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Would Linux Survive if Solaris Was Free?
"If you look at what the Linux community is doing now, it has already been done by Sun. Solaris can do everything Linux can do, but better." This article at OsOpinion asks: "Would Linux survive if Solaris was free?" I wonder if Scott McNealy has ever asked himself that question - or if he will after reading this. An interesting thought, eh?
But Sun Microsystems wouldn't be where they are today.
There is more to Linux than it just being free.
IIRC you can get an educational/home-use version of Solaris for merely the cost of shipping, at Sun's webpage. Granted, that's doesn't do any good for people looking for Enterprise Servers for their company, but it is free.
If I wanted to use Slowaris I would, but I don't so I run linux. Price has nothing to do with it.
Sure it would, Linux hw support is far
superior, at least in the commodity area.
Regards,
uwe
Ever wondered whats wrong with the world? http://www.ishmael.org/
... if solaris was free.
Noone would have needed it. The only downside to Solaris would have been its massive footprint (by 1992 standards), and that would have been fixed once someone saw the need.
Of course not! Don't forget, the reason Linus ever created this was due to not having a x86 free unix to fool around in at the time. Even solaris's student license was bloody expensive at the time and *bsd wasn't completly free yet... .... *CRUNCH*)
Besides it's a very good Unix so if it was free in the GPL/BSD way (either would do) I sure as hell would use it.
No, I can't spell!
-"Run to that wall until I tell you to stop"
(tagadum,tagadum,tagadum
-"stop...."
If Solaris became free? Then some people might go over to it. That's it. We're talking flavours here...
If Solaris had always been free? The world would be a completely different place and Linux may never have come about.
Think about it. Would you use Windows if it became free and/or open source? I think Linux has enough merits in itself to survive if *all* other o/s' became free.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't there already a free/almost free version of Solaris for i386 for personal use. This is a major area for linux, and Solaris hasn't taken over yet. I know this is free as in price, not code, but many users have never even seen the linux source code, so they wouldn't care.
If you take the Amiga as an example: It had a huge following, and still does even though it is no longer being produced (Ok, it is, albeit in very small quantities by clone manufacturers). If Solaris was to suddenly be made free, I think something similar would happen - people would still flock around Linux because of it's almost cultish following. And the advantage here over the Amiga is that Linux would still be produced, and would be updated.
Linux is a very very strong contender in the Unix marketplace, and I really don't see it slipping if Solaris was free.
Just my 2p.
This was the same argument M$ used about linux a couple of years ago.... .... *CRUNCH*)
Besides if it was free, all the linux Driver hackers would be doing Solaris drivers...
No, I can't spell!
-"Run to that wall until I tell you to stop"
(tagadum,tagadum,tagadum
-"stop...."
Micheal Whitmore doesn't say whether, by free, he means no-cost binaries or open source. Linux's key strength is not it's lack of cost to download, but rather the availablility of its source code. Without this key distinction the article is meaningless.
What if Solaris were Open-Source?
What if, in five years time, we could run a hybrid called 'Solinux' or 'Linaris'?
Free won't cut, but OSS might..
If we're talking about free as in open source, I guess Solaris' success would to a great extent depend on how maintainable the code was. After all, one of Linux' strengths is it's well documented source code that more or less anyone can hack into. If Solaris is less documented, or simply not as well laid-out codewise as Linux, I think that the majority of Linux hackers would stay with Linux.
But what the market would do is probably another question. Perhaps the "backed by a major corporation" bit is enough to make companies choose Solaris, but I'm not sure. I believe that, after all, many corporations switch because they've heard so much about this "Linux"-thingy, not because they believe Linux to be the best UNIX flavour.
So Linux would probably have quite a head-start, and I don't think the outcome is as clear as the article's author implies.
But it _would_ be great if Solaris was truly Open Source, with documentation and all. If not else, there would probably be a whole heap of security holes that would quickly be patched (and exploited). After all, there are still plenty of simple buffer-overruns in Solaris programs.
-- Soon we'll be sliding down the razorblade of life...
...but now we dont need it.
To echo some other comments: If solaris had been free (on x86), we wouldnt have needed Linux. But, now that there is Linux, there is no niche for a free Solaris to fill. Linux rocks on comparativly low-end hardware. I dont see anyone, even the biggest Linux-advocate, advocating running linux on the big iron (>4 processors, etc).
Sun makes great boxes to run your enterprise on. The hardware/software combo is great. But on a workstation? Solaris on a workstation may not be overkill, but it is certainly not that much different than linux.
These articles ("Linux would die if foo happened") all seem to miss an important point: Linux is not a finished product. It never will be. Linux is continuing to improve, and it will continually improve. There's no single critical company that can drop their support of the product when they want it to die. Linux will remain FS/OSS and it's hardly going to disappear overnight because a closed-source, closed-development OS from Sun is made freely availalbe.
Gates' Law: Every 18 months, the speed of software halves.
I've heard it said (and see some general usage reasoning why) that the main reason for running Solaris is to use the Sparc chip & Sun hardware, not the other way round. This lends itself to being more scalable for heavy server applications to use (eg RDBMSs, etc).
...including star office
It's all very well being 'able to run the same stuff' but bear in mind it's the Linux end of things where the open-source movement has blossomed, not on the commercial unixen. And frankly, configuring a linux box is a dream compared to screwing around with networking under any version of Solaris I've seen.
Linux:
* is proven at home & in the "unofficial" workstation / light-usage server end of the market
* has the backing of the entire 'Net for support at the touch of a button
* Runs everything solaris does, and more
* Has masses of stuff ported to it
*
So if Solaris had been free, sure we might not've needed Linux; that doesn't really sway the fact that it's not free, nor has it been, nor do we expect it to be.
~Tim
--
Rushing on down to the circle of the turn
Surely, part of the appeal of Linux is that you can tinker with the source code?
This "tinker factor" won't sway the drooling desktop users, but I'm sure it's a big pull for us geeks...
Strong data typing is for those with weak minds.
The answer to his question very much depends on your particular definition of free. Using the 'free beer' concept, the answer would definitely be No. How could Sun continue to spend millions of dollars maintaining a huge operating system if they weren't receiving any revenue in return?
But if it was 'free speech' free software (truly open source - none of this Community License rubbish) I doubt Linux would survive at all. Why struggle with adding features to Linux when they're already implemented in Solaris? There would initially be a problem of attracting outside developers to such a huge existing codebase, but it wouldn't take too long.
Theoretically, there would be enormous benefits to Sun if they GPLed Solaris and really encouraged the kind of lightning-paced development that Linux has enjoyed. They could still make money off their SPARC hardware, and gain a foothold in the low-end Intel market as well. But since Sun currently has more or less the same 'take-over-the-world' mentality that Microsoft has, this is unlikely to happen.
Brian Blackwell
-- briggers Remove blinkers to email me.
One of the strengths of Linux is that there is a huge developer base - it can evolve in hundreds of different ways as seen fit by the whim of a single developer. This is a strength and one that cannot be matched by a solitary vendor.
However, this amazing diversity also has a downside and that is that no-one can exert a unifying pressure on the development. If you compare Linux to FreeBSD, you will find BSD tends to have very good help files, it's packages are conveniently located at a central location and well categorised and listed, and the OS as a whole is consistent with it's layout, help files, and program defaults.
In my experience, Linux tends to be less well organised, less documented and less consistent than most other versions of *nix.
This is not to say one is better than the other, all I'm pointing out is that each has strengths that are opposites and that the money factor, while a component, is not by any means the key factor in determining which will survive.
Solaris is a pretty good OS and we use solaris i386 to develop stuff that targets actual Sun boxes. However, I don't rate the i386 version that highly, the cool thing about Linux is that it runs well on commodity hardware, and has large amounts of support for esoteric bits & pieces - ie the perfect hobbyists machine & good for a cheap server. Now solaris on the other hand is designed for and works best on Sun's own hardware, and is rock solid in this guise. Unfortunately the hardware is more expensive than commodity pc stuff, (it is built a lot better) - which makes it a lot less useful for hobbyists / people saving cash.
stty erase ^H
I bet you could build a bitchin beowolf cluster if you had free Solaris
Ok.. Free Solaris would have been a bad thing for Linux, but free doesn't neccessarily mean that you get the sourcecode..
People want the sourcecode so they can hack the kernel!
Get it?
Duh!
Solaris has its place. I still wouldn't run mission critical ECAD software on Linux but I would consider arming engineers with Linux boxes to log into the N processor Sun server running Solaris.
If Sun were to release Solaris under the GPL or BSD license tomorrow I think for the most part it would generate a big yawn in the community. Consider it this way: right now Solaris more or less is made for workstations running on SPARC processors. Intel processor support, at least the last time I looked, was just a best effort basis. A lot of the interesting features aren't even supported on Intel. The community would have to port these features into Solaris X86. Not everybody runs on Intel like processors though, some of us use DEC Alpha's, or PowerPC and so on.
The most economical thing to do, and the thing that would be most accepted in this community, would be to pillage the Solaris code base for its industrial strength features and roll them into Linux.
I think there was a golden opportunity to totally dominate the market about 5 years ago or so if all of the commercial UNIX vendors would've been willing to bury their collective hatchets in Microsoft's back. That opportunity was to improve Linux to support their best large system features and concentrating on designing hardware that best exploits those features. Of course any time I mentioned this to anybody from Sun at the time they basically laughed. Linux was and always will be a toy OS that hackers occasionaly boot into.
I think this move would've totally killed Windows NT and a lot of Microsofts credibility as well. SGI is realizing this now and so they're trying to go down this path now. Sun isn't in as precarious a position as SGI is and so they don't need to go down that path (yet)
Solaris itself may be more solid than Linux, but the standard tools that come with it suck. The GNU tools that come with all Linux distros are far better. Once you'd replaced all those, there would be little difference to the end user. I believe a selling point of Solaris 7 is that it now comes with traceroute. Wow! Wish we had that for Linux ;)
It's shallow as it stand.
There is much more to the equation after all.
Is he also preaching the pros of close-source development associated with Solaris? (many still believe in this model)
The pros of old school many flavor of unix reflected by Sun and other unix vendors? (I assume safely there are a few pros left in this, though not likely)
The pros of having a mature unix that supports more high-end hardware perhaps?
And then he has to worry about the many pros associated with the polar opposite of unix diversity, or high-end hardware compatibility, or close-sourced development.
It's not an easy evaluation.
I would personally not try to answer all these questions myself. Since GNU/Linux is truely a moving target in many senses. If you have a raid card that works only with proprietary unixes, nt, and novell today--it could be accompanied by a GPLed device driver or great specification documentations tomorrow. And if this raid card is popular enough. Over-night it would see to those who use this card Linux is equivalent to a Sun box using the same raid card. Over-night. For many many diverse hardware--truely a moving target no one can track. If one even dares to claim it one should take their words with a grain of salt.
The best one can do is to ask a GNU/Linux vet (one who attempted to run production linux boxes since 1995), and ask her very specific questions (say specific to your computational needs or business problems) about what you are trying to do, where you want to go tomorrow, and the day after that. And try to catch up yourself to their level of expertises--which means patience and dedication.
Until then, my feeling is Solaris holds its own ground for certain customers. But it also holds back certain computer users (who use Solaris) at the same time. It depends on your circumstances.
I posted below on this subject so I'll make it short and sweet. Linux would not find my SCSI CD drive after trying three SCSI cards (adaptec 2940 series, bus logic, and Intio) and tow different CD drives (NEC and Toshiba). NT, Solaris, and BeOS installed flawlessly on this same system. I know it's only one example but if you don't support SCSI then in my book you are not a major player in the microcomputer OS scene.
IMHO, if Solaris was free, Linux or Solaris would not be the question. It would be Linux and Solaris. We could take the best stuff out of both of them.
The article seems to mean "free" as in "free beer" rather than "free speech". In this case, Linux would still survive due to the inherent advantages of opensource -- greater control over the system given to developers, greater scalability in development and better reliability and performance in the long run. But even if Solaris was released opensource -- Linux would also survive in a fashion. Solaris' and Linux's codebases would proabably simply start fusing together according to the needs and wishes of opensource developers into a newer and better free Unix. Whether this fused OS would be called Linux or Solaris or "Sol-linux" or "Lin-aris" is only a matter of names. I feel that the opensource movement is unstoppable. If you don't join it, it'll crush you by the techinical and sociological merits of its development process, even if the economic advantages of it being "free beer" are removed. But if you join it, then free software gets better by the contribution of your code. It may mean the loss of a beloved piece of software due to its being outcompeted -- but that's how it works. If something better than Linux and also free emerges, it ought to replace Linux, and I would be happy to see it do so. dkhoo@mit.edu
For instance look at Java. When Sun came out with Java they had a simple threading model that they wanted people to use. You want to wait for some IO? Spawn a thread to make a blocking call for the IO. In some ways good, for instance this architecture removes the possibility of writing a lot of possible race conditions. However was it coincidence that it also uses lots of threads, and all of the other forms of Unix out there at the time could not handle large numbers of threads efficiently? How convenient to have a cross-platform language that coincidentally cannot be made to run as well on your main competitor's platforms without major modifications to the OS!
Sun has a history of these games. The current one is Java3D. They have a pretty nice spec for 3D graphics and vector math. There are two possible implementations - one is native (using the video card, etc for extremely good performance) and the other is in pure Java (for the molasses effect). Of course to get permission to even try and implement the native version for a platform you need Sun's permission - and they refuse to give it for Linux.
So if Solaris was made free, here is what I would open up that gift-horse's mouth and look for:
So yes, if Sun released Solaris free, I would almost certainly just stick with my Debian system. Yes, they do quality work. But Sun doesn't do anything that Sun is not the main beneficiary of, which is not unreasonable in and of itself but is unlikely to match my long-term road map. Linux (by a pleasant contrast) has no such hidden agenda to watch out for.
Sincerely,
Ben Tilly
My usual seat in the cluetrain is at A HREF="http://pub4.ezboard.com/biwethey.ht
The guy has as one of his points in favour of Solaris "runs on 64 bit SPARC platform (Intel doesn't even have a 64 bit platform yet)", implying that Intel's failure is Linux's failure. Obviously the guy hasn't done his homework, and he doesn't realize that Linux runs on at least two different 64 bit platforms, SPARC and Alpha. And correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't Linux running on 64 bit Alphas before the 64 bit SPARC even came out?
The next Cmdr Taco duplicate will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and see it early!
I think this question is sort of funny as we recently received a Sun Solaris (SPARC) box and found the (factory pre-installed) software setup to basially blow chunks. Yes, Solaris may have better top-of-the-line performance and scalability for huge database servers, but the default software installation they deliver is (at least when compared to Linux) is incomplete and butt ugly. Let's see:
- no compilers shipped. This in my book is a cardinal sin for a UNIX environment
- default graphical environment is CDE. Yes, it's a standard but it's butt ugly and feels very slow.
- default graphical setup is very 80s looking (then again, plain X and Motif never were very pretty). Comprared to KDE or GNOME it looks pretty pathetic. Maybe it can be made to look better, but the default configuration is boring/ugly. For a desktop environment this will make or break your distribution/system.
- limited tool set. You really start to appreciate GNU/Linux once you're used to having nice little things like locate, perl, apache, PHP and other stuff installed by default.
- try running Intel Solaris on the same box you run Linux on. It is sssllloooowwww.
Solaris has it's place in the high-end server space. In terms of the desktop though, I don't think there's much of a contest anymore. After a few years of endless tinkering by the Linux hordes, Linux shines in this respect while Solaris increasingly seems like an example of how NOT to build a desktop machine. Sure, you could download and compile all the GNOME stuff, perl, the GNU utilities and make your solaris box a bit nicer to work with. But why bother when you can get a $2 Linux CD (or a free download) that outshines Solaris by far in a desktop environment. Comments like this make me wonder if McNealy actually ever sat behind a properly configured (modern) Linux distribution such as Red Hat, Mandrake or Suse (those being the ones I tried over the past year). I would choose a modern Linux distro over Solaris any day (for the desktop); not for ideological reasons (although those also come into play) but simply because Linux is such a nicer desktop environment and comes with a complete set of software.
Could Solaris have done this? Yes, perhaps, at the start. But I don't think it could catch up now because there isn't the same sort of "fan" base for it. (no offense meant to any Solaris fans in the audience)
- Seth Finkelstein
If not people with years of experience and a wealth of knowledge are willing to offer advice online or at a local LUG meeting.
How could Sun organise something to match the scale of what Linux has going for it at the moment.
Everything always comes back to community... ask a Mac user, an Amiga user, a BeBoxer...
...and even if Solaris was free, could we afford the hardware to make use of what it has that Linux hasn't.
Marty
My $0.50 (adjusted for the rise in the price of gold)
"I can't buy want I want because it's free. Can't be what they want because I'm me." -Corduroy, Pearl Jam
Linux is so hyped right now, it will kill itself.
I wondered what the world would have been like if solaris had been free. However during the time that it mattered (5 years ago). It was not, and linux was, and you can't change what has happened.
Solaris comparied to linux (Use both), feels more finished, working with linux is more like trying to hit a moving target.
Solaris hardware support is terrible, and is going to get worse as Sun is interested in the high end market.
As to stating that solaris does everthing linux does. Correct and also wrong. Who here uses ip masq? You have to buy solstice firewall for that one! How about software raid or striping? Soltice metadisk. Join two partition together to make one big one over 2 disks really is core functionality these days!
In my oppion solaris might implement the core OS functionality better and APIs are more stable, however linux offers far more added value software (for free), and driver support is on a different level entirely.
Linux is also open source, so if you don't like something you can change it, and if your way is better it will probably be adopted... I don;t think sun is about to do that.
The author appears to neglect the fact that there are plenty of operating systems continuing to survive despite the presence of arguably better free alternatives. Let me see...
;-)
Dos: has yet to go away despite the presence of...
Linux & FreeBSD: Each is totally eclipsed by the other - ask any advocate, so why arent they dead?
GNU hurd: Well, maybe this one really is dead
the point being that OS's dont just go away because someone magically comes up with something 'better', free or not.
Also who would really trust any company to keep their software 'free'?
Once you have stifled all "inferior" competition there is nothing to prevent you from putting the price back up on the next version. If a product was really good enough to destroy all competition there is no way a companies lawers would let them release it under a license that prevented them from doing so.
So really it is a silly question with a number of flawed premises. The only bit of the article I agree with is that sun almost certainly arent going to.
Warning: Those used to my style of commenting on nearly an entire article in small quoted sections should find this to be nearly the same. What's worse, it's also chalk full of my strong opinions and is quite unedited (this post is way too long to edit.. I don't care if I look like a fool because of it). That said, read at your own risk. ;)
heh. You'd think that there hasn't been a GUI for Linux all this time after reading this article if you weren't previously in the know. I'm not sure how porting to the Merced can be something considered to have been done previously by every OS or what have you. Besides, if everything that had already been done on another OS (which basically means, if you balled up every feature from every OS, Linux would be just a little bloated, no? Talk about poor wording. What do they pay writers for these days, anyhow?
Sad to say, I don't consider myself an "Anti-Microsoft warrior". That's paramount to saying, "Once Microsoft is gone, Linux will have served its purpose and we can junk it in light of something that's actually good. We only need it for media hype to slay Microsoft and allow for a real OS to rise up." Being a proponent of Linux doesn't mean that your sole goal is wiping Microsoft off the face of the earth (it might not be a goal at all for many). It just means you like Linux, and enjoy using it. Perhaps others should check it out? If they don't like it, it's their loss. And whoever thinks it's easy to convince management to drop whatever they've got and use Linux is living in a lush living in a fantasy world where free beer flows quite freely.
Soo.. how many people here who use Linux do so because it's reliable and suits their needs, or because they want to be "cool"? Besides, why the hell would I want to stick my box in the basement ? (well, besides the simple fact that most houses in Texas don't even have a basement.. the ground isn't exactly all that.. soft.. around these parts)
Next comes those Solaris highlights..
Do I really need 64 processors? I mean, honestly? :) Sure, there are people who do, but I'm sure they could afford to pay for an expensive OS (I'm thinking they'd pay a lot more just for the hardware involved)
Um, I hope Intel never has a 64-bit SPARC. It would be rather unseemly to steal the trademark and architecture from another company. That seems to be more of a SPARC vs. Intel thing than a Solaris vs. Linux thing. Besides, aren't there already ports of Linux for SPARC? (and a wide variety of other architectures? do they just think we're stuck with Intel, or what?)
Linux, proud babysitter of the phone lines in two whole U.S. states. What, that kind of thing doesn't count?
Linux: has the support and backing of several major companies, and not all of them hype not yet mature technologies like Java when they first come out in order to make a buck based on media exposure alone.
Wow. I'm switching right now.
Um, and Linux doesn't have any software for it yet, right? heh.
I'm not sure, but didn't I read something about a port for Linux as well? Not that I keep up on office software.. That ends our Solaris highlights section..
Sun is about the last company I'd trust. Just because they want to carve up Microsoft's market share doesn't make them cool. I don't "like" that, I just think it's nifty that the vultures will continue to peck at one another while the real competition steams right on ahead. I can't get over how short-sighted that comment is. "Linux people should like that". Let me elaborate how much I "like" that: F@#$ Sun. Grr. ;)
NetBSD has been fully operational for quite some damn time (even when the Linux kernel was just an "infant"). And it's free. And it's still around. And Linux is still the one grabbing all of the media attention. By the way, someone care to remind me what Solaris is derived from? I seem to have forgotten.. =P
~ Kish
A major problem with SunOS is the fact that you have to spend hours installing the GNU packages that we all know and love before you have a usuable box. With linux you just install a distribution, tweak a few settings and you are done.
If Solaris were GPL'd, it would not compete with Linux. It would merge with it.
Sun might increase profits on hardware if they do it, so it's not that far-fetched.
The question is what if solais was free speech (perhaps even GPL), would linux survive?
The corporate workplace doesn't trust Linux in the enterprise (for several reasons) why would it throw out NT in favor of Solaris. I like Solaris but it is not as easy to use as NT and doesn't have anywhere near the industry support in terms of hardware and software. The best software, development tools, and hardware are all available when you are running NT. Personally, I would like to see more Solaris on the servers and BeOS on the clients but it ain't going to happen.
This is the driving force behind all software development (the learning experience) and this is the reason why there are so many projects that seem to be aiming at similar goals.
Unfortunately, many people see this as a bad thing because it presentsthe image of a fragmented community.
However, I can only see it as a good thing. It builds onfidence and a sense of achievement in the individual developer and, equally importantly, different developers have different ideas of how things should be done. These differences can make two 'similar' programs have radially different designs and features. These differences, in turn, can be analysed by another developer looking for inspiration to produce an even better program.
If Solaris had been free, then Linux would have still been written. It might have not snowballed as much as it did and we might al be using Solaris. OTOH, Linus might have used some of the design ideas from Solaris to produce a kernel that far outshines both today.
I've got a free copy of Solaris that sun give away free for non comercial use. Yeah, it's cool to have a Solaris box at home, but after a week I removed it coz there just isn't that much you can do with it.
Linux has a massive number of apps for it and while some will compile on Solaris it's just too much hassle and there's no really benifit to doing it.
----------------------- Nothing to say, no one to say it to.
..so be gentle. It's too early to bother with being flamed. ;)
Wasn't the GNU Project started in like 1984 or some such? Even if Linus Torvalds had never written the Linux kernel, the Hurd would have been done by now (probably long before now since there would have been more of a point to developing the Hurd if we didn't already have Linux.. now the Hurd is pretty much just a pet project of the FSF that they started and since they started it, figure they might as well finish it).
And wasn't the original Linux kernel written around 1991? =P
~ Kish
"...Solaris can do everything Linux can do, but better." If you love Solaris so much you can get it free for non-commercial purposes. There are several areas of Solaris which are worse, and on top of everything you do not have the source to help when something goes wrong.
One major reason why free solaris wouldn't pose a serious threat to linux is the issue of hardware support.
Solaris x86 runs on very limited hardware and unless sun hired an army of developers they wouldn't be able to catch up to linux in terms of hardware support, assuming of course that solaris is "free" as in "free beer" Even if it they released the source, they'd still have trouble wooing the linux device driver developers away from their current projects.
One of the beauties of the intel hardware platform is that there are so many different choices in individual components. Solaris isn't designed with this in mind. It's designed to run on specific hardware components and combinations.
Linux is too far ahead, and it's too late in the game
Besides I wouldn't want to wait some more 2-4 years to have Loki or someone new start porting civ to solaris...
...)
Its not about features.
Its not a social-market matter, if you don't pay to get an OS. Its your personal choice.
Its about the development and growth model!
OSS.
I'm not talking about kernel hacking (which is good.) and obviously not about the possibility my father finally has of reading the source code of his OS. (He usually dosn't do peer reviewing on the crypto code of his programs anyway
We have seen still very little about the REAL REVOLUTION (tm) which is not in technology, but in the IT growth model.
"Open source"/"Free Software"/"whatever" leaves businesses more in control when developing their products. And quality of development a possibility to grow thanks to open standards (which give small investors and single developers a bigger chance on where they are putting their training money).
Its not by chance that in the last years revenue for big IT firm has steadily moved prom products to consulting , services and support. Products are steadily becoming less the focus (and to do this you need scale economies at which OSS and open standards perform well). TCO and what I ACTUALLY get to using the box is the point.
Right now there are projects on what other OSes have already, just because thats what is still missing.
I don't think that when in a year or two this job is done, the community will just vanish.
Au contraire, the investment put in all these years of development and even more in what is happening this year and in the next 2, will produce its most spectaculr results AFTER we have finished with word processing and desktop GUI.
When competition on R&D will re-start.
(That's where MS stopped us all some 10 years ago...)
This is not likely to happen.
Heaven is faster, anyhoo...
If it did happen, Heaven an Hell would merge the good features of eachother into themselves.
What if... well it just isn't that way. And face it if Sun ruled then they would be just like Micro$oft.
On my PII-505 Mhz box with 327 MB ram Solaris 7 x86 is actly faster than Linux. Dont ask me why. the X enviroment in CDE is much more responsive and quicker than the Linux/Xfree86 enviroment. Solaris x86 support for PC hardware is'nt the best. Thats why i think even if they give away Solaris for free they wont harm then Linux/FreeBSD stronghold. Consumer hardware like TV cards, radio cards, MPEG decoder cards or 3D accelerator cards. But on the server side I can see them go strong, especialy on SMP boxes with 2 or more CPUs. Solaris scales very well on multiprocessor systems. (I should know, I manage serval Sun Ultra Enterprise boxes with 2, 4 and 8 CPU's at work)
Sounds about as likely as my installing a Linux distro with a silly ass name like Jesux. =P
~ Kish
Wondering how the world _would_ have been, if this or that had happened, is a total waste of time. Period.
Let's not waste any more time on it, and get on with changing the world to what we want it to become, making it a better place for every computer user.
Sig:
assuming that the author means free as in speech, and sun would GPL/insertappropriatelicensehere, i rather think the outcome would be quite the opposite.
while i'm sure there'd be a number of folks running Linux/BSD that would switch production boxes over to Solaris initially, i don't think anything will wipe Linux off of people's desktops (until Something Better (TM) comes along. too many people enjoy tinkering with it. too many people have sent too many keyboards to the dump over it.
after an initial hit, i think that linux developers would pillage the Solaris source code, and end up leaving Sun in the dust after a year or two. there is alot in there which linux could use, but the about the only thing Sun has to gain from linux is a user base. how many active linux developers would switch immediately? not many, i'd wager. politics, if nothing else, would keep them where they are.
"The things we wizards have to put up with."--Jethro Bodine
Not to say that it's any different with Solaris, but the OS in question was not ScumOS, it was Solaris. ;)
~ Kish
none of your points prove it's not free. you're just saying it's not open source.
Probably Linux would not see the widespread use it does, but I think some people will always want to tweak and twiddle with their own project just for the fun and learning experience. Writing a real OS kernel from scratch is Way Cool[tm]. :-P
On the other hand, maybe they would all have started working on the Hurd in a Solaris cross-compilation environment
Daniel
Hurry up and jump on the individualist bandwagon!
In what way..? Kernel merge? Doubtful. Real doubtful. Base tool set merge? Again, highly unlikely. Why don't we have a single distro, instead of several? There are many forks in the overall OS development of GNU/Linux (as opposed to forks in kernel development, since the "official" kernel implementation is overseen by Linus and co.). Complete OS merge? The most unlikely of all possible scenarios. I just don't see this happening.
Though perhaps you mean Solaris would try to embrace and extend Linux? That just seems weird. One thing I'll agree on, they wouldn't compete.. ;)
~ Kish
"I wonder if Scott McNealy has ever asked himself that question - or if he will after reading this. "
/.
Scott is too busy plotting what he will do when he replaces Bill Gates as the Evil Overlord of the Computer Industry to worry about
Would LINUX Still Survive? Well, some BSD derivates are free (FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD), and Linux still survives
The question is rather "What if Linux is Free ? Would Solaris Survive ?". We already know the answer for IRIX, and have hints of the answer for SCO.
I have a copy of Solaris 7 for x86 at home just begging to be installed. I just haven't had time to get to it. Meanwhile, I'm happily plugging away at both Linux and Windows.
Meanwhile, I don't see that free Solaris has had a measurable impact on Linux or any of the BSD's.
D. Keith Higgs
CWRU. Kelvin Smith Library
My office has been taken over by iPod people.
But that would never happen now, would it? But if Solaris were as completely open and unrestricted (not like Java or Mozilla, but like Linux itself), then I think yes, it would eventually kill off Linux. Remember, Solaris is already dual-platform (Sparc and x86), and further ports would certainly be done. And Solaris has perceptual advantages in the commercial market (it's Sun, it's "supported", it's well-established) that have kept Linux from growing even faster. I think enough people would "defect" from Linux to a truly free Solaris that the commercial focus would shift quickly.
Now, if you ask me if I'd switch or if people switching is a Good Thing, I'd say no. I'm happy on Linux, and I like what it represents in the computing world. Besides, Sun is in it for the money. Microsoft knows how to fight those kind of companies. That's why they don't know what to do about Linux.
- -Josh Turiel
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
There are more players in the game than just Solaris and Linux. We have FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD...you name it. Still most people choose Linux. What is this choice based on? I'm not sure. I do think that if Solaris would be available for free, most people would still use Linux, and Solaris would be in the *BSD-corner; it's very good, but nobody knows about it. Most people simply don't consider all options before they choose which OS to use. That's why NT is still used a lot, but it's also the reason for the popularity of Linux.
0x or or snor perron?!
Driven by interest for *IX/*UX I flirted with the idea to build up a Solaris-box, a few months ago, because interesting things were said about it (like in this discussion).
There was one thing that hold me off doing so: It is not open. Like RH-CEO said in an CNN-interview, who would buy a car with a kind of locked up engine? So, working with Linux a while I think I would never go back to a non-open platform, unless I am forced to.
Ballmer from mickeysoft just dropped some notes about an upcoming dilemma: The lack of brains willing to push them further. At the moment open-source seems to have far more 'brain-power' than companies in competition could ever mobilize. And that is something that makes me feel secure with open-source.
NetBSD, FreeBSD, and OpenBSD are all free, fairly similar, mildly different, yet all thrive. And even though they've been "mature" longer than GNU/Linux, GNU/Linux thrives as well. I'm not so sure I'm all that scared of Solaris closing down the GNU/Linux market any more than I am of *BSD doing so, were it free beer or free speech.
~ Kish
I have used Linux since 1992. I only use computers at work. This means that I have never paid a single cent for any of the software I use anyway, nor for the computers. I can basically have any workstation I want. I chose Linux then. I still choose Linux. The only other Unix I can work with without excessive pain is Irix. I can work as much as I want with Solaris, AIX etc. but it's such a pain. It hurts to use those crappy systems.
I use Linux because Linux is good to work with! I don't pay anyway, I wouldn't have used Solaris if I was paid a dollar an hour to use it.
TA
Every society needs a causa belli or reason to rebel, whether it is feminism, environmentalism, whatever. It's just the nature of human beings that there is always some segment that doesn't like conforming to social norms and the computing industry is no exception, especially when the creativity to push beyond known limits already puts the innovators at the fringe. Now whether you put this trait down to pure human orniness or the fact that in every flock of sheep, there are always a few itching to be the underdogs, is irrelevant.
:-).
The philosophy of "free code" (as in freedom of speech) first mooted by RMS has crystalised around Linux probably due to good timing and some inspired leadership. Also the OpenSource movement has been helped by mainstream sympathisers (both individual and corporate) who have been stomped on quite heavily by the current market gorillas. Now whether Solaris could have played that same role is a little debateable as it could have been perceived as being contaminated by corporate strings (witness the current doubts about Sun's Community License). Would it have the right elements to provoke a similar response if there was no external motivating factors? Like most grassroot social movements, OpenSource requires the right environmental factors (in this case repulsion by existing market leaders, technological changes exposing previous high priests of computing, and new communications medium of the internet to link the individual elements into a more cohensive whole) and a simple rallying standard to invoke the passions of the supporters (despite what people think, greed doesn't create the same motivating force). Solaris might be very well suited as an enterprise computing platform but it would not have the cheap hardware base to attract entry-level Linux hackers, nor the non-profit motive of supporting (to them) fringe hardware and functions. For example, Microsoft wouldn't be interested in a market unless they could sell a million units.
Given enough time, any piece of software can be recreated (from scratch if necessary, and probably unnecessarily given the number of commercial clones on freshmeat) and the internet allows people with the interest and spare time to band together and create software edfices they could never achieve on their own. Despite what most people feel, probably only a fraction of the OpenSource projects will ever become commercially competitive, much less viable. However, it does allow people to express themselves and gain a feeling of achievement that can not be recreated by running canned applications. In short, I suspect it satisfies more the goals of individual internal mastery in the mental sphere similar in a way atheletes do in winning competitions with nice side effects of producing robust software that doesn't suck. Companies that recognise this and can act as patron and sponsor will probably benefit the most from the OpenSource movement. SGI probably has a clue, IBM has so much tech, they can afford to throw a few fish to encourage Linux supporters. Whether some Solaris/Java manager gets a clue and Sun sees the light is probably a matter of time but they would be starting back in the pack (there are limits to the number of talented Linux hackers in the world, no matter how fast the movement is growing).
Shold be an interesting decade ahead of us
LL
Would Linux survive if Solaris was free? Of course it would. To suggest otherwise indicates a very poor understanding of what Linux is, and what it's good at.
Historically, Linux was the UNIX you could run on your PC - for free. It's ability to provide "serious computing" facilities on commodity hardware won it the hearts and minds battle a long time ago.
When I was at university we had rooms full of SPARCstations and similar kit. They opened up my eyes to what an open systems environment was capable of. Then there was X - for all it's clunkiness still based on a great architecture. The whole "it's more important to do it right than to do it quickly" philosophy which is found throughout the UNIX world - and which is still completely alien in the Windows world.
It was a revelation to me. And it came at a time when I was getting more and more frustrated with the limitations and costs of Windows 3.1 on my home PC. It crashed all the time. (Heh. We complain about NT crashing "all the time". Remember when "all the time" really was ALL the time?). You couldn't develop anything on it without spending a lot of money first. And I was a student - where would I get money?
So, when Linux hit us (in the form of Yggdrasil Linux 0.99pl13) almost every one of us CS students embraced it. Here was a free, cool, capable, stable (even then), platform that we could take home and do the same cool stuff on our home PCs that we had previously been doing on the X-tens-of-thousands-of-pounds SPARCstations. We could write C code for coursework. We could write little TCP servers and clients to our heart's content. We could write Xlib apps. And we could take them all back into university, put them on the Suns, and they would work!
It's difficult to express how significant that time was. The idea that you could run X at home now seems trivial, but back then it was a Big Thing. We're talking about students here - no money. Sure, UNIX for PCs was around in the form of things like SCO and Solaris 86, but they were expensive (VERY expensive). But Linux was free, and ran on my cheap 386sx20 with 2Mb just great.
It's no concidence, of course, that the people who discovered Linux at college back then are now graduated and starting to be in decision making positions inside companies just at the time that Linux is being taken more seriously by the commercial world.
The article's conclusion is based on some assumptions that don't seem to be right to me:
Most people would agree that the various BSDs are at least technically as good as Linux. But they are massively, hugely, enourmously less popular. So even if Solaris 86 was better than Linux, that wouldn't necessarily make a difference.
Not that Solaris 86 is better than Linux. Solaris SPARC is excellent and as robust a platform as you could hope for, but Solaris 86 I wouldn't touch with a bargepole. It simply isn't better than Linux. It has less hardware support, is less robust, has less software, and crashes more often. It is arguably more secure, in the sense that "broken" = "secure". Plus it eats resources like no other OS.
This all probably explains why people continue to choose Linux despite the fact that Solaris 86 *is* free to hobby users, as is Solaris SPARC. That's a good thing. But there's more to this issue than price.
There's the community for a start. There's the symbiosis that you get between developers and users. There's the complete lack of "us and them". There's the ever growing list of features that you can pick and choose at your own rate. There's even a healthy competition between distribution makers which is leading to improvements in installation and package support. There are thousands of applications, web pages, mailing lists, and people willing to help.
Partly, all of this is because Linux is popular. But partly, Linux is popular because of the community support. It works both ways - a nice positive feedback loop. One that just isn't there for Solaris 86.
So, nice try Michael, but try understanding what you're criticising next time.
I think that sort of comparison just misses the point. Linux is not "anti-Microsoft" even if most of its users (me included) are; it has not been designed from scrach as a web/ftp/whatever platform and was not implemented in order to get nice revenues. The whole point is that Linux is free software in the sense of the GPL and not just "given away at no cost". If we were talking about linux vs hurd (or even linux vs {Free, Net}Bsd) than a debate like that would make sense (Hurd is free and GPL-ed, BSD is free but not GPL-ed, thus there are differences that have to be taken into account). The question would have had to be "Would linuk survive if Solaris were GPL-ed ?" Mightbe, but then it mightbe as well that they would have somewere merged and taken from each other... but Solaris is as proprietary as WinNT, hence my question is just a bit pointless.
A couple of points:
1. It's a matter of trust. I think, as a group, Open Source and Linux users are fundamentally wary of corporations.
Corporations are capricious entities; what's "free" today may be an unsupported, abandoned version tomorrow.
2. If Solaris was free, Linus Torvalds would still not have been able to afford the hardware, so he likely still would have started his project.
3. The statement "Since Linux is free, it's easy to convince management to use Linux." is patently absurd to anyone who has tried to convince a large corporation to use free software. How long have people been complaining that the exact opposite is true? Sounds like a convenient case of selective memory to me.
When I put Solaris on my x86 machine, Netscape and Matlab were not available (the two apps I use constantly). Plus I couldn't get decent video drivers. VGA on a 21 inch monitor is silly.
The installation tool for Sol x86 at the time was terrible.
I know about the recent lxrun for running linux binaries on solaris, but is it really worth the trouble?
It might be nice to run a partially homogeneous (in the OS sense) system. We have ultra 10s and enterprise servers here. Solaris x86 just is not worh the associated problems.
Too bad Sparc and x86 are not binary compatible. Maybe the Transmeta chip will solve all of our problems... (G3 and Alpha would be nice too!) That could solve tons of problems.
BTW, there was an article on the OXYGEN project promoting configurable computing. basically letting PDAs change to suit the needs of a certain job. Maybe that relates to Transmeta too...
enough!
ed
I hate that site. It's navigation is sooo horrible. I went to go look up what SPARC stood for (I'm probably the only fool who didn't know.. let's just say I didn't care too much about what many acronyms stood for until a recent curiosity stole over my brain). Therefore, I didn't bother gleaning anything else off of their site (actually, I didn't even glean that.. not from their site. I picked up an email address to harass, though ;).
My odd question of the day being: Anyone else out there actually bothered to find out what SPARC stands for? Hee hee..
~ Kish
The opinion of the author boils down to one assertion: a free version of Solaris would have killed the development of Linux.
It is clear that this is not the case. The Linux project was begun as one hacker wanted to run a version of Unix on a cheap intel-based '386 machine. In 1992 I do not belive that Solaris was an option.
Let make his point more relevent: Would a free Solaris two years ago have relegated Linux to the sidelines in the enterprise computing world?
I would have to say quite possibly, but it would never have happened. Sun sells hardware. Producing a free OS that can run on cheap multi-platform hardware would kill the company. A large number of firms who need mid-sized servers have purchased Sun equipment where it really wasn't needed. The simple fact was they needed a decent Unix-based system and the easiest solution was to dump a sparc on the network.
If you're a Sun fanatic, I could see you construing the assertions of the openness of Java, and now StarOffice[maybe], as Sun embracing that which gave rise to Linux. It would, however, be simplification in the grandest of terms. Sun still wants to sell hardware. Whether it is Sparc based servers, or embeddable Java processors, they would like nothing less that a cut of every piece of modern electronics sold it the world.
After the sweeping statements made in the first three quarters of this article I really expected a detailed, logical, and elaborate explanation. Instead I get none, but the paltry "Sun can do anything Linux can do better".
There are obviously monumental reasons people choose Linux and wouldn't choose Solaris even if it were free:
1) Open Source. Solaris is a great OS, but even IF it were free, it could not expect to match Linux in several important areas. One of the greatest attributes of Open Source software is peer-review. A constant incremental development and revision, always striving for something better. Even if Solaris were "better" now, and released free, Linux, due to its Open Source nature is accelerating rapidly and would in no doubt eclipse it. The open development model also allows for tighter security auditing. Since so many people work on Linux, drivers for the newest whizbang device are usually written very fast.
2) Support. Since no one own Linux, no one company is responsible. Support is available from many places, and is not limited to one company. Many major companies are jumping on the bandwagon and are supporting Linux in some way, either through tech supp, or documentation, or publishing software, etc.
3) Choice. If you want it on Linux you can get it. Linux, due to its development model, is a virtual bazaar (pardon the pun) of hardware and software. Linux supports common, and many uncommon hardware devices. Since it is posix compliant, Linux also support the wealth of pre-existing Unix software, as well as the monumental amount of software that has been developed for it since its inception. Anything you want you can have, or failing that, make yourself and give back to the community.
Freeing solaris would have about the same effect of freeing windows (not to be inflammatory), I think. So it's free...just means you have to pay less to use it.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
First, Solaris will be free. Sun is moving to make all of its IP free (although some people think its license is not OSD-compatible, I think it is, and I don't care if others don't :), including hardware and software.
Second, you want the subjunctive. It is not "if Solaris was free," but "if Solaris were free."
I will be brief:
Linux.
FreeBSD.
NetBSD.
OpenBSD.
They are all free (beer and speech). They are all Unix-like. Three of them are descended from the same code. Two of them were the same code four years ago. All of them, the last I heard, have growing user bases.
Stupid article, would probably have been ignored on Usenet, not worth mentioning on Slashdot.
imho Solaris is better than Linux, please don't hate me :)
Would Solaris knock out Linux if it went free? I seriously doubt that. People really don't use Linux cause it is free do they ? They use it cause it appeals to them and they like it.
Would Solaris gain a larger user base if is was free ? Sure I think it would gain some users but
not to the quantity that it would blow Linux or any other unix version for that matter away.
Isn't Solaris really a sub product at Sun, I can't imagine they really making any money on Solaris in itself compared to the development costs. What they make money on is selling hardware.
About Slowaris as some people refer to it as. Sure I can agree on that the Intel version of Solaris ain't a very speedy os but that is in my opinion not the "REAL" Solaris.
So Solaris ain't open source and it is owned by Sun. Linux may be open in all it's glory but big decission are still made by Mr.Torvalds in a more non-democratic fashion. Nothing wrong with that thou.
I wouldn't mind Solaris being free thou even if it is currently so for Students (ok not really free there is a shipping and handling cost) but you get that if you order Linux to and don't download it from the net.
A BMW is to a hand-built swamp buggy as Solaris is to Linux
Yeah. And you can have a hell of a lot more fun in the swamp buggy!
axolotl
If Solaris was all GPL from the beginning, nobody would have thought of making another free Unix.
If Solaris was freed today, we'd probably see just another fragmentation. Also, both Linux and Solaris would have ended up much richer and better since both could steal code from each other. That's the whole idea of software freedom! There's absolutely no reason why both couldn't have co-existed.
This is however extremely hypothetical. I doubt they'll ever free Solaris to the extent of GNU, but if they did, it would be infinitely cool!
"Oppression and harassment is a small price to pay to live in the land of the free." -- Montgomery Burns.
Yes, but a swamp buggy has much better cross-country mobility. Some military SPECOP forces use vehicles, which can be described as swamp buggies. They usually do not drive around in BMWs ;-)
While we're on the topic of spawning threads to do blocking read()s on sockets - this model is extremely inefficient for server processes. It is far more efficient to use non-blocking read()s and either select() or poll() when dealing with IO on a large number of file descriptors. When input is detected on one socket it can then be delegated to a worker thread from a (relatively small) thread pool. Because Java lacks any select() or poll()-like construct their server connections top out at around 1000 socket connections. Threads take up a lot of resources, and should be used sparingly if you want good performance and stability.
Free is not the same as Open Source. Open
Source has made Linux and GNU great, in
addition to the fact they are free.
Would Sun support Solaris on Alpha, PPC,
ARM, etc. or just Sparcs and x86? Since
Sun sells Sparcs, I think you can guess the
answer.
Those who can do. Those who can't sue.
OK, I never respond to these things, but this one is nuts. Has this guy really used Linux and Solaris? I run Linux on a variety of platforms, MIPS, Alpha, x86, PPC, and have on a few others. Linux strength is in it's OPEN SOURCE, not it being free. Most people I know actually purchased a copy somewhere along the way, and I personally always purchase a copy when I use Linux for business purposes. It's my way of supporting Linux. So, would Solaris just be free, or actually Open Source? Would it be portable to dozens of platforms from Palm Pilots to 64-way SMP (OK, it already does the top end pretty well). Someone mentioned that Linus started writing Linux to have a free x86 OS, and that may be true, but if I remember correctly, it was to have a free x86 OS that would run on MODEST hardware. Linux became popular in it's early days because it made all of those machines that other OS's had long abandoned usable again. Heck, I still have an old 386/25 with 8 Meg running linux 2.0.37 for a diald proxy for a client, I don't think Solaris would work here. Also, Linux has multiple vendors, not just Sun. Linux is a movement about freedom, freedom to choose your platform, your vendor, your GUI, whatever. And even freedom to fix (and create) your own bugs. Anyway, I'm sure Solaris being free would have had some affect on Linux, but I wanted to point out some other parts of the puzzle. I apologize for the rambling here, I scribbled this out quickly, and without thought to proper grammer and organization, but I think it gets my point across. I'll do better next time. Tom
Mr. Whitmore makes the point 'What if Solaris was free?' without fully defining what he means. Free as in a full GPL release with all source code or Sun's version of 'free'? If indeed the full source code was GPLed the viability of GNU/Linux might be questioned. At least we would have a interesting choice and a real pro / con evaluation of GNU/Linux vs Solaris can be made. If the free release would be binarys only then it would be only a small blip on the OS screen and most GNU/Linux users won't even notice it.
zenray
Solaris 7 is not slow on single processor boxen. I installed it after Debian gave me fits and let me tell you pops, it is fast as hell. Considerably, demonstrably faster than Linux. And guess what: logging file system. And a kernel that adjusts itself to use the amount of memory you need for different buffers, etc. The only downside to the install is that my sound card needed OSS drivers to work - other than that, it has been pretty terrific. If Solaris is free, people should be writing device drivers for it left, right, center. Forget whether or not it's open sourced, it is already far superior on a kernel level to Linux - you can write your own modular device drivers for it now and never need to see a line of the kernel code! Finally, very little of Gnome, KDE and other open sourced software fails to compile on Solaris. I installed KDE, Gnome, Gimp, Xchat, XMMS, Mozilla, and many other packages without fail. What fails is software written for Linux specifically - how open is THAT?
Solaris is already free, at least for personal use. You can download it from Sun. Sun did this to stem the tide of Linux -- and it failed miserably.
Also, on the same hardware Solaris is noticeably slower than Linux. In fact, I recently compared performance of my Ultra 5 (at work) and my K6/2-300 (at home). I did it in a simple minded way: I compiled GCC on both. My K6-2 started later and finished sooner -- I didn't actually measure the times, but it was around twice as fast.
It costs less than $500, the Ultra 5 costs around $3000. Bottom line is that in the low-end server/desktop market, Sun hardware just doesn't make any sense. Given that Solaris/x86 is not too hot (in my experience it is nowhere near as robust as Solaris/SPARX or Linux) why would we give up Linux?
Also, a lot of the advantage of Linux is that, instead of having to go out and get all the GNU tools to make a system useful after you load Solaris, it comes with them. Things like bash, GNU find, GNU grep are dramatically better than the equivalent bundled commands.
-- Slashdot sucks.
linux has made it to where it is not because of the fact that it is free, but because people like to not have to rely on the big corps for support and such. linux started off as a underground O/S and that has a big effect on why it has been such a success.
And it isn't very good. In fact it can't detect any hardware very well. 64bit linux is on it's way and will probably beat the pants off of Solaris. Free to the people is also what Linux is all about not just no $$$. Sure Sun gives away Star Office but it says that it is illegal to redistribute it as well. I like Solaris on a SPARC machine but keep it off my PC.
I own the free version of Solaris. I rushed out and bought it the first week it was released for free. I also own too many distributions of Linux. I've installed Solaris on about 8 machines at various jobs. Every time I've thought "What a poor imitation of Linux."
I have my own Web server. It runs Linux or FreeBSD (Which I also bought) depending on my mood. When I installed BSD I thought: "Wow! This is very usable, it reminds me of Linux!"
Solaris, on low end hardware (any Intel) is very slow compared to Linux. I haven't run Solaris on many Sun Workstations, so I can only hope that it is exponentially faster, but for me, what makes Linux so great is:
- Open kernel sources
- The ability to modify the kernel
- Hardware support (Especially Video, sadly lacking in Solaris)
- The community spirit
- The great software:
- Apache
- Gnome
- KDE
- Vi
- Emacs
- Gcc (Gotta have a compiler)
- Enlightenment
- The Gimp
- XFree86 in general
- PHP/MySQL
- Telneting
- A completely customizable OS
- Text files for modifying EVERYTHING
- The speed
- The great multitasking
- Samba
Now, it's true that practically everything on that list is doable under Solaris, in fact all of that software will easily compile and install under Solaris (Heck, I've done it!)But NONE of it is as nice or as integrated as it is in Linux. To me, Solaris is the NT of Unix, and Sun the Microsoft of Unix.
I like that Linux is developed by the community for the community. Same as the BSD's. For that reason, I am a total convert who will never give up my cherished platform.
I have deployed Linux as web servers into two environments, my own server, and one that was previously running IIS. In both cases, we fell under the category of being allowed to run the "Free" Solaris. In both cases we had access to NT, Linux and Solaris. In both cases we chose Linux. It had NOTHING to do with price.
If Solaris was OpenSource, MAYBE it would be a contender, but I doubt it.
Ben
http://moses.penguinpowered.com
I installed Sun Solaris 2.6 on my ix86 based machine. I had problems with the GUI (to the extent that it was unusable), due to my video card not being fully supported - there was little technical support for this problem here, because even if Solaris is free support isn't. A compiler wasn't installed by default and I couldn't find a solaris version. I was limited to CDE as a Window manager, which I have to say I don't really like (personal preference, I guess)
Basicly, it isn't just the case that Linux that is free. It's also the distributions that pack everything up for you in a nice little CD and install things in a way that you simply wouldn't be able to do with Solaris. Linux support is always freely available. Albeit sometimes of limited quality.
I would venture to say now, that with the name that Linux has made for itself that it has become a free standing entity which doesn't need to rely on the fact that it is a UN*X to survive. With this fact, I think it therefore follows that if other UN*X change their marketing structure, then it is unlikely to kill of Linux entirely.
In short, with the troubles I've had with Solaris and the troubles (and solutions) I've experienced with Linux, then Linux wins hands down.
solaris is free all you do is pay for the cds and books. it's $18 w/shipping included. i cannot remember when i ever paid that little for a redhat boxed edition. for home and educational use only. as long as it is not running an e-commerce site i do not think they really care what you use it for.
You see a problem, I see potential. - Vincent 'Vinnie' Antonelli
I got a developer version of Solaris OS. It is the whole OS. It cost about $15 including shipping and handling which is about $5 more than what I paid for my RH cdrom. It is the full Solaris 7 OS. I can use it for personal use.
However here are the differences:
If Solaris were free free, it would have to be Linux free. Not just free but open source, and not hhe Java 'open source' license.
Having the cdrom I have used Solaris, and could easily switch from one to the other, but Solaris woudl have a lot of work to make a Solaris distribution worth switching to from Linux. However I personally find that Linux is friendlier than Solaris.
Only 'flamers' flame!
In addition to all the other excellent rebuttals and points that others have made better than me, there is a big thing that the original author missed. Sun couldn't make Solaris Free if they wanted to. Does the author think that Sun actually wrote Solaris?
Sun licensed AT&T's System V Unix code, and incorporated it into their existing SunOS codebase (based on BSD). They then tweaked it a bit for better performance and features on their Sparc systems and called it Solaris. Since a good portion of Solaris code is licensed from AT&T, Sun couldn't Free it without AT&T's permission. Anyone who was working on BSD in the 4.3 days will realize how futile hoping for AT&T's permission to Free their source code is.
----
----
Open mind, insert foot.
The title represents a condition contrary to fact. Since Slowlaris is not free, the title really should read:
"...If Solaris were free" You may say it does not matter, but every time you blur the distinction between two forms, you reduce the expressive power of your language.
Is Alan Cox gonna run and start hacking Solaris! HAH no way. Who would want to do free work for Solaris? No Community support EVEN IF it was GPL'd Cool grab the neat stuff and leave the rest out to dry. No Linux has carved its own unique market and everyone else would be seen as band wagon hopping!
A BMW is to a hand-built swamp buggy as Solaris is to Linux.
But you can drive a swamp buggy on roads, try driving a BMW through a swamp...
To put it rather bluntly, this article didn't have enough thought behind it to merit mention here. The author fails to address the fact that ideology was (and continues to be) more a driving factor in the development of and for Linux than simple economics. From the GNU toolset, whose developers take issue with existing ideas about intellectual property, to the assorted GUIs developed by those who feel that currently available user interfaces are fundamentally flawed, most Linux projects and components have more to do with doing things one's own way, unbeholden to anyone else's, and little or nothing to do with saving the odd dollar or two.
Since when does Solaris 7 (for Intel or SPARC) come with a logging file system? When I bought Solaris 7 (SPARC) last winter it came with plain old UFS. A journaling file system (I assume that's what you mean) was an expensive add-on from Veritas.
Also, my experience with Solaris 2.6 on Intel was that it was significantly slower than the Linux that was current at that time (2.0.30-something). A 64 MB PPro 200 box running Solaris 2.6 crunched about 75% of the RSA keys as a P133 with 32 MB running Linux 2.0.30-whatever. This might have been the fault of the RSA client, but considering how the UltraSPARC-optimized RSA client on the E450 was chewing through keys faster than two PA-8000 systems combined I can't believe the client would have been the sole culprit.
Netscape ran a little faster and better on Solaris/x86 because Solaris comes with Motif. If the Open Group wasn't a bunch of wankers that wouldn't matter, and it won't matter if Mozilla ever gets done. Motif sucks rocks anyhow and it's not worth keeping around, even for Netscape.
Since you have Solaris 7 on x86 handy, why don't you post some benchmarks for your system?
Yes, but a swamp buggy has much better cross-country mobility. Some military SPECOP forces use vehicles, which can be described as swamp buggies. They usually do not drive around in BMWs ;-)
Probably they don't even use the kind of cars BMW supplied to the Georgian goverenment. Having to rely on roads is bad news for an army. Also in many parts of the world a dirt track is considered a "quality road".
Cept companies looking to make a buck or two. Seriously, how many people do you personally know that run Linux to play with the source code. Out of about 40 people I know that run it, NONE of them even go near the source. It just doesn't matter to 99.9% of the Linux users.
OK, just because a company is not Microsoft does not make them good. As a matter of fact I don't like the devious little bastards at Sun. They pretend to be all gung ho for the Linux movement, but their license for StarOffice sucks... and where is JAVA for Linux? Oh well.. don't think I'll pick up JAVA anytime soon.
Anyway, back to the subject. Linux (and BSD for that matter) is doing to the OS industry what IBM Compatibles did to the PC Industry. It is introducing open standards. Let's look back at some closed standards...
1. IBM's MicroChannel Architecture (MCA) - Failed miserably because they wanted to charge royalties for use of their bus. So the industry developed its own "open" architecture... VLB.. and then PCI. Yes, MCA was superior technologically for a long time, but no one wanted to pay royalties. 2. Macintosh - What no clones? Sure their hardware was easy to use. Sure they had plug and play about five years before Windows. But while Apple was sitting on their asses being all anal about their hardware specs Compaq reverse engineered the first PC and an onslaught of PC clone makers made PCs with standards that everyone could develop around the IBM Compatible. This cloned environment made hardware around "open" standards. True, no one shared their schematics for their motherboards, but there were defined standards which every company in the world could develop around. True, things are a bit hectic in the PC world, because their are so many variants of the PC architeture, but if you want to make a video card there is no one holding you back, no company to ask permission from. Want to make a new os? Sure... anyone has access to IBM Compatible standards. That's why BeOS doesn't do PowerPCs anymore because Macintosh shut them out from the G3 on (competing with their OS). Apple is the ultimate closed source proprietary company in the computer world. If it was up to them we would be no where near where the cloned PC revolution has taken us. Of course I can hear some of you saying.. hey doesn't Microsoft have APIs too.. Yes they do, but if you really start to compete with a product of theirs (Office vs. Corel) then Microsoft will always have the upper hand because they make the APIs, they know the undocumented API calls, they wrote the book, you will lose when they want to win (a la sabotage of Quicktime). With Linux everyone is on a level playing field. Anyway, I'm rambling, but the point is that Linux's "Open Source Software" standards will take us much further because it's open and it belongs to the community not just another company that happens not to be called Microsoft. That inspires developers because they know that they can get out of the OS what they put into it. Now I'm sure many of you *BSD users are saying.. we have open software too... well I have no argument for why Linux is getting more press than BSD. All I know is that open software will make a revolution that much larger than the first Compaq clones because it allows everyone in on the action for OS development.
So I give my thanks to all the kernel hackers out there, all the developers for Linux who make programs in their free time and started all of this, to Linus and Alan Cox (and the many other kernel developers). Thanks for making Linux the OS for everyone.
Campaign for Liberty
The hand built swamp buggy will take you more places though...
r@m
When Sun first started in '82, they aimed for the high-end workstation market. Now they still do. And they also make enterprise-class software and hardware solutions. I betcha the average Joe has no idea what Sun does.
Linux was started as a Unix clone for students who couldn't afford the high price tag that came with the Unix solutions offered by Sun/NExT/etc. Now those original students have grown up on Linux and are now working, they have no reason to move to another Unix platform for home/SOHO use even if it was free. The x86 platform IMO still offers the most bang for the buck. Not only that, a layperson can still have the multimedia capabilities of Win/Mac under Linux that Solaris still lacks.
All of this because Sun never intended to shoot for the home consumer/small-time developer.
"Microsoft is the epitome of innovation and product quality."
Sanity.html - Error 404 not found
I'm sure your comment will be moderated up to a 5 as it seems to fit the exact mindset so prominent on /.
While I think that Stallman truely believes that free software equals freedom, I would be willing to bet that in reality this idea was born from the true hacker's desire to understand how everything works.
The whole arguement that the license selected by the author of a piece of code can diminish the freedom of others is truely laughable. The author of code is the master of his/her own freedom. By choosing to make this code available to the community of programmers or creating a commercial product, she/he is expressing that freedom born in the act of creation. If anything, the availability of another piece of software in the world increases the power in hands of the user. They can choose to use it or not. Each new piece of software, irregardless of its license, empowers the user and cannot, by itself, shackle the individual and result in the diminshment of personal freedom.
If we look at the Linux kernel as an example I would assert that the GPL has actually reduced freedom. As Red Hat and others strive for multi-billion dollar capitalization on the world market, the authors of code are relegated to sidelines. Their code is not longer under their control, they have abdicated their own freedom, and it has been usurped by others. Some have found patronage and thus the ability to earn an hourly wage and the promise of stock options.
Explain to me how this is the embodiment of freedom?
Freedom should never be a zero-sum game. The GPL and the Free Software movement is about empowering users at the expense of programmers. It is no better that the most restrictive of comercial licenses.
I agree with your model. In fact what you describe is exactly what Apache does. But if you allow select() or poll() then people can also write the good old select, and then race through their sockets and try to grab it. The problem? There is a race condition. Apache used to do this with the result that occasionally threads would get blocked trying to grab sockets that another thread got. Also waking up 10 processes at once is inefficient.
In other words Sun tries to force Java programmers to program their way, which is safely. As always, doing so has good and bad points. Is it worth it? Perhaps. Is it irritating..?
The "right" architecture is the "wake up one" model that I think is will arrive with Linux 2.4. Here a number of processes do a blocking read on the same descriptor, but the OS knows that when input comes in, it chooses one to wake up and leaves the rest asleep. Why is this better? Well it is simpler to program for, more efficient on resources, and it is easy to support efficiently when you move to an SMP (or clustered) system with inputs coming in many directions. (Just find the first CPU with a waiting process...)
But given the Java design, that option is now precluded entirely in that language until Sun allows it. And if it is something that helps Linux compete with Solaris, do you think that they will change that feature?
Not a chance.
Cheers,
Ben
My usual seat in the cluetrain is at A HREF="http://pub4.ezboard.com/biwethey.ht
Slowlaris only runs on Sparc & Intel. Linux would for sure survive on other platform. It would also survive on those two platform as well, in fact it would do more than survive, it would LIVE LONG AND PROSPER! Just ask youself: Would Free/Net/OpenBSD survive if Linux was free? DUh! or: Would Minix get back to life if it were the only free Unix out there? Free software lives forever.
This whole thing is silly. Solaris X86 is 99% useless, and is dog slow. I'm a Solaris Systems Engineer at a large cable modem ISP and I honestly can say that if Sun gave you $500 for using Solaris it still would stand no chance of replacing linux on the X86 platform. Now if by some act of god they made it open-source anything would be possible.
If Solaris was free (gpl-like free) it would only make Linux stronger.
Free Solaris may sound threatining at first, but it's really a non-issue. They will still charge the same outrageous prices for their hardware, related software, and support. This is Sun, folks. Would you expect anything less?
Monty
Solaris is slow and bloated. I installed it, I understood, I removed it.
patch clusters are free... maybe try sunsolve.com??
A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe in God.
I agree in some aspects, but if Solaris was free would it be open-source? I've heard many headache stories about Solaris on x86 and that it is very slow.
Is it just me and my English writing tendencies or were there an ass-load of grammatical mistakes in that article?
Derek
I've run solaris on my home pc just as I have run linux. I purchased solaris directly from sun and it only cost me $18 for the x86 version and the Sparc version. In a corporate setting $18 per computer really does not matter all that much, but when you start getting into the $100+ for windows NT workstation and $500+ (I'm not really sure of the price, and I don't wanna know) for NT Server, then it begins to matter.
Why re-invent the wheel?
To make it better... The real question is would linux survive if Solaris was open source?
Scalable Processor ARChitecture. And I have to say, it lives up to its name.
yeah if you write corrupt code... You can crash anything in 12 lines if you try hard enough
Free as in price, or free as in open source ?. who will control development ?. Linux moves along very well due to world wide coders contributing to it..
Solaris is not slow, but like everything else in unix, to get the best performance you have to optimize. I have a SPARC running Sol8 beta at my house that would any linux/intel machine out of the water. The reason is not because either one is slow, its because i know my shit. You represent the biggest problem with linux, unprofessional administration that only has a voice on the internet, and unfortunately people listen to you. I am a big supporter of linux, i do prefer SPARC/Solaris however, but i am not a developer, i am a system administrator. I want to install stuff and not wonder if its going to do its job, it has to do its job. If some experimental code is in the app to speed shit up, thats fine for linux, but i want stability over speed. Break it down to a hardware issue and you will see you can have the best of both worlds.
doesnt mean linux has more hardware support. Yes it does have more hardware support in the home pc arena, but in the real work world, people need stability and cost saving technologies more than sound cards and games. The reality is Sun a great server, with great hardware support. A RAID array is not an experimental thing with Sun, its a standard. Shit just works, and works all the time.
The main factor is ease of maintenance of the software we use. When we bought a Solaris system it came with no compiler. No problem, install gcc. Of course emacs was missing. Install it too. We also need perl, pine, elm, etc. You get the idea. And then there is TeX which is really the reason we have this deparmental network.
With RedHat Linux once you do an install all these things are just there. These days we tend to buy systems with Linux pre-installed so we don't even have to do that. When we got a Solaris box we actually went out and got a consultant to install all the things above (oh, did I mention the latest updates to bind and sendmail). Keep in mind there are no rpm's here. We're talking compile and and install -- including a rational plan on where everything should go. This is a big job with 30 or 40 packages. Then there is the question of monitoring and installing security updates -- easy with rpms, but a horrible task if you have to track every package at its source.
The packaging, organization, and integration is what RedHat supplies us. That's why we pay full price for at least one of each of their releases.
The title of this article brings out the distinction between Linux and GNU/Linux. If Linux was just the kernel then Solaris might replace it. But Solaris doesn't come close to GNU/Linux. Did I mention Gnome and KDE?
If Sun were smart they would adopt the RedHat Package Manager and port all the standard things mentioned above to rpms for Solaris. Then they would be at least competitive with GNU/Linux.
You're right. Solaris is slow on a 486 Gateway that you're probably running. Solaris is meant to run on systems, whose owners can appreciate a powerfull computer. None of this "I run BitchX on my 486 with 4 MB ram... IT ROCKS, MAN!". And I'm so glad that you understood it. You probably had it installed for a week? thats plenty of time for to learn a REAL operating system. But that's righ, I forgot, your probably one of those *REALY* cool people that know how to change the login screen in Linux. I bow down in the presence of your superior intelect.
it crashes. Get an IT job and start trying to revamp your old sparc's and axils with ultrapenguin or debian, then make that statement. The only stable OS's that run SPARC architecture are Solaris, and BSD for some reason works good.
Free in this context does not mean without cost (beer).
---- sonoffreak
Tell me about it...I installed Solaris on an x86 machine and it was hell trying to find a gcc compiler for it. Every website that I would check would have a precompiled gcc for SPARC, but nada for x86. Of course it was really easy to find sources, but ummm its kind of useless since these people don't even ship a friggin compiler with the system.
The important advantages the author states apply to Solaris on Sparc but not to X86. Even if the OS was given away, the additional cost of the hardware would wipe out the savings. Plus, the flexibility users get and the wide range of other OSes on X86 is something many wouldn't want to give up.
I'd be curious to hear from people who are dual-booting Solaris X86 and Linux on how they compare.
Sun is bad (not evil, bad) because when they get control of APIs they deliberately play games with them to make their stuff look good and others look bad. If you own the APIs you control the rules and can force others into playing catch-up.
Don't believe that is an issue? Take a look at how Microsoft uses the Windows API to leverage their OS monopoly into further monopolies (eg Office). Sun would love to get the same control...
Cheers,
Ben
My usual seat in the cluetrain is at A HREF="http://pub4.ezboard.com/biwethey.ht
If you're using RedHat 5 they you're messing with an ancient version that still uses the 2.0 series kernel. SCSI support at that time was admittedly less than wonderful. I've been using the 2.2 series for some time and have had absolutely no problems with any of the adaptec SCSI sontrollers (even those pesky controllers built into the motherboards) or SCSI devices attached to any of the machines I admin. I'm not saying this to flame, but Linux is developing at such a rapid pace that it's hardly appropriate to dredge up an old version of a distro when you want to compare features with another OS Just my opinion
While I think that Stallman truely believes that free software equals freedom, I would be willing to bet that in reality this idea was born from the true hacker's desire to understand how everything works.
And is this a bad ideal? If you look back at historical stuff like patent laws, they were always intended to encourage dissemination of knowledge to further the arts and sciences. Scientists have spent decades trying to understand how the world works. I recall one escaped negro slave from Civil War times who self-educated himself to escape the "bondage of ignorance". Freedom is a rather nebulous term with many subtle interpretations but the principle of an uncoerced informed choice will probably persist.
If anything, the availability of another piece of software in the world increases the power in hands of the user. They can choose to use it or not. Each new piece of software, irregardless of its license, empowers the user and cannot, by itself, shackle the individual and result in the diminshment of personal freedom.
Well said. The software which you define here fits the Perl Artistic License, any code can be modified and combined in new ways relatively easily. However, there may be subtle hidden costs due to specific interactions of the license conditions and the wider environment. Slow erosion of rights (which are another great area of debate) may prove more corrosive and even lead to catastrophic failure. Suppose a license said you could only run software on platform x, then if x disappears you are stuffed. The tendency towards a software monoculture raises the risk profile which is not directly observable, yet ultimately creates a potential failure. I'm sure lawyers must love designing licenses because the devil is always in the details.
If we look at the Linux kernel as an example I would assert that the GPL has actually reduced freedom. As Red Hat and others strive for multi-billion dollar capitalization on the world market, the authors of code are relegated to sidelines.
I would agree that given the current economic system, distributors are favored over creators. In fact, I've questioned the ability of OpenSource to scale up to really large projects, and one reason is that small groups can retain ownership of the code more effectively (e.g. Apache). As for your assertion of reducing freedom, the GPL does shift the balance of power away from the individual contributor to the user but with the viral effect of (forced?) conversion of the user to be a contributor. While the individual loses some rights (e.g. absolute control of distribution), some reciprocal rights are gained from feedback as well as the property that the license would still be valid for the nth user as for the first. This is a rather imporatant side-effect as down-stream users cannot exclude marginal users such as alternate platforms. While facists governments like Nazi Germany wants to exclude "outcasts" like gypsies, jews, homosexuals from mainstream, a democractic system attempts to be inclusive. Rules, whether embodied in laws or licenses tries to achieve certain social effects and I suspect RMS thought very carefully about the GPL design to fit the circumstances as he saw them. You may disagree with the intent but then you've also got the choice of following specific project leaders, whether Linux GPL, *BSD or whatever based on their licensing variants.
Their code is not longer under their control, they have abdicated their own freedom, and it has been usurped by others. Some have found patronage and thus the ability to earn an hourly wage and the promise of stock options. Explain to me how this is the embodiment of freedom?
As compared to the alternative of giving all rights to your thoughts to a corporation? Freedom is a relative concept, back in the Middle Ages serfs didn't even own their bodies. It is the hallmark of a civilisation that as we (supposedly) grow more enlightened, more rights are transferred to the individual. My bet is that the software ecosystem will oscillate between open/closed until an equilibrium is reached. Currently the momentum is with OpenSource but if RedHat or any other group abuses the outcome, the pendulum will swing the other way. New models of software creation/distribution will open up as a result creating more opportunities which we can't even imagine at the moment. If you take a look at say the evolution of companies, you see different structures according to whether it is a family firm (typically hierarchical control), corporations (separation between goverance (directors), operations (executive) and ownership (shareholders)), and modern multinational corporations with loose coalition of subsidaries held by a common subculture (e.g. Disney). As OpenSource matures, new and more sophisticated organisational structures will evolve which will better reflect the balance between all the stakeholders but it is still early days to say what shape it will take.
Freedom should never be a zero-sum game. The GPL and the Free Software movement is about empowering users at the expense of programmers. It is no better that the most restrictive of comercial licenses.
I agree that on the spectrum between completely open and complete closed, FSF and commercial end-user-licenses probably lie on the extremes with very little degrees of movement. However, the growing diversity of the OpenSource licenses like *BSD, Mozilla, Apache, etc allows people to choose various tradeoffs to suit various social/economic objectives. Being the pragmatic (balance between optimism of human nature and cynicism of individuals) type, I would say choose whatever makes you happy. Dogma shouldn't be the reason why people blindly choose one license over another and a little bit of thinking about what you wish to achieve with releasing source will probably go a long way. It still comes down to what relative freedoms (frankly pretty open-ended list) are being negotiated and only time will tell as to what is the most efficient balance between coders, distributors and users. However, the general philosophy of releasing source code does have the advantage of preserving the seed corn for the next generation of hackers/programmers and that, in itself, is a worthy endeavour.
LL
Where do I download the kernel code to compile for my Alpha? How about my PowerPC? My Intel box? So much for "does everything better today."
--
When you quote someone, be sure to enclose the quoted text within "'s and include the source you were quoting from. I was distressed to find this famous free beer, free speech text being quoted such without proper citations and credit.
Thank you.
--
Yes, Linux would survive, and so would NetBSD, FreeBSD, etc. Solaris is a great OS on SPARC systems, and if it were free it would reduce the cost of SPARC boxes with their best OS a bit (Linux is not the best OS on SPARC), but Solaris on x86 is pretty bad. My friends from Sun agree, and they probably ought to know...
Linux and the free BSD variants have taken pains to specifically to address the quirks of running a UNIX variant on lower-end hardware, and Solaris has not. Solaris is perfect for people running 64bit SPARC architectures, and there's not much guesswork needed as to why...
As at least one person has already pointed out, Solaris uses too much AT&T SysV code to be made completely open source by Sun, but they could give it away to end users for free as a closed source OS without violating their AT&T license. However, the user community would still be dependent upon Sun to support their hardware, and Sun has shown a remarkable lack of interest in making OSes for non-SPARC hardware...
o/~ we are pissed, we are pissed, we have to resist... o/~ - ec8or
I just find it amusing that I had to email SPARC International in order to obtain that piece of information. Nowhere on Sun's nor SPARC's site have I seen any mention as to what that acronym stood for. Most sites make those kinds of things rather clear. Otherwise, there would be little point to having an acronym if no one knew what it meant, eh?
As a personal amusement, you may want to look up "SPARC" on Google. SPARC International aren't the only ones who use that acronym.. the other ones are kind of funny.. ;)
~ Kish
(I'm not saying that it should or shouldn't be 'GNU/Linux' in other contexts, tho :))
- doctea
Type `man mount_ufs` for more info.
UFS logging kicks ass. No more fsck. Accidentally trip over the power cable? No problem.
Linux - I have Red Hat 6 on a server. Within two days of installing it it crashed. The file system was so screwed up it wouldn't boot again. After two days of smacking my head against a wall, I was forced to reinstall.
The ext2 filesystem is just the tip of the iceberg of Linux's problems. The kernel might scale to a whopty-do 4 processors, but the TCP/IP stack is single threaded and therefore doesn't scale beyond one processor. This makes Linux SMP useless on servers.
I've been wondering, is there any way to recover an X session if the server crashes? Perhaps suspend all the programs untill X can be restarted?
Solaris *is already* pretty much free! Developers can get a CD of the x86 version for $10 from sun.com. Most Linux users installed from distros that cost much more than $10! The world needs both Linux and Solaris. Mindcraft showed that NT sp5 beats Linux on systems of more than 2 chips. But if you need a bigger box than 2 chips, Solaris slaughters NT. Solaris scalability comes at a price - - fine grained locking of kernel data structures, mutexes everywhere. Consequently, Solaris *is* slower on single chip systems. The smug moniker "Slowlaris" is applied by those who think that fully threaded, fine-grained locking can be achieved without executing any locking code. Linux is faster on single chips systems because it uses a global kernel lock. And its TCP is not fully threaded. Linux and Solaris both result from careful judgement and brilliant implementation applied to two different design points. They both have a few warts, but they are nonetheless complimentary. Porting code between them is a snap, and if you can admin one, the other is easy. I'm amused to see vendors hawking 4 processor Linux systems. If you really have a load big enough for 4 cpus, you should be running Solaris x86. The only exception is workloads that have few system calls, have little or no network component, and don't stress IO. Don't believe me - - listen to what Linus said at Fermi Lab this spring: http://ssadler.phy.bnl.gov/adler/Torvalds/fnal.htm l. Have a look at the Solaris x86 benchmarks that a Sun performance guru has privately put up at http://fishbutt.fiver.net (and pigberty.fiver.net). Too bad Microsoft and Mindcraft didn't include Solaris x86! All of that said, I have just changed several of my single-chip systems to Linux. Sun has aimed its Solaris design and marketing at SERVERS. The message is loud and clear. It is a pain in the neck to install a boatload of development tools on Solaris x86. I love spinning a Linux CD onto a new disk and having a complete development system up in 40 minutes. Solaris-on-Intel has relatively weak driver support. They release only multi-threaded bulletproof drivers for server-oriented hardware. It takes more programming and debugging time to produce threaded drivers, but it is the only way to get massive throughput. Sun disdains EIDE (the Linux IDE drivers are better), since any real server runs SCSI. Sun dropped laptop support from Solaris altogether, leaving travellers to choose between Windows and Linux. Hardware vendors produce Windows drivers at their own expense and give them to Microsoft. Few of these same vendors write Solaris drivers - - Sun has to write them internally. This is a very big reason why the OS monopoly is self-sustaining. Sun cannot afford to develop top quality drivers for every piece of hardware on the market, and they are unwilling to damage their reputation by distributing crappy ones. This situation is exactly where Linux fits in. The fact that Linux drivers do not have to be threaded makes them easier to write. Lots of 'em end up getting written. And for 2 chip boxes, they are perfectly adequate. Sun is also much more constrained by backwards compatibility than Linux. Although Sun makes a lot of transparent innovations in the guts of the kernel, the existing APIs must remain stable. Linux APIs can evolve much faster - - and there both good and bad consequences to that flexibility. I don't want Linux to "evolve" into a Solaris x86 competitor. Such an evolution would invariably slow single and dual chip system call speed, and reduce driver availability. Some of the creative open source developers would drop out if they had to quadruple their debugging efforts to deal with kernel threads. I'd rather have a fast running, fast-evolving Linux. Personally, I'm really glad to have both Linux and Solaris.
Randy
Despite the many good features that Solaris has it lacks in one: hardware. Sun, a commerical company would have to create thousands of drives for equipment that is not even made anymore, or made in non-US countries. Would the Linux community migrate the code? Unlikely; it would be easier to raid the 'Solaris Free Code' for advanced features. Also who wants to do the PowerPC and Alpha ports. Solaris doesn't have a chance of replacing Linux. Solaris is a good OS to emulate. Let's leave it there.
The author of this low substance flamebait article never does define what he means by free. Does he mean if Solaris was free in price (like Internet Explorer) or an actual free software license like the GPL or BSD license.
If Solaris was released under a free software license, that *might* give Linux some serious competition, but I don't think it would kill it completely.
If Solaris was just free of charge.... That wouldn't make a lick of difference. Solaris would get some of the media attention that Linux is currently basking in, but who cares? The people who spend their time actually *contributing* to Linux would *still* be contributing to Linux. And that's what really matters. No matter how popular Linux is or isn't, as long as the core community remains strong Linux will survive and prosper. (The same can be said of any free software project).
I have very little interest in writing Solaris device drives without significant up-front pay. And what a lame article. No facts or discussion. Simply a one-word "no" opinion presented as fact. Most people agree that Scott isn't upset at the kind of market lock and low quality software thatBill Gates has produced. Scott is merely unhappythat he didn't get there first.
Linux can be just as stable as Solaris if you avoid experimental code and beta software. While Solaris seems faster than Linux on SPARC hardware, it's not a fair comparison. As far as I can tell, the speed difference is 99% due to the X server. On PC hardware, Solaris is a bit slower and is much less memory efficient.
There are a lot of other things I don't like about Solaris. First are the GUI administration tools, which *still* have bugs, are not robust at all, and don't deal with mixing manual and GUI administration. SuSE's YaST is much more intelligent and robust than Solaris' GUI equivalents. Second, many Solaris patches mangle important config files. Third, I don't get a build environment & compilers with Solaris, and the Workshop products are seriously expensive. Fourth, I don't like the fact that Solaris pushes that NIS+ abortion, although thankfully they still include the NIS tools for compatibility.
> I went to go look up what SPARC stood for
I've found whats.com to be a tremendous resource for looling up IT-related TLA's.
Also, if you've got the dictd(8) running and the foldoc dictionary installed, you can just say "dict sparc" which is even faster than web lookups.
-- Don't Tase me, bro!
Not SunOS, but it predated Solaris.
Linux also runs on IBM's 64bit PowerPC chip called Power3.
UltraPenguin was admittedly a non-polished release. I have seen RedHat 6 running nicely on some Sparc2 and 10 machines. Also, I remember an old issue of SunExpert where they loaded an old Sparc with RedHat 4.x and tested it. No complaints about stability from them. Sounds like it could be your kung fu that is not up to par ace.
Solaris can do everything
Linux can do, but better."
Why can't I get solaris to run w. sound and networking on my laptop (no drivers) but Linux works fine????
Overal I would say linux driver support is far better than Solaris x86. And if the os doesn't work with my hardware, I don't give a dang about any other features it may have.....
I don't rightly know if sun is sitll doing this, but lat August I ordered Solaris 2.6 media for Intel for FREE. That's right, FREE I only paid like $10.95 for shipping. Sp why didn't solaris compete more on that level. I think we have to look at a couple of things. On the intel platform, linux supports a wider range of devices, especially newer video cards. (This is where my hangup was). To get the best performance out of Solaris it really need be run on a Sparc machine, and the facts remain that Sun hardware is not cheap. Now, it's not as expensive as it used to be, but it still ain't cheep. A Low-end sun machihen with a relatively small hard drive will still run you up to and over two-thousand dollars. My point being: it's a hardware cost issue. I would love to be running Solaris on a scalable sparc machine, but i can't afford it. I can however afford to piece together an intel machine and slap linux on there. This is where Linux had a hand up on sun.
Their CSH implemented "which" as an independent shell-script. God help you if you used "which" in your .cshrc. This was characteristic of their other tools as well. Minimal implementations were the norm. For example, there was a bug in tar where it would not handle paths/filenames longer than N characters.
It did not come with a C/C++ compiler or recent version of EMACS.
My first several weeks on Solaris were spent downloading, compiling, and installing FSF (GNU) tools. This becomes more of a challenge when one needs to bootstrap a C compiler, and one lacks both gzip and a working version of tar.
The bug / patch listings exceeded the mass of a small planetoid. But you couldn't access them without paying out lots of money. The source was always inaccessible.
Linux, in contrast, uses FSF (GNU) software by default. It is heavily over-featured. (Which is a good thing!) The source is always right there for me to play with. Bugs and patches are freely available across the web. Information, help, and support are freely available across netnews.
The difference is night and day.
I thought we were talking about Solaris taking over NT's market. NT's market is corporate America's servers at the departmental level (mostly) running mostly on Intel with some Alpha, PPC, and MIPS platforms thrown in. My argument makes perfect sense if you stop long enough to think about it. Solaris is an enterprise OS running on mostly SPARC. For it to take over NTs market we would not only have to stop placing NT/Intel systems into production but we would also need to either do away with Intel or beef up Solaris support on this platform. Then we would need to get buy-in from top executives to place free (ie not supported by formal contracts and policies) Solaris boxes into production. NOT LIKELY AT ALL!
64-bit is not better than 32-bit unless you need VERY large memory configurations. Most systems today require 128MB to 512MB of RAM. This will change someday but today isn't a big deal. When is the last time you had 4GB of RAM in your server and needed to upgrade it?
What if there would be no speed limits...
...
What if
You should stop eating so much American food...
I think that if every OS went open-source/free, there would be a serious fragmentation/specialization thing happening. If Red Hat (for example) could grab the best technology from Solaris, Irix, Windows (there could be some...), BSD, etc. but so could everyone else, how would anyone differentiate their OS/distro. from all the others? By customizing, niche-finding, and focusing. Basically the same way that all the current Linux distros are competing right now.
I mean, is there really a huge difference between Slackware 4 and Red Hat 6? sure there are, but they are minor things, and after six months of being administrated by the same guy they'd have many less differences. Kinda like the way I can never remember which Slack I put on which box. Slackware '95, Slackware 3.2, Slackware 3.6 by now I can't tell. they're library-homogenous, all of the differences in them are due to how they are being used, not what they had loaded on them the first time.
I was using Solaris x86 up until a couple of months ago. I still think it is the best overall UNIX for sparc or X86 IMHO. Sadly I think that Sun is slowly getting out of the x86 market, there is less and less hardware support as time goes by. When you try to install Solaris on a new system, you are unlikely to have hardware support for it. Linux though is very likely to support your system. I guess I can see their position, they would have to pump massive amounts of money into driver support, in order to compete with Linux. They proabably can't affortd to do this as long term they can't compete with a free OS. In the end I think *we* suffer for not having the choice of a well supported Solaris operating system for our x86 systems.
Why not? It's not a matter of software at all. It's a matter of hardware.
First, my basic assumption: People don't really care which computer system they run so long as it gets the job done. If it works well enough they will decide by price. Sun beat Apollo and DEC not by having better software (even today's Solaris is a pale shadow of Domain in all sorts of ways) but by selling fast machines cheap. SunOS was bare-bones to say the least. But Sun sold their Sun3 boxes at prices the other guys couldn't match, and then they slam-dunked them with the SPARCstation, providing three times the performance at the same price.
The "fast machines cheap" theme runs decades long in the computer world. Remember: DEC beat IBM not by having better stuff but by selling it for less.
We're seeing it happen again. The Intel and the PC manufacturers are building boxes using mainstream hardware that are the equal of some pretty expensive hardware just a couple of years back. Sure, Sun's stuff got faster too but that's not the point: the point is that people who couldn't have dealt with a PC before can now use them to get their job done. So why pay more?
PCs are cheap and up to all but the toughest tasks -- and they're getting faster and more reliable and even cheaper all the time. Lots of people, like myself, who were exclusive SPARC users for years now use PCs because they provide much better bang for the buck. So long as the PC is fast enough to get the job done it doesn't much matter that the SPARC has the performance edge.
In the not-so-distant future the SPARC will become untenable for Sun; the R&D costs will continue to climb while the number of chips they can amortize the cost over will drop due to increasing penetration by Intel-based systems. Sun will get pushed ever upward towards the tip of the pyramid of users, those few who buy the fastest machines, and will have to charge more and more for those machines just to break even.
This theme is familiar too: Sun did it to the supercomputer companies. Thinking Machines? Cray? Gone. All of the specialized supercomputer companies are gone, their markets dwindled to the point where the business was untenable.
I think we can take as a given that whatever wins in the workstation/server space will win on Intel-based hardware. It has such a huge user base that they have the most R&D resources and can spread it amongst the most user. Now the question is: is Solaris good enough on Intel hardware to beat Linux or other contenders?
Today that answer is emphatically "no". Solaris scales better and performs pretty well but it just doesn't support that much hardware. Linux runs on everything while Solaris is, well, picky. You really want top-grade stuff to run Solaris. Linux runs on that piece of junk clone 486 box with the weird CD-ROM. Or any clone box you happen to find in the pages of Computer Shopper.
What that means is that the market for Linux is way, way larger than that for Solaris. Sun could fix that, but it'll take years and cost a fortune. Linux is getting that support for free. And even if Sun makes the investment they can't beat Linux on price.
I've long wondered why Sun keeps bashing on Microsoft. It must just be for the PR. You see, Microsoft is not Sun's problem. Intel is Sun's problem. Linux just makes that problem worse.
So: All else being equal, Linux would probably win because it's faster on common hardware and supports more (read: cheaper) hardware and Sun can't really afford to make Solaris competitive.
But all else is not equal. You see, Sun doesn't make their money on software. Never did; if you needed any proof of that the Solar System fiasco really removed all doubt. Sun makes their money on hardware and they're in trouble because PC hardware is decimating their sales at the low-end and rapidly encroaching on midrange. Over the next few years Intel-based hardware will scale well up into Sun's performance spectrum and will do it at a price Sun cannot afford to match.
Sun can't afford to give away a version of Solaris that might accelerate that. Hell, they can't even afford to SELL a version of Solaris that might accelerate that. Solaris/x86 was supposed to be a hole card if they had to jump off of SPARC. But Linux blindsided them. Now all their competitors have a high-quality UNIX too, and they don't even have to pay anyone else for the right to sell it.
So: Sun can't win this. They can't compete in the PC space against companies that are accustomed to razor-thin margins. They can't give away any kind of seriously supported Solaris on the PC because it'll just chop up their market even faster. And the PC is encroaching, fast. At some point they simply won't be able to afford to do Solaris development anymore, free or otherwise.
Lots of people are claiming that open source will rule the world because it's open. No, that's not it at all. Open source will rule because it's CHEAP. As it turns out "open" and "cheap" are interrelated in this case, but the important point is that the hardware companies don't have to pay a software tax.
For all practical purposes Microsoft is successful because they allow vendors to outsource the OS development, spreading R&D costs out over many vendors. That was true of UNIX, too, once upon a time. Well, Linux is the mother of all outsourcing operations and that will make it a smash hit. It is not only low-cost, it's zero-cost.
Linux gives the PC manufacturers -- particularly Compaq and Dell -- the possibility of competing head-to-head with Sun on functionality but without any of the software R&D costs that Sun has to bear with Solaris. With super-low software costs and the ability to undercut Sun seriously on hardware these PC vendors are going to beat Sun silly.
Some may argue that scalability problems will keep Linux out of the game indefinitely. I don't think so; it'll slow it down in the near term, but not much. Linux' scalability is improving at an unbelievable pace. It did in the last two years what it took Sun five to do with Solaris, and that was without significant vendor support. Linux will likely scale as well as Solaris inside of two years.
And that's why Solaris can't possibly beat Linux. Not now, anyway, and it probably never could have.
But all of this is just a specific case of a more important point that you should keep in mind whenever you're thinking of Linux-versus-whatever. Linux has effectively devalued server OS software to the point where it's not worth spending a lot of money on anymore. That is great for the consumer but it's bad for proprietary server OS vendors. It's certainly going to dent Microsoft's plans, but it's really going to hurt Novell. And you'd have to be blind to miss the fact that it's going to devalue it elsewhere too; the desktop PC is probably immune, but only because it's so late in its life and there's a lot of momentum.
Food for thought.
jim frost
jimf@frostbytes.com
jim frost
jimf@frostbytes.com
SPARC laptop = about $14,000
Intel w/linux + a car to drive around = about $14,000
MoatBuilder
Solaris is the reason Linux exists. When Sun abandoned the devotees of SunOS, Torvalds showed up to lead them away. Who would go back?
August 1991 0.01 Linux (first release, not bootable)
December 1993 0.99pl14 Linux (usable)
December 1993 FreeBSD 1.0 (patches to encumbered "Net/2" 4.3BSDLite)
November 1994 FreeBSD 2.0 First truly open source
(no legal challenges) version
This according to http://www.freebsd.org/handbook/histor y.html
and http://www.redhat.com/mirrors/L DP/LDP/gs/node3.html
So, no, an open source version of BSD was being developed contemperaneously with Linux but not released in unemcumbered form until a little later. The fear of legal challenges probably kept some developers away in the early days, and there was certainly not even a gratis version of BSD for x86 when Linus started developing Linux.
--
"L'IT c'est moi!"
Uhh, about a year ago, we tried implimenting NT server and MS Exchange Server for mail. Software cost was 1100, I think, not including hardware.
Of course, this is not to mention the 3 new machines we had to come up with to allow for integration into a novell netware environment, and since we're not small but not big, we had more than one, uhh, I completely forgot the word, damnit, section (token ring, fast [100mps] ethernet, and regular [10mps] ethernet).
For the record, we've gone to groupwise, but I think it sucks, constant crashes, incompatablitity with certain other products we need.
Dan
"Yes, they do quality work. But Sun doesn't do anything that Sun is not the main beneficiary of" Doesn't that describe just about what every company does? Companies are formed to make money, not make people happy or give major inside info away for free.
It takes forever to boot up, but compiles were lightning quick. Other than adding some GNU tools I liked it. Now to see if vmount will compile so I can mount my ntfs partition.
Lets face it. Sun charges about $50 for shipping an media (3 cd & 1 disk and documentation) for a package Solaris 7. That's wat I call free. I run it myself on a Pentium Pro 200Mhz and 64Mb. It's slower that linux on this machien but it runs runs runs....
on my IPC and SS2 ftp'ing a file across my lan would make the scsi bus reset for 15 seconds. There was the mmu slowdown bug that rendered the machine useless after about 1 day. Now I use OpenBSD and its rock solid. Compiles are also faster. Not a single crash or lock up in 6 months. Linux has some catching up to do.
Even if Solaris were totally free (speech as well as beer) it still would not supplant Linux.
The reason? Has *BSD died because of Linux? Nope. Despite all the hype behind Linux, there are people out there that still use NetBSD, OpenBSD, and FreeBSD.
Each UNIX has a different niche to fill. If Solaris were made free, that still wouldn't change the fact that it runs best on huge servers (I wonder how well it would work on those rumored 8-processor Athalon systems?). The people who use Linux would still use Linux, and the same thing for the other BSDs. Solaris might steal some market share from the NT crowd, but I don't see too much change there either.
Solaris is geared for serious uses (business, scientific computing) where the cost of the software is nothing compared to the cost of the hardware you need to make it run effectively. Therefore, by default it's not going to be much use for the average Joe. That's where Linux comes in.
In fact, I think Solaris being made free would be more dangerous for the BSDs than for Linux. Both can be used pretty effectively as web servers.
Glückwünsche, haben Sie Slashdot ermordet, indem Sie zum korporativen Druck beugten und Subskriptionen einlei
RAID is hardly a cost-saving technology. That's just one expensive oversized server (and single point of failure) in place of the cluster you should have set up.
Maybe it's because they want you to buy their books. ;-) I bought several books from the SPARC International bookstore, and each one expands the SPARC acronym inside its covers. Those books are very good technical reading, too, if you're into computer architecture, compiler design, assembly programming, or the history of Sun's products. In fact, you can now even download the RTL diagrams for the microSPARC IIep processor from Sun's Web site (http://www.sun.com/microelectronics) along with the SPARC Architecture Manual, Version 8 in PDF format. It's good "geek food"; enjoy!
Didn't think so. >Solaris can do everything Linux can do, but better rings just a *tad* hollow.
If Solaris were free, lack of PPC support from Sun would only be a temporary nuisance.
if solaris had been free all along, I don't know. But right now I would take linux over solaris, especially for an x86 system.
SGI apparently is already pushing some IRIX related components into Linux, primarily xfs and smp. I dont think SGI wants to support both IRIX and Linux long term. It seems they intend to develop the area of Linux where IRIX is better so that Irix is redundent and can go away.
Good looking fonts. Ideally, those nice expensive postscript fonts that commercial unices have.
I HATE the way XFree86 fonts look - it's ugly. It hurts my eyes. It just doesn't look right. In fact, I dual boot BeOS and Linux, and I am running BeOS 90% of the time. The main reason is fonts. PLEASE somebody do something to make X look decent.
--
grappler
Vidi, Vici, Veni
Solaris couldn't give me any more than 640x400 and greyscale, whereas Linux was fine on the no-name rented low-end PC which was all I could get due to slow precurement at my work - just a driver issue I suppose.
Before testing the video and screen Solaris' tells you that if it fails "press the re-boot button" (or something to that effect). Linux lets you try again.
Linux installs much more quickly than Solaris.
Solaris comes with no development environment - though you can download most of the GNU stuff prebuilt from http://sunfreeware.com/ .
Solaris is much slower: the disk thrashes like mad!
Rebuilt our compiler: okay, both platforms.
Compiled some stuff: on Solaris the debugging info wasn't there! Too much work to fix it since it works fine on Linux.
Result: goodbye Solaris, hello Linux.
I'm baffled by the timing of this article. Sun is currently cleaning up the code of Solaris to make it community licensed. Sun used a lot of 3rd party code e.g. X server which they cannot disclose. There are others like the nexus layer that Sun wants to protect, otherwise imps like Compaq and IBM can just copy. Please remember that Solaris is the crown jewel of Sun software. Sun has spent so many years refining the SMP model in Solaris to make it scale. It is this that makes Solaris the choice for the enterprise. You think they will give away all the secrets to competition? To Sun, IBM is the prime enemy. All these M$ and Linux talks are non-issues. IBM is the one to beat. If you talk to any Sun sales, and mention the word IBM, they turn very aggressive in their pricing. And yes, IBM is the biggest pusher for Java, but remember, you must be close to your enemy to beat him, same here.
Software needs strong adaptability to survive in the long term (like any other living being heh). OSS is the best way to achieve this. So if Solaris were free AND OSS, it would probably become a serious contender, yes. A bunch of OSS-developers would switch camps. Linux development hence would slow down initially, probably causing distro-fragmentation to lessen thru 'mergers' (is this a good thing?) and Linux would eventually still 'catch up' with Solaris. Focus would also be more on embedded Linux. Anyway, by then there's probably a whole new paradigm at play.
IM(PNS)HO, many of the linux folk truly like to fiddle with their kernels and modules and such. So if for the *linux community* linux wouldn't die, but perhaps for the business types, they'd embrace solaris more readily, since there's someone to blame if it goes bad. ;p The additional question would be, "what if solaris went open-source", in which case there would most likely be a division. Solaris might be rather fun to play with for a while for some of the real linux community.
#include"disclaimer.h"
And, perhaps more interesting yet, would Sun survive if Java was free?
Leaving aside the undeniable fact that Linux's performance is at the very least comparable to that of commercial Unixen (Solaris included) it has two features that make vastly more attractive than Solaris, even if Solaris were also free: 1) It's source code-available under the GPL. 2) It's not controlled by a big corporation. Were Solaris to meet these two conditions -- well, it would be Linux.
Leaving aside the undeniable fact that Linux's performance is at the very least comparable to that of commercial Unixen (Solaris included) it has two features that make vastly more attractive than Solaris, even if Solaris were also free:
1) It's source code-available under the GPL.
2) It's not controlled by a big corporation.
Were Solaris to meet these two conditions -- well, it would be Linux.
'Nuff said.
Thanks for the very well written and logical reply.
/. is a bit skewed, but I cannot tell if my software would find a home here. My current belief is that it would not as it would not be open sourced. It would also compete obliquely with two high profile GPLed OSS projects. I'm still working to understand the Linux community and project how it will evolve on the desktop.
I do have infinite respect for Stallman's curiousity and purity of purpose, even though I do not share his philosophy on software.
Today, the GPL dogma rules the day. As users clamor for this license, it is the corporations that are buckling under the pressure and releasing their code under the GPL. It is innevitable that the GPL license that gave so many a ready-made product to form a business around will be used to undercut them in the future. When this happens, the R&D at these companies will no longer produce GPL software.
I read a comment this week where a poster talked about his "freedom platform." This kind of fundamentalist perspective on software was that of rabid furvor, and it was a bit shocking.
I am an application writer and have been looking at Linux as another platform to support. Perhaps the readership on
The Linux community is a many headed complex beast. This has resulted in a torrent of immense creativity used to build a system from nothing, but I fear that this will lead to stagnation and only incremental improvements of the current distros.
Sun would never release the source to Solaris on those conditions though, so it's a moot question.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
BMW's will do everything a swamp bug will do except break down when you really need it the most. If you think otherwise than you are just stupid
Made me chuckle
This is a rather timely article for me. At work We have been using Suns since the Sun 3/xxx days, and Vaxen running BSD before that. We however, never jumped to Solaris. In the mean-time all of our old SPARCstations have been slowly been replaced by Linux boxen. Anyway, I just recently acquired a new Sun Ultra w/ Solaris 7. Right out of the box Solaris 7 is useless. Its not a trivial task to download and install all the various tools that I depend on. All of which come straight out of the box with RH. Maybe if Solaris were truely free, someone would have created a distribution that was worth a damn. Instead, not only has Sun not improved the number and quality of the tools delivered with Solaris, they have reduced them since SunOS (What kind of UNIX distribution comes without a C compiler?).
Then all those things Solaris does that Linux doesn't would quickly be assimilated into Linux and Solaris would melt away.
There would be nothing to stop Solaris from being maintained, marketed and developed independently, but.. why? For the Enterprise users, there would likely be some benefit, but at the end of the day both Solaris and Linux are just UNIX with a different name.
Linux has already won the battle, in that it has come to be a competitor to practically every major OS in the world without any appreciable commercial backing (excepting distro companies like RH) at all. I could get Solaris for free, noncommercial use, but i don't really want it, theres no community (that i know of) around it.
Even were Solaris to be released free like beer or speech, this would most likely only accelerate the adoption of Linux as the 'standard' free OS.
Anyway, Solaris has no cool penguin mascot, so whats the attraction?
I gots ta ding a ding dang my dang a long ling long
I think linux would survive perfectly well.
/poorly/.
/still/ uses classed network addressing (did they fix this in version 7?). Other aspects of then networking side are also still ancient. (including slow)
/seen/ how many file system types Linux supports??
THe comment that 'solaris can do everything linux can do, only better' is complete rubbish. There are so many things that solaris does so
For example.
1. Solaris is slower than linux. We have done tests here to show that linux is faster by at least a factor of two compared to solaris-x86, in things such as forking processes, network activity, disk activity. A friend of mine has made similar comparisons with linux and soalris on a sparc.
2. Solaris' utilities are poor. Have you ever tried running any of the pkgtool utilites? they're horrible... RPM, for example, is much better. (Probably the same for dpkg as well)
3. Solairs (at least 2.6)
4. Solaris is less flexible than linux. For example, have you
5. Solaris' organisation of boot structures and startup scripts is exceptionally complicated. Linux is easy enough to change things around and do things the way you want, if you needed to.
6. Solaris' collection of utilits (mail,dns,etc) is very basic. This, of course, could be solved just by repackaging all the GNU utilities for solaris. (Technically, the GNU programs arent really part of linux either)
A RAID device, a REAL RAID device is just another address on a SCSI bus. There's no real rocket science to that. Even a 10 year old Mac can manage such a thing.
This is hardly a trump card in Solaris' favor.
There really anything to 'support' with such a thing.
Is Solaris was free (as in a GPL or BSD license), Linux would certainly survive. Solaris and Linux both have their strengths and weaknesses. However, there are several parts of Solaris, such as the IP Stack and some SMP code that would quickly be folded into linux. It would likely be a lot easier/more fun to fold bits of Solaris into the Linux source tree than the other way around, even though neither is horrifically bad.
My home network contains a - Sparc Station LX (2GB 5400 SCSI-II drive, 72MB RAM) running RH 5.2 - SS 10MP 712 (4GB SCSI-II over 3 drives, 128MB), running OpenStep 4.2 (uniproc), Solaris 2.6, RH 5.2 - Old NeXT Cube (2GB HP SCSI -II, 64MB), OpenStep 4.2 - AMD K6-400 PeeCee (128 MB, 10GB 7200 IDE, SCSI-III PCI bus) running 98 for games, RH 6.0. So Solaris x86 due to Voodoo 3 as primary framebuffer Sol7 is absolutely unusable even under OpenWin on the LX. Removing CDE and using WindowMaker still render it vile. However, RH 5.2 is a very usable system on the same HW. Ditto with the SS10. Yes, Solaris is fine on this box, but Linux radically increases perf. Acknowledged that the Solaris install is totally stock and untuned. But, again, the Linux SMP is OK, and overall usability is double (measured totally unscientifically). To be remotely considered in the same breath as Linux as a desktop, Solaris really needs to be stripped, and CDE is bloatware in extremis. Yes, I would base my enterprise apps on Solaris over Linux to be sure, but they are apples and oranges. From a free (no-cost) perspective, Linux still provides tangible performance gains on older sun4m platforms. And it works pretty well on Ultra 5/10, too. FWIW, I so Solaris admin for a living, and I won't mention what my ID badge may or may not say. This is purely a personal post, and was never intended to reflect what any hypothetical employer may or may not represent. Please, Mr. ID 3, don't persecute me. ;-D NEXTSTEP and NetInfo rule, BTW! :-p
My home network contains a
;-D
:-p
- Sparc Station LX (2GB 5400 SCSI-II drive, 72MB RAM) running RH 5.2
- SS 10MP 712 (4GB SCSI-II over 3 drives, 128MB), running OpenStep 4.2 (uniproc), Solaris 2.6, RH 5.2
- Old NeXT Cube (2GB HP SCSI -II, 64MB), OpenStep 4.2
- AMD K6-400 PeeCee (128 MB, 10GB 7200 IDE, SCSI-III PCI bus) running 98 for games, RH 6.0. So Solaris x86 due to Voodoo 3 as primary framebuffer
Sol7 is absolutely unusable even under OpenWin on the LX. Removing CDE and using WindowMaker still render it vile. However, RH 5.2 is a very usable system on the same HW.
Ditto with the SS10. Yes, Solaris is fine on this box, but Linux radically increases perf. Acknowledged that the Solaris install is totally stock and untuned. But, again, the Linux SMP is OK, and overall usability is double (measured totally unscientifically).
To be remotely considered in the same breath as Linux as a desktop, Solaris really needs to be stripped, and CDE is bloatware in extremis. Yes, I would base my enterprise apps on Solaris over Linux to be sure, but they are apples and oranges. From a free (no-cost) perspective, Linux still provides tangible performance gains on older sun4m platforms. And it works pretty well on Ultra 5/10, too.
FWIW, I so Solaris admin for a living, and I won't mention what my ID badge may or may not say. This is purely a personal post, and was never intended to reflect what any hypothetical employer may or may not represent. Please, Mr. ID 3, don't persecute me.
NEXTSTEP and NetInfo rule, BTW!
Or how about, "Now that Windows is so stable, can Linux survive?" Or the old classic, "Have you stopped beating your wife?" This guy is supposed to have been in the computer industry for 12 years, yet he seems to be incapable of posing a simple question in a logically valid form. Anyway, what's the word "survive" doing in the same sentence with an OS that's been growing like yeast these past few years?
Other posts have already provided excellent technical rebuttals. I'd just like to point out some of the absurdities in this pathetic piece...
"I myself joined the Linux bandwagon in 1997." And what HAVE you been doing on the bandwagon since then? Sleeping like a baby? I don't believe this guy has ever used Linux for any serious work. "Solaris can do everything Linux can do, but better". Indeed. If you define "better" as "slower and with more pain to the poor SOB saddled with administering the pig", that would be a lot closer to the truth. Sure, there are some specific, mostly high-end, areas where Linux can't touch Solaris (yet!). But since when has that been "everything?" There's as much truth to this claim as "NT a better Unix than Unix"...
"If you look at what the Linux community is doing now, it has already been done by Sun." Really? Well if the geniuses at Sun had bothered to cover this ground properly in the first place, NT would be a real corpse today, instead of just smelling, tasing and feeling like one [joke courtesy of fortune(1)].
Some time ago, I had the bad luck to administer Solaris on a few SPARC boxes at a small research institution (astronomers). It was a pretty bleak three years. Quite fortunately, some burglars stole the SPARC 10, just as the other boxes became hopelessly obsolete. It was the best thing that ever happened to my career. I moved all the network services to Linux, and we have never looked back. Suddenly, I was a fraction-time admin, rather than a mostly full-time one, and I could finally write that PhD thesis I'd been putting off. If they hadn't stolen that SPARC, I'd still be locked in an eternal struggle with Slowaris instead of doing science.
From my involvement with Linux (since the days of 1.0.x) and commercial Unixen (besides Solaris, I have risked prolonged exposure to AIX, HP-UX, and SCO), I have this image in my head of various Unixen as dinosaurs. They're still big, strong and deadly. They also happen to be scaly, ugly (SCO's the ugliest of all!), clumsy, and totally unable to adapt. And there's this bunch of small, quick mammals (mammalian penguins?) scrambling around underfoot, and they seem to be beating the ugly idiots to all the choicy bits of food. And at the rate the penguings have been evolving lately, the dinosaurs may find themselves mounted at the Smithsonian a lot sooner than they ever expected.
In my other job (nobody makes a living doing science in Russia these days. There's always a second job), I've been doing some serious software development, mostly Air Traffic Control applications. We started with Russian airports, and have recently moved out to Europe. Initially we decided to gamble on Linux. And in the 1.0.x days, it was quite a gamble. ATC meant _very serious_ high-availability. So we set up dual boxes (one as hot-standby), and did the fallback/fallover stuff in the application software. (It worked beautifully. Somewhere out in Siberia, one of our systems is still cheerfully running 1.2.13. It's still the most stable system their airport has got. And the main reason they could afford it in the first place was the "cost" of GNU and Linux.) My boss kept rumbling about "time to move our stuff to a real Unix", but I managed to keep that idea sidetracked until it sort of died on its own somewhere around the time of the Oracle/Informix announcements. During our most recent installation this summer, I had great fun working side by side with some guys from Sweden who were delivering another system at this airport. Theirs was based on AIX. Bizzarely enough, they developed in Visual C++ under NT, then built under AIX. Talk about perversions... They were serfing on this well into the night. We were in and out of the place in two weeks, with all acceptance testing complete, which was a sort of a local record (the testing is very exhaustive and time-consuming); for all I know, the AIX/NT guys are still delivering theirs. Every time I looked over their shoulder, I could see the word "dinosaur" flash in my mind. When they looked over mine and saw DDD, they just went away, shoulders slumped. Compared to them, our Linux development environment (nothing more than a bunch of free software working _real well_ together), was like flying to crawling. But the best part was the look on one guy's face. He was the local engineer placed in charge of the Swedish system, the guy who would be responsible for running it once the developers went home. Here's how the look came about. I had a couple of hours to waste, so I slapped together a nice little "monitoring console" for the sysadmin's workstation. It was not in the customer's requirements, I just did it for fun. Nothing more complex than a few xosviews and xloads swallowed in a button bar. It turned out quite well, in that it looked cool, and was actually useful for keeping track of whether each machine (there were five) was running as intended (i.e., not running out of memory, or burning up CPU when it shouldn't). So just when I was demonstrating this new feature to our contact (the engineer assigned to maintain our system), the sysadmin for the Swedes' system wandered by. He spent some time drooling at the flashing xosview windows, and just then (perfect timing!), someone accidentally pulled the output signal cable in the back of the rack. The system initiated a voice notification (it monitors the signal), in a pleasant female voice. At this point the guy got this amazed/dreamy look on his face, then turned to our contact, and said, "You lucky bastard!"
Anyway, didn't mean to run on so. Original point was, I've done more than enough work in both environments, and there's few things that Solaris does better by any definition. It's rock solid and sophisticated, but it's also unwieldy and full of cruft. Did somebody compare it to a BMW here? BMWs are a joy to drive. This thing is more like an 18-wheeler. It won't die, but I believe that it will eventually be forced out to habitate exclusively where it really belongs: on high-end SMP SPARCcenters and the like, where Larry Ellison can generate more benchmarks to humiliate micros~1 (the mutant cockroach of my ecosystem concept). And the Whitmore piece is a sorry excuse for an article.
I'd buy that.
This is a prime example of companies not seeing the definition of "free software" If Solaris was free, it still wouldn't be free... It would probably be released in some sort of a form where you can get the binaries, but not the source. You wouldn't be able to look at the source, examine for problems, alter problem, enhance lack of features, or contribute to you fellow man the changes that should be made to a great OS to make it better. Institutions and people like OSOpinion are not seeing the point. GNU/Linux is free software because you can do with it, what you need to and still contribute your changes to the rest of the world - That is why it survives, and will continue to survive.
Solaris on Intel does not suck; it just doesn't have any applications to speak of.
You ever try Solaris? It's flithy and lacks many of the features of linux. (Debian GNU/Linux anyway)
is not free.
Solaris Highlights:
Highly scalable (64 processors)
Already runs on 64-bit SPARC chip (Intel doesn't even have one yet)
Has been proven in the industry
Has the support backing of a major company (Sun)
Runs everything Linux does (Mail, DNS, FTP etc...)
Already has many software packages ported to it.
Now has Star Office
Almost every one of these benifits apply to Microsoft's operating systems as well. Lots of software, has Microsoft Office, support by a major company, and so forth.
The real issue here is access to the source code, the security of not having to rely on another company's stability, and the rapid development that comes with the Open Source model. Cost has very little to do with it. Most companies write the cost of their operating systems off of their taxes. Even those that switch to Linux still usually pay hefty sums for a reckognized disbribution like Red Hat and, more importantly, the support that they can get with it. Not to say price isn't a factor, but it isn't the main one.
Their are a lot of benefits that Linux offers that Sun's Solaris could never supply. First is the GPL license. This protects people and corperations from being at the whim of somebody else. For example, Sun might release Solaris free today, but charge you big money for the next upgrade. Since you don't have the source code, you have the choice of tearing down your whole enterprise system and switching to something else, or paying the piper. Sun might go belly up. Strong today doesn't guarantee the future. Solaris may not have features or hardware support you need. I guess you'll have to wait for Sun to get around to it.
Of course Sun could try releasing the source code for Solaris. In that case however, Linux would simply cannabalize the good stuff and be that much better off.
A number of UNIX versions have features that Linux does not have yet but that Linux will need, such as scalability. However this doesn't mean Linux would die or even get slowed down just because these versions were made freely available. People and corperations are willing to 'reinvent the wheel' as you say with Linux because it is their wheel, not somebody elses. So like it or not, Linux will continue to evolve into whatever people want it to be and if the work of a number of programmers put into various UNIX systems get's duplicated, oh well. That's the price you pay for freedom from the whims of the companies that own those various distributions of UNIX.
Sun aren't really pushing Solaris x86 as a desktop solution anymore, and won't be keeping device drivers cutting edge ( Did they ever? ;) )
Sun will be pushing x86 as a viable server solution, with NT pushing x86 into decent server-land, decent SMP / Fault tolerant hardware etc. Solaris x86 is a perfectly good server. It is fast. You've to understand Solaris though, for one it needs far more swap than Linux, that's where most home users trying out Solaris once get bitten.
Might be a more interesting "what if".
Consider that you have no real problems about h/w support and there's a hige software base
It might even be a good strategy for Microsoft, as I understand that a large amount of their money comes from selling stuff on top of the basic OS, e.g. Office. It'd be a logical extension of their policy of putting Netscape out of the frame by giving away IE.
[Before anyone flames this, I use Linux as my main OS of choice]
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
utility until version 7 (the latest available) in the standard solaris distribution. Ive been working quite a lot on solaris systems, but when it comes to networking -> :-( ! Did you ever have to install PPP, if so you know what Im talking about. Did you ever want to configure "routing" -> :-( And what about this annoying System V Printing System, -> its awful. Some time ago, when we had troubles with crond under solaris we got a piece of code from Sun support to debug. The routines for handling the configuration File defined a configuration line with *char[100] !!!! With vixie cron, this could never happen, since its open, everybody could see it and complain, so is Linux ! so long ...
Linux ain't Sol...?
Linux ain't Berk...?
Linux ain't MS Slayer?
Then what is Linux?
A big present from very Idealistitc folks to the world!
There are always errors in coments that limit or generalize.
THANKS AGAIN FOLKS, y'all are good people.
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
the *BSDs exist, and linux isn't touched.. Not because of technical superiorty, but because linux users feel they are fighting some nonexistant political war against the Redmond people.
There are _already_ OSes that exist that are better in most ways than Linux. Doesn't affect usage, either. Same way Windows is still extrememly popular
-bugg, afraid of karma damage (i'm already at like -9)
Actually I support microsystems for a living. I have better hardware skills than probably 90 percent of the computer professionals
wow, I can plug a card into a slot to!!, I guess I'm 31337!!. SWEET
. My area of expertise is spec'ing out hardware and software and then assembling it for use
Wow that sounds so hard! We should all bow down to you're ability to plug hard drives and video cards into motherboards!
Any 14 year old could do what you do.
"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
What would be really cool is if java had a callback mechanism that allowed for a function to be called when data became ready. This is one of the (few) cool things about NT.
-AP