Your posting implies that Sun is somehow anti OpenSource. The reality as the EU has just revealed is that Sun's support for OpenSource in terms of material donations dwarfs all the other commercial and non-commercial contributors. Sun has apparently donated 3x more code than any other entity. A very odd strategy for a company that is also allegedly trying to destroy FOSS.
The Solaris Kernel is a long way ahead of Linux in scalability and reliability. It has features such as Dtrace, ZFS, SMF etc which only have pale imitiations if anything at all in Linux. The only advantage that linux has over Solaris is a better HCL and even that is arguable, in the server space where Solaris is focussed the Solaris HCL is probably good enough. That said Sun's OpenSource moves are capturing momentum from Linux and some of that will translate into better device support.
Its highly unlikely that you would end up with Solaris tools on a Linux kernel, for one thing a lot of Solaris tools are also OpenSource tools anyway (Gnome etc). Solaris's strength is its kernel which is well ahead of Linux in terms of capabilities the only thing the Linux as a kernel has over Solaris is a large HCL list which in itself isn't actually much to do with Linux.
Umm so the only technology you would pick in a merged Linux OpenSolaris OS from the Linux half(quarter/little tiny bit) would be hardware device drivers most of which are not specifically Linux at all. Interesting, not sure what that says for the sum total of Linux development.
No I am not assuming I know because our software licenses are for SPARC/Solaris and X86/Solaris not Linux on Sun HW. The reasons for the switch are the relatively high cost of ownership of Linux vs Solaris and numerous support issues associated with Linux which do not exist on Solaris. Sun's relaxed attitude to providing Solaris for free providing you don't want support has ment that we are seing Solaris x86 being used for development and testing with customers buying support from Sun for their production environments and larger dev/test systems. The Solaris route is simpler/cheaper and easier for them than going RedHat.
I am not refuting your point about Linux being unknown in Finance, in fact financial services companies were among the first commercial users of Linux as we know from our SW footprint in these customers. However what should be worrying to the Linux community is that the same companies which were the first commercial adopters of Linux ware now showing every sign of being the first commercial customers to drop Linux as a platform. The reasons for the move seem to be a perception that Solaris is a better OS (which is probably true), concerns about Linux support and the relatively high cost of Linux particularly when compared with Solaris x86. Something which is compounding this is that x86 servers no longer have a price performance advantage over low end Sun boxes for a whole class of workloads which consume 80% of these financial services companies low/mid tier server cycles.
Hardly, Sun, IBM and Cray were competing for HPC platform projects. The key is in the reference to proximity computing which is very definitely not anything to do with SW.
I work for a large infrastructure SW vendor, or products run on Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, Linux and Windows. Nearly all the large financial services companies buy our SW. You impression of the Linux's place in financial services vs Solaris is far from reality. Most of our customers use large high end Sun's to power their back end settlement, STP, etc systems. Sun's problem was that they lost a lot of share in these companies in the mid tier/web/app server space. However this has changed in the last year or so for a number of reasons.
1. Solaris 10 came out and it is a very very capable OS particularly when compared with Linux.
2. Solaris on Intel has become a much more viable option and some of our customers are switching back from Linux to Solaris but in Intel.
3. The T1000/T2000 Coolthreads servers are very quick and very competitive with x86 based servers running Linux.
4. People are much more aware of the hidden costs of Linux which easily offset the cost benefits of moving to an x86 commodity platform.
We are seeing increased spending on Solaris in financial services with some of this being on Intel mainly at the expense of Linux on Intel. The reasons for the switch back to Solaris from Linux are Linux's cost and Solaris's capability.
So if oil is going to run out in 50 years then why not take the measures required to ward off Global Warming earlier, it will extend the life of our Oil reserves and countries like the USA which on current consumption would be utterly devastated if Oil ran out or became scarce will survive. California has worked this out, shame that the US government has spent more on Global Warming denial than trying to fix the problem has not.
Quite, so you have identified the main reason why if you don't believe in the science of Global Warming you should still embrace the Global Warming message. Whatever you think of Global Warming as a theory the actions that the green lobby want us to take to reduce the effects also reduce our dependence on Oil. Everyone agrees that Oil will run out, the economies most dependent on Oil when it starts becoming scarce will be the ones that suffer most. At the moment due to the shortsighted self interest of American politicians the country most likely to be seriously impacted is the US.
GPL applications can run perfectly well on OpenSolaris and there is no conflict between the Solaris kernel which is CDDL and a whole host of GPL licensed apps. What exercised the Linux bigots when OpenSolaris was released was the fact that being CDDL based you could not mix GPL and CDDL kernel code.
It was always rather questionable what benefit would have been derived from doing this since copying large chunks of Solaris kernel code into Linux wasn't very practical given the differences between the two kernels. The noise was all from the Linux side anyway since it is difficult to see what you would want to copy from the Linux kernel into Solaris.
In that sense the adoption of GPLv2 or GPLv3 for OpenSolaris would be more of a PR effort than anything else though it would have the beneficial effect of silencing the oppose Sun forever bigots once and for all.
SPARC is used in low end servers, the T1000 and T2000 are low end boxes and both use SPARC processors as do the V2XX servers. The T1000 and T2000 are extremely competitive with low end x86-64 boxes assuming that you have workload that exhibits thread level or process level parallelism. They are also very low power consumption.
Sun also has a rather wider range of Opteron based boxes than any of their competitors. They are currently the only major hardware vendor which supports 8 module (16 core) Opteron servers with their X4600. 16 cores is probably beyond what most people would consider to be low end.
If OpenSolaris is released under GPL then why would you bother with Linux at all. Yes I know Linux has more device drivers than OpenSolaris but this gap is being closed rapidly. And yes Linux User land is nicer for the less skilled to use than Solaris, but again this gap is also being closed.
The difficult challenge is not building a nice UI on top of your kernel of choice, instead it is building a sensibly architected and well implemented kernel. Despite Linus's anti Solaris gibes no one who has much of a clue about the relative capabilities of the Solaris and Linux kernels seriously thinks that Linux gets close to Solaris in terms of reliability, scalability and clever/useful features such as dtrace etc.
The reality is that Linux only has four things going for it, better UI, more device drivers, arguably GPL and better marketing. If OpenSolaris goes GPL and the other two techical gaps are being closed then why would you want ZFS under Linux when you can have a much better kernel with ZFS and without the effort?
Quite, it would be much harder to fork Java as Microsoft attempted to do for commercial reasons. In the mean time Java has become so widely used that a deliberate strategy like to one attempted by MS would fail.
I used to work for Sun and at the time of the Sun/MS court cases Sun was well aware of the danger that allowing MS to produce an incompatible version of Java presented to the creation of a usable Java standard.
Sun's willingness to provide access to the JVM's in an almost free way always demonstrated that Sun wasn't in the business of controlling Java in a way that destroyed innovation, Sun was just concerned to make sure that it didn't fork.
Sun's most recent move which incidentally makes Sun's lead as the largest commercial source of OpenSource software unassailable was probably made because Sun felt that forking was no longer an issue.
I doubt it will have any impact on Sun at all, unless of course Oracle drop support for Solaris which is highly unlikely.
The reality is that the Linux support model (for commercial customers) will not change if people source Linux from Oracle or if their source it from RedHat. The bits that RedHat/Oracle can fix which isn't relatively speaking that much they will, for the rest they will simply act as a call handling mechanism passing the issues through to the OSS code maintainers and hoping that they may get a fix back that can be packaged and sent to the customer.
The customers who like the one throat to choke type support offered by Sun and the other UNIX vendors will stay with Solaris etc, preferring the predictability of commercial UNIX support to the variability of Linux support.
The more likely scenario is one where Oracle gradually reduce the number of Linux distributions they support down to something that is less of a cost drain on them and which is more sensible from a number of platforms perspective.
Sun published their results for the 3rd quarter last week and it looks as if their market share will increase again when IDC/gartner publish the market share numbers for Q3.
There is a tendancy for posters on Slashdot to downplay Sun as a vendor probably because OpenSolaris is a Linux advocates worst nightmare.
At least in the early stages some of the most effective ways of reducing carbon emissions actually save you money and where there is a cost the payback is in most cases in a couple of years.
Consuming less saves you money, something like 30% of all the food that enters the supply chain is wasted, we buy too much and then have to trhow it out. So buy less it saves you cash and is saves food miles, stuff miles etc. Exactly how many Plasma displays do we need certainly not more displays than there are people in the house but many people have more displays than householders.
Insulating your home properly with deeper loft insulation, draft excluders etc generally pays for itself in a year. Installing low energy lighting ditto.
Turning your heating system down one degree saves you money immediately.
Recycling, doesn't cost you anything and ultimately will save you money when local authorities start charging you by weight for non-recyclable waste.
Car sharing saves money, planning car trips better saves money.
Buying food with less food miles doesn't cost anything.
Of course there is a downside, consumers spending less on food, power, gas, petrol will hit someone but then that is exactly the reason why the Bush administration has buried their heads in the sand because this would have the biggest impact on the people who paid fro Bust to be elected.
Really, so why is the Linux community spending so much effort in a vain attempt to match OpenSolaris's features such as Dtrace. Including publishing incorrect feature for feature score cards? OpenSolaris is the Elephant in the room that few Linux advocates dare to recognise. Ironic when you consider that it appears to be the gold standard that much of the Linux development community is trying to better.
I am not sure where the lock in would apply. Yes Oracle may eliminate Red Hat but that hardly removes Linux from the scene and there are a number of other commercial distributions which could be used instead with an Oracle DBMS etc. There would be a problem if Oracle refused to support any Linux platform except their own or made it harder to get support. Now that is perfectly possible and in a way I can understand Oracles stance. The Linux community has not exactly made it easy for commecial SW vendors to support their SW on Linux. The failure of LSB and the incompatibility between distributions and within distributions makes Linux a much more expensive option to support than other more adult OS's. So you could see why Oracle might imagine a world where there was only one commercial Linux and why they might think that was a good thing.
Its also slightly difficult to understand why the death of commercial server side Linux would be a disaster, there are enough highly competent and highly differentiated (from Linux) OpenSource OS platforms for OpenSource to thrive without a thriving commercial Linux platform.
In fact it might be a good thing, some of the resources being wasted in the vain attempt to match OpenSolaris feature for feature might be better employed on more usefull activities.
One factor behind Oracles move into Linux support and distribution is their need to try to contain the linux ABI stability issue, they currently have more testing and qualification issues on Linux than they do on any other platform.
From a technical standpoint they would have been better advised to have chosen OpenSolaris instead, similar hardware platforms but a much more stable ABI/API. Of course they would have had much less opportunity to make money supporting the platform because Sun charges much less to support Solaris x86 on a per platform basis than Red Hat does.
Umm, so you think that Red Hat Engineers fix all the bugs reported by customers who have maintenance contracts with them. How quaint. The reality is somewhat different, in some cases the Red Hat Engineers fix the bugs, in many cases they ask send information about the bug to the maintainer of the code who doesn't work for them and in some cases they get a fix back.
I do however agree with your main point which I think is that it doesn't make much difference to people if Oracle does this or Red Hat since for the majority of cases both companies a simply acting as a clearing house for issues and a packageing mechanism for resolutions to those issues.
I take you point about commercial companies like RedHat needing to pay programmers to cut code for them. However there are some examples of commercial companies allowing you to have your cake and eat it at the same time. The most notable is probably Sun were both OpenSolaris (analogous to Fedora) and Solaris are free. You only need to pay for the commercial packaged version if you want predictable support as opposed to broadcast and wait support.
Sun is doing this because they bet that providing free Solaris downloads which may be snapped up by developers, students etc will grow the Solaris ecosystem and this will in turn increase the number of people who decide they need a commercial support contract. Its also obvious that increase Solaris usage may also sell more Sun hardware though not necessarely.
It would of course be entirely possible for RedHat to make the same call, more free use of their commercial distribution resulting in more support contracts but they may also calculate that there many well be a large amount of leakage to other commercially supported distributions.
CPU priviledge levels allow software developers to impliment a properly separated security hierachy. Sometimes refered to as rings. Without CPU support for this it would be hard to impossible to guarantee complete separation between "supervisor/kernel" mode code and "user" level code.
That may be true but its largely irrelevant because there is no interest in providing a fully instrumanted Linux Kernel or at least that is Linus's public possition on the matter.
When dtrace first hit the streets there was a rash of Linux advocacy comparing Dtrace with one or other of the Linux "alternatives" none matched up to Dtrace for a number of reasons one of which was the lack of interest in fully instrumenting the standard Linux kernel.
Slashdot Mirror
Your posting implies that Sun is somehow anti OpenSource. The reality as the EU has just revealed is that Sun's support for OpenSource in terms of material donations dwarfs all the other commercial and non-commercial contributors. Sun has apparently donated 3x more code than any other entity. A very odd strategy for a company that is also allegedly trying to destroy FOSS.
The Solaris Kernel is a long way ahead of Linux in scalability and reliability. It has features such as Dtrace, ZFS, SMF etc which only have pale imitiations if anything at all in Linux. The only advantage that linux has over Solaris is a better HCL and even that is arguable, in the server space where Solaris is focussed the Solaris HCL is probably good enough. That said Sun's OpenSource moves are capturing momentum from Linux and some of that will translate into better device support.
Its highly unlikely that you would end up with Solaris tools on a Linux kernel, for one thing a lot of Solaris tools are also OpenSource tools anyway (Gnome etc). Solaris's strength is its kernel which is well ahead of Linux in terms of capabilities the only thing the Linux as a kernel has over Solaris is a large HCL list which in itself isn't actually much to do with Linux.
Umm so the only technology you would pick in a merged Linux OpenSolaris OS from the Linux half(quarter/little tiny bit) would be hardware device drivers most of which are not specifically Linux at all. Interesting, not sure what that says for the sum total of Linux development.
No I am not assuming I know because our software licenses are for SPARC/Solaris and X86/Solaris not Linux on Sun HW. The reasons for the switch are the relatively high cost of ownership of Linux vs Solaris and numerous support issues associated with Linux which do not exist on Solaris. Sun's relaxed attitude to providing Solaris for free providing you don't want support has ment that we are seing Solaris x86 being used for development and testing with customers buying support from Sun for their production environments and larger dev/test systems. The Solaris route is simpler/cheaper and easier for them than going RedHat.
I am not refuting your point about Linux being unknown in Finance, in fact financial services companies were among the first commercial users of Linux as we know from our SW footprint in these customers. However what should be worrying to the Linux community is that the same companies which were the first commercial adopters of Linux ware now showing every sign of being the first commercial customers to drop Linux as a platform. The reasons for the move seem to be a perception that Solaris is a better OS (which is probably true), concerns about Linux support and the relatively high cost of Linux particularly when compared with Solaris x86. Something which is compounding this is that x86 servers no longer have a price performance advantage over low end Sun boxes for a whole class of workloads which consume 80% of these financial services companies low/mid tier server cycles.
Hardly, Sun, IBM and Cray were competing for HPC platform projects. The key is in the reference to proximity computing which is very definitely not anything to do with SW.
I work for a large infrastructure SW vendor, or products run on Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, Linux and Windows. Nearly all the large financial services companies buy our SW. You impression of the Linux's place in financial services vs Solaris is far from reality. Most of our customers use large high end Sun's to power their back end settlement, STP, etc systems. Sun's problem was that they lost a lot of share in these companies in the mid tier/web/app server space. However this has changed in the last year or so for a number of reasons.
1. Solaris 10 came out and it is a very very capable OS particularly when compared with Linux.
2. Solaris on Intel has become a much more viable option and some of our customers are switching back from Linux to Solaris but in Intel.
3. The T1000/T2000 Coolthreads servers are very quick and very competitive with x86 based servers running Linux.
4. People are much more aware of the hidden costs of Linux which easily offset the cost benefits of moving to an x86 commodity platform.
We are seeing increased spending on Solaris in financial services with some of this being on Intel mainly at the expense of Linux on Intel. The reasons for the switch back to Solaris from Linux are Linux's cost and Solaris's capability.
James Lovelock, the environmentalist who coined the Gaia theory is a supporter of Nuclear power.
So if oil is going to run out in 50 years then why not take the measures required to ward off Global Warming earlier, it will extend the life of our Oil reserves and countries like the USA which on current consumption would be utterly devastated if Oil ran out or became scarce will survive. California has worked this out, shame that the US government has spent more on Global Warming denial than trying to fix the problem has not.
Quite, so you have identified the main reason why if you don't believe in the science of Global Warming you should still embrace the Global Warming message. Whatever you think of Global Warming as a theory the actions that the green lobby want us to take to reduce the effects also reduce our dependence on Oil. Everyone agrees that Oil will run out, the economies most dependent on Oil when it starts becoming scarce will be the ones that suffer most. At the moment due to the shortsighted self interest of American politicians the country most likely to be seriously impacted is the US.
GPL applications can run perfectly well on OpenSolaris and there is no conflict between the Solaris kernel which is CDDL and a whole host of GPL licensed apps. What exercised the Linux bigots when OpenSolaris was released was the fact that being CDDL based you could not mix GPL and CDDL kernel code.
It was always rather questionable what benefit would have been derived from doing this since copying large chunks of Solaris kernel code into Linux wasn't very practical given the differences between the two kernels. The noise was all from the Linux side anyway since it is difficult to see what you would want to copy from the Linux kernel into Solaris.
In that sense the adoption of GPLv2 or GPLv3 for OpenSolaris would be more of a PR effort than anything else though it would have the beneficial effect of silencing the oppose Sun forever bigots once and for all.
SPARC is used in low end servers, the T1000 and T2000 are low end boxes and both use SPARC processors as do the V2XX servers. The T1000 and T2000 are extremely competitive with low end x86-64 boxes assuming that you have workload that exhibits thread level or process level parallelism. They are also very low power consumption.
Sun also has a rather wider range of Opteron based boxes than any of their competitors. They are currently the only major hardware vendor which supports 8 module (16 core) Opteron servers with their X4600. 16 cores is probably beyond what most people would consider to be low end.
If OpenSolaris is released under GPL then why would you bother with Linux at all. Yes I know Linux has more device drivers than OpenSolaris but this gap is being closed rapidly. And yes Linux User land is nicer for the less skilled to use than Solaris, but again this gap is also being closed.
The difficult challenge is not building a nice UI on top of your kernel of choice, instead it is building a sensibly architected and well implemented kernel. Despite Linus's anti Solaris gibes no one who has much of a clue about the relative capabilities of the Solaris and Linux kernels seriously thinks that Linux gets close to Solaris in terms of reliability, scalability and clever/useful features such as dtrace etc.
The reality is that Linux only has four things going for it, better UI, more device drivers, arguably GPL and better marketing. If OpenSolaris goes GPL and the other two techical gaps are being closed then why would you want ZFS under Linux when you can have a much better kernel with ZFS and without the effort?
Quite, it would be much harder to fork Java as Microsoft attempted to do for commercial reasons. In the mean time Java has become so widely used that a deliberate strategy like to one attempted by MS would fail.
I used to work for Sun and at the time of the Sun/MS court cases Sun was well aware of the danger that allowing MS to produce an incompatible version of Java presented to the creation of a usable Java standard.
Sun's willingness to provide access to the JVM's in an almost free way always demonstrated that Sun wasn't in the business of controlling Java in a way that destroyed innovation, Sun was just concerned to make sure that it didn't fork.
Sun's most recent move which incidentally makes Sun's lead as the largest commercial source of OpenSource software unassailable was probably made because Sun felt that forking was no longer an issue.
I doubt it will have any impact on Sun at all, unless of course Oracle drop support for Solaris which is highly unlikely.
The reality is that the Linux support model (for commercial customers) will not change if people source Linux from Oracle or if their source it from RedHat. The bits that RedHat/Oracle can fix which isn't relatively speaking that much they will, for the rest they will simply act as a call handling mechanism passing the issues through to the OSS code maintainers and hoping that they may get a fix back that can be packaged and sent to the customer.
The customers who like the one throat to choke type support offered by Sun and the other UNIX vendors will stay with Solaris etc, preferring the predictability of commercial UNIX support to the variability of Linux support. The more likely scenario is one where Oracle gradually reduce the number of Linux distributions they support down to something that is less of a cost drain on them and which is more sensible from a number of platforms perspective.
Sun published their results for the 3rd quarter last week and it looks as if their market share will increase again when IDC/gartner publish the market share numbers for Q3.
There is a tendancy for posters on Slashdot to downplay Sun as a vendor probably because OpenSolaris is a Linux advocates worst nightmare.
At least in the early stages some of the most effective ways of reducing carbon emissions actually save you money and where there is a cost the payback is in most cases in a couple of years.
Consuming less saves you money, something like 30% of all the food that enters the supply chain is wasted, we buy too much and then have to trhow it out. So buy less it saves you cash and is saves food miles, stuff miles etc. Exactly how many Plasma displays do we need certainly not more displays than there are people in the house but many people have more displays than householders.
Insulating your home properly with deeper loft insulation, draft excluders etc generally pays for itself in a year. Installing low energy lighting ditto.
Turning your heating system down one degree saves you money immediately.
Recycling, doesn't cost you anything and ultimately will save you money when local authorities start charging you by weight for non-recyclable waste.
Car sharing saves money, planning car trips better saves money.
Buying food with less food miles doesn't cost anything.
Of course there is a downside, consumers spending less on food, power, gas, petrol will hit someone but then that is exactly the reason why the Bush administration has buried their heads in the sand because this would have the biggest impact on the people who paid fro Bust to be elected.
Really, so why is the Linux community spending so much effort in a vain attempt to match OpenSolaris's features such as Dtrace. Including publishing incorrect feature for feature score cards? OpenSolaris is the Elephant in the room that few Linux advocates dare to recognise. Ironic when you consider that it appears to be the gold standard that much of the Linux development community is trying to better.
I am not sure where the lock in would apply. Yes Oracle may eliminate Red Hat but that hardly removes Linux from the scene and there are a number of other commercial distributions which could be used instead with an Oracle DBMS etc. There would be a problem if Oracle refused to support any Linux platform except their own or made it harder to get support. Now that is perfectly possible and in a way I can understand Oracles stance. The Linux community has not exactly made it easy for commecial SW vendors to support their SW on Linux. The failure of LSB and the incompatibility between distributions and within distributions makes Linux a much more expensive option to support than other more adult OS's. So you could see why Oracle might imagine a world where there was only one commercial Linux and why they might think that was a good thing.
Its also slightly difficult to understand why the death of commercial server side Linux would be a disaster, there are enough highly competent and highly differentiated (from Linux) OpenSource OS platforms for OpenSource to thrive without a thriving commercial Linux platform.
In fact it might be a good thing, some of the resources being wasted in the vain attempt to match OpenSolaris feature for feature might be better employed on more usefull activities.
Don't move anywhere that is less than 35 feet above current mean sea level. That rules out Holland.
One factor behind Oracles move into Linux support and distribution is their need to try to contain the linux ABI stability issue, they currently have more testing and qualification issues on Linux than they do on any other platform.
From a technical standpoint they would have been better advised to have chosen OpenSolaris instead, similar hardware platforms but a much more stable ABI/API. Of course they would have had much less opportunity to make money supporting the platform because Sun charges much less to support Solaris x86 on a per platform basis than Red Hat does.
Umm, so you think that Red Hat Engineers fix all the bugs reported by customers who have maintenance contracts with them. How quaint. The reality is somewhat different, in some cases the Red Hat Engineers fix the bugs, in many cases they ask send information about the bug to the maintainer of the code who doesn't work for them and in some cases they get a fix back.
I do however agree with your main point which I think is that it doesn't make much difference to people if Oracle does this or Red Hat since for the majority of cases both companies a simply acting as a clearing house for issues and a packageing mechanism for resolutions to those issues.
I take you point about commercial companies like RedHat needing to pay programmers to cut code for them. However there are some examples of commercial companies allowing you to have your cake and eat it at the same time. The most notable is probably Sun were both OpenSolaris (analogous to Fedora) and Solaris are free. You only need to pay for the commercial packaged version if you want predictable support as opposed to broadcast and wait support.
Sun is doing this because they bet that providing free Solaris downloads which may be snapped up by developers, students etc will grow the Solaris ecosystem and this will in turn increase the number of people who decide they need a commercial support contract. Its also obvious that increase Solaris usage may also sell more Sun hardware though not necessarely.
It would of course be entirely possible for RedHat to make the same call, more free use of their commercial distribution resulting in more support contracts but they may also calculate that there many well be a large amount of leakage to other commercially supported distributions.
CPU priviledge levels allow software developers to impliment a properly separated security hierachy. Sometimes refered to as rings. Without CPU support for this it would be hard to impossible to guarantee complete separation between "supervisor/kernel" mode code and "user" level code.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_mode
That may be true but its largely irrelevant because there is no interest in providing a fully instrumanted Linux Kernel or at least that is Linus's public possition on the matter.
When dtrace first hit the streets there was a rash of Linux advocacy comparing Dtrace with one or other of the Linux "alternatives" none matched up to Dtrace for a number of reasons one of which was the lack of interest in fully instrumenting the standard Linux kernel.