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."
Solaris Vs Linux? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Solaris Vs Linux? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Solaris Vs Linux? (Score:5, 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.
Re:Solaris Vs Linux? (Score:5, Insightful)
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:Solaris Vs Linux? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Solaris Vs Linux? (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.blastwave.org [blastwave.org]
Sun should be doing this themselves - the Solaris package format is inferior and automatic dependency resolution should be expected.
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:GNU/SunOS, not Solaris (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:GNU/SunOS, not Solaris (Score:5, Informative)
Solaris 1.x is SunOS 4.x, which is BSD-based.
Solaris 2.x is SunOS 5.x, which is System V-based.
Re:Solaris Vs Linux? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Solaris Vs Linux? (Score:3, Informative)
Linux, especially 2.6, has much better thread granularity than 2.2 did, but it's not as parallel as irix or solaris.
Solaris and irix both evolved slowly to run on those huge boxes. First you thr
Re:Solaris Vs Linux? (Score:4, Insightful)
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? (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.
Re:Solaris Vs Linux? (Score:3, Insightful)
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 differen
Re:Solaris Vs Linux? (Score:4, Insightful)
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 adva
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:Works the other way too... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Solaris Vs Linux? (Score:5, Informative)
If you've got sparc hardware, x86 stuff is a downgrade path you don't want to follow.
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.
Re:Solaris Vs Linux? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Solaris Vs Linux? (Score:3, Informative)
Journaled file systems reduce disk write latency because new data (and metadata) can be written in one sequential write. Non-journaled file systems (like ext2) must move the disk head to multiple locations to update the data and then the metadata. For more info, John Ousterhout (creator of Tcl) has some good papers about journaling file systems, such as "The Design and Implementation of a Log-Structured File System (1991)" [psu.edu].
Re:Solaris Vs Linux? (Score:3, Informative)
If you've got sparc hardware, x86 stuff is a downgrade path you don't want to follow.
UNQUOTE
Unless you want to talk about cost. If your software only runs on Solaris and your customers are balking on buying because of the high cost of Sun servers, you certainly want to investigate porting to linux.
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.
Re:Solaris Vs Linux? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Solaris Vs Linux? (Score:3, Informative)
Oracle doesn't have a great history in this area. I have firsthand experience with 9i on E15Ks and secondhand experience with 8i on E10Ks.
Now, once you've got the instance itself sorted out then you have to be concerned about excessive block level contention. If you app isn't paralleli
Re:Solaris Vs Linux? (Score:4, Insightful)
Random thoughts about wineglass v plate stability (Score:5, Funny)
It takes a lot more effort to get an upside down plate the right way up, than it does to get a wine glass on its side the right way up.
Does this mean it's much easier to get a titsup linux box up and working again than a titsup Solaris box?
That all depends... (Score:3, Funny)
Or a plate, for that matter.
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:Solaris Vs Linux? (Score:4, Insightful)
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:Stability (Score:5, Insightful)
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:Stability (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Stability (Score:3, Informative)
Sounds like either an older graphics card (cg3?) or an X11 configuration where the default color model is pseudocolor rather than trucolor. There could be good reasons for that (eg heavy use of a graphic application that modifies the LUTs for highlighting or animation effects) but it can have psychedelic effects on windows belonging to a different application, depending on the hardware.
Re:Stability (Score:3, Funny)
Instead of RGB phospors, the display is based on CMYK toner, so if someone uses a lot of, say, yellow in their on-screen graphics, it will eventually run out of yellow and develop a bluish tint.
Re:Solaris Vs Linux? (Score:2, Informative)
Scalability, stability are the main reasons. There are also some cool features like DTrace that aren't available in Linux.
Re:Solaris Vs Linux? (Score:5, Informative)
It's faster (approx. 30% : Sun to challenge Linux to a benchmarking duel shortly with Solaris 10)
It has N1 Grid Containers
At $99 It's cheaper than any enterprise Linux distro.
It scales better.
*Even* More secure than Linux
It's standard
Solaris 10 runs RH Linux apps efficiently
etc. etc. etc.
Re:Solaris Vs Linux? (Score:4, Insightful)
*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
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-L
Re:Solaris Vs Linux? (Score:3, Informative)
Oh wait, that's right, there is none.
I'd say that the time of recess between the general community being aware of a vulnerability and a workable patch being available is a pretty good measure. But, according to this article [archive.org], In 1999, Red Hat's "at risk" time was half that of Sun's (presumably then-current versions of Solaris), and a third o
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:5, Informative)
A Solaris install on the Internet on its own would probably get rooted before the hour ran out. At least it would if you were to choose a full install.
I use solaris on most of my servers, but before entering production, you have to patch the hell out of it (last time I checked, the Solaris 8 patch cluster was like 50MB), install ssh, if needed, and close a bunch of services that are activated by default *and* reactivated upon patch application.
I usually play it safe and install ipfilter, just in case.
Re:Solaris Vs Linux? (Score:5, Insightful)
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? (Score:5, Insightful)
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:Solaris Vs Linux? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Solaris Vs Linux? (Score:3, Insightful)
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
Re:Solaris Vs Linux? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Solaris Vs Linux? (Score:3)
And well, I know quite a lot of large telecom systems that run on
Solaris, and only Solaris.
Re:Linux doesn't cost more (Score:3, Informative)
Another thing to note is that the "License" is probably nothing more than a sheet of paper that says "You're legally allowed to run this software on that machine". Solaris itself has absolutely no enforcement of licensing.
If you put 8 CPUs in that SS1000, and installed Solaris 8, it would work just perfectly fine with all the CPUs. (Support for sun4d machines SS1000/SC2000 was dropped in Solaris 9)
Seen this coming? (Score:2, Funny)
Too little too late? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Too little too late? (Score:4, Interesting)
Only good news, if it's really open (Score:5, 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.
Re:Only good news, if it's really open (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Only good news, if it's really open (Score:4, Funny)
"Evacuate? In our moment of triumph? I think you overestimate their chances."
**KABOOM!**
Open Source, AMD Processors...? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Open Source, AMD Processors...? (Score:5, Insightful)
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:Future of SPARC (Score:3, Insightful)
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
Re:Future of SPARC (Score:3, Informative)
Sun cancelled UltraSPARC V because it was too late. They also realised that in server-type situations, multi-core and multi-threading was the way to go, so they developed Niagra. Simply increasing clock frequency just doesn't scale anymore c.f. Pentium IV.
Further more, Fujitsu has an excellent 64-bit SPARC implementation (SPARC is an Open Standard, unlike itanic), so it makes more sense for them to use that than develop their own single-threaded UltraS
Except device Drivers... (Score:5, Funny)
So like linux it will work great if you could only find the drivers for your printer.
Can they do this? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Can they do this? (Score:5, Informative)
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:Can they do this? (Score:3, Informative)
Where do I apply for commit bit? (Score:2)
Don't get tainted (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Don't get tainted (Score:5, Insightful)
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
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??????
Re:Unix(tm) code? (Score:3, Informative)
I can use a initial capital letters if I wish. *Their* convention is wholely capital letters.
Why use Linux then? (Score:4, Interesting)
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: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.
Open source != GPL (Score:5, Insightful)
... 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?
What does that mean? (Score:4, Interesting)
On the other hand, isn't that part of why they call it Slowlaris?
Uh huh (Score:5, Insightful)
The license is the key and it may not be "Free" (Score:5, Insightful)
A legal open source SysV derivative? (Score:3, Interesting)
Otherwise, this is in violent conflict with the bizarre SCO derivative theory.
Vaporware wanring (Score:5, Informative)
This will be the saem way with this announcement..
So let's see here... (Score:3, Interesting)
Contradiction of the Sun--Microsoft Agreement (Score:3, Informative)
The Non-disclosure terms for any protocols that can interoperate with Microsoft's Client or Server software would seem to restrict a lot of functionality from being released under an open source license by Sun..
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?
The $20,000 question (Score:3, Insightful)
Reality Check available here. [sun.com] Heh!
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.
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.
I'll believe it when ... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I'll believe it when ... (Score:3, Insightful)
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 th
Solaris is dead (Score:3, Insightful)
there's absolutely no evidence... (Score:3, Informative)
I doubt anything they call 'open source' will legally be able to be used in Linux.
Max
Re:there's absolutely no evidence... (Score:3, Informative)
sounds like they're going to 'share-source' their stuff in the Microsoft fashion
Or the java community process fashion...
Free or Open (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Model Fedora? (Score:5, Insightful)
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??
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:Market Pressure Cooker (Score:3, Insightful)
In other words, Linux is no better in this regard, get over it.
Re:Market Pressure Cooker (Score:3, Insightful)
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 man
Re:Now... (Score:3, Funny)
All better now.
Re:Market Pressure Cooker (Score:2)
If you give away the software, you can sell the service (ie RedHat)
If you give away the software, you will sell more hardware (ie IBM)
Sun obviously can't release the protected software of other companies... however, I do bet that they transition over to non-proprietary in the future.
They can't do everything at once... but at least it's a start in the right direction.
Re:Market Pressure Cooker (Score:4, Insightful)
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.