Why OpenSolaris Failed To Build a Community 280
xtaski writes "Ted Ts'o, one of the earliest Linux developers, points out some serious flaws in OpenSolaris. There is a severe lack of developers, for one. Apparently, after 3 years, the OpenSolaris 'developer community' is still struggling to get the proper tools for developers to develop! Ted also points out some other flaws which make it clear just how disconnected the executives at Sun are from what's really going on in their 'open source communities.' He notes, 'It was never ... Sun's intention to try to promote a kernel engineering community, or at least, it was certainly not a high priority for them to do so.'"
mirror (Score:5, Informative)
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14:21:06 up 121 days, 16:47, 2 users, load average: 40.47, 12.41, 4.55
14:23:05 up 121 days, 16:49, 2 users, load average: 81.43, 36.97, 14.52
Fortuantely I'm still mirroring my blog onto my old Livejournal account; please read it there for now! The two articles that you want are this one: What Sun was trying to do with Open Solaris and this one: [livejournal.com]Organic vs. Non-organic Open Source [livejournal.com], if you can't get through to thunk.org.
Re:mirror (Score:5, Funny)
Doh!
(Once I actually really enabled wp-cache, my server seems to have been able to keep up, for now...)
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How's it get up to 80?
Re:mirror (Score:4, Interesting)
But yeah, I was pretty impressed that my 1 GHz Pentium III with only 512 megs of memory running 2.6.16 linux was able to not only survive, but recover from a slashdotting without needing to reboot. If I had only checked earlier to make sure that wp-cache really was enabled, but as the old saying goes, "no one expects the Spanish Inquisition!"
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Severe lack of...interest? (Score:2, Funny)
No developers or any tools?
At least we won't have to blame another Solaris bomb on George Clooney this time.
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For those too lazy too read the article: (Score:5, Insightful)
OSS is a labor of love. You've got to want to work on the project, and you've got to be able to work on the project.
If you put a big chunk of your time into something and get rudely dismissed, then its hardly likely that you'll continue to contribute.
Wait (Score:2, Funny)
Re:For those too lazy too read the article: (Score:5, Interesting)
I didn't come to Sun because I like the Kool-Aid, I came by acquisition. I haven't decided yet whether or not this whole "we love Open Source" thing Jonathan keeps plugging is real or a charade. I'm optimistic, but we'll see.
On better days, I like to think that the people way up at the helm really "get it" and are just waiting for the rest of the ship to slowly (slowly!) turn. On not-so-good days, I start to wonder if maybe someone's trying to pull a fast one.
There are lots and lots of people here who really and truly believe that Linux is just an upgrade path to Solaris. In other words... Once people start running Linux on Sun hardware, they'll "want more", and "step into the big league" with Solaris. It's kind of sad, when it's not irritating.
Anyhow... I could bitch for a while, but I won't.
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I once applied for a job whose sole perk was that the site was a huge testbed for Sun hardware, and I'd have the ability to just play with it...To play with big iron.
But I can't i
Re:For those too lazy too read the article: (Score:5, Interesting)
So, for example, the Thumper [sun.com] is one of Andy's creations. It's pretty hard to beat the storage density you get for the price. Put a mess of those under a Lustre filesystem, and people start to take notice of Sun as a player in HPC. The recent TACC Ranger [utexas.edu] system is all Sun gear: storage, compute, and network (with sun-built Magnum [sun.com] switches). The OS? Linux.
There's more interesting stuff coming down the pike, and from my perspective, it seems that there's a shift toward making money on volume rather than margins. In other words, somewhat less awesome, but more of it.
I dunno. I don't profess to have much more special knowledge than anyone outside of the upper echelons. I'm hopeful, though. I read somewhere that many of the big Solaris egos were hired away by teh google. Hopefully they keep going. They can have our kool-aid-drunk sales and marketing people too.
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Where I work we have two sun mainframes;
Um, no you don't.
Re:For those too lazy too read the article: (Score:5, Interesting)
Funny. It has been exactly the opposite for us.
We're running a bunch of xfires (14 boxes total, 4100, 4200, 4150) here
and initially started out with solaris because the wise guys said it's faster,
more stable, oh and no least you get that shiny "platinum support" badge...
Yea it was all that and the zfs hype, what could possibly go wrong?
Nothing much to be honest. We fell in love with the hardware immediately
and the machines hummed along without too much trouble. Postgres performs
well, java performs well, and ZFS snapshots are a blessing.
Despite all that superficial happyness we switched most of the hosts to linux
(and aim for 100% linux) after a few months. We still love ZFS (and can't wait
for a linux equivalent) but that alone couldn't justify sticking to solaris for us.
What broke it for us is the userland with all its subtle differences
to linux, or in other words: the learning curve. This may sound strange when
talking about a UNIX OS but as a linux shop we're spoiled by the GNU toolchain,
by dead-simple package management and all the little everyday things that just
work a tiny little bit different under solaris.
I'm not saying the linux-UI is better (actually, it is in many
places, but that's not the point here), it's just that we all grew
up with linux, so the solaris CLI "felt like a really old version of linux"
(to paraphrase a coworker) from the start.
We didn't slack, mind you. We tried hard to make that feeling stop. We read the
books and collected bigadmin bookmarks like trophies. We changed the default-shell
to bash and installed the GNU tools to keep our sanity but otherwise did our best
to treat solaris with respect and resisted the urge to dress it up to look more
like linux.
It didn't work out.
I could rant for days about the many little things that drove us away but
I'll try to focus on a few of the most significant points here:
1. Package Management (the lack thereof)
Pkg-add is bad joke when you're used to apt-get and emerge. JumpStart feels
like an insult when you're spoiled by FAI. I can only guess how Sun expects
us to keep our multiple solaris boxes in sync. Maybe they sell that as
one of their many enterprise service?
2. Google doesn't work well for solaris
Not really something we can blame on solaris or Sun but time after time we
were astonished as to how hard it is to find useful help for specific solaris
problems via google. Howto's and Tutorials about all things solaris are generally
very sparse. Due to this "learning by doing" doesn't work as well for solaris
as it does for linux.
3. The sun website SUCKS
Sure there is a lot of documentation, if you can find it in the pile
of rubble that sun calls a website. But even the stuff we found was
not always helpful. Sun documentation tends to be very verbose while
still often glossing over important details. Sun docs often feel like
they expect you to print them out and put them under your pillow.
We don't work that way. We're spoiled by straighforward howtos,
examples, stuff that gets us going fast. We're the impatient
youngsters.
Well, this got longer than I intended. I'll close with saying that
we'll keep buying sun hardware. The xfire series is the best piece of kit
(at a very competitive price) that I have ever seen and it runs linux
like a champ.
But linux as an "upgrade path to solaris"? Ha. Good joke.
In my world solaris has it's place on big iron and in areas where
the last bit of performance really matters. For everyone else the
natural choice is what they're familar with. And who grows up with
solaris these days?
Re:For those too lazy too read the article: (Score:4, Interesting)
As a cross-platform sysadmin with a decade-plus of experience, dude. Just... dude. My "Ineptitude" sense is tingling.
I mean, how much messing around on the command line do you really need to do on a daily basis? If the answer is "A Lot" - then I can sort of see Linux taking the advantage. Kinda. Yet, most, if not all, command line wrangling on modern servers is to munge shell scripts, and that's mostly been supplanted by python and ruby these days, anyhow. You've never even heard of JumpStart? "pkgadd -d" is too hard for you? You can't find anything on Solaris administration by googling the problem keywords with "sun Solaris administration" appended after? Really? Wow.
Not to be mean or anything, but seriously. If you can't handle Solaris, you shouldn't be in the sysadmin game. Only OpenBSD us easier for Unix wonks to tinker with. Stuff like AIX and NonStop would =break= you into a quivering pile of goop. Based on your post, I have doubts you'd be able to hack the more challenging Linux distros, too, like Slack or Debian.
There are good reasons to go with Linux on Sun hardware - pure speed, cross-platform compatibility (esp. with LAMP stack stuff), the need to tinker with the kernel to meet project objectives, or stripping down the OS to a bare minimum for performance or security advantages, re-purposing old hardware with an up-to-date OS that demands fewer resources. Then there are the reasons you gave.
I suppose if you really wanted to re-orient your entire computing platform around the needs of the sysadmins to play with the shell rather than the needs of the project to utilize its very expensive hardware to its fullest with modern OS features not yet available on Linux, your reasons are valid. Stupid, short-sighted, luddite and likely to get you fired at any other Unix shop of any size, but valid. I guess.
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Most of the younger staff here take a few months to get used to Solaris, it's the little things, netstat doesn't work as they expect (Why can't I just see the PID/binary name), ls doesn't have the switches they expect and to perfectly honest, while pkgtools is familiar to anyone who's used Slack etc kids today are spoiled with apt and they're right to like it, it "Just works"
We can't over modify the system as they need to be able to provide advice to clients
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Zones are indeed amazing but we don't have a use-case for them on our
production hosts. Maybe we could have used "zone-images" to deploy our
stuff but that'd really only be an excuse to use zones for a task
that seems to be better suited to apt (dependency tracking, controlled
distribution of updates etc.).
ZFS, no doubt, is something we miss.
SMF. Well, as often with solaris I love the concept but hate the implementation.
Yes, it beats sysv-init hands down. But, gah, XML, and m
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That company will not change though, they will quit using the software if thats the only option.
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It is very obvious, however, that it is not a clause that gives IBM any more rights than others, as you claimed. Were IBM to sell me a consumer product, they would be bound by the same rules as anyone else doing so.
Re:Not welcoming your Scott McNealy overlord? (Score:5, Insightful)
The lesson here is: If you're going to try to court people active in OSS development, then you're going to have to be nice to them, and you're going to have to let them take some ownership.
IBM is being smart; they're reaping rewards far in excess of their investment. Effectively they've outsourced their development, and while the terms of the "outsourcing" say that they have to share everything that comes out of the project, they're still in a position to steer, and support the product.
I'm not sure how you equate that with "control"; sounds just like more FUD to me.
Re:Not welcoming your Scott McNealy overlord? (Score:4, Informative)
You have that story all wrong. Nothing that previously was opensource is closing. MySQL has released open and closed-source products forever. The decision to make a native backup driver and compression/encryption as plugins to the open/public API had nothing to do with Sun's management. That was decided by MySQL prior to the acquisition.
There is 0 change there. It's an indicator of business as usual for MySQL.
Bureaucracy (Score:5, Informative)
I think Sun underestimated the importance of casual users. A lot of times the people choosing an OS for a project (be it enterprise deployment, inclusion with hardware, or just use within IT) go with what they are familiar with and also what their current interests are. When Sun open sourced Solaris, there was a lot of interest from the Linux and BSD communities. A lot of those people decided to download a copy and give it a try. The difficulty these casual users had in grabbing an installable copy and getting it running easily were significant. A lot of people just said, "meh" and moved on. The last time I grabbed a developer preview I still had to fill out a bunch of forms with my personal data then deal with Sun's "download manager" and then spend significant time getting it to install, even within a VM customized to run OpenSolaris in particular. That is still better than it used to be. I only have a success rate of about 50% in getting Solaris to install to date.
For most people I think it is just too much of a hassle and all the developer momentum is on Linux. I guess when Sun thinks about open sourcing Solaris, they see it as a way to try to stop their hardware customers from moving away from Sun, which is fine, but does little to leverage the real benefits of an OSS community such as Linux has been doing for a long time.
Download barriers (Score:5, Insightful)
Downloading is a royal PITA. The registration is usually a deal-breaker. Almost nothing I've ever run across that's worth anything requires registration for download. However, as a (former) long-time Solaris / SunOS user and major FOSS user, I felt compelled several times to try to circumvent that. But then there's no real way do a network install and othewise week download choice.
That gripe aside, the article is a bit premature. Though time is running out and it could become true if Sun decides to keep downloads off of anonymous FTP, AFS and Bittorrent.
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That gripe aside, the article is a bit premature. Though time is running out and it could become true if Sun decides to keep downloads off of anonymous FTP, AFS and Bittorrent.
I agree with that last bit, the article is way immature and innacurate.
If you read the comments of one of the blogs cited, you will see OpenSolaris members clearing up the situation and showing how she was a bit hasty in her comments. At least that's my opinion.
Like signing and NDA for a OpenSolaris User Group meeting. Turns out, even by the blogger's own statement that The NDA was for confidential information in case for instance something got left behind in the meeting room. Since OpenSolaris related
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Can't have those pesky Iranians downloading munitions, you know.
You think I'm joking? Go read about it [epic.org].
Sun does a huge amount of business with the US Gov't. Sun would rather annoy users than risk its lucrative government relationships. Ergo, stupid download portals that make you verify that you're not from the axis-of-can't-get-strong-crypto.
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Mind you it would not suprise me in the least if the USG was still being this stupid but I seem to remember hearing otherwise... So, here is what I dug up in a few minutes of googling [google.com]. (and yes, Wikipedia is close to the
OpenSolaris fails to build community b/c it sucks (Score:5, Insightful)
To get a hacker community, you have to offer fun. OpenSolaris is simply not fun. It reminds me of work.
Re:OpenSolaris fails to build community b/c it suc (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:OpenSolaris fails to build community b/c it suc (Score:5, Informative)
However, for desktop and non-standard services, it still sucks. If it's not a web server, and it's not a storage server, don't use Nexenta, use Ubuntu Server. Or Debian if you know what you're doing
from an old article on Slashdot (Score:2)
Linux community (Score:2, Informative)
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I agree. The structure may be close to the "original" UNIX, but where is all the comfort you are used to from any Linux distro off the shelf? The command line is positively hostile, unless you hunt down and install all the typical Linux tools. And on the GUI front things are not much better. It makes a certain kind of sense to write everything in Java, but unfortunately it is horribly slow, ugly and often difficult to use.
Solaris can be a nice system, but by the
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Good thing I used to run Gentoo otherwise that kind of thing might actually tick me off.
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Re:OpenSolaris fails to build community b/c it suc (Score:5, Insightful)
The niche for OpenSolaris is the 64way mission-critical server. Unfortunately, even ultimate kernel hacking enthusiasts rarely have one of those at home.
Re:OpenSolaris fails to build community b/c it suc (Score:4, Interesting)
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OpenSolaris was supposed to be for people who really like Solaris but don't much care for official support or something. I've only ever used it once, for a precompiled application that was built on it. It's not really that bad to configure although it did require several trips to google to get everything set up properly. My subjective opinion was that it was kinda slow for the hardware we were running it o
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"They also called is Slowlaris."
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Installation problems as well (Score:5, Informative)
Hmmm - Linux Fan Boys speak out.... (Score:5, Interesting)
There have been a lot of great development work on OpenSolaris in both the x86/x64 and SPARC worlds.
OpenSolaris (much like it's big brother Solaris) does have a list of valid / tested hardware platforms that work out of the box without issue.
If your specific hardware isn't listed and it's fairly well mainstream, document what didn't work, submit it, and it will more than likely get fixed.
I've used OpenSolaris on IBM/Lenovo thinkpads, IBM xServer hardware, SuperMicro / Intel hardware, homebrew systems with rarely an issue.
I've enjoyed the support of the OpenSolaris community as a whole, and found them to be as resourceful as any *inux / bsd community.
It all depends on what you like / want.
For me, gaining the ability to work with Solaris during development cycles to help in some small way guide / assist with the efforts is worthwhile.
Re:Hmmm - Linux Fan Boys speak out.... (Score:5, Insightful)
The point of picking and choosing your operating system is so that you can pick the best tool for the job. If that tool is Solaris, then use it. If not, so be it.
Since Sun actively develops Solaris (and thus parts of OpenSolaris), do they really need individual contributors?
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What about all of the burned bridges? (Score:5, Informative)
-Wouldn't let the opensolaris board call the project opensolaris. Probably a legal quagmire of their own creation. The consequences of that lead to this resignation. http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/ogb-discuss/2008-February/004488.html [opensolaris.org]
-There's this gem, most of which I don't pretend to understand. The punchline is on the bottom. http://cryptnet.net/mirrors/texts/kissedagirl.html [cryptnet.net]
-There's this gem, where even Ian Murdock links in suggesting the difficulty is happening above his level. http://ianskerrett.wordpress.com/2008/02/22/a-solution-for-suns-os-community-problems/#comment-17418 [wordpress.com]
Instant success (Score:5, Insightful)
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Linux wasn't an overnight success, that's true. But it's a success *now*. OpenSolaris needs to do everything Linux does, but better. Until it can do that, no one will bother with it. The problem being, of course, that if no one bothers with it, it will NEVER be better than Linux. So, yeah, it's dead. Everyone but Sun knew this would happen.
It's the same issue that prevents any truly *new* operating systems from gaining traction. Simply being *technically* better doesn't mean
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Linux drivers, sucky as they can be, are still chugging along because there are hackers that want to make things work. Sun sells hardware, and they have a hardware maker's mentality that the software just sells the hardware, folks. That's partly why they went 'open' in the first place-- but it was a lame attempt at building a community that McNealy couldn't stomach and Schwartz pays lip service to. It's all about shareholder equity-- make no mistake about this. Sun couldn't figu
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Well, the community may not be a failure yet, but if Sun continues being recalcitrant in providing dev tools (like a proper code repository) the community may very well decide that OpenSolaris isn't worth the potential benefits and move on to other projects.
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If you were looking for Yet Another Open Source Linux Replacement, and have failed to receive it from a barely four year old project, then sure, I suppose to you that project has "failed".
If, like me, you saw OpenSolaris as a sandbox and open dialogue with the community to shape the next version of Solaris, and not a Linux replacement, then perhaps you aren't so disappointed at the moment.
The development of ZFS in particular has c
A simple reason? (Score:2)
Gnu/Solaris (Score:4, Interesting)
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GPL was a reactionary statement to the BSD licenses' freedoms being taken advantage of by corporate powers. The license OpenSolaris is under now ( CDDL ) is much more balanced. It keeps the code under a viral clause ( change it? share it! ) but it doesn't spread to the surrounding code like the GPL does ( link to it? share it! )
The GPL illustrated some fine points about giving users too much freedom, and now it's time to lay it to rest with Marx and pure Smith economics as political tool
Support Some Hardware? (Score:2)
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Somebody said the Marvell driver tended to lose links - just curious if you had any contrary experience?
of course not (Score:5, Insightful)
I mean, who is going to contribute to such a project if (1) Sun engineers keep calling the shots, and (2) anything you contribute needs to be given to Sun so that they can sell it to paying customers?
If Sun were serious about making Solaris and Java open source projects, they'd release them under a single, open source license only. That would probably have to be BSD.
And why not? Solaris was BSD licensed to begin with; it was Sun that made it proprietary.
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SunOS 4 was indeed based on some kind of BSD, but got killed by Solaris 2 long time ago
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Solaris >=2 still contains plenty of BSD code. Furthermore, System V contains stuff derived from Berkeley as well.
Without BSD, Sun wouldn't even exist.
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You don't even have to pay for minimal patch support. ie security / vulnerability / stability patches are freely available to registered users - without paying for a support contract. This is on their Enterprise Solaris product, not the OpenSolaris product.
Sun has the reigns to make certain that everything works and works well as they end up having to support it on their hardware (and other vendor's as well - Read IBM / Dell agre
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Yes, and that's the problem: Sun holds the reigns. Even if they were using that control well, it would be a problem. But Sun engineering and management doesn't know what they are doing, and that makes it worse. Of course, it doesn't matter for Solaris (who cares?), but Java has become so much a part of the computing infrastructure that Sun's continued screw-ups are a real problem.
Can you even download a copy of RedHat Enterprise Server and use it, w
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Dtrace?
ZFS?
Zones / Containers?
Ultra SPARC T1, T2, T2+?
They took their source code and chip designs, opened it up with their version of opensource license, while keeping control of what gets put back into the distributions for the OpenSolaris and Solaris projects, and it's working - quite well.
If opensource were all on an even playing field, there would only be one opensource license.
Considering the numerous versions and variations, there's obviously some things that everyone just can't agree on
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holds the reigns
It's actually "reins", not "reigns", direct metaphor from horses and other domesticated animals. Sorry for being a grammar Nazi, anyway...
Reasons for this failure. (Score:3, Insightful)
Because Solaris without Sparcs isn't that great? (Score:2, Insightful)
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BTW, what white-box linux platform competes with, say, the Sun Fire X4500 + Solaris?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zQ5RLAyA7w [youtube.com]
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It's a sexy, if heavy, machine.
Too easy to replace Solaris... (Score:3, Interesting)
As a member of the community... (Score:5, Insightful)
Is his complaint that the majority of code comes directly from Sun? If so... let me just say *DUH*. If you have thousands of PAID programmers writing code, nobody is going to waste their free time re-writing from scratch. On the flip side, there's TONS of public side-projects, I can think of several around zfs like the automatic snapshots. Or maybe that little side project called nexenta.
I think I understand what his issue is... he doesn't even know what the opensolaris community is. By his definition, one distribution of linux is a measure if its success or failure. Last I checked, when we talk about linux, we're encompassing ubuntu, redhat, suse, slackware, etc, etc, etc... Guess what, the same holds true for Opensolaris.
So... basically, it sounds like a linux zealot casting a stone because he's most likely upset that Sun wont' release solaris under the GPL so that linux devs can start ripping code.
Re:As a member of the community... (Score:5, Insightful)
The reason why I found Jon Plocher's candidate statement for the Open Solaris Governing Board so interesting was that it was first that I had seen someone from inside Sun comment about the what Sun had been hoping to achieve by release Solaris under a Open Source license that didn't appear influenced by Sun's marketing/spin machine. I don't believe Sun's officially stated reasons (that show up on the CEO's blog, for example) because after three years their words have not been matched by their deeds.
So for me, it's more about correcting the marketing spin. If Sun salescritters want to pay analysts to create Total Cost of Ownership white papers which compare the cost of the most expensive get-someone-on-the-phone 24x7 Red Hat support with a support-by-email Solaris support subscription, I might mock their desperation.
Similarly, if Jonathan Schwartz wants to talk about how wonderful it will be that Open Solaris is Open Source, and how they will reap the benefits of having Open Source developers, but three years later still have processes that result in 0.6 patches/day being accepted into Open Solaris, then I think it's only fair that to point out the chasm between his words and his company's actions.
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Speaking French might be expected if you're in France, but if you're in Ireland, then perhaps the shoe is on the other foot.
OpenSolaris users choose OpenSolaris because they trust Sun, its track record. its binary backwards compatibility (Solaris 2.6 binaries still run unmodified on Solaris 2.10), its way of doing things, and its 10 year life cycle. If they didn't they would be using Linux. The binary compatibi
My answer (Score:3)
There is no need for it now. Linux had already supplanted Solaris
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Heck, if you go by desktops, MacOSX has already supplanted Linux.
In any event, having the right tools for the job is great.
I wanted a file server with redundant RAID - ZFS is way easier to admin then Linux LVM/RAID. Easier then Windows, easier then Sun's Disksuite. As easy as a NetApp really.
I'm also picking supported hardware for it & not stuff that's lying about.
Then I wanted to run a virtual Windows to deal with TiVo stuff. Looks like Linux is the an
OpenSolaris is a very young opensource initiative (Score:5, Insightful)
OpenSolaris is an interesting operating system, I don't doubt it'll grow in popularity among developers, however slowly. As I said, give it some time, we have only just begun.
Linux Partisan Disparages Non-Linux OS (Score:5, Insightful)
Copyright assignment (Score:3)
I can't imagine why anyone would want to take part of a community that requires the copyright assignment. Yeah, the FSF also uses a copyright assignment, but then the FSF is a foundation, Sun is a company. I mean, I write the code and Sun takes my rights??? (yeah, i can fork opensolaris and keep my copyright, but it just shows how community-unfriendly opensolaris is...)
I'm definitively not wasting time with a project that requires copyright assignment to a copmany....
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I use Linux in the server room. If one vendor really gets me peeved, there's nothing stopping me from going elsewhere. With Solaris there is really only Sun. In that respect, its as bad as Windows.
It's Difficult to Download OpenSolaris (rants) (Score:5, Insightful)
I spent over a week trying to get Open Solaris build 85. Sun just doesn't get the free distribution thing. You have to register and log in to the Sun Download Centre, from where you can download the CD or DVD images. They try to persuade you to get the Sun Download Manager which is some Java app that gives you pause and resume buttons for the download.
I tried 5 or 6 times to download on different days with the download stalling at sometimes as much as 90%. On the 8th day, I got the whole image. So much for their download manager. You just have to overwrite the chunk you have and start again.
After all these years, they still haven't sorted out the auto-layout of the filesystems. There's not enough room partitioned to install their developer tools.
I went to build gcc-4.2.3. That took 5 days and about a day of CPU time. OK it's an ancient 500MHz USIIi that I got for nothing, but...
See, Solaris's /bin/sh is badly broken (archaic) and can't be used to build gcc. So you set CONFIG_SHELL to be ksh. Only the configure scripts in gcc are still broken from gcc-3.1.x days and two of the scripts it generates, bin/as and bin/collect-ld at each stage of the bootstrap are broken because they begin #!ksh instead of #!/usr/bin/ksh or whatever.
When I used to build gcc on Solaris, I just sed'd all the scripts to replace /bin/sh with /bin/bash or whatever.
So, for the casual SPARC/Solaris power-user/Linux developer myself, it's just too darn inconvenient.
And the stuff in /usr/sfw/bin, which is where the "Open Source migration" into Solaris proper was supposed to happen still looks like it did in 2005, 3 years ago.
Solaris has a brilliant kernel. Putting the DVD images on Bittorrent (officially) like OpenOffice.org, would be a great start. There are too many hurdles for the average user to go through who might have been interested in trying it out. I don't have to register to download Slackware, Ubuntu, KNOPPIX, NetBSD etc.
Sort out the default install so that the disk layout is sane and make it trivial to install the GNU toolchain.
But I've been through all this years ago, and it pains me to see that it still hasn't been fixed.
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The download manager works just fine. I even live in Southern France which has about the most primitive internet capability, a real pain after my stints in the Netherlands and Germany. If I can get the downloads in one go, anybody can. Sounds like a problem with your computer, not Sun.
I've installed openSolaris dev edition from scratch and 4 months later performed a live update to the new version. It worked perfectly to the letter as outlined on Sun's excellent documen
Good idea: talk about it (Score:2)
Typical Sun (Score:5, Insightful)
But the OSS projects themselves have problems involving people outside of Sun. In the case of OpenOffice, Novel had to fork to get their improvements in at a reasonable pace. NeoOffice had to fork to get a useable Mac OS X version at all.
OpenSolaris may head down the same path, with Nexenta having the better and more available build than the main project does.
It seems that Sun knows how to code. They just don't know how to be open. Websites with registrations and download managers are barriers. Projects that accept outside contributions at a glacial pace, if they accept them at all, are barriers. And these are typical of everything Sun.
If they could learn how to create vibrant open communities, while still retaining the ability to guide/control the projects as much as needed for their purposes, they'd be an even more incredible force in the OSS world.
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We are still at an Open Solaris thread, aren't we?
Re:I didnt bother. (Score:5, Informative)
I had to setup an oracle cluster: Thanks to Oracle's support policies, we could not use Solaris x86. Nor could we use RHEL5 (no Oracle 9i support), so RHEL4.6 it was. Should be easy, right? Well tested "enterprise" class linux that can do everything the big boys can do.... We took the hardware we were going to use for solaris and switched it to linux. A pair of Sun x4600M2's, 128G of ram, 4 Dual core AMD's. Sun fully supports linux on this box and RedHat lists it on their HCL. Should be easy.
The basic OS install was more or less easy, once we battled through the serial port redirection setup (guess most linux users never used a serial port before. After all, why bother when the box sits under your desk). I stil like serial ports over video for one major reason: issue resolution (when bad things happen, having that panic string saved by a console server can really save the day)
Ok, so the system was kickstarted and now it is time to set it up for use as an oracle DB. This is a production system, and we need lots of space (4TB) and High Availability. This means redundant connections to everything, mirroring and clustering.
Issue #1: multipathing drivers for the SAN. With solaris, you just plug the thing into the san and all of the storage that the host has access to just showed up. Multipathing was instant and I didnt have to do jack. I could see what devices mapped to which physical array with a simple command. I didnt have to guess which array
Issue #2: dynamically add luns: With solaris, you just change the mapping on the array and the host picks it up and auto creates the dev links. That was easy. On Linux? you've got to be kidding me... You get to echo some crazy strings into several spots in
issue #3: IP Multipathing. With solaris, dladmin is used to create a bond (if it is going to the same switch and the switch supports bonding) or use the built in ip multipathing to do an active/failover setup if you are going to multiple switches. Very well documented and very easy to do. With linux... yeah, bonding is a fun task. Need to go to multiple switches? no such luck, you are screwed. I eventually used VCS to take over the systems main IP and uses its IPMultipathing agent to do the job for me. VCS on solaris just hands the task off to mpathd since the OS already does it for you.
Issue #4: zones: dont get me started. I dont want to run another entire OS, I just want name space isolation and chroot is so primative it is not even funny. Zones gives me everything I want with minimal overhead. It would have been nice to have since there are a few oracle products that dont play nicely with clusters (*Warehouse Builder*) because they imbed the host name everywhere. We could put it under Xen, but this is an app that moves huge amounts of data around, not exactly a good candidate for virtualization. Zones let us get around Oracle's brain dead use of the hostname, no such luck with linux.
Issue #5: 3rd party drivers vs the new kernel patch. If I install a 3rd party device driver in solaris and upgrade the kernel, I dont have to rebuild/reinstall the driver. Linux (even redhat 4.x with their "back port") forces me to rebuild/reinstall every damn time. Its great if the driver is standard with the kernel, but if you need something outside of that (lsi multipathing drivers to get around #1 and 10G NIC drivers in my case) and you are screwed. No wonder up2date ignores all of the kernel* rpm's by default.
Issue #6: Whats the system doing? Solaris: `mdb -k` and dtrace. Linux: still trying
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Install the Oracle prep RPM from Novell, all parms are set.
Multipathing? Not nearly as hard as you seem to make it out to be. As well, to me, multi-pathing involves FC and not IP bound networks. STILL a lot easier to handle in SUSE than RH
You want zones? How about using a hypervisor? There ARE solutions for Linux to
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1) We did it as part of the finish script in the kickstart script. It was more than just adding it to the grub.conf, you also have to tweak a few other files to actually get the damn thing to start a login prompt on the serial port. Compared to solaris where I just add a console=ttya in the add_install_client script (yeah, we jumpstart everything) as a boot param and the installer takes care of the rest.
2) I ended up loading the lsi mpp drivers. Using a combination of veritas dmp debug commands an
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Yes, it's a hog, and I say this as someone with a couple of dozen SUNW^H^H^H^HJAVA shares.
I have some old Sun boxen, one of which (Sun Blade 100, 512MB, 500MHz) I used to play at 64-bit big-endian RISCs running Solaris. All of my other boxes are Linux including an old Ultra 1 with splack.
Nevada build 85 only took about 2+ hours to install from DVD on my Sun Blade 100. The previous one I tried (78?) took 3.5. The GUI is unusably slow, and the disk thrashes like mad. I use it headless over my network normal
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Imagine how good the hardware support could be on Linux if Linus had just picked a license that lets people link in to the kernel with non-GPL code, and kept a stable ABI so that it made sense to do so. THAT'S what Sun was after