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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.
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?).
Surely it depends upon what you mean by "support?"
OpenSolaris is backed by one of the big UNIX developers and is a true, direct lineage UNIX. You can also pay Sun for full enterprise OS support, which could include getting their programmers to fix a particular kernel or core OS bug for you within days.. if you're rich enough to afford the Platinum Support.
Agrajag: "Oh no, not again!"
because you forgot to write down the most important part of your question: for which purpose is this server intended.
Looks like this is "just for fun" or to learn new, interesting things. A good reason, if you ask me.
Having used both briefly, I can't think of a good answer other than "try both" or "flip a coin" - neither is better or more interesting than the other and both are different from Linux in many subtle ways, enough to force you to learn something, and to cause that funny feeling when you perform some learned, almost mechanical tasks as if it were Linux and almost forget it isn't, when suddenly something unexpected happens (as in, a command having completely different output formatting or existing under a different name, or a subtle difference in directory structure, not a spurious rm -rf /, hopefully).
This is Slashdot. Common sense is futile. You will be modded down.
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 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.
I'd have to agree here. Although FreeBSD's ZFS support is getting quite good now. I'm using it on a production system and it hasn't let me down. It even saved my bacon a couple of times (yay, ZFS snapshots). I guess it depends on what you want to do. Both have strong features. OpenSolaris has Crossbow, but FreeBSD will have vimage soon. Both have Dtrace and ZFS. Solaris has zones, FreeBSD has jails. But I think FreeBSD is easier to tinker around with (personal opinion).
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.
You are used to Debian ? Then try Debian GNU/kFreeBSD.
The Debian distro on top of a FreeBSD kernel.
Surely it depends upon what you mean by "support?"
OpenSolaris is backed by one of the big UNIX developers and is a true, direct lineage UNIX. You can also pay Sun for full enterprise OS support, which could include getting their programmers to fix a particular kernel or core OS bug for you within days.. if you're rich enough to afford the Platinum Support.
And you've bought hardware on their "supported hardware" list.
Or you could use Debian and accept that your distribution hasn't been compiled with -Oevery silly little option for a fraction% improvement.
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
There needs to be a Gentoo Stable version of Gentoo, where packages update very infrequently, but people test the ebuilds to make sure that they work even if you're not updating from the version that was issued 15 minutes ago.
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/
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 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?
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
Sun.... didnt they get bought by a horrible DB company that may or may not ditch the OS? Sweet...
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
> Now who's trolling/flambating?
I was over the top, but...
You said you like to compile your own because of "speed issues." If your speed issues are that sensitive, you don't want Solaris. Solaris on x86 has been known to be a pig for speed in the past. While this has improved in Solaris10, I think you'll find Solaris on x86 to be slightly below par compared to a precompiled Debian kernel for your architecture.
The reasons for running Solaris are not speed related.
> I also like setting compile-time options, applying patches etc. that you can't do with packages
I believe that the whole "locally compiled = better performance" is a load of hogwash since you chew up time compiling, and if you compile in the background, doesn't that affect what's going on in the foreground? This is why some people have a separate "compile machine" for Gentoo. I believe this "wasted" effort and time outweighs whatever potential benefits you get from a local compile.
And someone up there mentioned going from hypothetical versions x.x.3 to x.x.4rc or something, leaving you with the choice of not being arsed to do it and put up with a potential security hole or do another recompile for a minor bugfix.
Your argument for local compilation also assumes that packages go unpatched. That's simply not true. And if you're really impatient or can't find it in the repository, you can build your own packages from source with chkinstall. I have my own little repository called local.debs just for that.
> But there's only one of me so I can't use both.
Sure you can. They're called virtual machines. It's also called multiple boot.
Make some space and try 'em out for yourself.
--
BMO
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.
"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.
Its a good point there. I work with a Microsoft shop but somewhere along the line they decided to support Oracle databases running on Redhat. Since then, I'd say the majority of our customers running Oracle have plumped for Redhat (the others won't until they upgrade). I wonder if Oracle will be trying to scrap this in favour of Solaris (not OpenSolaris surely) and charge lots of money, but I doubt any of them will migrate - migrating from Windows to Redhat makes a lot of sense, even if the cost is roughly the same overall. Migrating to a more expensive Solaris OS probably won't.
Sun made itself as irrelevant as anyone else, they were the Apple of the server world, selling overpriced hardware that wasn't much good compared to the equivalent you could get from IBM (we did this, 2 pedestal servers, the IBM was 4x the computing power, cheaper, and a much better build quality). It wasn't Linux that killed them.
This is exactly what I evaluate when choosing OS. One this is corporate class support, the other is what the OS itself supports.
I don't know if it has been fixed today, but when I last tried and tested OpenSolaris as a replacement for my Linux, I ended up ditching it because of lacking support for Bluetooth.
While this particular feature isn't vital to a server, other features may be. So my general advice to OP would be first to make clear what the requirements are, and put priority to the corporate support vs. license question. Since OpenSolaris and BSD are what's left to decide between, I would guess the license isn't that important.
So if OpenSolaris supports all the hardware and features needed for the task, I would go for that in a corporate environment, because of the posibility of corporate class support. If the company already have plenty of experienced un*x admins to provide a 24/7 3hr support on its own, I'd say go for FreeBSD, because development is more agile than OpenSolaris, new features and hardware are supported quicker on this platform, and given you have these skillfull admins already, the new stuff could be made to work easily.
If I was as pragmatic and objective as I claim to be, would I be commenting?
> 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.
Way to keep the troll alive. I know you are just trying to get a rise out of people, but come on, digging up a term from like 1995 isn't very convincing. I personally run Solaris (and production systems at work) because there is nothing in the space that scales like it. Even for single thread applications (and only one of them) with no memory requirements it is just as fast (now at least, early x86 versions of Solaris didn't perform as well as their SPARC counterparts) as FreeBSD, Linux, Windows, etc.
I could go on to bash Linux et al but, but what would be the point? What ever suits your needs the best is the best OS. Oh, I remember, this is slashdot, we make uninformed, brash comments here now. In 2000, this was a forum for killing FUD, now it is hear to spread FUD.
To the original poster, I think, if you want a better debate, you should take it to serverfault.com
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.
False. Most distributions attempt to deal with this problem in this way, but unless the program uses a pluggable (not just dynamically loaded) architecture it can't actually be packaged this way. The UMN mapserver is a prime example; code might not be used if you don't turn on a feature, but there's no loadable module support so you have to build in support for everything you think you might ever use. This is the problem gentoo was truly created to solve, and so far there is no solution whatsoever other than custom compilation. Programs like Apache which permit you to build modules independently and load them are, of course, different; but then, they don't have this problem to begin with.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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?
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.
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();
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?
I didn't realize the people who wanted a complete GNU system needed different levels of indentation in the source code! :)
As a long-term Linux guy (since 1995) I think ZFS integration with Samba, iSCSI Targets, and Zones makes OpenSolaris relevant to me. I am now trying to learn Opensolaris so I can use these on a SOHO server. Sure in a year or two BTRFS may have RAID5-like redundancy, caching and intent logging on SSD, and these features, but OpenSolaris/ZFS has them now. I definitely won't be running any solaris on my netbook (kubuntu), laptop (WinXP), or Macs though.
I think if the opensolaris community can produce a variant that makes it easy for a less-than-elite user to set up a server with a samba share, some iSCSI targets (for time machine, aperture library, or whatever), and possibly an IMAP server, they can greatly increase the pool to whom they are relevant. Auto-magic HDD management like drobo would help too.
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...
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.
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.
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