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?

Comments

Another walk in the park..

[Kitsune Sushi]

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. ;)

As we speak, there are various projects to develop software for Linux. Projects for GUI's, Office software and efforts to port Linux to the new Intel 64-bit chip. It seems like everything that has already been done on another OS is being ported or implemented on Linux.

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?

As the Anti-Microsoft warriors spread the word about Linux, many businesses are contemplating whether or not to include Linux in their corporate network. Since Linux is free, it's easy to convince management to use Linux. Also, companies such as Linux Care are providing 24/7 support to make those CEO's sleep at night.

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.

The Linux movement as a whole attracts people to it. It's that feeling of rebelling, of being the first guy on the block to have an FTP server in your basement. Call it a movement; call it a revolution, Linux is here.

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..

Highly scalable (64 processors)

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)

Already runs on 64-bit SPARC chip (Intel doesn't even have one yet)

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?)

Has been proven in the industry

Linux, proud babysitter of the phone lines in two whole U.S. states. What, that kind of thing doesn't count?

Has the support backing of a major company (Sun)

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.

Runs everything Linux does (Mail, DNS, FTP etc...)

Wow. I'm switching right now.

Already has many software packages ported to it.

Um, and Linux doesn't have any software for it yet, right? heh.

Now has Star Office

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..

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. You have the backing of a major corporation, which is also in competition with Microsoft (Linux people should like that.)

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. ;)

How about these questions: Could Linux survive as a UNIX alternative?

The answer is no. Why re-invent the wheel? Solaris is a fully operational, scalable and reliable OS. Linux would have no place in a world were Solaris was free. Sorry, that's the truth. (The only place left would be embedded systems)

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

Would Linux survive? Of course it would!

[sparks]

Ho hum. Michael Whitmore subjecting us to his usual banal thinking in the name of filling column pixels.

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:

• That if price is taken out of the equation, the technically better OS will "win".
• That Solaris is better than Linux.
• That Solaris isn't free at the moment.
• That people choose Liunx purely on the basis of cost and don't care about the community aspect.

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.

Solaris CAN'T be Free

[Gleef]

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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