels have received further optimizations for desktop performance.
If its a server OS you are looking for then it depends on what you are using it for (LAMP, file server, DB host etc.). If you are looking to run commercial DBs like Oracle on it, a certified OS like RHEL/Solaris may be a better bet if u plan to ask for support. Thats a totally different ball game all together and is something on which one can write pages on.
Good luck on whatever you choose to use.
I am in quite a predicament. My boss hired me because I bullshitted my way through an interview, but really I don't know shit from shinola when it comes to servers and operating systems and such. I can play WoW... HELP ME PLEASE.
Although I always enjoy the opportunity to recommend FreeBSD to somebody, I didn't really get an explanation of your needs. Are you going to be running servers? Desktop? Or just having fun? I imagine that you're just going to have some fun since you just want to learn something new. In that case I'd definitely go with FreeBSD. It is a great "learning" OS and is well documented thanks to the Handbook. The /usr/ports collection has the source code for just about any piece of software you'd ever need, and the dependencies are all taken care of for you. You get some pretty awesome hardware support, server daemons are incredibly easy to configure, it is robust as all hell, doesn't use a lot of resources, can also make a great desktop OS, lots of smart people on IRC you can get help from, and countless amounts of other things. Additionally I'd go with FreeBSD because there are a large percentage of servers on the internet use this OS. If IT is your profession, it definitely won't hurt to learn FreeBSD. All you need to know is, /etc/rc.conf and /usr/ports. Then you just move on from there :-) Good luck!
*plays the Apogee theme song music*
(Yes, I have used Gentoo. For several years. I concluded at the end that the amount of work was greater than the benefit.)
Me too. I love Gentoo, and think it's pretty much as close to my perfect distro as possible. Gentoo Hardened is brilliant.
However, if you do what I do, and only update packages that have security issues, you'll find that suddenly one day, your profile has expired, and packages you need to bring it up to date have entered and left portage, meaning that you have to jump through hoops just to get Python working enough to update.
Say anything about this, and you get the statement "Just do emerge world every night", which is stupid for a production server.
I much prefer Gentoo to Ubuntu or Debian (and nothing to do with speed (claimed or otherwise)), but my current host? Ubuntu 9.04.
Get your own free personal location tracker
Instead of FreeVMS which isn't ready for prime time... Get the OpenVMS hobbiest edition, load up SimH and run OpenVMS on a real emulated Vax. For fun you could boot OpenBSD, NetBSD or BSD4.x on the emulated Vax.
As far as Solaris vs. BSD -- I run 'em both here. Solaris mostly on Sparc and BSD on x86. I've done Solaris x86
and it's ok, but it's really fun to set up a jumpstart server and load up some old Sparcs.
I've even got SunOS 4.1.4 up...
Take a look at the software available on the http://www.openvmshobbyist.com/ site. A ton of VMS languages including C, ADA, Pascal, Macro32... TCP/IP and Clustering.
http://simh.trailing-edge.com/
Also... take a look at the early Unix varients for PDP11 for SimH. You wouldn't recognize it.
I'm using Debian stable right now as the solution for my particular requirements (development desktop that's a good Xen Dom0), but I'd much rather be using a BSD (the first machine I bare metaled was BSD 2.x onto a PDP-11/44 in 1981 (sic)) or Solaris (it took me most of a decade, but I eventually got over their switch to AT&T :-).
The big problems with FreeBSD when I made my decision were no Dom0 support and an immature ZFS, and the problem I've always had with Solaris is solid mass storage device driver support, at least for vaguely affordable controllers that don't require a PCI-X bus. E.g. when I last checked nVidia SATA chipset support was iffy (which was odd since a classic workstation they shipped had a rebadged Tyan motherboard with a nVidia chipset; I've got two of those Tyans in prodution and they're rock solid ... with Windows XP :-( hey, I'm not willing to put my parents on Linux or whatever quite yet )).
This may have improved since then, but be sure to check for problems in the field.
Without that information, all you'll get is a bunch of people suggesting their own pet projects.
Even if you just want to learn and play you might want to have a goal. Do you want to learn to administer ZFS? You seem to be fixated on it.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
What makes you want to blow away something you're already running & comfortable with? You give no reason for switching away from Debian.
Suggestions:
- For Linux, Debian is pretty much the granddaddy, and can likely be wrangled to do whatever you want. You seem the explorative type. If you're comfortable with Debian, figure out how to do whatever it is you're interested in on Debian and get on with it. Changing distros won't change your life.
- For other OSs, you're blessed to live in the age where you can just grab virtualbox, fire up a VM of whatever it is you wan to play with, and fiddle with it. When I was messing with all this I had 5 crappy old noisy minitower PCs around my desk (and a NeXT on top of it, which was what I actually used as my workstation becuase it Just Worked). If you're really really impressed by something that you've monkeyed with in your VMs for a while, switch to it if you really want to, but honestly in ISP and hosting type shops Debian is what I see most.
- It sounds like you want slowlaris or FreeBSD just to get ZFS, presumably because you have an ever-expanding collection of media, pr0n, und w4r3z and want to be able to just add disks to your storage pool on the fly and all the other spiffy stuff that ZFS does. If you want to kick the tires on a new filesystem technology, may I suggest that you grab the latest iso release of DragonFlyBSD and check out HAMMER? It's really a lot simpler to use than ZFS, and personally I feel it's really designed The Right Way.
- If you really want a challenge, get a Mac (or buy yourself Snow Leopard and make yourself a hackintosh) and learn how to use the powerful and complicated tools that make Mac OS X Server work. Things are very different from the way other unixen do things, and I find messing with them and learning how they work to be very satisfying.
I expect some BSDs to flourish as well, but if you think that'll happen because the GPL/LGPL stack is somehow shunned by the commercial players... well, all I can say is that you are the one with blinders on.
Copyleft is successful now because companies see value in contributing to copyleft software. You can keep trash talking all you want, that doesn't change the reality.
Trying to pin the non-success of SFU on the open source community is especialy rich...
I came from a SunOS background but used Linux based distributions at home (Slaskware was the easiest at the time).
I the tried NetBSD and FreeBSD and they were okay, I found general responsiveness felt good, not necessarily faster, but more consistant, this was years before low lateny linux kernel.
After about 9-12 months, I realised I was spending a lot of my time just trying to get iBCS, Wine and Linux compatibility working so I could be productive. I realised I wasn't gaining anything from running FreeBSD
and was struggling to make it work like a Linux based desktop OS. As a server I favoured Solaris anyway.
I'm quite happy with both OpenSolaris and FreeBSD as desktops, as well as servers.
You didn't specify what your primary goals are for the system in question-- if you're looking for a general purpose web surfing/light development machine, OpenSolaris should be fine for you-- as long as you have at least a gigabyte of memory and a moderately fast processor.
FreeBSD's a lot less resource intensive in my experience-- I'm currently supporting two sites that still have Pentium III/600-based servers with uptimes approaching a year each. (Last reboot for each was due to a multi-day power outage.)
If you have VirtualBox installed, give both FreeBSD and OpenSolaris a whirl, see what you think.
Since you're not telling us what you're actually planning to do with the OS, might as well advice some random OS based on no reason whatsoever.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
If you need the features (or paid sun support) though, go for it - but FreeBSD has most of the feature set these days and is much faster. Ports are also way easier than obtaining package X from source and then running into whatever undiscovered bugs exist in that particular package under opensolaris becuase you happen to be the first one to actually run it on that platform.
It REALLY depends on your intended purpose as to which OS is best - the only one who can really answer that, whilst taking into account your previous history, skillset andn willingness to learn/fiddle is you.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
You have that backwards.ATT&T Bell Labs invented C, and then used it to write Unix, which was a play on the name of the OS called Multics, which was also AT&T Bell Lab's baby (along with MIT and General Electric.)
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
What a treat to even be able to have this discussion: which of the many capable, mature, free options to adopt. Thank you, open source movement!
org.slashdot.post.SignatureNotFoundException: ewg
Restrictive (copyleft) licensed software like the Linux kernel and the GNU toolchain indeed follows a communist philosophy that fails to see the value of free market competition, and instead relies on government force (see gpl-violations.org).
No it doesn't.
It raises the bar for competition. It allows everyone to start from a more advanced position, the whole "Shoulders of Giants" thing.
We are very lucky to live in a world with GPL software. The GPL has succeeded in allowing real progress to flourish where monopolies have stifled progress in an unregulated "free" market.
The Windows Interix subsystem could have evolved into a great UNIX server platform, but socialist governments (especially in Europe) place severe restrictions on what Microsoft can include in their products, which is the only thing holding them back.
The double-speak of a Microsoft apologist.
Stick Men
With Oracle trying to take control, you cant be assured of its future. With FreeBSD, you can. I would worry less about the performance differences and think about the long term stability and true openness. Don't want your eggs in a leaky basket. You can buy commercial FreeBSD support, if that is a business requirement.
Also, I agree ports are great ( unless its close to a new release.. they tend to get stale and out of sync ), but i don't see an issue with the 'minimal default install'. You want bloat off the line? You can create custom 'install sets' if you really think you need the extras at install time, and not 'admin time'.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
If this weren't moderated as interesting, I'd be afraid to answer for fear of feeding stupid trols, but since it is, lets go ahead.
There's a certain stupidity in modern "soundbite" thinking that seems to think that by labelling something you thereby make it bad. This leads people to stuipdly stretch those labels as far as they think they can make them stick. Here is a perfect example. The GPL requires certain actions to avoid restrictions in copying. Microsoft's licenses restrict all copying with small exceptions. The FSF occasionally goes to court to try to get organisations to follow their license. The BSA, Microsoft's enforcers, regularly carry out military style raids on their customers searching for violations, let alone what they do to actual pirates. If you believe that this makes the FSF, the free software movement or whatever communist then you must believe that commercial software producers are all ultra communists and Microsoft is Comintern its self. If you really did believe that and weren't just making a debating point, you could easily find yourself being declared clinically insane.
Interix was created solely for the reason of destroying UNIX; I think you will find that the "open source community" is completely rational for not working on it. Your complaint is like a person wanting to know why turkeys don't do volunteer work to spread the thanksgiving message. However, there is nothing they could do to stop the Windows community from doing the port. The reason it's not happening is because Microsoft and Microsoft collaborators aren't interested in becoming helpful collaborating members of the community.
Which leads to the question why didn't Microsoft just go ahead and fix it. Answer; because then it would be difficult to kill it later. Interix might be a sane choice for an organisation which was trying to eliminate old UNIX installs and just had a few applications which were difficult to rewrite at the current time. It's not something anyone sane would base their future on.
This is the funniest and most ironic statement of your entire post. Stallman never claimed to be an economist and from the beginning said "do this because it's the moral thing even though it will lose you money". The irony comes from the fact that he was wrong. In fact the GPL is an excellent choice as part of a commercial strategy. Either dual license model for sofware with narrow developer interest or through the free (as in beer) software + expensive support model.
Some of the other systems you mentioned should be, logically, looking at their design and historical position before Linux really took off and the number of products developed from them which could have contributed to their develomement dominating the market. However they have failed. The reason is simple. Every time someone comes up with a product based on a non copyleft system (OS-X; JunOS, Microsoft's TCP/IP stack, IPSO etc. etc.) the community divides between those working on the product and those working on the OS. This leads to continual weakening of the community. Compare with
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
Many small-time programmers do pick GPL for irrational ideological reasons - "don't let evil corporations steal our code". That was the prevailing culture from the early days of open source software, back when everyone lived in mom's basement and thought money grew on trees. As FLOSS got bigger, a lot of software authors simply didn't give much thought to the GPL-vs-BSD debate, and went with the herd mentality (pun intended). Some bigger players like Qt (now Nokia) also used GPL's restrictiveness to make money, which is perfectly fine as long as you don't claim that restrictively licensed software is somehow more "free" than the permissively licensed / public domain kind. A lot of people also thought GPL would be more effective at "hurting Microsoft" than BSD, which has proven to be completely the opposite - as I predicted. (Google - smart, IBM - dumb.)
I'm not "trying to pin the non-success of SFU" on anyone but the regulators. The FLOSS community doesn't have any obligation to support a particular platform, but it's very telling that they snubbed Interix as much as they did...
So, anyway, I'm just making a long-term prediction of a libertarian-minded counter-movement in open-source software - people like me picking *BSD over Linux / Solaris for ideological reasons. We'll see how that prediction holds out.
Remeber that you don't get any free security updates for OpenSolaris. That means you are stuck with the security problems and bugs until the next release,
Of course you can buy support from Sun.
However, if you do what I do, and only update packages that have security issues, you'll find that suddenly one day, your profile has expired, and packages you need to bring it up to date have entered and left portage, meaning that you have to jump through hoops just to get Python working enough to update.
It was exactly this that drove to to Debian. You don't generally make changes to a production server unless you really can't help it because every change has a risk of something going wrong and suddenly your production server is in need of serious work to get it back up. You certainly don't want to find that patching one item introduces a raft of new dependencies which require you to re-emerge half the software. Debian understands this. Gentoo doesn't.
"Restrictive (copyleft) licensed software like the Linux kernel and the GNU toolchain indeed follows a communist philosophy that fails to see the value of free market competition, and instead relies on government force (see gpl-violations.org)." Idiot. Relying on "government force" to enforce contracts isn't "communist". In fact, even among most libertarians, enforcement of contract is considered one of the basic and vary legitimate functions of government. There's nothing "anti-free-market" about a collaborative effort; every pursuit that's not for-profit isn't "anti-capitalist". Communism is *compulsory* sharing of work and work product you own. Taking someone else's and using it on the terms they've placed on it isn't compulsory - you don't have to use it.
"Raising the bar for competition" is exactly what BSD does, and just look at how much it helped Apple and Google to finally start offering some serious challenges to Microsoft. GPL actually helps the biggest commercial player (i.e. Microsoft) retain their position, because they can afford to put huge amounts of money into R&D while their would-be competitors cannot. Sure, GPL will eventually squeeze them out of some over-saturated fields, but Microsoft will always be able to invest in other things where it can make a profit: business services, hardware, and so on.
Calling me a "Microsoft apologist" does not change the basic economic facts. And, in reality, the only type of "monopoly" that has ever existed in human history was the regional hegemony of government force - everything else is subject to perpetual change.
anti capitalist? maybe the floss crowd doesn't want to help a for-pay software stack when they themselves don't get a piece o fthe pie. In the floss world, they are 'paid' with the contributions of others. If they were to work with 'interix' they gain nothing except a more powerful competitor who wants to crush open source.
I'm currently running Slackware64 13.0, and have been a huge Slack fan since around 3.3. Currently I run a handful of vm's under kvm. Including ubuntu, debian, centos, vista, xp, a few Win7's (two betas, rc1 and the final enterprise), opensolaris and now I'm thinking of freebsd 8.0. Some of my favorites are ubuntu and Win7. I have about 16 of them all told but only use abour 2-3 at a time. It's a fantastic way to learn several different things at once. Run two VMs, focus on OpenSolaris for a week/month then switch to FreeBSD 8.0. Then run them both at the same time when you're comfortable.
FLR
I'm completely with you. And I think there's some truth to the theory that corporations shunning GPL is going to hurt it. Sure, if your goal is to forever be a countercultural niche player, you can always thrive in that narrow space without corporate backing, but the GPL projects that have succeeded in a broader sense have almost invariably done so with *massive* corporate backing.
Take GCC, for example. If you've ever tried to fix bugs in GCC, it's a dauntingly large piece of code, and unless you work for a company that needs a fix, chances are you won't have the time or the inclination to delve into something that large, much less sufficient understanding of compiler concepts. As a result, I suspect if you took the statistics, you'd find that nearly every contribution to GCC in the past year came from someone fixing it as part of his/her job.
Without those contributions, the code would almost certainly stagnate; the "us versus the corporations" mentality is childish and self-destructive.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
I've been playing with Nexenta (www.nexenta.org) for a while with some success. It calls itself GNU/Solaris in the same way that Debian is GNU/Linux. They put an OpenSolaris kernel under a GNU software stack using recompiled Ubuntu packages. Last time I checked they were using Hardy.
Packaged software support isn't as large as with FreeBSD (not all Ubuntu packages are converted), but larger than OpenSolaris (it includes the OpenSolaris packages through apt).
Its main appeal is in combining the power of Solaris with the ease of apt and adds a cool feature called apt-clone that takes a ZFS snapshot before doing any package maintenance allowing clean, trivial rollbacks for testing and error correction. It also supports switching between GNU and Solaris contexts in case you prefer your tar without a -z option.
It's not completely mature at this point so I wouldn't use it in my datacenter, but it's fine for a home server. I haven't tested it on the desktop yet.
I've read the GPL and I haven't seen anything relating to the redistribution of wealth or any quote from Das Kapital. You just throw buzzwords like "communist philosophy" out there because a) you're american (yours is the only country where anyone would take you seriously with rubbish like that, due to a cultural meme that has no base in reality) and b) you're hoping to excite the masses, i.e. troll the forums. I don't have mod points today, but you would get a -1 Troll if I did.
No, you're trying to troll the forums, and you're succeeding too. There's a famous argument that is used to defend Microsoft's OS costs: No one is forcing you to use it. The same applies to the GPL. You are free to choose whatever license you want for your software. Forcing you to choose a certain license would, however, not necessarily be communist, since communism entails forced redistribution of property. It would be tyrannical, but the American cultural meme is that communism=authoritarianism. Police states like that which Argentina and Chile used to be were just as tyrannical as Cuba or modern Venezuela.
For the community. I hear they have pot luck dinners every Sunday afternoon.
This reminds me of an insightful observation, I saw in a Slashdot signature years ago: BSD developers do it, because they love Unix. Linux ones do it, because they hate Microsoft.
Don't get married — nor pick anything less important either — out of dislike for something (or someone) else to spite them.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
I would go with FreeBSD. FreeBSD is known for its high reliability and some of the root DNS servers use it. But, I would not use ZFS. ZFS has an achilles heal as we discovered. If you loose a volume in a ZFS setup, you cannot remove the volume. This caused us to scrap its use. I really like the BSDs. FreeBSD by itself, addressed 95% of our computing needs. For the remainder, we use OpenBSD. These two operating systems, when combined, give use a powerful platform.
I use Solaris 10 x64 for production, on Sun hardware. On the desktop I use OS X, and to a lesser extent Windows 7 and OpenSolaris. I've tried various Linux distributions and OpenBSD. I used Solaris 9 and older on SPARC, but my recent experience is with Solaris 10 on x64. That's a rather different and more interesting OS than Solaris 6 - 8, particularly the old x86 port.
I don't see the performance issues with current versions of Solaris. A couple of years ago when we were setting up I looked at published Java benchmarks, and found Solaris a couple of percent better than Linux. Not enough to matter. It is probably true that OpenSolaris on the desktop is not a good fit for small memory. This is particularly true now that the default install uses ZFS. The design of ZFS assumes a fair amount of memory, because by default it uses a large cache. It's fine on my old 1 GB laptop, and I've used smaller virtual machines, but it's not what I'd choose for a 256 MB Pentium. I should note that ZFS is still under active development. A lot of it involves performance.
Surely the BSD lawsuit had something to do with Linux taking off instead of BSD?
I rather doubt it, the timelines don't fit. "USL v. BSDi was a lawsuit brought in the United States in 1992 [...]. The case was settled out of court in 1993 [...]."
Meanwhile, Linux didn't hit version 1.0 until March, 1994. Yggdrasil, the first distro, was released in November, 1992, and Slackware in June, 1993, but they were strictly for hobbyists. Anyone looking to do something commercial would have wanted to use a more mature OS, and as I recall there were lots of commercial solutions during that time frame that were based off of BSD derivatives.
IMHO, Linux beat the BSDs for the same reason it beat Minux. It provided meaningful work for outside contributors. To be meaningful, work has to provide autonomy, complexity and a connection between effort and reward. The first two are easy, they are practically inherent to the software development process. The last one is the winner. Wikipedia had the same property, and look at how it grew. Now it seems to be getting harder to make meaningful contributions, and participation seems to be falling. It took a while for people to discover that the iPhone App Store never had this property, but now even the commercial developers are leaving. Especially in the early days, Linus accepted other people's contributions with very few strings, so people got rapid positive feedback. As Linux has grown, it has gotten harder to keep doing this, but Linus seems to try harder than his "competitors". This is the core of the success of Linux.
Nothing for 6-digit uids?
Wow...
First, GPL software is hardly "communist", nor is it anti-free market. If a commercial software developer can't compete with free, that's just too bad.
Second, it doesn't rely on "government force" either. It uses exactly the same copyright laws that commercial software uses. It just uses them differently - it covers purely redistribution, and imposes no limits at all on use (or modification, if you don't distribute those modifications).
As for Internix... That was never included in anything but the high end business versions of Windows, and typically only the server versions. It was intended to move businesses off of Unix onto Windows NT, and to allow Windows NT to gain FIPS 151-2 certification (which requires a POSIX implementation). It was entirely commercial until 2004, when one version was released for free, but only worked on Windows XP Professional. Subsequent versions only work on the server or high-end business versions of Windows (Ultimate and Enterprise, as of Windows 7). Considering that it relies on an insanely expensive version of Windows that most people won't have access to, required a lot of extra work to install, and until very recently only provided limited capabilities, is it any wonder that hardly anybody pays attention to it?
Microsoft was never prevented from including this in Windows. They just chose not to - it provides absolutely no benefit whatsoever to most of their user base, while providing an incentive to not write native Windows applications - what's the point if the same application could otherwise run on Windows (via the Unix subsystem), Mac OS X (which is Unix), Linux (which is almost Unix), and any commercial Unix system they cared to compile it for?
It also wouldn't have been possible without some GPL-licensed code, most notably GCC.
While I agree with much of what you say, it doesn't exactly help your case when you layer your own post with fairly fanciful and stupid assertions, while rebutting the exact same in the GPs post. For one, the BSA aren't Microsoft's enforcers anymore than the RIAA are the Bee Gees' enforcers. They are a group that exists to enforce copyright and software licences, and while I don't agree with much of their policy or their actions in enforcing it, suggesting they are some puppet of Microsoft's is just absurd. Check the BSA membership, it's full of huge industry giants many of them direct competitors of Microsoft's; IBM, Apple, Dell, Adobe, Symantec, RSA, to name just a few. Further, military style raids might be a slight exaggeration, like calling the GPL communist or anti-capitalist for example.
But one point in particular I'd like to address is your assertions on the Interix system. Firstly, I think it's absurd to suggest that Interix was "created solely for the reason of destroying UNIX". Where's your proof? What leads you to this conclusion? Or does providing compatibility now (much like a huge number of other projects, like Wine) automatically entail an objective of destroying the target platform? Unix (and Unix-like) systems have always played and continue to play a major role in computing, and this is a good thing, surely some degree of compatibility with these systems at the API level is a good thing? This is a large part of what Interix does, it provides a POSIX implementation on Windows as well as a Unix-like environment for development and productivity. So you have the POSIX API, Csh/Korn shells, a large set of Unix utilities, compiler, libraries and headers, and a lot more. The idea is to provide a Unix environment on Windows for migration, compatibility and development.
Cygwin I suspect wasn't "fixed" by Microsoft for several reasons. One would be that Interix/Cygwin began development around the same time, another would be whether the developers would be receptive to development efforts by Microsoft, another might be legal concerns and all the usual licensing crap, but perhaps most of all, the way they accomplish their functionality is very different. Cygwin provides a POSIX implementation and Unix-like environment _ON TOP_ of the Win32 API. This is done through a DLL (cygwin1.dll) which translates POSIX calls into Win32 calls which in turn call into the NT Native API. Interix by contrast does not use Win32 at all, but runs directly on top of the POSIX subsystem, thus, Interix apps go POSIX Subsystem -> NT Native API. Of course, you still have to use the Win32 API as that's what the Windows OS is primarily built on, but the POSIX subsystem runs alongside it and Interix on top of it. This is indeed the point of the NT Native API and much of the NT design; the Native API is (as the name implies) the base API for the NT OS and environment subsystems run on top of it providing an API for client applications. The Windows API is one such subsystem and the one that 99% of people use, POSIX is another, Win16 is another (I think?), and in the past there has been a (fairly crippled) OS/2 subsystem, and possibly others.
This affords some unique functionality for Interix in that it can do things at the API level that the Win32 API doesn't really support, simple example: fork(). The Win32 API to my knowledge has no real fork() equivalent, however, this is supported by the POSIX subsystem. The reason is that the Native API does support fork() but does not expose it through Win32 (but does through POSIX). Clearly, the Cygwin developers have worked around this, although how they've done it I'm not sure. Perhaps they translate fork() calls to loose Win32 equivalents? Or they call directly into the Native API (possible, but strongly discouraged)? Whatever, my point is the implementations of these two environments are very different, and I suspect they offer varying functionality as well as differing in actual POSIX implementation. I gather there's quite a nice Interix community, and Microsoft has put a
So what if the case was settled in 1993? As a result of the case, the AT&T code was removed from free BSD distributions. FreeBSD didn't have a cleaned-up release version until 1995.
Why is it that we always deal with the word "communist" as a pejorative? Free software is one of the few examples in the world of successful communism at work: from each, according to their ability, to each, according to their need. The objection to communism historically--and a fair one, I say--is that it just doesn't work. And that instituting it at a nation state level causes nothing but misery. But volunteer-only based communism, in a context where it has proven itself effective? To object to that is just small minded, and mean spirited.
Windows could have NEVER been a good Unix. Unix is based on the philosophy of elegant, minimalist components working together to compose a whole. Windows is an intractable monolith that not even programmers inside Microsoft know very well (yes, this is a problem that even Microsoft recognizes internally).
There won't be a sudden shift of developer time to non copyleft software. Most developers are somewhat jealous of their code. The GPL provides them an emotional lozenge to chew on, where the less restrictive licenses lead them to fear that some commercial company is going to grab up their code without giving them credit and so forth. The emotional lozenge of the GPL: "at least my code, and anything based on it, will always be free".
C//
and if you want it more so, there is PC-BSD (Free BSD with (good) lipstick).
Or even Solaris proper. Solaris 10 changed the game from the ground up, much to the point where it's Unix on roids. Run levels have been replaced with milestones, init.d has been replaced with SMF and the contract file system. Dtrace makes life worth living. Look, vmstat is great; but with Dtrace you can recreate vmstat/iostat/mpstat from the ground up! Get the picture of what this tool can do for you?!?! Containers/Zones for virtual hosts. OpenCluster for building and working with an HA cluster. Crossbow, for building whole networks inside your machine.
I think my only complaint about OpenSolaris is packages. After 8 years of Debian apt calls I find *Solaris to be a little too retro-RedHat (before YUM) for dependencies and new software.
Well, maybe.
There's nothing about open source software that makes it inherently more stable or secure. As far as cost effectiveness, it depends. Open source software might be used because it's cheaper to buy more capable hardware than to license existing embedded software/develop custom software. If hardware becomes more expensive or other software becomes cheaper, there's less reason to stick with open source. As an example, some Linksys consumer routers started shipping with vxWorks and less memory when they had previously shipped with Linux.
You ask as if I was accusing Microsoft of being especially evil. This isn't another big secret like the the way they carefully arrange APIs to disadvantage other companies that develop for Windows. In fact let's just ask them.
from an MS press release>:
It allows users with UNIX environments to take advantage of the benefits of the Windows environment without having to rewrite critical applications. In addition, users can immediately use the full Windows-based application development environment to develop native Win32® API-based applications.
In other words we'd like UNIX customers to move to Windows and abandon UNIX.
from the same MS press release:
Interix 2.2 brings Microsoft customers one step closer to its vision of a single desktop computer for all uses by providing a complete enterprise platform to run all Windows-based, UNIX and Internet applications.
In other words, we'd like you to only use Windows.
In fact there is nothing wrong with this as such. The normal way the free market works is by competition in which one company tries to destroy another companies products by getting people to use their own. What could easily be wrong is if they were, for example, ensuring some of their own software in a market where they had used illegal tactics to become a dominant player were only available on their own platform so that their competitors could not try to do the same to them.
It interests me why the MS astroturfers are so touchy about this topic? Could it be that MS has something to hide on this topic?
People who are neither working for the good of the "Open Source Community" nor Microsoft? Possibly, in part, Useful idiots? People who would be better to spend their time improving Debian or CentOS? Is Microsoft contributing or not? I know little of this and would be honestly interested to analyse it.
Agreed.
That is what many people say. However the SCO probably lawsuit hasn't really had that much influence on Linux. I'm not convinced that it's true. Certainly this doesn't apply to Minix or many of the other BSD situations. It certainly doesn't explain the success of Mozilla (copyleft) over Mosaic (not).
The source they do provide means that any major feature they implement in Linux its self is available to others. That's key. That means that competitors who release features into Linux can do so with the knowledge that major improvements to their features will be available to copy back.
As far as the binary module thing goes; this is an exce
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
Except for the fact that you seem to imply that MS created Interix to destroy Unix. Only problem is that MS didn't create Interix, they bought it.
Thank you for playing. Here's your lovely parting gift.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Go back and read your Adam Smith. Not just 'The Wealth of Nations' either. Read 'The Theory of Moral Sentiments' too.
Free-market economy without government has not only never existed, but is inadvisable. Do I think government should be reduced in power? Yes. But somebody has to enforce the rules to ensure that men do not become slaves of circumstance. Natural monopolies or oligopolies are a prime example. They can do well and be very efficient, but when pricing becomes increased far above natural levels they present a huge net economic harm, especially when they are a necessary commodity. It takes an outside force to ensure that whatever barriers the monopoly has created are dealt with so that free markets can be restored.
Now, the government as used today often does the opposite by subscribing to a model of protectionism (which has worked so well in the past), and that should be stopped. I want a government that follows Smith's advice to the British nobility: keep business interests and public interests as far separated as possible! Let the free market do it's thing unabated and be sure to not let one of them catch your ear and convince you he needs your help.
So I agree that a government that is taking action in the manner is has been for centuries is not a good thing, but saying that the free market can replace the functions of government is just crazy.
I am become
I've been in the same boat, trying to find a good OS that has ZFS (without having to take such a huge performance hit from zfs-fuse).
FreeBSD would freeze under heavy load; from what research I did on it, it seemed like a zfs bug with FreeBSD 8.
OpenSolaris on the other hand is a pretty nice desktop (Gnome is pretty much the same everywhere...) and it has a lot of useful packages in it's repository. Flash was installed out of the box, and installing Songbird and Eclipse took only three mouse clicks.
Give OpenSolaris a try (assuming it has support for your hardware).
Massive parallelism.
Automatic clustering.
Fault tolerance.
Single system image.
Unix was designed on and for a single minicomputer system, and it shows. It simply isn't a very good operating system for managing the resources of the networks of commodity systems we all have now.
A good system would let me switch on a new system/pc and it would automatically share all it's resources (storage, ram, cpu, I/O) with a defined cluster of other systems/PCs. It would handle the sharing out of tasks across the cluster in an efficient, redundant/fault tolerant manner and it would appear to the user to be a single system in every respect.
I don't expect any of the existing Unix/Linux codebases ever to reach this point. Unfortunately it's quite a hard problem and there really isn't anyone out there who is capable of pulling it off, so, we simply get the wheel re-invented again and again.
Deleted
Of course they would. A company wants more customers. So Interix "was created solely for the reason of destroying UNIX" in the same way that any company tries to make their products better than competing products.
I suspect people contribute to these kinds of projects because they use them, not for the only benefit of helping "the community". People do use computers for useful work, from time to time.
After the BSD lawsuit, the open source BSD distributions were rewritten without infringing code. This took some time; the non infringing version of FreeBSD wasn't released until 1995.
The SCO lawsuit had no effect on Linux because it was immediately recognized as nonsense from the beginning.
In the 90s, Minix couldn't even be freely distributed. As a useful operating system, Minix didn't compare to Linux or BSD back then.
Netscape was closed source and commercial for a long time. By the time the Mozilla project was started/Netscape was open sourced, IE (another closed source browser) had already gained significant market share and Mosaic had long been irrelevant.
The source is always available, yes - and if the feature is useful to others, and someone else has an interest to put that feature in the mainline Linux kernel, they can. Otherwise, the code will just get stale.
Companies are hardly "in" the community if they do nothing other than honor the GPL obligation to release the source. The criteria I am using: Do they contribute their useful modifications as patches to the original project or participate in the communities of the projects they use?
One of those operating systems is a certified UNIX operating system. The other is FreeBSD.
Nexenta is basically the OpenSolaris kernel and the Debian/Ubuntu userland.
Jag pratar lite svenska.
I didn't realize the people who wanted a complete GNU system needed different levels of indentation in the source code! :)
I've been using FreeBSD for quite a while. I decided to jump ship to Opensolaris for ZFS when I brought up a new NAS server. Welp, with FreeBSD 8.0 out now, I'm jumping back. I've had a heck of a time getting apps to work on Opensolaris, the file system is impressive and works great, but if I can't run the apps I want to access the data, it's pointless for me.
I haven't read the article, so you may have answered this; still it seems silly that you haven't considered virtualization to try them both.
I have hardware running Fedora 12, Windows 7, and OS X 10.6. But that's not enough for me personally. Just for keeping tabs on whats going on with the different operating systems and each ones nuances I like to have several more installed.
In my case, I use VMware Fusion on my Macbook to run desktop environments on various OS's; Fedora, Windows, Solaris, FreeBSD, and whatever else I can shove on its undersized hard drive... hell building OpenOffice.org 3.1 on my new FreeBSD 8.0 vm, just finished up at some gawd aweful hour this morning completing its setup.
Not only that you can set up multiple systems to run at the same time and allow them to interact in server/client environments and see each shine in its own right.
Since my mac is too underpowered to be running multiple VM's I use KVM to launch servers to connect them to as I see fit... hell I have DNS, DHCP, Kerberos, 389 Directory Server, etc. etc. It's a lot to keep in your head, and fiddling with it until your comfortable with it more than most admins is your key to success. I have lists of other things I want to build up when lulls in personal and work life hit; puppet, ruby, cobbler, more nagios, and so on... By virtue of using virtualization you also become familiar with those technologies... sometimes I'll even download an eval license of Windows Server and go through the effort of promoting it to a DC setting up RIS and another service or two just so I can remember how to do so. I don't even admin windows anymore, but it's still good to know.
And in the end I can keep the two or three real systems quite clean and problem free, because if I want to try something I do it in a vm, rather than blowing up one of my host/base operating systems...
That's my two cents; like I said you may have already answered the question, but it just seems silly not to take an approach like this.
The choice of one over the other depends on the application. For a desktop environment, OpenSolaris is not very user friendly as it is derived from System V. FreeBSD, especially with the ports collection, can be used to create a very customizable desktop experience on par with Linux, and the BSD flavor of the OS interface provides for a much more navigable filesystem and user interface than OpenSolaris. If ZFS is key to your application, then OpenSolaris is the way to go, I doubt that even recent forks of FreeBSD have the most recent capabilities that have been integrated into the ZFS project (real time storage deduplication, pluggable storage modules for iSCSI, FCoE, FC etc). You would be hard pressed to find anything that can rival OpenSolaris on the storage backend, FreeBSD (or any other OS for that matter) doesn't get close in the storage realm. Performance between the two is probably negligible given recent performance enhancements to FreeBSD. With OpenSolaris you have Zones for virtualization, in FreeBSD jails - both similar concepts but implemented differently. Licensing would be something to look at as well. The BSD license is truly open source, meaning that you could create derivative works from the FreeBSD OS and rebrand it as your own product with no attribution back to the FreeBSD project. OpenSolaris has a more restrictive license than BSD so if the final product is say an appliance or a turnkey VM that includes the OS, the BSD license would be much more amenable to redistribution and rebranding as opposed to pretty much everything else out there.
"FreeBSD is more towards a desktop"
No it isn't. Freebsd's primary focus is and always has been for servers. The motto, "Freebsd, the power to serve". Freebsd is actually working in various directions like most operating systems including Opensolaris.
A UNIX certification, like most, is about money, pay and get certified, don't and you won't. It has nothing to do with quality.
"civilization comes from voluntary cooperation between self-interested individuals that occurs in the free market"
The co-operation may start all market-egalitarian, peer-to-peer, but thermodynamically, co-operation will pretty much always morph into hierarchical command and control (with varying degrees of semi-autonomy allowed the parts in the whole.)
The underlying reason for this is that it is more feasible to coordinate things in a hierarchical structure. The information flows are limited in scope and complexity at each level of communication between a supervisor and multiple but not many controlled elements. Also the incentive structures tend to morph toward increasing reward for controlling (via hierarchy) a larger and larger sized co-operating organization.
So if we accept that hierarchy formation in society and economy is inevitable, our moral/ethical question is what technical form such hierarchy should take. Should it be representative democracy, mafia oligarchy, totalitarian dictatorship etc. But taxation is just an inevitable artifact of hierarchically co-ordinated co-operation.
In the thermodynamically efficient hierarchical form of (semi-willing, semi-imposed) co-operation, the controlling agents at the top of each level of the hierarchy (of each sub-unit of the economy), demand, and have the power to enforce, the extraction of "taxes", defined as a portion of the work-product of each unit further down the hierarchy. This portion of work dedicated to the more global unit's needs provides the resources necessary to the control and centralized or semi-centralized co-ordination of the co-operation.
There is no difference in essence between taxation and monopoly price-raising in a formerly free market that has evolved toward a small number of monopolies. The only substantial difference may be in how much democratic adjustment there may be to what uses the accumulated, concentrated funds are put to. In the market monopoly situation, the control can only be overthrown by the arising of another competing corporate hierarchy. In a democracy, the control (and directed dispersement of the funds) can theoretically be guided to some extent by the will of the people in a one-person-one-vote power-leveling manner.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
This is going to be a difficult question that entirely depends on what you are planning to do.
If you plan to learn business based programs I would suggest OpenSolaris. It is more in line with big business than any *BSD will ever be. You will find that fortune 500 companies use Oracle, Symantec Veritas products (cluster service, Volume manager, NetBackup etc..), or require Solaris for other business applications. The only other major *nix flavors in big business is HP-UX, AIX, and Linux. For the most part HP-UX and AIX are going bye bye and being replaced by big Linux boxes.
On the other hand, if you like the Web and want to learn to program, Try out FreeBSD. It has a much more open structure and an open user base that is more than willing to help solve complex problems.
Hope this helps.
Use a virtual machine -- it is really much easier once it is set up. If we could start the OS wars from scratch, but with modern hardware, I would argue for a very simple layer that sits just above BIOS, that reads the file system, and lunches different OSes running in virtual machines. If that were standard, then every OS would seamlessly work with the system.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
You probably want Nexenta. Only slightly behind OpenSolaris in terms of the Solaris kernel. Ubuntu userland, ZFS/GRUB-integrated apt.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
If, like me, what you didn't like about Linux was the often shallow and generic help documentation and the constant sense of being a beta tester, despite running "stable" releases, then IMHO you may not like FreeBSD. Disclaimer: I stopped using FreeBSD shortly after the 4.8 to 5.0 upgrade. Disclaimer2: I run the commercial release of Solaris 10, having only run OpenSolaris for a few weeks. But if you are primarily concerned with performance and uptime then FreeBSD might be for you. As for the ports system, while it seems to have more apps than most Linuxes, not all the apps in the ports system install as seamlessly as others. You'll also encounter some ports that are behind the current rev of that app. If you want to install many apps for learning and experimentation then, in my experience most app install systems (Linux's RPM, Debian's aptget, FreeBSD's ports) require you to retreat to installing from source about 25% of the time. And finally, I've found nothing else quite as solid and well designed as Solaris' Service Management Facility tools (svcadm, svccfg, svcs, etc). It really gives you a lot of visibility into, and control over, the various dependencies an app needs and the various states a daemon can be in. Good luck.
--tcpiplab
Rats. My "arrows" made up of equal sign and greater than symbols didn't work. Please consider the headline of my original post to be "Re:Why my path too was Linux to FreeBSD to Solaris".
--tcpiplab
I chose GPL for my open source project because I wrote it and I wanted some control. Specifically, I didn't want anyone distributing a closed source fork of my work, without my consent. There are people using my code to make money (including me), but there isn't anyone distributing it (AFAIK) to make money. If somebody wants to sell a closed source fork, they know where to find me. I have received code contributions from about a dozen people--I suspect that some of these contributors would not sending me patches if they could distribute their own closed source version.
Ya. I'm with you on this question. Now that Solaris is free, runs very well on x86, and even has a decent graphical desktop, I don't know of a reason to run OpenSolaris instead. BTW, I really do get the importance and greatness of GPL/BSD/CDDL/MPL OSes. They have their place. But for year in, year out industrial strength Unix, I think you can't go wrong with Solaris. Also, IMHO there is less value in using an open source OS if you simply don't have the time or interest in being a part of the community associated with that open source OS.
--tcpiplab
For me OpenSolaris is great, i ran it for a few months but I have always gone back to FreeBSD in the end. I like the ports tree a lot, its fast and simple to use and very straight forward on location of config files and it always stays that way. Upgrades and port updating is very painless 99% of the time. I personally just like FreeBSD better.
I expect some BSDs to flourish as well
Have you forgotten the Unix Wars? (Are you old enough to remember the Unix Wars?
The BSD license allowed companies to fracture Unix into a dozen slightly different flavors. That allowed MSFT to swoop in as the cheap, "unified code base" and dominate the industry.
While the GPL seems to encourage forking just as much as does BSD, the "lessons learned" from BSD and the requirement to publish patches actually mitigates against forking.
Besides, which BSDs -- besides OSX -- are actually flourishing?
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
It's not entirely hopeless though: things like AFS, various distributed shared memory systems with a good API, task and process migration and so on have been around for quite some time.
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
I love running DOS15 on PDP-15 SIMH emulator; the installation was almost an adventure, but eventually got there. As far as the OpenVMS goes, I run it from time to time on a OpenSolaris host (two dual Opterons) and it is faster emulated than on any real hardware I have ever run it on (well, the fastest VAX m/c i've ever used was an 8700, started on a 730...).
Gone are the days...
OpenSolaris is a pain to run on hardware which requires drivers not present in the base system. Their mechanism for adding drivers at boot time is arcane. Nevertheless I built a huge ZFS tank on a Tyan mobo and ran OpenSolaris on it (had to add Broadcom ethernet and Areca RAID card drivers to the mix).
When I recently tried to upgrade, the latest OpenSolaris flat-out refused to run on that motherboard. Something had happened in the development of the OS that collided violently with the motherboard BIOS, and upgrading to the latest BIOS didn't help a bit (though Tyan's release notes said it had introduced BIOS changes to support Solaris u1, u2 and u3, Solaris is now up to u8).
After a week of struggling I gave up. The box now runs FreeBSD 8.0-RELEASE, which came up out of the box with no problems whatsoever. I just hope the ZFS is as stable as they claim it now is.
Moral: You can try to boot OpenSolaris. If and when that doesn't work, FreeBSD is your only other stable ZFS option right now.
Mafia theft... err... "taxes" don't "pay for civilization", civilization comes from voluntary cooperation between self-interested individuals that occurs in the free market!
Show me an existing or past successful and prospering civilization which is based strictly on voluntary cooperation, with no single organizing entity with an ultimate mandate to use force (i.e. government) and no forced taxation, and then I'll agree with you.
Until then, my political views are guided by the same reasoning as my software choices - "use things proven to work". Which is why I support a society based on regulated capitalist free market, and a "safety net" of a welfare state.
I started my unix-life about 13 years ago with FreeBSD. It was the 2.x.x era. It was young but super stable and used by many Internet power houses like Yahoo. Long story short, I eventually migrated mainly to Linux on my personal servers. I've been using Gentoo for about 5 years now. Now, I want a file-system to store all my stuff on my home server that is superior to ext3.
This quest has brought me back full circle to FreeBSD 8. I've used ZFS professionally for many years now and is my preference. So my first thought was to use OpenSolaris. Unfortunately, I was saddened to see that my old but still perfectly working 3ware 8xxx SATA cards are unsupported in Solaris. That left me with FreeBSD which had 3ware support and happily stable ZFS support.
Moral of the story is that while OpenSolaris has expanded hardware support here and there, it's still woefully short of "anything you might have laying around" type of support which is essential for the home hobbyist. Interestingly, while I'm sure there have been many under-the-hood changes over the years, FreeBSD from a user's perspective is still near identical to how it was all those years ago. That is somewhat disappointing because the menu-interface should've been drastically improved years ago. Seriously, why would I want to hit "Cancel" to move to the next menu?
But it gets the job done.
I just wasted your mod points! HA!
I'm a professional UNIX admin. I've worked extensively with both FreeBSD and Solaris for years. Most of my recent work experience has been with Solaris 10, but I've run FreeBSD at home for years.
I recently needed to stand up a new application server at home. I considered using Linux, using OpenSolaris, or using FreeBSD.
I considered Fedora because the handwriting is on the wall where I work: the company will not permit new Solaris installations, in large part because it's not clear that Sun will still be a viable concern in a year or two. The corporate direction is to move to Red Hat. However, I quickly became infuriated with the poor quality of Fedora's documentation. I couldn't find clear answers to setup questions. This wasn't a problem with either FreeBSD or OpenSolaris. This took Fedora out of the running for me.
I decided to try OpenSolaris, because I know Solaris 10 and it might be useful to have the extra practice system at home. But OpenSolaris isn't Solaris 10. It doesn't have the driver support.
What really caused me to wipe out my OpenSolaris install and go with FreeBSD, however, was learning that Sun doesn't even supply security patches for OpenSolaris. If a security issue arises, you either have to wait for the next OpenSolaris release, or go about rebuilding from source. If you want prompt security patches, you have to pay for a Sun support contract -- and pay just as much as you'd pay for the "commercially supported" Solaris 10.
This astounded me. On Solaris 10, Sun provides critical security patches free of charge. Why does the "commerical" package provide free security patches, but the "open source" package doesn't?
There are features in OpenSolaris and Solaris 10 that FreeBSD doesn't have. But, speaking as a certified Solaris admin, I have to say that FreeBSD is more supportable if you can't afford the Sun support contract.
So, I would, and did, go with FreeBSD. It works great, it's solid, it's well supported, it runs well on all sorts of hardware, and it's likely to be around for a while. If the European Union drags out the Oracle/Sun deal much longer, I don't know that Sun will be able to avoid liquidation. Even if the deal goes through, Sun has a big challenge; a lot of their best customers have pulled away because of the uncertainty -- and the decline in support quality over the past year or two. I don't think that Solaris experience means quite as much as it used to on a resume.
Yes, they need indentation on lines with braces and then an extra layer of indentation for the lines after the braces. They also require a mixture of tabs and spaces with the tab width set to 8.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
You certainly don't want to find that patching one item introduces a raft of new dependencies which require you to re-emerge half the software. Debian understands this. Gentoo doesn't.
Indeed, some time ago I got onto Gentoo's IRC channel asking for some help sorting out some serious mess I got myself into with expired profiles and no longer updateable packages. I got all sorts of weird recommendations and all they did was hose my system even more.
My complaints that this *sucked* where not welcome.
Choice is wonderful. ;) I went back to Debian, of course. There is something to said for stability.
I've worked with SPARC Solaris 9, NetBSD and FreeBSD. (I realize that's not quite what you're choosing between, it's just background information.) And of course various Linuxes and Windows. Um, and OS X. Well, actually, TRSDOS and some clones, and CP/M, and I think I'll stop there before I start naming 35-year-old mainframe OSes. :) My own personal preference is FreeBSD, given your choices. I just find it friendlier, and the ports system has a lot to do with it. Though frankly I don't have a clue what OpenSolaris might have in the way of package distribution systems, I'm pretty far behind on that.
So yeah, lots of qualifiers. But you asked for opinions. I like FreeBSD and would choose it over OpenSolaris.
For whatever that's worth, there it is. :)
Cleverly disguised as a responsible adult.
Of these two choices FreeBSD is more towards desktop even if it makes a fine server OS. Personally I prefer to run OpenBSD on my servers. Solaris is for running Oracle.
Depends. If you want something to do with TCP/IP stack, maybe FreeBSD is more convenient. Speed is same, after you tuned Solaris TCP/IP stack from conservative-soft-and-slow to aggressive, as it is by default in FreeBSD. As of OS itself, it is very cool that FreeBSD finally got 13th version of ZFS, working through kernel mapping, but I prefer *native* ZFS Pool version of 22 that does not hangs with kernel panic, faster Java (I do need it) and better memory management... :-) In fact, may folks forgive me, but BSD is too old and great candidate for museum. I would bet on Solaris, since it is much more advanced than FreeBSD (look for COMSTAR or Crossbow projects, for example). Additionally, if you need Java, then it has problems with threads on FreeBSD -- hence Yahoo! was decided to go with PHP instead Java (although they do really wanted Java, but all FreeBSD's won't allow that go smoothly). I also think that FreeBSD is quite good for routers (again: pf is somewhat more advanced than ipf, and OpenSolaris is using older Quagga). But there is no much way to port pf to OpenSolaris due to kernel differences. But I would think twice if I need application server[s] or mail -- Solaris is better here.
Both systems are stable.
Also I do like OpenSolaris release is scheduled each 6 months, while I really hate FreeBSD release depends on Moon phase, Solar interference waves and an atmosphere speed on Jupiter...
My experience with OpenSolaris has been great. I set up an OpenSolaris NFS server with a RAID 1 array using two 300G drives under ZFS, and it's been rock solid.
A few months ago (I'm not that great of a SysAdmin) I decided I'd better check the health of the server, and discovered that my Secondary IDE channel was gonzo, and that OpenSolaris was reporting that my RAID 1 array was 'degraded', and running on only one drive. (Each drive is on a different IDE channel for redundancy -- guess that was the right decision.)
I now have a new chassis that I'll be putting that system's three drives into .. Real Soon Now.
Fortunately, the majority of people using open source software are neither anti-corporate socialists nor freedom-oriented libertarians. We use open-source software because it works better than closed source software and its open nature ensures that we'll be able to keep it working in the absence of corporate support. I don't how any of your ideological straw men affects that one way or the other.
We all know what to do, but we don't know how to get re-elected once we have done it
GPL code is more free, as in more likely to remain free in ways that are meaningful to the end user.
I don't begrudge the fact that Microsoft is able to use the BSD TCP/IP stack to save themselves a bit of work, but at the end of the day I can't fix any bugs I might find, nor can I extend it to support new technologies that Microsoft doesn't feel like supporting. And frankly, I don't see any reason why I as a programmer should care any more about the needs of purveyors of closed source software than they care about my needs as an end user.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
I rather doubt it, the timelines don't fit. "USL v. BSDi was a lawsuit brought in the United States in 1992 [...]. The case was settled out of court in 1993 [...]."
Meanwhile, Linux didn't hit version 1.0 until March, 1994. Yggdrasil, the first distro, was released in November, 1992, and Slackware in June, 1993, but they were strictly for hobbyists.
How does the timeline not fit? BSD was kneecapped by USL at the critical juncture when Linux was created and and released to the public. Doubts about the future of BSD drove many developers to Linux who would never have considered it otherwise. Not to mention the fact that Linus might not have even started it in the first place had BSDi's 386 port not been held up by the suit (the Wikipedia article is confusing, that suit was filed in April 1990).
If not for USL v BSDi, Linux likely wouldn't have received the developer attention it needed to become viable.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
How much do you get payed for shilling?
I know tobacco is bad for you, so I smoke weed with crack.
opensolaris does have a packaging system but last I checked it did not have a whole lot of different software packages. The ports collection has everything you could want. If you are going to go with opensolaris check whether the software you plan on using is there or be willing
to compile and/or package your own.
The freebsd zfs implentation is pretty mature now in 8.0 but it's not the newest version and it doesn't have all the latest features that opensolaris does. This isn't neccessarily a bad thing though, look at the differences and see if you actually need those newer features now.
What are you going to use this box for? Overall it really comes down to looking at what requirements you have for the box and looking at which of the 2 meets those requirements the best. If you can't decide then just try them both and see which one you like better. Thats what I did and I settled on freebsd.
The thing is, the giving back part isn't what makes the GPL so thorny. It's all the other baggage. The majority of companies that use open source (even BSD code) also freely give back their changes unless they are using code for which the changes are so extensive and so irrelevant to the original developer that it would be pointless (e.g. the BSD-derived networking stack inside the Windows kernel).
The things that freak out companies are all of the viral parts---the reverse engineering clauses, the software patent clauses, the inability to link closed source code to GPLed libraries, the limitations it places on hardware developers, etc. The GPL long ago ceased to be merely a "you must give back your changes" license. If you just want to require postbacks,, choose the MPL or similar.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
how do you feel about an "open source fork of your work, without your consent"?
If you are okay with one, but not the other.. why?
not true.
A subset of "quality", in the software world, is "consistency of interface".
For those people who want "frobnotz -a" to always work the same way, GUARANTEED, that is a very important aspect of "quality" that they care about.
Now, not everyone has the same criteria by which they judge "quality". Obviously, this isnt one of yours. But it is one for other people/businesses.
"Free software is one of the few examples in the world of successful communism at work:"
No it isnt. specifically, GPL is. But not all "free software" is GPL'd or equivalent.
"The emotional lozenge of the GPL: "at least my code, and anything based on it, will always be free"."
personally, as a software author, I'd rather have, "at least my code, will always be MINE".
The GPL takes that away from me, and substitutes, "my code, will now always belong to everyone ELSE"(ie: pure communism). Which is why I avoid the GPL.
Not because I am anti-communism specifically, but simply because I like My code,to STAY My code.
"I like My code,to STAY My code."
The GPL does not intrude on your right to license your code under other licenses. In fact, as the originator, you're the one party that continues to hold the right to license your code commercially if you use the GPL. I'm curious to hear which other FOSS license thinks protects you better. For example if you use BSD and family, you have essentially given up the right to license your code commercially (because you give that right away with many of the other licenses).
C//
Well, that my friend, was why Haskell was invented.
Massive parallelism? Check. (by being a lazy functional programming language)
Automatic clustering! Check. (The language can easily do it. The compiler just isn’t there yet. But you can already do it with a bit of code in a library.)
Fault tolerance? Check. (Haskell goes further, but not allowing compilation when it could fail. Of course, since the other parts of the system are not that reliable, the IO still can fail.)
Single system image? Isn’t that the same thing as automatic clustering? Oh, and I would NOT want my desktop os, to automatically “cluster” to all my other PCs in the network. Just no.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
For one, the BSA aren't Microsoft's enforcers anymore than the RIAA are the Bee Gees' enforcers.
The Bee Gees are effectively employees of the record companies. Microsoft is the actual software producer. To compare the situations is silly. I would say that the RIAA are, for example, EMI or Sony's enforcers.
They are a group that exists to enforce copyright and software licences, and while I don't agree with much of their policy or their actions in enforcing it, suggesting they are some puppet of Microsoft's is just absurd.
Microsoft is one of the founding members. Microsoft products are by far the most common ones to be enforced. When the BSA does a raid and finds MS products, MS can call them off or let the leash off. If I'm not to use puppet, what should I say? Pony? Bondage slave? Attack dog? Puppet seems the best option to me.
Further, military style raids might be a slight exaggeration, like calling the GPL communist or anti-capitalist for example.
"Military style" does not mean tanks, so when we have a hail of bullets I think I will claim that I actually understated.
Where's your proof? What leads you to this conclusion? The rest was easily answered in my other post with excerpts from an MS press release. If you think it's inaccurate please take it up with them.
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
[The only] problem is that MS didn't create Interix, they bought it
The thing I "seemed to imply" is hardly exactly the key point in my comment. In fact if I was completely wrong about it, it would not even slightly distiurb my point. However, Interix was aquired from Softway Systems in 1999 at version 3.0. It's now at version 6.0 and it's key feature, total integration as a first class citizen in the Windows environment, is only possible for MS to deliver. Interix as delivered now is created by MS as surely as Solaris (which is based on SYSV) is created by SUN.
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
Of course they would. A company wants more customers. So Interix "was created solely for the reason of destroying UNIX" in the same way that any company tries to make their products better than competing products.
No; in this case MS would add equivalent features such as fork to their Win32 API. The point is that they made these features available in a way which is specifically designed to entice UNIX customers away. Once again there's nothing wrong with that as such.
Netscape was closed source and commercial for a long time. By the time the Mozilla project was started/Netscape was open sourced, IE (another closed source browser) had already gained significant market share and Mosaic had long been irrelevant.
Mosaic is still, in a sense, in existence. IE was based on Mosaic and Netscape was developed by the Mosaic developers. The reason why Mosaic as a product failed is because it was never copylefted so it didn't get back contributions from it's community.
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
"The GPL does not intrude on your right to license your code under other licenses. "
You implication that that absurd clause/concept somehow preserves my ownership of the code, is absurd as the notion that saying "the gpl does not prohibit you from selling your code", means that it does not destroy the economic value of the code as "property".
It clearly does.
Only an idiot pays money for something, that he can legally get for free.
the semi-exception for that, is that organizations sometimes pay an author, for a NON-gpl licensed version of the code.
But that rather proves the related point of "you cant made money directly off of gpl'd code". You have to use a DIFFERENT LICENSE to make money from it!
Note also: charging money for support, is not making money directly "from the code". It is making money from your support actions.
Which open source license protects you better? None. Anyway, you're missing the point. There are an army of folks out there who make proprietary code. They cannot use your code if it is GPL'd. If it is BSD'ed, they can.
I can see, however, in reviewing the thread that you're not interested in any kind of open source at all. I'm not quite sure why you replied at all.
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