Solaris 10 to be Open Source

An anonymous reader writes "It looks as though Sun is going to open source their new Solaris 10 operating system. It seems to include eveything except some device drivers. They plan to model the Darwin and Fedora projects. Sounds very interesting."

Solaris Vs Linux?

[Sanity]

Can anyone explain why someone might choose to use Solaris over Linux other than for legacy reasons?

Market Pressure Cooker

[Anonymous Coward]

Because some portions of Solaris 10, such as device drivers, are the property of other companies, Sun will release source code as well as binaries, in which proprietary code is not accessible

When you make your source open then I'll be interested but until that, this is just a bone for the community to do work for Sun and not actually get a full fledge open source solution. If the market pushes Sun down another $1 (25%) I imagine that Sun will have to figure out how to get that proprietary crap out of the code huh?

Re:Solaris Vs Linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps if you needed support for 32-core chips [slashdot.org]?

Too little too late?

[jarich]

Is this a desparate move of a company trying to regain relevance or a brilliant shrewd move?

Re:Model Fedora?

[peragrin]

What is better is how can you Model Darwin and Fedora????

Darwin is the just the Basic OS, you can't run any OS X apps on it without Apple's software.

Fedora is pure Open Source, it just changes regularly, and has trademark restrictions on Red hat's images and such.

How are these the same??

Re:Solaris Vs Linux?

[sneezinglion]

Well let me see: 1. Familiarity. I have used solaris much much more often than linux in my work. 2. Maturity. Solaris is a very mature product with a long history and alot of tech support on the web. 3. It looks better on your resume if you say you know solaris, then it does if you say Linux....at least where I work it does. 4. Stability. Linux is stable yes, but stable like a wine glass, not stable like a plate.

Can they do this?

[AnuradhaRatnaweera]

Unlike Linux, Solaris is a derivative of UNIX. I am sure SCO will be keenly looking forward to the day when Solaris is open source. ;-)

Don't get tainted

[SpaceLifeForm]

Remember, if you hack on Linux (or plan to), you best not review the code.

Re:Market Pressure Cooker

[Kiryat Malachi]

*coughLinuxATINVIDIAalltheotherproprietaryhardware drivesinLinuxcough*

In other words, Linux is no better in this regard, get over it.

Open source != GPL

[Anonymous Coward]

Open source is one thing, but I'm wondering how useful to us Sun's move really is if the code will not be put out under a GPL-like or BSD-like license

... lately I sense that "open-sourcing" is more an attempt of big companies to get some work done for free and get some PR at the same time, BUT with little real use to the community as GPL'ing the code would provide. Am I right?

Re:Solaris Vs Linux?

[Allen Zadr]

For most of the world... It's not one or the other, it's both. Solaris is a strong OS, despite losing some market share in the last 8 years. Open Source projects benefit from being listed on the solarisfreeware web site. As an admin I've always had a tendancy to use and support whatever project has the largest cross-platform capability.

Well, how better to support a Solaris solution for your OSS project than to _run_ Solaris. More importantly, the issues in Solaris that have long dogged OSS projects (can only be compiled with gcc - must use OSS version of malloc, etc) can be found and fixed by debugging and recompiling now-open-sourced system libraries.

Re:Market Pressure Cooker

[mr_z_beeblebrox]

When you make your source open then I'll be interested but until that, this is just a bone for the community to do work for Sun and not actually get a full fledge open source solution.

They are, that's what the article is about. They are not opening source they do not own. Your comment could also be directed at Linus for not opening up the Cisco VPN drivers for example...THEY ARE NOT HIS to do so. Also, I am sure that your market analysis is based on a lot of research but just one flaw. How would having less revenue force them to get rid of established drivers which work well and are mature and instead hope that the community will make them fast? Seems that would ultimately cost more and be counterproductive.

what about McBride and SCO?

[ssbljk]

will they sue them too?

Java

[Anonymous Coward]

Great, now release Java. Seriously, they're killing it.

Uh huh

[starseeker]

I'm waiting to see the license terms before I celebrate.

The license is the key and it may not be "Free"

[Tracy Reed]

Just because it's "open source" (as opposed to "Open Source") as in "you can read the source" doesn't mean it's Free. And that may be all they do: let you read the source. If they don't use the GPL or BSD or some other well known FOSS license I doubt this will really help them all that much. If they come up with their own license (which a company as big as Sun is wont to do) it will probably be quite complicated and your average hacker won't understand it.

Re:Solaris Vs Linux?

[cyngus]

Solaris has the best threading model and threading support that I've seen in what I'll call a mainstream operating system. The entire system was designed really well, why? Because these guys built it to make a profit. Not to take a shot at Linux, but dinner is a much better incentive to make something that runs well (and thus sells well) than [kernel] hacker pride. At the end of the day Linux is built on surplus time and energy. Solaris was built by people whose job and living depended on making good software. Not to mention that Sun employed (and employs) some really smart and creative people that have helped make Solaris an impressively scalable OS.

If it has the applications I need, I'll pick Solaris over Linux in a hummingbird heartbeat. I was actually rather upset when I heard my old university moving the CS labs from Solaris to Linux.

Re:Solaris Vs Linux?

[jonathanduty]

Solaris is very mature and stable (I'm sure I'll get a bunch of posts on that one). And it maps very well to sun hardware. I'm not downing linux, but solaris is great if you need a server to be up and running all the time no matter what. Sure, it may be a little slower that other OS, but my experience is that it is as stable as a rock.

Re:Solaris Vs Linux?

[dunstan]

There's more to implementing stuff in your kernel than just lifing a bit of source code from elsewhere.

The way the Solaris kernel is so scaleable across over 100 processors is not some clever hack, it's taken years of refinement of the kernel. I'm not a kernel hacker, but you won't just be able to lift bits of Solaris kernel code and drop them into a Linux kernel.

What I would expect to see fairly quickly is a "GNU/Solaris" distribution, where (as many of us have been doing for years) you get a Solaris kernel and basic libraries, and then put a GNU based set of tools on top of it. Couple this with the Niagara processors and you have an awesome edge appliance.

Re:Open Source, AMD Processors...?

[cmaxx]

They do everything they used to do.

Just cos they're taking advantage of what people want now (Linux, Opteron, Open Source) doesn't mean they're not also working on stuff that's cool that we don't know that we want yet, or even stuff that's not cool but is still worthy.

This is where Sun, IBM, SGI, even HP, do more for us than Dell and Microsoft. Though at least, and I hate myself for saying this, Microsoft are trying.

Cleary being first or having the best idea ever are no guarantees of esteem or profit - often the opposite, so kudos to Sun for slugging it out and continuing to bet on innovation. Ditto to IBM and AMD.

Re:Solaris Vs Linux?

[d_force]

*Even* More secure than Linux

*Whew*.. I'm glad you cleared that up. Because, for the life of me, I couldn't find any adequate metric that defines security using an agreed, quantitative metric within the Information Security industry.

Oh wait, that's right, there is none.

Shoo! Go back to marketing.

-- dforce

Re:Solaris Vs Linux?

[secolactico]

What I would expect to see fairly quickly is a "GNU/Solaris" distribution, where (as many of us have been doing for years) you get a Solaris kernel and basic libraries, and then put a GNU based set of tools on top of it.

Solaris is a sweet OS, but what I which the most is something like the FreeBSD port tree to be done for solaris. Sun already has niftly package tools, but a port collection would take care of dependencies and make updating easier.

Stability

[kahei]

Hrm, well, I'm not particularly skilled in administrating either of them, but I've worked in lots of places with lots of Solaris and if that's 'stable like a plate' then I dread to think what instability must be like. They fill up their disk with logs, and they crash. They run out of swap space, and they crash. They run out of colors (!!!!) and they do something which amounts to crashing in that nobody can use them till they're rebooted. It's freakin' endless.

I'm sure there is some sense in which they are more stable than Linux and XP but in my subjective experience, there are a lot of people who would consider 'stability' an odd reason to keep paying the Sun tax.

The most stable device I can think of is my DSL modem/firewall at home. If they made a version that also acted as a Tibco/MQ router they'd clean up.

The $20,000 question

[iqvoice]

So does this mean that Sun is going to give up trying to squeeze $20,000 from me just for upgrading my 10-proc Ultra Enterprise from Solaris 7 to Solaris 10?

Reality Check available here. [sun.com] Heh!

Re:Market Pressure Cooker

[Kiryat Malachi]

Looking at this, it looks like the kernel will be open source, and some 3rd-party device drivers will be non-open. I see no difference, without knowing whether Sun is planning a 'free' license or not, at least. Solaris is not those drivers, just like Linux isn't ATI's drivers, so get over the bitching about some aspects not being open-sourced.

My point was that complaining that Sun won't open-source certain proprietary drivers is totally pot and the kettle, given that Linux relies on similar things in many circumstances.

Since we don't know what license things will go open source under, and we don't know what things will go open source, show some restraint before applauding or complaining.

Re:Don't get tainted

[jpvlsmv]

And if you ever plan to write the Great American Novel, make sure you never read any books, magazines, websites, or other written work.

And if you ever plan to write music, never listen to any CDs or recorded music from any other musician.

Because you'll get "tainted".

--Joe

Re:Solaris Vs Linux?

[avdp]

Your theory has several gaping holes. Here are two of them:

1. Microsoft hires a whole lot of people "whose and job and living depended on making good software" yet they produce mediocre software at best

2. Linux is getting worked on by a whole lot of people "whose and job and living depended on making good software". In fact, right about every major kernel "hacker" is getting paid to do it these days (Linus included).

The bottom line: getting paid to do something is complete unrelated to quality. At best, it doesn't matter either way. At worse, it actually interferes with quality if these programmers are slaves to rigid release schedules, feature creep (often demanded by marketing), etc.

I am not saying that Solaris is bad. Just saying your reason why doesn't hold up.

Desperation in Face Intel/IBM Onslaught

[reporter]

Sun Microsystems (SUNW) is now putting Solaris into open-mode in direct response to the following threats.

1. The greatest threat to SUNW is IBM [informationweek.com]. IBM is now pursuing the low end of the server market, which is precisely the market on which SUNW is focused. As you recall, SUNW allied with Fujitsu and devised a plan whereby Fujitsu focuses on the high end and SUNW focuses on the low end.

   The new systems by IBM run Linux atop a Power5. Proprietary Solaris 10 atop a Niagara simply cannot compete because Linux is debugged by a small army of developers and made rock solid by IBM's 6 sigma commitment to reliability. So, in a desparate move, SUNW has decided to put Solaris 10 into open-mode in order to bring the SUNW Niagara-based servers closer to parity with the Power5.

2. Intel is now designing multiple cores into future x86 chips [informationweek.com]. In short order, Intel will devour SUNW. SUNW simply cannot match the engineering prowess of Intel; the current Pentium IV crushes the UltraSPARC III in performance. Future systems from the Dell, HP, etc. will feature Linux running atop a multi-core Pentium. Proprietary Solaris 10 atop a Niagara simply cannot compete because Linux is debugged by a small army of developers and made rock solid by IBM's 6 sigma commitment to reliability. (IBM is the prime commercial developer for Linux.)

The bell tolls for SUNW.

Re:Daniel Robbins persuaded Sun

[Anonymous Coward]

qoute:
By devaluing their intellectual property they can write it off and use that as means to boost their profitability (like they did w/ the Microsoft settlement.) /qoute

What you said makes absolutely no sense whatso ever.

Explain what "write it off and use that as a means to boost their profitablity" mean?

Is this a bad attempt at a joke or something?

Re:Solaris Vs Linux?

[vrai]

There is no point running Solaris on x86 hardware - unless it's as a dev/test environment for Sparc production machines. If you're running a fully x86 shop then Linux/*BSD is the best choice - they were built with the architecture in mind and their lack of scalability isn't an issue on a 4 processor box.

However, if you need an ultra-reliable, 128Gb, 32 processor server you buy a Sun and run Solaris on it. It's the only operating system that can fully take advantage of Sun's high-end hardware.

Yes, you could run Solaris x86 exclusively in a PII/III shop. But you wouldn't gain anything from doing so.

Re:Solaris Vs Linux?

[joib]

The way the Solaris kernel is so scaleable across over 100 processors is not some clever hack, it's taken years of refinement of the kernel.


Well, I'd guess that Linux with the various SGI patches that run on the SGI 512 CPU systems aren't "some clever hack" either, for that matter if that's what you're trying to imply. It's the result of years of work SGI put into making IRIX scale that has been ported to Linux.

I'll believe it when ...

[HP-UX'er]

... I have my hands on the install media, while reading the license it comes with. Sun says _many_ things. They rarely follow through, and when they do, it always falls short.

Re:Solaris Vs Linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

But that wouldn't be Open Source, now, wouldn't it?

Re:Stability

[upsidedown_duck]

They run out of swap space, and they crash.

What ancient mummified version of SunOS did you work with? Just recently, I had a program go wacko and suck up every bit of virtual memory it could. My Sun workstation slowed down, of course, but I eventually got to an xterm to kill the offending process. No crash.

The book, Solaris Internals, details exactly what Solaris does when resources become scarce. It is designed to degrade gracefully by speeding up page scanning, for example, at certain thresholds of memory usage.

I think the crashing you saw was due to a specific program that you depended on (not Solaris) that was very poorly written.

Re:I'll believe it when ...

[josepha48]

... it will be as open source as Java is... and that is only mildly open... I do have to wonder. IfSun were to actually GPL (lol) thier source, where would that leave the SCO lawsuit ( not that that's going anywhere ). Sun competes with SCO on x86 along with Linux and BSD.

I still think it will not be GPL, but some Java type license.

Closed source is slowly becoming a thing of the past and even MS knows this. Which is why the are doing thier patent thing. So if Sun does open source their OS what will their stance be on their technology that may have patents behind them?

Re:Stability

[upsidedown_duck]

How exactly do they run out of colors?

They don't, as pretty much every Sun graphics board since the Ultra 1 workstation was 24-bit (Creator boards and onwards). Older SPARCstations had 24-bit boards, too, but they were very expensive and not common.

Solaris is dead

[Maljin Jolt]

Or rather undead. The good thing is the Sun realises about it. Opening closed source is a positive way to afterlife for software.

Re:Solaris Vs Linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

Only if you plan on stealing code Copyright Sun Microsystems.

You're a primary example of what the type of attitude that gives open source bad name.

Open source != Free. Does not mean you can use it in other applications, does not mean you can take snippets of code and cut and paste into your own application.

Re:Future of SPARC

[drinkypoo]

What makes you say "certainly not"? And what makes linking that phrase to marketing propaganda insightful? Ultrasparc is running out of gas, folks. It's not scaling up and instead of finishing and releasing their new core they actually had to scrap that effort and release a multi-core processor instead because the ultrasparc is getting left behind badly [aceshardware.com] by POWER5. Even Opteron seems to be faster; from what we know about its processor interconnect technology it should scale well, and the 4-way Opteron in the above-linked benchmark looks like it would beat the UltraSparc III with half as many cores. (It's only compared with 1/4 as many cores as the sample USIII system.) USPARCIV is basically a dual-core USPARCIII since they couldn't manage to bring their actual new core out. Put another way, an 8-processor (16 core) USPARCIV should be no faster for CPU-intensive tasks than a 4-processor (8 core) Opteron when such a beast becomes available - which will be soon.

Hence, unless Sun comes up with a new UltraSPARC soon, which seems unlikely, SPARC is done. It's over. There's no reason for Sun to keep flogging this particular deceased equine when it can just buy Opteron processors and build systems around that.

Of course, there's no reason to buy such a system from Sun, either, once PCs start getting onboard peripherals that lie along a PCI-E bus. Right now you're lucky if your onboard peripherals that need more than 133MB/sec of bus bandwidth are even on 64 bit or 66MHz PCI buses internally. I'm not sitting at my workstation just now but some of its hardware is on one or the other type of PCI bus, but not both...

Re:Solaris Vs Linux?

[flaming-opus]

Absolutely. The general methods for creating a scalable OS have been known to the linux kernel folk for a long time. It's just a lot of work, and requires some difficult design choices. Multiprocessor scalability usually comes at the expense of single cpu performance.

Re:Solaris Vs Linux?

[jedidiah]

ANY application that scales to 100 cpus will be highly tuned to the environment. You don't code an app for 2 or 4 cpus and have it magically scale to 40 or 80.

Now if you are talking about applications that depend on an underlying application server then things get even trickier. First, the appserver needs to be able to scale to the given number of cpus. THEN, the application needs to be written to scale to that level.

Oracle didn't scale on Sun E10Ks period.

It has problems scaling on 15K's as well.

This is likely why Oracle is pushing clustering now. Solving n smaller problems is probably easier than solving one really monsterous one.

An Oracle database can already run quite effectively on Linux across 120-240 cpus. Those cpus just won't all be in the same chassis.

Re:Solaris Vs Linux?

[tverbeek]

As far as I know solaris (not sun OS) came out in the early 90's because of the issues is BSD licencing. That is not what a call a long history, IE linux was released in 1991 so i would say that are on par

In Linux in the early 90's were at all comparable to Solaris in the early 90's, you might actually have a point.

Re:Random thoughts about wineglass v plate stabili

[Anonymous Coward]

my plates are in a rack. on their edge. most people load their dishwasher that way too.

Re:Works the other way too...

[kinzillah]

They may be late, but they are bringing the hot blond that everyone stares at. She might just have a few makeover tips for the unibrowed linux kernel. :)

Re:Solaris Vs Linux?

[phaetonic]

While I will agree with you based on my personal experience with Solaris 2.5.1/2.7/2.8/2.9, I will say that you left out VxFS, which as far as I'm concerned beats the pants off of ext3.

Re:Solaris Vs Linux?

[justins]

Well, I'd guess that Linux with the various SGI patches that run on the SGI 512 CPU systems aren't "some clever hack" either, for that matter if that's what you're trying to imply.

I imagine the above poster only meant to imply that there won't be any quickie code transplants from Solaris to Linux, regardless of the license. Your example is also an instance of this: you can be sure that SGI's Linux changes to run on 512 CPU machines aren't transplants of IRIX code. =Not only because it's a totally different system which does not lend itself to such transplants, which was the above poster's point, but also because SCO would (rightly or wrongly) be all over them for using System V code like that. They've already bitched about the XFS stuff in Linux.

Re:Solaris Vs Linux?

[CyberdogOSX]

i don't think apple can do no wrong. i, and many other mac users have found ways around Apple's DRM for quite a while now. since it first started actually. we may like iTunes, but that doesn't mean we accept Apple's DRM without fighting. my cdr is unsupported by iTunes, and yet i burn my music store downlods all the time. mac users are fans of a superior platform, not zealots blinded by loyalty to a company. you'll never find anyone harder on Apple, or harder to please, than Mac users. we use the best because we know the difference. and Apple works hard to make sure we get it.if they don't hit the mark, we let them know. either by word of mouth, or by circumventing the things they do that we don't like.