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Illumos Sporks OpenSolaris
suraj.sun sends in this news from The Register. "If you were hoping that someone would fork the OpenSolaris operating system, you are going to have to settle for a spork. You know, half spoon and half fork. That, in essence, is what the Illumos, an alternative open source project to continue development on the core bits of OpenSolaris, is all about. ... Development on OpenSolaris has all but stopped, so Garrett D'Amore, a former Sun and Oracle software engineer who worked on Solaris for many years, decided to do something about it. ... What Illumos is doing is taking the core OpenSolaris kernel and foundation, which is called OS/Net or ON inside of the former Sun, and creating a repository and development community around that. ON includes the kernel, C libraries, shell and shell utilities, file systems, and networking functions of OpenSolaris. 'We are not a distribution in a normal sense,' says D'Amore. 'It is more of a code base.' And one that Nexenta, Belenix, and SchilliX, who do create alternative distros for OpenSolaris, can in theory base their future releases upon if they don't like what is — or isn't — coming out of OpenSolaris."
I hope they decide to use the FreeBSD userland on top of the OpenSolaris kernel. The FreeBSD userland is the premiere UNIX-like userland environment available today, and is also released under an extremely liberal license that maximizes everybody's freedom.
No, but perhaps the codebase is cleaner and has fewer bugs? Clearly, someone is interested in it.
Palm trees and 8
You mean other than API/ABI stability, less bugs and cleaner code base?
The way I see it, OpenSolaris should have happened five years earlier, when people might have still cared. By the time Sun announced OpenSolaris, it was already an uphill battle to find open source developers who even cared about Solaris.
Palm trees and 8
Would you perhaps like to explain to me and people like me how "Zones" are different from "virtual machines?"
Palm trees and 8
Zones are not VMs. FreeBSD jails are probably the closest thing to it. Virtualization technologies are eventually going to render both of those obselete, I think, but it hasn't gotten there yet. And if you think a FUSE driver is any kind of substitute for a full implementation, you have no business running a data center. Even FreeBSD's port of ZFS isn't always up to snuff, and it's leaps and bounds beyond the FUSE driver.
Look, you've obviously picked a "side" and you'll pull out any comparison you need to support it, so stop pretending you can offer any kind of objectivity. I rather doubt you've even got any experience with a Unix OS that isn't Linux.
I always thought a foon was more fork than spoon, and a spork more spoon than fork.
no, but FreeBSD jails are basically the same thing as Solaris Zones, and FreeBSD supports ZFS and DTrace, too. Plus, the added benefit of also not being Linux.
...so I guess all these uni scientists who create for-profit spinoff companies and patent the living crap out of everything, including patenting life itself, which is rather bogus..that they do all this from altruism, and just want to give everything away for the good of Gaia and stuff and work for a pittance, simply refuse most of their stipends and salaries, etc., and just creative commons license everything for free or..err.how does that work again, which is it? And they publish on those free..er..journal paywall sites that want a month's pay for people in the developing world to read an article...That's certainly altruistic....not...
Too broad, man. Scientists are humans, that's it, with the same wild and varied mix of greed to altruism everyone else has. There just *ain't* too many pure Gandhis** on this planet, never has been, and it will be a really long time until there is.
**well, OK, I suppose some wisenheimer will now link me to the white pages of india phone book to prove me wrong. %^)