Solaris 10 to be Open Source 432
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."
Only good news, if it's really open (Score:5, Interesting)
Open Source, AMD Processors...? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Solaris Vs Linux? (Score:5, Interesting)
Unix(tm) code? (Score:5, Interesting)
I guess it's easier if they forget about CDE/X11 etc but it will be interesting to see what open source licence they use and how they handle 'other peoples' code in SOlaris 10.
Of course they could have removed all the Sys V R5.4 code, but without doing this unsing clean room conditions SCO could have a wondrful time in court.
Just wondering??????
Why use Linux then? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Too little too late? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Solaris Vs Linux? (Score:3, Interesting)
I suspect they're just going to let you see the code, but not necessarily copy IP from it.
What does that mean? (Score:4, Interesting)
On the other hand, isn't that part of why they call it Slowlaris?
DTrace (Score:2, Interesting)
Credibility with PHB (Score:2, Interesting)
A legal open source SysV derivative? (Score:3, Interesting)
Otherwise, this is in violent conflict with the bizarre SCO derivative theory.
Re:Solaris Vs Linux? (Score:2, Interesting)
So let's see here... (Score:3, Interesting)
Not quite... (Score:5, Interesting)
Just like Darwin, Sun will only open the parts that will ultimately benefit Sun. Just like Fedora, they hope to get a boost from loyal Solaris (RedHat desktop) users that have been using the "Solaris Free Binary License" (yes, I qualify here on both counts).
I hope this helps.
Re:Solaris Vs Linux? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Only good news, if it's really open (Score:5, Interesting)
Schwartz invoked the precedent set by Sun's popular Java programming language. [...] We need to now take the model with Java and bring it to Solaris.
A problem that Schwartz wants to avoid is having Solaris splintered into different distributions like Linux, which he said creates application incompatibilities. Going the way of Linux-type licensing, he suggested, creates open source but not open standards.
Too little too late? OPENSTEP and Mac OS X nicer? (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm looking forward to running
- tetex (not sure which version, trying to find a version w/ otp2ocp which doesn't crash)
- Dmitri Linde's InstantTeX and TeXView Hyper w/ hyperlink support
- Cenon (a NeXT-era CAD/CAM program making the jump to DTP illustration on Mac OS X, OPENSTEP 4.2 and Linux running GNUstep, see http://www.cenon.info )
and a couple of other nifty quad-architecture things, (the Lighthouse office suite) or stuff I can manage to get compiled.
Under Solaris we used this box to run Miles 33 (a proprietary typesetting system), which I couldn't even tell was taking advantage of Display PostScript --- is there something nifty I could do with this under Solaris that I'm not seeing?
How 'bout Linux?
William
Trademark conflict on the way? (Score:3, Interesting)
Isn't Janus the name of the Microsoft DRM scheme?
Re:Solaris Vs Linux? (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't know. Linux has iptables, PaX, Grsec, Selinux, etc. I still see Sun boxes around without SSH on them - either client or server.
If I had to choose between a Solaris install, or a Linux install, on it's own, with a live IP address, I'd choose Linux every time.
If I had to choose a box to give shells out on, I'd choose Linux.
In fact, I can't think of anything that I would choose Solaris for.
But then again, I'm a lot better with Linux.
Re:Solaris Vs Linux? (Score:2, Interesting)
I am sorry and don't intend to flame you either but really where do you get some of this stuff from?
IE Solaris is a very mature product with a long history please define long history? 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
alot of tech support on the web obviously you have never looked up linux.google.com or gone to sites like rhn.redhat.com?
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. yes maybe if you work for a bank or a teleco it might (although the last bank I worked for run's linux partitions on IBM mainframes) but that is far from the general rule.
Stability. Linux is stable yes, but stable like a wine glass, not stable like a plate. What!! there is a e450 here running oracle on solaris 9 that constantly eats its self, where the dell 4600 with redhat AS 2.1 again running oracle has not died in 1.5 years and both are under the same load. My point with this that stability is not just the operating system but how you set it up and what hardware you are running IE linux normally runs on cheaper less redundant more error prone hardware so unless you are comparing the two on the same hardware you can't make that statement.
Re:Why use Linux then? (Score:4, Interesting)
Also, there will be the issue of 'controlled innovation', Sun's way or the highway. This has good parts and bad parts, as does anything, but it will not fit everybody's teacup - just as Linux does not right now.
Re:Solaris Vs Linux? (Score:2, Interesting)
Zones, N1 Grid containers, predictive failover, dtrace, fine-grained process rights management (a ala systrace), etc. etc.
Most people don't need this stuff. The ones who do, and who realize they do, love Solaris. Those who do, and who don't realize it, waste their customers' time and money, and deliver second-class service.
GNU/SunOS, not Solaris (Score:5, Interesting)
If we're going to get pedantic, then it should be "GNU/SunOS," not "Solaris." To put it into Linux terms, Solaris is the distribution that's built on the SunOS kernel, just as Mandrake (for instance) is a distro that's built on the Linux kernel.
Re:Solaris Vs Linux? (Score:1, Interesting)
ROFL (Score:3, Interesting)
Oh wait, that's right, there is none.
Shoo! Go back to marketing.
Guess what stood before that, as it was modded up as insightful.
a) Linux is more secure than Windows
b) Solaris is more secure than Linux
If it had been a), this would be at -1,troll or -1, flamebait. But I guess it got +2, Irrational pro-Linux argument to flip it to positive.
Kjella
Re:Solaris Vs Linux? (Score:5, Interesting)
You are right that until recently the "reference platform" for large Oracle installations was Solaris, and Oracle would run efficiently and scalably across tens of processors.
Then Oracle invented parallel databases. Their first attempt, Oracle Parallel Server in 8i was horrible, held together with string and bubble gum. Nobody used it.
Then they came out with the next version, 9i RAC, which was quite a lot better. But any attempt to run a read/write database across a number of servers is always going to be limitted by the speed of the interconnects, so it is still far preferable to run 9i non-RAC on a large server than RAC across multiple machines. So enter Oracle's love affair with Linux.
Oracle have taken to pitching 9i RAC solutions on Linux as being the "cheaper" alternative to running on a big Solaris box. The rational is simple: the customer either pays Oracle for 9i non-RAC and Sun for a big box, or they pay Oracle for 9i RAC and implement it on commodity x86 hardware running GNU/Linux - obviously they prefer the second solution because they get more money from a similar sized cake.
The snag is that 9i RAC doesn't scale well, because of the previously mentioned interconnect latency issue. They will quote you impressive figures which are the result of:
a) picking benchmark examples which are naturally going to scale well across boxes - where the data sets are already well partitioned
b) comparing RAC on two nodes to a single node running RAC - the true comparison would be with a single node running 9i non-RAC (which is loads faster).
So don't imagine that this is Oracle having been converted by any sort of technical merits - they are being driven simply by ways of maximising their revenue stream.
Impartial Interjection? (Score:4, Interesting)
Sun has an excellent single place to search for all service calls on their equipment and OS, along with resolution information. So, it's a lot of information, yet more importantly, it's a single place for all of that information.
Personally, I have both Solaris AND Linux on my resume - and have to go with Solaris as the more impressive during interviews (less market share - more "serious").
I had a Solaris machine that ate itself running Solaris and Oracle. It turned out that one of the CPUs (StarFire E10000) was not torqued down properly. You should really have Sun take a look at your 450 - full tear down and rebuild if necessary. Otherwise, in my experience, Linux is slightly less stable, but I've been migrating to Linux because it's cheaper to run two Intel/Linux boxes (hot spare) than a single Solaris box with the same load capacity as one of the I/Linux boxes.
That's to say - you've both got valid points.
Re:GNU/SunOS, not Solaris (Score:3, Interesting)
i hope SOME people just get stuff in there (Score:4, Interesting)
I would love to be able to practice more admin stuff on Solaris. With the exception of production servers -- which are not ideal "hey, i wonder what this does" testing conditions -- I don't have access to any Solaris boxes; I'd like to run it on a laptop but drivers are a fucking nightmare (yes, i know there are solaris sparc laptops like SPARCle but I don't have that kind of money to just toss around.)
My job at a university entails working with Solaris and migrating everything that's ON solaris OFF it, over to linux or BSD or windows or "anything but solaris". Management has lost faith in SUN in general and solaris specifically, and they want it gone gone gone. This is good for me, because I get to practice doing Cool Shit with linux and FreeBSD (FreeBSD being the only distro I've tried that doesn't require setting up stupid sunlabel partitions and lots of tweaking to get right: slap the CD in, install it, tweak it a bit and then forget about it. Even my beloved Debian wasn't that easy on a sparc arch machine.) At the same time, I'd still like to get more familiar with the Solaris way of doing things, for sundry reasons (more impressive skillset, more theory and better understanding of the internal workings of the OS, etc.)
I slapped the Sol10 beta on a single-proc netra that we found lying in a gutter begging for change, and it wasn't too bad. Of course, I haven't used it for more than 10 minutes, but that's the price you pay for having fun at work, I guess.
Re:Solaris Vs Linux? (Score:5, Interesting)
Depends a lot on what you're doing. SPARC might be OK at high-throughput jobs, but IA32 and PowerPC just smash it to little bits for things that are less sequential.
Also, Solaris' local filesystem (UFS) gets the pants beat off it by EXT3 (and, to a lesser extent, AIX JFS2). Even if you turn on journalling, which makes for a nice speed boost on Solaris 8 and up.
In fact, for local file I/O, you're better with Solaris on IA32 than Solaris on SPARC.
I'm not actually sure what SPARC hardware is good for these days. Every time I benchmark something, it loses. Granted, our best SPARC machine is an 8-way UltraSPARC-III 1.2 GHz. So maybe a faster SPARC chip might keep up with PowerPC and Intel a little better.
Point? (Score:3, Interesting)
The operating system on every PC I own is also a Unix-like OS based around a monolithic kernel and conforming more to the System V way than the BSD way. And it always has been, and always will be, Open Source.
AFAICT the main difference is that Solaris has earned itself the reputation for slowness by insisting to write everything to disk before saying ready, whilst Linux never writes anything to disk until one of the following happens: (a) a process asks for more memory and RAM is full of cached disk data. (b) shutdown. But default caching policy -- which almost certainly can be changed -- is no more an adequate criterion for judging an operating system than shoes are for judging a sexual partner.
I, for one, like to think I have some principles. I prefer manual methods over closed-source software. As it happens, I have reached a position where I can exert some influence: I instituted an almost total GNU/Linux migration in the company where I work There is only one department which is still using Windows, and that's accounts -- for reasons beyond my control, namely to be compatible with Group Head Office's legacy systems. I can't be the only idealistic young IT manager in the world. As awareness of Open Source -- and its benefits -- grows, closedness of source is becoming a criterion for rejecting a software product.
But the real point runs much, much deeper. Sun aren't stupid.
Closed source, however much its proponents bluster, is going to become a thing of the past soon anyway. Remember it was James Watt who put one of the nails in the coffin of Slavery. Sometimes, a technology comes along that enables, or even forces, great political change. Decompilers are going to kick off big-style any time soon, and will do for closed source what steam engines and electric motors . The problems of decompilation are, mathematically, very similar to those of shape recognition (and the US authorities are spunking their pants over systems claimed to be able to recognise a face in a crowd from a photograph taken from a different angle; it's Not Quite There Yet though). Now, I can buy something barely half the size of a DVD box that can decipher my handwriting -- and it does so using just a piddly little low-power RISC processor. Scale up the power a lot, and re-render the image
Like it or not, in a few years' time, all software, to all intents and purposes, will be open source. And Sun know they're better off inside the tent pissing out, than outside the tent getting pissed on.
Works the other way too... (Score:3, Interesting)
It works the other way too, now that Solaris is going open source, and if its GPL say, then Solaris can port things from Linux and the rest. I suspect Sun thinks it will get a lot of developers to this for free for them
The problem is that Sun is late to the party, yet again, and is playing catch up. I think they waited too long but what choice do they have...
Re:Why use Linux then? (Score:4, Interesting)
I found it far pickier over the hardware than Linux (it doesn't seem to like AMD based systems much) - frankly, Solaris IMO is best suited to the architecture for which it was intended.
Re:Can they do this? (Score:5, Interesting)
So this is something sun probably asked as a part of the deal... And SCO migh have asked them to be quiet for this for certain period of time. And this announcement might have been planned a LONG time ago...
Re:Only good news, if it's really open (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Solaris Vs Linux? (Score:3, Interesting)
> 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
You don't keep up with the news either. SGI has already augmented the Linux kernel to allow it to scale as much as Solaris can, more actually.
This clearly shows that the Linux kernel is now in the condition where enterprise grade features can be dropped into it nullifying any competitive advantage Sun might have.
Although, support for multi-million dollar hardware is of limited interest anyways.
Re:Debian (Score:1, Interesting)
We've migrated to Debian from RH 7.3 not so long ago. Very impressed with Debian so far. Comparing to RH, administration in Debian is damn easy.
Re:Solaris Vs Linux? (Score:2, Interesting)
Microsoft and F/OSS are both species of Borgs, it's just that their methods of assimilation are different.
Re:Solaris Vs Linux? (Score:4, Interesting)
There's this thing called "fork and exec" which has been out for awhile, which very easily enables an application to scale to N CPUs. Apache for example, will nicely scale to lots of CPUs assuming the underlying OS efficiently does copy-on-write, thread/process management, etc. Solaris does.
If you believe "Oracle didn't scale on Sun E10Ks period", check out the site called eBay. It's the only way they are able to handle the massive workload...
Oracle is pushing clustering now for the reason a previous poster gave- Cheaper hardware means more $$ for licensing, with a static budget.
Lastly your claim about Oracle scaling effectively across 120-240 Linux CPUs appals me. Are you claiming that RAC can be deployed to 30-60 quad-CPU boxes? 15-30 8-CPU boxes? You may be interested to know that 9i RAC degrades in performance beyond 3 nodes- a 3 node cluster performs better than a 4 node cluster. Oracle themselves tout RAC more as an "accessibility" technology that removes single points of failure, rather than a scalability approach. Heck, there are even companies [polyserve.com] that sell third-party tools [polyserve.com] to make RAC more scalable...
In conclusion, I do not believe you have any clue with regards to the subjects you are addressing in your post.