Linked by Thom Holwerda on Tue 6th May 2008 21:48 UTC, submitted by irbis
Yesterday, the OpenSolaris team released OpenSolaris 2008.05, the fruit of Project Indiana. The first review we found was published over at Blogbeebe, which is overall fairly positive. At the same time, Practical Technology believes that "OpenSolaris has finally been released just in time to die".
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Member since:2005-07-06
Agreed.
The guys in Linux community are worried, that's pretty obvious. They keep claiming "this is bad, that is bad" while they realize that such kid has a block to stand onto.
The guys in Linux community are worried, that's pretty obvious. They keep claiming "this is bad, that is bad" while they realize that such kid has a block to stand onto.
True. Lets put it this way; its like two beer companies; one is an expensive boutique beer and another is a cheaper one. The cheaper one gets most of the limelight because it is cheap - and good enough. The boutique beer comes out and makes their desirable beer cheaper; those who would have gone for the cheaper beer are now looking at the boutique beer. Guess who the cheaper beer is - its amazing when I see Linux advocates foam the mouth over Solaris when it should be a great thing there is more choice, more competition and more resources spent in the opensource world.
Even people like me who aren't Unix/Linux users can appreciate how good it would be a free Solaris (because let's confess it: it's about price now) fully loaded with Enterprise-ready technologies and with a big guy like Sun behind it. That has a tremendous business value, expecially when you consider that even if Solaris is OS, Sun will always be able to bring a basic platform for "serious computing" while kids will keep releasing MyOwnLittleModifiedSolaris distro (though there are some distros which aren't just about the new Gnome theme or the last MP3 player).
I'd say that Sun won't create a desktop distribution in terms of the 'unwashed masses' but I do see Indiana becoming the operating system for workstations they sell - hopefully get people developing on OpenSolaris and then moving it beyond that to deploying it in enterprise desktops. I think that Sun has realised that Sun Ray product may be nice in theory, but business still want to keep traditional desktops - they've woken up and finally created a product to address that need.
While I'm not interested in Linux for business reasons (at least until it will look so half-finished and dependent on untrustable pieces), I'm monitoring Solaris. It won't be easy to drive us out of Windows field but if it will EVER be, it will be to Solaris, that's for sure.
My concern is about Sun itself: will it be able to profit enough from all those open-sourced technologies? Sure, they have some advantages since they a h/w-maker too, but bringing Solaris back to compete with Windows and Linux means being able to profit enough to sell your hardware, keep R&D for that, continue development of Java, MySQL and Solaris itself and flood market with good apps / services to attract users. That means LOTS of resources.
My concern is about Sun itself: will it be able to profit enough from all those open-sourced technologies? Sure, they have some advantages since they a h/w-maker too, but bringing Solaris back to compete with Windows and Linux means being able to profit enough to sell your hardware, keep R&D for that, continue development of Java, MySQL and Solaris itself and flood market with good apps / services to attract users. That means LOTS of resources.
Well, I think Sun is going to continue to improve - the problem is that wall street want instant results and simply ignore the reality that turning around the company takes time. Turning around HP was easy - it was bloated, over employment and bad direction. It was matter of slicing and dicing it down to size.
Sun's problems are a hell of alot more complex than just a matter of firing a few people, bobs ya uncle, and things get back on track in an instance. When the whole business model has been changed, its going to take time, there will be a transition, but I think for the long term, profitability under the new model is going to be smoother, the margins are going to be better, and ultimately, you won't see the dramatic swings in either extreme in terms of profitability/loss.
RE[3]: Piece of garbage
by unoengborg on Wed 7th May 2008 13:24
in reply to "RE[2]: Piece of garbage"
Member since:2005-07-06
The problem is that the expensive boutique bear, that now have gone cheap is not ready for consumption just yet.
At least not for the big parties. ZFS and zones are nice, but even though already open sourced by Sun, software for clustering is, as far as I know, not yet integrated into the latest OpenSolaris release, and ZFS still doesn't support concurrent access.
If you are going to do things like that, you are better off using Red Hat or CentOS using GFS, and on the Desktop Solaris is still Gnome 2.20, so you will miss the latest and greatest.
Once ZFS gets support for concurrent acccess, it will be great for datacenters, especially combined with its ability to easy export as iscsi devices.
Anyway, the new OpenSolaris feels snappy, and looks very good as a Desktop, even though it lacks the latest and greatest from Gnome. It is the first Solaris version in a very long time that I actually could consider for my desktop.
Member since:2005-07-06
The guys in Linux community are worried, that's pretty obvious. They keep claiming "this is bad, that is bad" while they realize that such kid has a block to stand onto.
Not really. There's a sense of bemusement that Sun is trying to take on the one hand and not give anything back on the other. The license incompatibility is one thing, and the pseudo-MySQL development model that no one wants to talk about is the other. The rest of the open source community, and Linux, has been through all of this stuff.
...but bringing Solaris back to compete with Windows and Linux means being able to profit enough to sell your hardware, keep R&D for that, continue development of Java, MySQL and Solaris itself and flood market with good apps / services to attract users. That means LOTS of resources.
Yer, and those resources have to come from somewhere. Sun don't have them, otherwise they would have put them in by now. What they need is a community of kernel developers writing lots of drivers and people testing their software on Solaris systems along with Linux equally. In order to keep those developers, you have to give something back to them in terms of control and autonomy. That ship has sailed.
Member since:2005-07-07
Not really. There's a sense of bemusement that Sun is trying to take on the one hand and not give anything back on the other. The license incompatibility is one thing, and the pseudo-MySQL development model that no one wants to talk about is the other. The rest of the open source community, and Linux, has been through all of this stuff.
Can you please lay off the Anti-Sun FUD? Sun just completely open sourced MySQL.
Yer, and those resources have to come from somewhere. Sun don't have them, otherwise they would have put them in by now. What they need is a community of kernel developers writing lots of drivers and people testing their software on Solaris systems along with Linux equally. In order to keep those developers, you have to give something back to them in terms of control and autonomy. That ship has sailed.
Please share with us some examples of where nothing was given back. You can download the source from the website and people have come up with complete distributions like Nexenta and Bellenix from those sources.
Please don't point to that one thread by Roy Fielding where you completely misread and misunderstood the issues that were being discussed.
On the other thread I asked you to provide examples to substantiate your claims but your disappeared and came here to spread more FUD. Now put up or shut up.
Edited 2008-05-07 16:18 UTC
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Member since:
2005-07-06
Agreed.
The guys in Linux community are worried, that's pretty obvious. They keep claiming "this is bad, that is bad" while they realize that such kid has a block to stand onto.
Even people like me who aren't Unix/Linux users can appreciate how good it would be a free Solaris (because let's confess it: it's about price now) fully loaded with Enterprise-ready technologies and with a big guy like Sun behind it. That has a tremendous business value, expecially when you consider that even if Solaris is OS, Sun will always be able to bring a basic platform for "serious computing" while kids will keep releasing MyOwnLittleModifiedSolaris distro (though there are some distros which aren't just about the new Gnome theme or the last MP3 player).
While I'm not interested in Linux for business reasons (at least until it will look so half-finished and dependent on untrustable pieces), I'm monitoring Solaris. It won't be easy to drive us out of Windows field but if it will EVER be, it will be to Solaris, that's for sure.
My concern is about Sun itself: will it be able to profit enough from all those open-sourced technologies? Sure, they have some advantages since they a h/w-maker too, but bringing Solaris back to compete with Windows and Linux means being able to profit enough to sell your hardware, keep R&D for that, continue development of Java, MySQL and Solaris itself and flood market with good apps / services to attract users. That means LOTS of resources.
Edited 2008-05-07 11:37 UTC