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IBM Derides OpenSolaris as Not-So-Open 168

Posted by timothy from the when-the-playground's-in-full-swing dept.
MaverickFire writes "OpenSolaris isn't a true open-source project, but rather a "facade," because Sun Microsystems doesn't share control of it with outsiders, executives from rival IBM say. "Sun holds it all behind the firewall. The community sees nothing," Dan Frye, the IBM vice president who runs the company's Linux Technology Center, said. Sun could do "simple things" to build a real OpenSolaris community if it were serious about doing so, Frye said. "They would push their design discussions out into the forums, so people can see what's going on," he suggested." I talked to one of the OpenSolaris developers at the project's LWCE booth in the "dot-org ghetto," and though it wasn't in response to this article, he pointed out that OpenSolaris takes contributions from all comers, has active public mailing lists, open IRC channels, and several online communities, so Frye's description seems at least overblown.
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IBM Derides OpenSolaris as Not-So-Open

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  • Not Open? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by lewp ( 95638 ) on Thursday August 17, 2006 @11:13AM (#15926875) Journal
    It's more open than AIX, that's for sure.

    • Welll...yes (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 17, 2006 @11:18AM (#15926911)
      This is true. It is more open the AIX. IBM does not, however, claim that AIX is open. OpenSolaris is also more open than Windows, whatever software the NSA uses to crack codes, and a closed door, but of these things, only OpenSolaris claims to be open, and it is these claims Mr. Frye is addressing.

      • he pointed out that OpenSolaris takes contributions from all comers, has active public mailing lists, open IRC channels, and several online communities, so Frye's description seems at least overblown.

        Any proprietary software vendor "takes contributions from all comers" - especially when they free.

        Check Apple and you will also see "public mailing lists, open IRC channels, and several online communities".

        In other words he claim openness in a sense of Java: look openly but do not touch. Wanna touch it? A

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Haeleth ( 414428 )
          Any proprietary software vendor "takes contributions from all comers" - especially when they free.

          This is utterly untrue.

          For example, Microsoft - arguably the prototypical proprietary software vendor, and the one most often accused of stealing ideas - explicitly states [microsoft.com], and I quote,

          MICROSOFT OR ANY OF ITS EMPLOYEES DO NOT ACCEPT OR CONSIDER UNSOLICITED IDEAS, INCLUDING IDEAS FOR NEW ADVERTISING CAMPAIGNS, NEW PROMOTIONS, NEW PRODUCTS OR TECHNOLOGIES, PROCESSES, MATERIALS, MARKETING PLANS OR NEW PRODUCT NAME

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by andreyw ( 798182 )
      Why is this flaimbait? It's true. It's very curious to see IBM make statement's about a competitor's UNIX offering, while their own is about as closed-source as you can get. (Not only proprietary, but runs on IBM HW only).

      In other news, vendor A doesn't want you to buy into vendor B's products. News of the day!

  • First post (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 17, 2006 @11:14AM (#15926881)
    I think this has more to do with IBM feeling the heat over not doing *anything* to open-source AIX. Sure OpenSolaris isn't quite as open as some would like, but it's more than what IBM has done with AIX. C'mon IBM, open up AIX!

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by ettlz ( 639203 )

      Open AIX?

      Isn't the whole idea to improve the Open Source gene pool?

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Doctor Memory ( 6336 )
        I was going to say... Although they had the first good LVM I ever saw, working with AIX has always made me feel I was in a foreign country or something. Things were always just a little bit different, and when I say "things" I mean everything.

        It's just too bad IBM makes such kick-ass hardware, otherwise AIX would have died a natural death long ago.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by ettlz ( 639203 )
          I have a colleague who works with Lattice QCD and he occasionally uses the AIX-based QCDOC front-end machine. "Foreign country" is more or less exactly how I'd describe it, and I refrain from LARTing him whenever he asks "obvious" questions with it. Even the staple UNIX stuff is different — cp, cat, no switched support for gzip or bzip2 on tar. It's like something from fifteen years ago.
    • I suggest looking through the Linux kernel change histories sometime. There are a _lot_ of IBM email addresses in there.

      And not just there. Have a look at most Apache projects too, for that matter.

      There's a reason why SCO went after IBM. Well, ok, a second reason, beside the obvious "because SCO is on a pump and dump scheme." Like most lies, SCO's "IBM took our IP they had used in AIX and put it into making Linux enterprise-ready" is based on a small grain of truth, although in this case one irrelevant to t

      • Re:You mean, as in, Linux? (Score:5, Insightful)

        by htd2 ( 854946 ) on Thursday August 17, 2006 @12:56PM (#15927670)
        Your posting gives the impression that IBM is a huge donator to OpenSource projects and Sun with the exception of OpenSolaris which you are unsure about isn't.

        Let me soothe your concerns, in fact Sun without OpenSolaris dwarfs IBM in terms of OpenSource contributions, as has been pointed out on a number of occasions more code in RedHat was donated by Sun than any other commercial company IBM and RedHat included. This excludes Sun's donations such as OpenOffice and it also excludes a huge amount of IP donated by Sun in the form of properly documented standards Patents and interfaces that most of the other commercial donators to OpenSource had to be dragged kicking and screaming to.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Nevyn ( 5505 ) *

          Let me soothe your concerns, in fact Sun without OpenSolaris dwarfs IBM in terms of OpenSource contributions, as has been pointed out on a number of occasions more code in RedHat was donated by Sun than any other commercial company IBM and RedHat included. This excludes Sun's donations such as OpenOffice

          With the OO.o code, they are probably in the running with IBM (I'm not entirely sure, eclipse was a big code drop) and maybe even Red Hat. But I don't believe they "dwarf" Red Hat even then, and they su

      • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward
        > But even OpenSolaris is a very new development. What I'm getting at is: IBM was putting its money where its mouth was, _long_ before Sun.

        Sun open sourced NFS, RPC, and libc while IBM was still pushing Microchannel.

        So excuse me if I find your claims fatuous.

      • Re:You mean, as in, Linux? (Score:5, Insightful)

        by gdamore ( 933478 ) <garrettNO@SPAMdamore.org> on Thursday August 17, 2006 @02:40PM (#15928621) Homepage
        But even OpenSolaris is a very new development. What I'm getting at is: IBM was putting its money where its mouth was, _long_ before Sun.

        Ever hear of, oh, NFS. No? How about RPC? These Sun contributions to open source predate IBM's involvement with FOSS by a long time. Heck, they even predate the whole FOSS movement. Except for the University of California, Berkeley, I doubt any institution has ever given as much or as freely to open source as Sun has, as early as it did, or technologly that has done more to contribute to the developments that ultimately led to the Internet. And they have continued to support open source (and open standards) throughout their history.

        Get your facts straight next time.

        You also said:

        I don't know exactly how "open" OpenSolaris is. Maybe it's really open, maybe it's one of Sun's usual smoke screens. No idea. I couldn't be bothered to care about it at that point.
        Then WTF are you doing posting here? You obviously haven't looked into it. Yes, OpenSolaris is mostly OpenSource (there are a few closed bits, but they are not necessarily critical bits anyway). And guess what? Just because Sun has control of OpenSolaris, doesn't mean you can't download the whole source tree and fork it and start your own project. (Some folks have already done this, check out the PPC port of Solaris, or the port of Debian userland to the Solaris kernel, for example.) That is what Open Source means.

        Somebody mod the parent down, please!

        • Ever hear of, oh, NFS. No? How about RPC? These Sun contributions to open source predate IBM's involvement with FOSS by a long time.

          Wow, that's some creative rewriting of history. In fact, NFS was proprietary for many years. I'm not sure at what point Sun did or did not release NFS source code, but it hasn't been relevant to the Linux world because (1) Linux already had its own NFS implementations by the time Sun released it, and (2) Sun's licenses were likely unacceptable.

          Furthermore, both NFS and RPC we

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by turgid ( 580780 )

        But even OpenSolaris is a very new development. What I'm getting at is: IBM was putting its money where its mouth was, _long_ before Sun.

        *cough* *hach* *retch*

        Bill Joy. vi. BSD [wikipedia.org]. SunOS [wikipedia.org]. Tcl/Tk. OpenOffice.org, Solaris...

        And, by the way, Sun was instrumental in beating down SCO with a big stick in order to get Solaris open-sourced....

        Although this is slashdot and we don't like Sun here.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by kaffiene ( 38781 )
        The fact that you claim that IBM outshines Sun re: open source and got modded Insightful shows how fucked up the Slashdot crowd's anti-Sun bias is. That's laughable.

        Sun has been contributing to open source for a VERY long time and has a huge number of notable OS contributions.

        NFS
        RPC
        OpenOffice
        Solaris
        Glassfish
        Netbeans
        UltraSparc design
        Java coming...

        Sun also contributes to GNOME, Mozilla, X.org and Perl. Sun contributed heavily to RedHat.

        And given that Solaris and Java both contribute Sun's 'crown jewels', th
    • I think this has more to do with IBM feeling the heat over not doing *anything* to open-source AIX.

      AIX has contributed most of the valuable bits and pieces of AIX to Linux already and they have contributed extensively to Linux.

      Open sourcing AIX would make no sense; it would be an attack on Linux and open source, just like open sourcing Solaris was a deliberate and calculated attack by Sun on Linux (coordinated with Sun FUD and Sun sham licenses).
  • For me the key paragraph is

    IBM's business agenda, though, doesn't include lavishing praise on a rival operating system. It prefers Linux and its own proprietary version of Unix, called AIX. Solaris now runs on x86 computers such as IBM's System x servers as well as on Sun's own Sparc-based computers. OpenSolaris is designed to appeal to developers, who have the power to sneak software into companies the same way Linux snuck in during the 1990s.

    Hey guys (and gals), they're trying to get our vote!

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by argoff ( 142580 ) *

      Hey guys (and gals), they're trying to get our vote!

      Maybe they are, but IBM is still on our side for this battle anyhow. IBM's big money comes from services, Sun's big money comes from expensive hardware. Even though Solaris runs on x86, Sun is basically trying to make Solaris a value proposition for it's hardware. If Sun doesn't have a distinct Solaris value, people will then start to switch to Linux on x86 much quicker. Sun is attacking this on two fronts. 1) Free solaris just enough so that tho

      • Re:The key paragraph (Score:4, Interesting)

        by Score Whore ( 32328 ) on Thursday August 17, 2006 @12:54PM (#15927658)
        Maybe they are, but IBM is still on our side for this battle anyhow. IBM's big money comes from services, Sun's big money comes from expensive hardware.


        Apparently you've never priced Sun and IBM hardware. Sun's bottom end x86 server is $745, or $945 for a dual core Opteron. They're lowest end SPARC is $3145. IBM's bottom end x86 server is $1129. They're lowest end p-series is $2995 for a PPC970, for an actual POWER5 system it's $3399 and then you have to license the software on top of that.

        Claiming that Sun is selling overpriced hardware just indicates that you really aren't in touch with the market.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by argoff ( 142580 ) *
          Oh really. Hmmm, how about pricing out their $32,000 enterprise servers with an IBM x86 farm equivalent?

        • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

          by Kadin2048 ( 468275 )
          I don't think that the GP ever claimed that all of Sun's hardware was overpriced, or for that matter that IBM's hardware wasn't equally overpriced. Frankly I think they're both damned expensive, although I think as you scale into the high end, that it becomes very hard to compare one two the other.

          At any rate, your price comparison doesn't really address the GP's point, namely that Sun is a hardware company, and IBM is a services and consulting company. Sun's products are always going to be, like Apple, des
  • Complaining about how Sun's OSS software isn't that opensource is merely a ploy by IBM in order to copycat Suns' projects and start making a profit. IBM is as ignorant as SCO. However, Sun has everyright to not be allow access to certain parts of code that might be pure proprietary. If they are funding the project than why should those that are not complain that they are not being 'that' open with their project?

    This is why I think opensource is not that good for conglomerates such as IBM, SUN, etc. because
    • It is largely thanks to the collaboration of competing conglomerates such as IBM, Red Hat, Novell, (even Sun), Oracle, Intel, AMD, HP, SGI and others on the Linux kernel that has made it so fantastically capable. We wouldn't have the world-class portability, the performance, support for all the hardware under the sun, CPU/PCI/memory hotplug, multiple journalling filesystems, etc. without the above named companies realizing that they can get _more_ ROI via controlled cooperation than with proprietary enginee

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Alex ( 342 )
        You reply to a post about not getting open source - with a rant about getting linux. Hmmm - an interesting tactic.

        It is largely thanks to the collaboration of competing conglomerates such as IBM, Red Hat, Novell, (even Sun), Oracle, Intel, AMD, HP, SGI and others on the Linux kernel that has made it so fantastically capable. We wouldn't have the world-class portability, the performance, support for all the hardware under the sun, CPU/PCI/memory hotplug, multiple journalling filesystems, etc. without the abo
        • Your choice of numbers is frankly full of shit.

          IBM contributes heavily to Linux, whether it be financial contributions or intellectual ones. Linux isn't the whole of open source, but pegging IBM with "0%" is a big fat lie. IBM not only contributes to Linux, but they are even being sued for it(!) and fighting tooth and nail to their own benefit as well as the benefit of every Linux user out there.

          I won't bother discussing Red Hat, Novell, Intel, AMD, HP, SGI or Oracle, since all of those companies are extern

  • Typical IBM FUD (Score:2, Flamebait)

    by cpuh0g ( 839926 )

    What else would you expect from IBM? Their entire Linux strategy is based on the idea of luring people in with Linux and then signing them up for ridiculously overpriced "consulting services' that usually results in a recommendation to purchase their own proprietary hardware running AIX and ever more extensive service contracts and recurring revenue for IBM. They are now seeing customers running Solaris 10 on IBM hardware and more and more requests for Solaris 10 instead of their own stuff and its not a

    • They are now seeing customers running Solaris 10 on IBM hardware and more and more requests for Solaris 10 instead of their own stuff and its not a pleasant prospect to see where the trends are heading for IBM.

      Really? Do you have any unknown info to share? Because if you look at their stock and corporate info, they are losing ground, not gaining.

    • Their entire Linux strategy is based on the idea of luring people in with Linux and then signing them up for ridiculously overpriced "consulting services' that usually results in a recommendation to purchase their own proprietary hardware running AIX and ever more extensive service contracts and recurring revenue for IBM.

      When I set up two HPC clusters using IBM hardware, they had no intention of recommending AIX. It was in their scope of work that we use RedHat, as it was what we wanted. And they eve

  • Just like Sun's other "open" products? (Score:3, Informative)

    by bigbigbison ( 104532 ) on Thursday August 17, 2006 @11:23AM (#15926958) Homepage
    So this is just like OpenOffice.org then? I've read a lot of complains that OO.o is tightly controlled by Sun.
    Sun should just do as AOL did and spin off their open source projects as a seperate company.

  • IBM is wrong (Score:5, Insightful)

    by pinky0x51 ( 951042 ) on Thursday August 17, 2006 @11:23AM (#15926960) Homepage
    Whether IBM is right or not that OpenSolaris has a development community, OpenSolaris is true Free Software.
    Free Software is not about a development method but about a way of licensing software. Free Software can build in a community process and in a in-house process as proprietary software can be developed in a community or in-house. It's not the development method which makes something Free Software it's the license.

    Sad to see that even such a big company with such a big "linux-centre" like IBM doesn't really understand Free Software.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by mwvdlee ( 775178 )
      The key question is; if Sun tries to kill OpenSolaris development, can they do it?

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by pinky0x51 ( 951042 )
        >The key question is; if Sun tries to kill OpenSolaris development, can they do it?

        No, because OpenSolaris is Free Software, so everyone can use it, study it, adapt it and (re-)distribute it.

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by ahl_at_sun ( 853337 )

        The key question is; if Sun tries to kill OpenSolaris development, can they do it?

        Ignoring the question of why Sun would try to do that (some sort of exotic open source poison pill?), I suppose they could turn off the juice on OpenSolaris.org, but even that wouldn't shut down development. The code is in the open and it's under a license that explicitly allows people to use it and modify it. No one -- not even Sun -- could keep people from building their own distros, doing their own development, and bu

    • Free Software is not about a development method but about a way of licensing software.

      I agree. The key for free software (to me) is not whether the developer(s) are engaging with a community to develop the software -- it's whether people in the community can freely fork the code and continue to develop it independently if they decide they don't like the way that the original developer(s) are going.

      As long as Open Solaris is licensed in such a way, it's fine by me to refer to it open source.

      Sad to see

  • Many Open Solaris options (Score:5, Informative)

    by andrewzx1 ( 832134 ) on Thursday August 17, 2006 @11:25AM (#15926968) Homepage Journal
    There are a variety of very good Open Solaris distros now:

    Belenix: http://belenix.sarovar.org/belenix_download.html/ [sarovar.org]

    Polaris, Solaris for PowerPC: http://www.blastware.org/ [blastware.org]

    Nexenta, the Solaris/Ubuntu mix: http://www.gnusolaris.org/gswiki/Nexenta_OS/ [gnusolaris.org]

    And of course you can go straight to the official Open Solaris Communities page here: http://www.opensolaris.org/os/communities/;jsessio nid=6E46815A1C5CC33AC6470A9439DABAA6#all/ [opensolaris.org]

    Fight IBM FUD with Open Solaris Fact.

  • I call BS (Score:5, Insightful)

    by mihalis ( 28146 ) on Thursday August 17, 2006 @11:26AM (#15926980) Homepage

    IBM is just full of it. If OpenSolaris were not for real do you think they would have gone to the trouble of changing their source code control system from the in-house Teamware stuff to Mercurial (see this [selenic.com]).

    No, that is the kind of wrenching and disruptive change that you do if you're really serious about pulling in developers outside the corporate WAN. If it were a facade they could have built a more impressive facade much more quickly.

    Progress is slow on OpenSolaris because unlike Linux in 1991, Solaris is already a mission-critical operating system in many enterprises, and because they are trying to pull in non-employee contributions whilst maintaining quality. This is actually difficult.

    Disclaimer: I was on the invite-only OpenSolaris pilot program and got some free t-shirts (none of which fit).

  • I am an outside contributor (Score:5, Informative)

    by gdamore ( 933478 ) <garrettNO@SPAMdamore.org> on Thursday August 17, 2006 @11:28AM (#15927002) Homepage
    I am an outside contributor to OpenSolaris. I have several projects which are currently in the process of getting integrated into Solaris.

    It is true that the development model at Sun is a bit more "Cathedral" than "Bazaar", and there are still some technical and administrative challenges to solve (for example they haven't figured out how to get folks to directly commit to OpenSolaris yet -- you have to hand off code to folks at Sun who integrate your code and walk it thru the process.)

    Development of Solaris has always been a tricky thing, and historically has had huge amounts of "process" to get changes. This is because there are numerous quality safeguards, and committees that have been involved. There are famous questions that every project integrating has historically had to answer: (is it i18n safe, what interfaces does it expose? does it conform to various standards already established? is it portable to both intel and sparc? etc. etc.)

    Part of the review process also has to uphold things like Sun's binary compatibility guarantee. In any respects, the _quality_ of Sun's Solaris product is much higher, I think, than what you find in say Linux, where churn is a lot higher and quality and oversight controls a bit less.

    Anyway, it is possible to contribute to OpenSolaris now, though its a bit of a rough road right now. But they are making it better, and I expect it will be a lot easier in the next year or so.
  • The way I see it, the reason IBM is acting like this is because they refuse to open source their own major programs (like DB2 and AIX).

    So they can't say "Sun is doing a good job at open-sourcing their own software" because then they'd be asked "so why aren't you doing the same?" - and because nobody likes to admit a competitor is doing a good job.

    So we get these mealy-mouthed attacks instead.

    Given that DTrace has been integrated into MacOS X into Leopard:
    http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/bmc?entry=dtrace_ on [sun.com]

  • FUD-tastic (Score:5, Informative)

    by ahl_at_sun ( 853337 ) on Thursday August 17, 2006 @11:34AM (#15927054) Homepage
    How this blatant FUD could be confused with actual newsworthy content is a credit to IBM. The assertions put forth in the article seem to have only a casual relationship with reality. For example:
    Sun could do "simple things" to build a real OpenSolaris community if it were serious about doing so, Frye said. "They would push their design discussions out into the forums, so people can see what's going on," he suggested.
    Take a look at the discussions page [opensolaris.org] at OpenSolaris.org and that's exactly what you'll see. Not only are there discussion forums for established components (ZFS, DTrace, Zones, etc.), but for projects which are still in their early stages (e.g. BrandZ, Xen, clearview) that are encouraging community involvement for testing and development.

    Components of OpenSolaris are also showing up in other operating systems: DTrace [opensolaris.org] will be in the next release of Mac OS X [sun.com] and FreeBSD [sun.com]. Speaking personally as one of the DTrace engineers at Sun, it's been quite a pleasure working with both the Apple and FreeBSD kernel engineers -- pretty decent community for a "facade".

  • Not for nothing, but... (Score:5, Funny)

    by DoofusOfDeath ( 636671 ) on Thursday August 17, 2006 @11:36AM (#15927071)
    It beats the hell out of OpenAIX. On acount of being somewhat more... existant.

  • What's the problem (Score:3, Funny)

    by $RANDOMLUSER ( 804576 ) on Thursday August 17, 2006 @11:39AM (#15927084)
    It's at least as Open as OpenVMS!

  • Firewall?? (Score:3, Funny)

    by ader ( 1402 ) on Thursday August 17, 2006 @11:43AM (#15927110) Homepage
    > "Sun holds it all behind the firewall."

    Trans.: "I know a techie word and I'm going to use it."

    Ade_
        /

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by kunwon1 ( 795332 ) *
      That's the hardest I've laughed while reading Slashdot in a very long time. I wish I had mod points. Bravo.
  • The poster claims

    "...he pointed out that OpenSolaris takes contributions from all comers, has active public mailing lists, open IRC channels, and several online communities, so Frye's description seems at least overblown."

    With my apologies, if these things make something open source, .Net is certainly open source. But it's not. I congratulate Sun on what they're doing, but that's still not true open source. Making the definition of open source muddy is really not a good idea.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by eldoo77 ( 817524 )
      Who died and left you in charge of what makes a project "Open Source." Just because a project doesn't line up with your ideals doesn't mean it isn't Open Source. Clearly OpenSolaris qualifies and if IBM disagrees, who give a flying ...

    • Re:Still not open source (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Score Whore ( 32328 ) on Thursday August 17, 2006 @01:13PM (#15927795)
      So, out of curiousity, what exactly is "open source" in your world?

      You can take Solaris get the complete source. Make whatever changes you want, build your own distro and release it. Sun could decide it was all a complete screwup and shutdown opensolaris tomorrow and you'd still be able to continue to develop and release your derivative code. Sounds like open source to me.

      Contrast this to Linux. You can contribute patcehs to Linus. You can discuss it on IRC. You can subscribe to email lists. You can take the source and build your own. And Linus undeniably has private discussions with developers whom he has established working relationships with about the development of Linus' kernel. Additionally you cannot directly check your code into the mainline Linux kernel. Sounds about the same as the OpenSolaris development process to me.
  • OpenSolaris has always been a lame marketing gimmick - and people with a serious interest in F/OSS don't need IBM to tell them that.

    It's interesting to see IBM taking jabs at Sun, though. Perhaps those new Niagara CPUs have some PowerPC salesmen worried.
    • It's interesting to see IBM taking jabs at Sun, though

      Typically, in recent years, IBM has been pretty classy about not disparaging competitors while Sun seemed to spend most of their waking hours trash-talking just about everyone.

      When I see one company diss-ing another I tend to think less of them and I assume they are speaking from a position of weakness (which is what I have thought about Sun for years). So when I read this I tend to think like you are, is IBM worried about something?

  • Only 1 open source os needed? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by jm91509 ( 161085 ) on Thursday August 17, 2006 @12:07PM (#15927257) Homepage
    One open-source operating system is plenty, though, so there would be no point to making AIX open-source, IBM's Handy said. "There's room for a proprietary one and an open one. Once one is open, you don't need any more," he said.

    So bugger off *BSD. Very open-minded of him

  • I'm somewhat of a Blue Fanboy BUT (Score:4, Insightful)

    by tweek ( 18111 ) on Thursday August 17, 2006 @12:18PM (#15927336) Homepage Journal
    I don't see openAIX floating around.
    Sure they've ported some of the technologies and added the opensource toolbox to AIX (imagine an RPM that can be installed on AIX and interfaces with the existing AIX package system).

    Why is there no JFS2 for Linux? Why can't I mount a JFS2 filesystem on the SAN on my Linux machine? Why has the AIX lvm not been ported to Linux or why has IBM not contributed to the Linux LVM2 the ability to import AIX volume groups along with the requiste filesystem support on Linux? Why the hell don't I have lsdev, lscfg, lsattr for Linux? That alone would save me alot of effort.

    Look the ODM is not the greatest thing since sliced bread but AIX has other good ideas that IBM should contribute instead of bitching about OpenSolaris. Shit they just want to sell more pSeries boxes anyway ;)

  • Lock customers into Linux? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by dpbsmith ( 263124 ) on Thursday August 17, 2006 @12:19PM (#15927348) Homepage
    ...I like some of the things IBM is doing now, but never forget they are a very, very big company whose agenda always directed at making money for their shareholders. They have a business motive behind everything they do.

    IBM is a big champion of Linux now, but it wasn't all that long ago that they were issuing stern warnings to those who foresake the safety of proprietary software about the dangers of getting "locked into open source."

    IBM would probably happily lock people into Linux... whatever, exactly, that would mean... if they can figure out how to do it and can see an advantage to IBM in doing it.
  • One good proof that Solaruis is really open is that DTrace is now in Mac OSX, or at least in the version of OSX released to Apple developers. I thinki that is a sign of an open project: When other projects can use your code in theirs. To be truely open code has to flow both ways to and from your project. Getting DTrace into OSX is a major contribution by Sun.
  • Last year I spoke with a group from Sun's Santa Clara offices at the OSBC East conference in Boston, and asked them about Sun's open source efforts. After drawing blank stares, and a bit of hemming and hawing after requesting that they actually call someone ("Umm...give us a card and we'll get back to you"), they finally relented and made a few phone calls. Got the name of someone in Austin. Came back to Texas, and to this day I've never heard back from said individual, despite several attempts to contact
  • Dan Frye also said that there was no Internet in 1991, so you'll forgive me if I laugh everything he says off.

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I have hardly ever known a mathematician who was capable of reasoning. -- Plato

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