Sun COO Schwartz Promises Open Source Solaris

Alapan writes "According to C-Net Asia, Sun plans to make Solaris open source soon. While I hardly expect Sun to make it GPL compatible, I wonder how much restrictions Sun will place on distributing modified solaris systems. And will we some integration of Solaris' strong points into other open source OSes like Linux and BSD?" Update: 06/02 14:16 GMT by T : Correction: Schwartz is Sun's COO and President, but not CEO (as the headline originally had it).

comments to sun

[millahtime]

I wonder if sun will accept comments on their system from those who write linux and BSD?

Odd..

[jwthompson2]

Just yesterday we were talking about this [slashdot.org]...which just leaves me saying huh!? Unless they meant Shared-Source and not really OSI-Style open source...

Re:porting

[grigori]

Expected at end of year with Solaris 10: 64 bit on SPARC and AMD, 32 bit on Pentium

Re:porting

[mh123083]

Umm, I assume you have heard of Solaris X86 and also Sun's Opteron based servers.

INCORRECT TITLE

[bstil]

Jonathan Schwartz is Sun Microsystems' president and chief operating officer, not CEO as the title, "Sun CEO Schwartz Promises Open Source Solaris" suggests!

Re:application incompatibilities?

[grigori]

Well I sure as heck have, and even breaks going from say RH 7.0 to 7.1 to 7.3 to 8 to 9! Let alone cross distro. Yes, recompiling from scratch usually gets you there, or changing environment variables to use old threading model, or installing 800 prereq RPMs that you don't already have, or removing some RPMs you have that break the code you want or.... Sure, no problem! Seriously - it IS a problem!

Re:I would be wary of this news

[TheLinuxWarrior]

Sun isn't saying "Don't use Linux". In fact, if you want Linux, you can get it on Sun (X86) hardware.

Sun is also producing turn key Linux cluster solutions for pharmaceutical companies. How does that say "don't use Linux"?

I think you're getting the wrong message. The message is, we've always prided ourselves on our committment to open standards and open source, and that trend will continue with Solaris.

I for one don't see anything bad coming from that.

Re:This would be welcome news

[Richard W.M. Jones]

I'm sorry, but once you've used GNU/Linux, you'll find Solaris sucks very badly.

• Where are all the useful tools? You have to download them from some unofficial site called Sunfreeware. Oh now, apparently you get some ancient GNU software compiled on an extra CD these days - great leap forward guys!
• No command-line editing anywhere in sight! I once saw a Solaris consultant configuring a box, and using the mouse to cut and paste command lines every two seconds. Man I felt sorry for him.
• The pkg format sucks. Erm, dependencies? Package repositories? This is not 1990 you know. What's going on with this 'pkg_add -d .' crap, defaulting to reading off the tape drive or some shit? Give me 'apt-get install <latest-cool-toy>' any day.
• How do I keep Solaris up to date? By constantly manually checking for patches from some obscure place on Sun's site, and installing them using a laborious manual process. No thanks.
• The installer is slow and horribly interactive. It's pretty much about the same level as when I installed my first ever Slackware (in 1992/93?)
• It's sllloooowwwwww too. I had a Sun Ultra 5 running Solaris 9 for a while. When I replaced it with Debian, I swear it felt twice as fast. And Solaris never worked out how to put the display into 16-bit colour depth. I never even knew it was possible until the Debian installer did it for me.
• The default desktop system is Motif + CDE, which is a great leap forward ... for 1992.

Basically they can make Solaris Free under a GPL license for all I care, and I still wouldn't touch it with a barge-pole, even on Sun hardware.

Re:This would be welcome news

[Cajal]

I suggest you check out Blastwave [blastwave.org]. They've created a Debian-esque wrapper around Sun's package format and have a network-aware installer. So, to install, say, PostgreSQL, you just do `sudo pkg-get install postgresql` and it will connect to a repository, fetch pgsql and its dependecies. You can also upgrade all of your Blastwave packages by doing a `sudo pkg-get upgrade'. It's pretty nice. They've got a decent amount of packages [blastwave.org] available.

Sun has announced that GNOME will be their new default desktop. In fact, I believe they are porting Java Desktop (which is GNOME with a Sun theme) to Solaris.

Regarding speed, have you checked out Solaris 10? It's a lot faster than 8 and 9. Sun is making the betas of 10 available for free - check out Solaris Express [sun.com].

Also, an Ultra 5 is hardly an ideal system to use. It's about 7 years old, and even then was extremely low-end. I used to use one as a Kerberos server. It worked fine as a lightweight server, but I'd never use it for interactive work. Linux is probably faster than Solaris on it, but Solaris is hardly optimized for that level of system.

Re:This would be welcome news

[rob_from_ca]

Solaris has always had ksh, which includes command line editing. Sounds like a bad consultant. Solaris 8 and up now includes bash as well.

Re:This would be welcome news

[Anonymous Coward]

And Sun recognizes this. Which is why since Solaris 8 Sun has shipped a CD with GNU tools/sources and in Solaris 10, many of those tools will be a part of the OS install itself.

Re:This would be welcome news

[irix]

you'll find Solaris sucks very badly

As a desktop, maybe. But Solaris doesn't shine as a desktop O/S, it shines on a server where uptime, stability and scalability are the primary concerns.

now, apparently you get some ancient GNU software compiled on an extra CD these days - great leap forward guys

I personally install many of the GNU tools over their Solaris counterparts. However if Sun up and replaced the Solaris tools overnight then thousands of scripts would break because they depend on the behaviour and options of the Solaris tools.

No command-line editing anywhere in sight!

WTF? You can run any shell on Solaris that you can run on Linux. The Bourne shell is the default for root for historical compatability reasons.

The pkg format sucks ... Give me 'apt-get install ' any day

Solaris has other package formats (RPM), but moving away from pkg isn't something that can happen overnight. Installing the latest cool toy from some unstable repository isn't exactly the priority.

How do I keep Solaris up to date? By constantly manually checking for patches from some obscure place on Sun's site...

Boy, that was hard to find [sun.com] If you are running a Sun and you don't know about Sunsolve what planet are you living on?

It's sllloooowwwwww too. I had a Sun Ultra 5 running Solaris 9 for a while. When I replaced it with Debian...

Ah yes, 8 yeard old hardware that is pretty much a PC with a SPARC CPU. How did Debian install and perform on a 128-way system?

The default desktop system is Motif + CDE

Not any more [sun.com]

Solaris doesn't stack up very well against Linux on the desktop, no argument from me. But running a desktop with the latest bleeding-edge toys installed on it is hardly the only measure of an O/S.

Who said anything about "soon"?

[base_chakra]

according to Mr. Schwartz, Solaris will be open source soon...

Actually, despite the headline's claim, Schwartz never actually said "soon"; in fact, he was very vague: 'I don't want to say when that will happen. But make no mistake, we will open source Solaris.'
So, what does that mean? At the latest possible hour, when all other options are exhausted?

And before we get too excited about an open Solaris, consider this: "one problem that Schwartz wants to avoid is having Solaris splintered into different distributions like Linux" (Ong Boon Kiat). If that statement is true, then it doesn't portend well for modified versions of the operating system, does it? I'm hoping that the author merely extrapolated from Schwartz' dim view of Red Hat.

A variety of Solaris distributions would be excellent, but it's probably not going to happen. John Loiacono of Sun adds: "We have to consider what licensing model we use and what levels of free usage we want. Then we also need to consider if we want to [segment the licensing model to address] commercial, private and academic use."

These deliberations suggest that the community will not get anything close to ideal licensing terms.

It's a shame, because if they would truly open source Solaris and Java, the open source community would rally around both products and actually help Sun get out of the death spiral they seem to be in right now.

True, but it's probably a pipe dream. Call me cynical, but it almost seems like Sun just wants free labor to bolster a dying product. I would be surprised if the eventual licensing terms concur with the notion of being "truly open source"; more like, "just open source enough to extract some patches and drivers from the open source development community." How many video cards do they support now? Six?

Don't get me wrong, I would love for Sun to open Solaris, but consider the source (no pun intended).

Re:God, I hope not.

[peawee03]

You can take an ISO C++ program and compile it on just about any standards compilant compiler across multiple computers of different makes / models. For example, I can write code in C++, and compile it with Sun CC on a SPARC, gcc on a FreeBSD Alpha box, and icc on an Linux x86 box. MS Visual C++ was designed to lock you into the Windows x86 platform, and force you to use Visual Studio tools to boot.

Tales of Net-SNMP and Sun's contributions

[hardaker]

A while ago Sun decided to use the Net-SNMP open-source (BSD-licenced) SNMP agent instead of their proprietary one that they had been distributing for a long time. Being the lead-developer of the project, they contacted me about how to best work with each other. They were wonderful to work with, accomodated all my requests of them and submitted more patches and bug fixes than probably anyone else (under a BSD license, which I required). Our users were certainly pleased with all this, as a large number of our users were sun users that had swapped in our snmp agent for theirs. Tighter integration meant better support for them. (not to mention better security as our code supports SNMPv3, and theirs did not to my understanding).

Unfortuantely, the tale turned sour when Sun downsized and the entire team that did all this wonderful work (and probably will have saved Sun money in the long run) got laid-off.

So, this story is both good and bad news. They've done smart things before in the OSS realm, but they've also laid off some of the people that really made it happen.