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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?
Only free beer. You don't have the source, and you can't redistribute it.
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
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.
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
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.
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
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 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
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.
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Open mind, insert foot.
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.
Wow, you really don't understand Linux or Open Source at all.
Open Source is the main feature of Linux, whether its users deal with that aspect of it on a day-to-day basis or not. Everything good about Linux -- the stability, the wide hardware support, the easy availability -- is a direct consequence of its openness! If Linux were just Free Beer instead of Free Speech, thn no one would use it, because it would be an unstable, uninstallable, unworkable piece of crap, instead of a parallel-debugged, widely-supported system.
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Have a Sloppy day!
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