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Solaris 10 – Oracle’s New Preferred Open Source OS

  Submitted by Samuel Kielek Solaris 96 Comments

Oracle selects the Solaris 10 Operating System as its preferred Open Source 64-bit development and deployment environment.

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Eugenia Loli

Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.

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96 Comments

  1. 2005-11-16 2:10 am
    Shaman

    2002: Linux runs Oracle faster than Solaris by a wide margin. Oracle gets behind Linux and touts it as the best thing for Oracle.

    2005: Open Source gets major database platforms in MySQL, Firebird and PostgreSQL. Sun releases Solaris under a restrictive, shared-source style license.

    Oracle moves to Solaris 10 even though Linux continues to outperform Solaris by a considerable margin, and claims that it is supporting an Open Source operating system when in fact it is not using OpenSolaris.

    What’s next… one wonders.

    • 2005-11-16 2:27 am
      Anonymous

      What is your definition of “open source”? Your post makes sense only if your definition of “open source” is “GPL or nothing!”.

      By the way … care to provide some evidence as to Linux vs. Solaris 10 performance? I’m curious to see, seeing as how it’s apparently common knowledge …

      • 2005-11-16 3:32 am
        rm6990

        Post Removed.

        Thought you were replying to someone else. Sorry.

        Edited 2005-11-16 03:42

    • 2005-11-16 2:28 am
      sergio

      > Sun releases Solaris under a restrictive, shared-source style license.

      That’s not true. CDDL is an OSI approved license.

      http://www.opensource.org/licenses/cddl1.php

      • 2005-11-16 2:31 am
        saxiyn

        >> Sun releases Solaris under a restrictive, shared-source style license.

        > That’s not true. CDDL is an OSI approved license.

        > http://www.opensource.org/licenses/cddl1.php

        That’s not true. Solaris is not licensed under CDDL, OpenSolaris is. And Oracle is not saying a word about OpenSolaris.

        Here’s Solaris license agreement, which is clearly non-free:

        http://www.sun.com/software/solaris/licensing/sla.xml

      • 2005-11-16 2:33 am
        Endymion

        yes, opensolaris is under the CDDL, but solaris is not. read the end of the parent’s post.

    • 2005-11-16 2:39 am
      jmcpAtSun

      …restrictive, shared-source style license

      Clearly you don’t like the fact that OSI has given Sun’s CDDL its imprimatur as a true Open Source license.

      That’s a shame, because you’re missing out on the good stuff that’s in (Open)Solaris. Like the performance enhancements right across the board (not just on x86 chips), the diagnostic and fault management innovations, ZFS, zones/containers….

      And finally, Solaris is a distribution of OpenSolaris, so yes, Solaris is open source.

      • 2005-11-16 2:45 am
        Endymion

        > And finally, Solaris is a distribution of OpenSolaris, so yes, Solaris is open source.

        so StarOffice, as a distribution of OpenOffice, is open source?

      • 2005-11-16 3:39 am
        rm6990

        And finally, Solaris is a distribution of OpenSolaris, so yes, Solaris is open source.

        Ah, just like OS X is open source, as a distribution of Darwin. Oh, and don’t forget, Windows contains BSD code, so it clearly is open source as well.

    • 2005-11-16 2:46 am
      Soulbender

      “Oracle moves to Solaris 10 even though Linux continues to outperform Solaris by a considerable margin”

      Eh, not really. Solaris runs large-scale Oracle installations better than Linux. Sure, Linux (and BSD) outperforms Solaris on a lot of tasks but running large-scale Oracle isn’t one of them.

    • 2005-11-16 3:17 am
      taos

      Depending on how you look at history:

      2002: Linux became more and more capable and the x86 were more compelling than those expensive SPARCs. By moving to Linux on x86, Oracle could save lots of money.

      2005: Free Solaris with compelling productiviy features, free first class native C/C++/Java development environments, a promissing OS roadmap (OpenSolaris). All these running on standard x86/x64/SPARC. Oracle sees a real potential in increase of productivity but not cost.

      See, in my view of history, it is never about which OS is faster, or which one is “real” open source, it’s about productivity and business.

      Tao

    • 2005-11-17 11:01 am
      Anonymous

      2002: Linux runs Oracle faster than Solaris by a wide margin. Oracle gets behind Linux and touts it as the best thing for Oracle.

      2005: Open Source gets major database platforms in MySQL, Firebird and PostgreSQL. Sun releases Solaris under a restrictive, shared-source style license.

      Oracle moves to Solaris 10 even though Linux continues to outperform Solaris by a considerable margin, and claims that it is supporting an Open Source operating system when in fact it is not using OpenSolaris.

      Do you really have to post twelve anti-Solaris messages in every Solaris thread for the last six months?

      I don’t know where you get your performance numbers from, but from the numbers I have seen Linux and Solaris 10 are pretty evenly matched. e.g:

      http://www.anandtech.com/systems/showdoc.aspx?i=2530&p=5

      What’s next… one wonders.

      More trolling from Shaman?

  2. 2005-11-16 2:25 am
    Xanady Asem

    It would be neat if you actually used sources to back your arguments.

    I claim that in 2001 DOS ran Oracle faster than Linux… I mean I can also pull stuff out of my rectal orifice.

  3. 2005-11-16 2:26 am
    saxiyn

    Strictly speaking, Solaris 10 is not an open source OS — OpenSolaris is. I think Oracle is using the word “open source” as a meaningless buzzword here.

  4. 2005-11-16 2:41 am
    poundsmack

    this is another big step for sun and solaris. sun is making some good friends in the corporate world. i hope there stock starts to resemble there new stronger foothold back in the computing industry. they are defenently poising themselves for comeing b ack to really show that they are still a major player in all this….

  5. 2005-11-16 2:54 am
    morgoth

    A few things to note…I don’t consider the CDDL a true “open source” license, the only one that is is the GPL. It ensures that the code not only starts open, but stays open, and that improvements go back to the community. The BSD, MIT, CDDL licenses etc, do not do this.

    I don’t think much of the OSI, which is basically an organisation to try and rape true open source products for the benefits of business(es). As a result of this, I don’t really give a rats ass about what OSI considers as ‘open source’ licenses. Neither Solaris or OpenSolaris are what I consider true ‘open source’. And until they’re released under the GPL, I won’t consider them either. That’s my choice. I’m sure all you Sun users, and BSD users will take offence at my comments, but remember the modding rules!

    As to Solaris being faster/slower than Linux, I think you’ll find that Solaris 9 was slower than the 2.4 kernel, and a lot slower than a 2.6 kernel. Solaris 10 has even things up a lot, but I suspect that the Linux kernel is more flexible, and supports more hardware. And, it’s truly “open”.

    In reality, larger corporations, running large servers, that are running large databases don’t really care (or need) a big list of compatible hardware. That evens up a lot of the advantages that Linux did have over Solaris and makes it a much more even playing field. Again, we need to note the pricing, and Solaris 10 is being placed very competitively. I’d hedge a bet that Sun is receiving money from Microsoft under the table to do this, with the end aim of killing off that damn pesky linux competitor from the corporate server market. I don’t have proof, only a suspicion.

    It’s common knowledge that both Sun and Microsoft are no friends of Linux, nor are they friends of the GPL which protects so much software from being raped by corporation business.

    As to Oracle, I really couldn’t care about them. They’re just as bad as other large corporations, just as corrupt, and care just about as little about their customer(s) as the other large corporations. It’s all about money, and monopolising your market. Nothing more, and certainly, nothing less.

    Dave

    • 2005-11-16 3:23 am
      JMcCarthy

      “A few things to note…I don’t consider the CDDL a true “open source” license, the only one that is is the GPL.”

      Most normal people would consider the CDDL an open source license, and the GPL a free-software license ;)

      The difference between the two being on side represents reality and the other fantasy-camp.

      Though, Richard’s Stalinist organization does infact consider the CDDL a free-software license, albeit incompatiable with the GPL.

      Edited 2005-11-16 03:24

      • 2005-11-16 3:40 am
        halfmanhalfamazing

        That’s modern day mccarthyism. 😛

        I agree with you 100%. RMS is one of the worst spokesmen for the OSS movement, makes us all look bad.

        We’re not all zealots! I promise! No, Really!!!!!!!!

        • 2005-11-16 3:59 am
          rattaro

          >I agree with you 100%. RMS is one of the worst spokesmen for the OSS movement, makes us all look bad.

          You DO know that he started the OSS movement, don’t you? It’s very hard to misrepresent something you started.

          • 2005-11-16 4:30 am
            kaiwai

            Thats a rather stupid thing to say considering that the concept of closed source software is only a recent concept that was developed; prior; software was always and after thought, with hardware being the main concerntration – you bough the hardware, and the software provided was the icing on the cake, not the main money spinner for the company.

          • 2005-11-16 5:03 am
            rattaro

            >Thats a rather stupid thing to say considering. . .

            Please reread my post. If you wish to respond, try to actually respond, and not go on completely unrelated topics.

          • 2005-11-16 6:01 am
            rm6990

            Correction : He started the free software movement.

      • 2005-11-16 11:30 am
        theine

        The difference between the two being on side represents reality and the other fantasy-camp.

        To you and all the other geeks who feel competent to talk about what’s going on in “the real world”: Wanking off in your parents basement — although definitely real — doesn’t qualify you.

    • 2005-11-16 10:25 pm
      morgoth

      Ah it’s good to still see that the pro bsd license and sun fanboys are still out there in forces, inappropriately modding down comments based on their views, and not the contents of the comment.

      hello osnews.com staff are you paying attention here? This moderating system might be nice, but it’s highly open to abuse, as you can see on my original post. I still think a tracking system of the IP address that requested the modding down should be available, and freely available for all users, to see and track if there’s a repititive modding down by certain individuals.

      I think you’d find that it proves my point that there are those out there that are modding down certain individuals whose opinions that they disagree with, not on the merit of the post, but purely on what they think is right (not always with evidence or merit I might add). And these people are targeting certain posts, by certain people deliberately. Every single time. If this is the case, that is abuse of the moderating system, and they should have their moderation points removed for a period of time, and if it still continues, then have their accounts removed.

      Dave

      • 2005-11-16 10:47 pm
        Robert Escue

        And the Linux fanboys don’t mod down posts they don’t like, think again! There is no doubt the moderation system is abused here, but all people here who post have to take responsibility for it and make an effort to police themselves. That means a Linux fanboi post should be jumped on just as quickly by the Linux users as it is by anyone else, and likewise for the other operating system/hardware fans.

        That is the first step to improving this site and everybody has to take it.

        • 2005-11-17 1:38 am
          morgoth

          And yet again people are voting comments down in the wrong manner, for the wrong reasons. I’m glad you’ve admitted that the system is being abused. And you have correctly came to the conclusion that everyone has to make an effort, not just some. What you have done wrong is made an assumption that I go about modding down posts for the wrong or inappropriate reasons, and that therefore, I’m “fair game” for abuse of the system as well. That’s just plain wrong. Punishing anyone from a particular group, because of a minority who abuse rules is not the right way of making something that’s broken become fixed. I hope you’ll happily note that, even though there are posts in here that I disagree with, I haven’t modded them down with any of my mod points as they didn’t break any rules. If only others could learn to stop being so childish and actually obey the rules, the modding system would be a lot more useful. Your analogy reads like this:

          An American Negroe rapes a white girl. Suddenly, all male Negroes are criminals, and rapists. Does this make sense? No, it surely doesn’t. But – you are applying the same ill logic here.

          I’ve formally complained to osnews.com earlier today about inappropriate moderation of posts, with some suggestions on how it can be monitored and combated. I’m sure that some people out there would be rather worried and nervous about having the moderating system monitored for abuse. Hopefully, osnews.com doesn’t just ignore this ongoing problem, but constructively seeks a way of not only blocking it, but monitoring it, to ensure that people are doing the right thing.

          Dave

      • 2005-11-16 11:01 pm
        Smartpatrol

        It goes both ways say anthing negative about American and quickly see your post modded up to 5. Learn to live with it genius.

        • 2005-11-17 1:17 am
          morgoth

          Not necssarily. I’ve seen anti American (governmental) posts that were modded down (as well as modded up). In fact, you seemingly modded down one of my post that contained an anti American (government) section on another topic earlier on.

          It seems to me that there are those that are blindly patriotic and refuse to accept that the US government has some serious issues at hand, and those issues impact upon the trade of other countries, or restriction of trade. Take for example:

          I buy any Symantec product (and I live in Australia). Why do I have to agree to a EULA that expressly forbids me to resell this onto a country that has been deemed to be ‘banned’ by the US government? mmm? Please tell me what valid laws a US company has on telling me, as an Australian, in Australia on what I can, and cannot do? Please explain that one eh?

          The rules on the modding of posts are quite clear, some people need to learn how to read and comprehend.

          Dave

          • 2005-11-17 1:08 pm
            Robert Escue

            You had better be sure that it was me, because I really don’t care about anti-American posts other than the fact they are off topic. This is supposed to be a site for discussion of operating systems and computer hardware and applications, save the political commentary for somewhere else.

            If you have a problem with Symantec’s products and where they can be sold and used take it up with the US Commerce Department, they are the regualtory body that specifies what products can be sold to whom based on various criteria. Many of the restrictions are the result of various treaties (which I would believe Australia signed along with the US), so you might want to take your concerns up with the Australian equivalent of the Commerce Department.

          • 2005-11-17 10:45 pm
            morgoth

            Quote: “You had better be sure that it was me, because I really don’t care about anti-American posts other than the fact they are off topic.”

            Actually, no, in some instances they are not ‘off-topic’ as you try to so succinctly put it. Software and politics are intertwined I’m afraid. Microsoft does dirty deals with the US government, everyone knows it, no one can prove it. Doesn’t mean it doesn’t, and didn’t happen. That’s political. And it warrants criticism of the US governments inability to punish Microsoft correctly. Everyone knows that Microsoft got a slap on the wrist (if we can even call it that!), and now, they’re back to their good old habits of anti competitiveness. Their ‘get the facts’ campaign is nothing more than a result of Microsoft bribing groups to say what they want them to say, and is in fact, as far as I’m concerned, false and misleading advertising, with the sole goal of ensuring that Microsoft’s monopoly continues. Where is the US DOJ on this? mmm? If you don’t like me criticising the US governments abilities to regulate and punish convicted monopolists like Microsoft, tough shit. The only reason why the US government doesn’t do anything is because they know they’ll lose income into the already weak US economy.

            Quote: “so you might want to take your concerns up with the Australian equivalent of the Commerce Department.”

            And I just knew you were going to say this! We both know that modern governments are not for the people, but, are in fact, for the corporations. My voice would never get heard. 1 person complains! Wow! Next! Why wasn’t I given a chance to vote on this particular ‘treaty’? Because modern governments are no longer democracies, especially the US government. It’s do what we want, or else! Politicians forget that they only exist to serve the people that voted them in. You might want to consider that most Americans don’t even vote anymore – they see it as a complete waste of time, and they do not feel that the politicans serve their needs. When that happens, democracy has truly failed – people have no faith in their elected leaders.

            I didn’t sign that treaty, and I don’t care at all about the US governments desires. And I see no reason why the Australian government should force me to lose rights, just to please Americans. Sorry, that doesn’t sit too well with me. We already seeing US inventions like DMCA, DRM, software patents, extended copyright periods, Palladium (TCPA), Illegal detention of people, etc, spreading to other countries that are “US allies”. None of that has been put to vote in Australia. None. Where’s the democracy in the decision making there? You tell me please. Those in power are NEVER going to going to give that power up. Those that are rich and powerful are never going to give up their influence on the government(s).

            Further, to your comments on “politics”, please tell me what’s happening in Massachusetts? Microsoft has effectively bribed a Senator to ensure that ODF is stillborn. We all know it, it’s as obvious as daylight. If you don’t believe me, go on over to groklaw.net and read the transcript (which they tried to hide). We had X amount of people on the panel, and only 2 supporting ODF (heavily outnumbered I might add), with the public and others not allowed to ask questions etc during the meeting. You tell me, was that politically motivated? Yes. Does it affect software and operating systems? Yes.

            So, you can take your comments and put them where the sun don’t shine, because, in reality, they have no basis of truth. You are simply being a patriotic American, who cannot stand having your country/government criticised (and where criticism is in fact heavily due).

            Dave

  6. 2005-11-16 3:17 am
    amjith

    Here are my thoughts about this Oracle’s Solaris move….

    http://amjith.blogspot.com/2005/11/oracle-and-solaris-10.html

    • 2005-11-16 12:42 pm
      Ronald Vos

      Here are my thoughts about this Oracle’s Solaris move….

  • 2005-11-16 4:00 am
    Shaman

    Find Solaris in the top-10 supercomputers. Not there? You can be an apologist for Sun if you wish, but until the most recent Solaris 10 distribution, Solaris was nowhere on the map – we are talking *weeks ago* now since Solaris crawled back into relevance. It has yet to prove that it’s appreciably better – indications are that it is quite a good UNIX but not outstanding with the exception of one tool – Dtrace – which will shortly find parity on other architectures, believe me. ZFS and Zones are impressive versions of things already out there, so don’t prattle on about them, please.

    Thing is, Linux is still in that space, and still providing the goods that Solaris needs to now prove it can parallel – and there are things that it CANNOT parallel. There are very good, compelling reasons that so many have left Sun in their wake. That’s the facts.

    Oracle itself announced that performance on the Linux operating system was so far and away better than anything running on Solaris (YES, the aging and poorly-managed SPARC architecture is also to blame) that it more or less had no choice but to make Linux its platform of choice. Of course, they gushed lovingly on and on about it to make it seem like it was all their idea… but truthfully, it was the customers. Go back and look at various press releases and benchmarks from Oracle – do your own footwork, the story is out there.

    Regarding “Stalinist,” Open Source is all about democracy as opposed to oppression – think it through. Statements that Open Source is communism is the exact opposite of the actual truth – Open Source is software by democracy if ever there was such a thing – Linux could be forked at any moment and Linus could but watch it happen – THAT sir is the precise opposite of an oppressive communist rule.

    The CDDL is more like shared-source than open-source. The OSI has approved many (too many) open source licenses, but in the case of the CDDL, code that goes into the operating system may never get out – and the same is also true of the existing code. I’m not saying Sun is wrong for doing that, it’s their code and it’s their choice… but that doesn’t mean that those of us who favour Open Source as in “libre” will have anything to do with it. Nor will many of us support it in any way; that’s our choice.

    And finally, a vignette. Years ago I was at a Sun performance metrics training course in Markham, Ontario and there was an Oracle customer there. He was there to find out what he was doing wrong – because they were getting 300% performance out of a $10K x86 system running Linux as compared to their $250K Sun system running Solaris (would be S5.8 then, at a guess). After wrestling with the course and with Sun SEs that were also there in various incarnations, he finally stormed out of the room at a break and announced that they’d never do business with Sun again. And right there, I knew he was right, Sun’s line about “throughput versus performance,” etc. was all bunk, which I’d been suspecting for a while… but unable to prove because we had done no Oracle installs on Sun equipment large enough to max out the hardware at that time. To make a long story longer, that was the end of my relationship with Sun – it was weeks after that, and I was deploying on Linux and a revolution in our business that culminated in tremendous bottom line improvements in profit as a result of money not spent in vain on Sun hardware and Solaris.

    I’m already expecting to be called a troll and for various and sundry to claim I don’t know what I am doing as an admin, but the fact is, I still have some Solaris machines in use and was certified up to 32 processor enterprise systems when I shit the bed and walked away from Sun’s parlor.

    As a final insult, a couple days ago I decided to resurrect an old Ultra 10, downloaded the Sun CDs, threw some 40GB drives into the box and attempted a Solaris 10 install. But no! Solaris wouldn’t install for love nor money… after much hair-pulling and swearing, I got it down to where it would fail on “swap space in use, cannot install” by formatting and labelling the drives manually. So what did I do?

    Linux orion 2.6.14.2 #1 Mon Nov 14 16:33:00 EST 2005 sparc64 GNU/Linux

    That’s it for me.

    • 2005-11-16 1:34 pm
      Snapper

      “As a final insult, a couple days ago I decided to resurrect an old Ultra 10, downloaded the Sun CDs, threw some 40GB drives into the box and attempted a Solaris 10 install. But no! Solaris wouldn’t install for love nor money… after much hair-pulling and swearing, I got it down to where it would fail on “swap space in use, cannot install” by formatting and labelling the drives manually. So what did I do? ”

      Dude, I have an ultra 10, and Solaris 10 installed with no problem…not sure what yours is, but if you state that you ran Solaris where you worked and you were the one deciding whether to stay with them or go, and then could not install Solaris 10 on a simple ultra 10…well, then I have to question your abilities, or desire to make something work. Like I said, it was no problem for me. Maybe you forgot to update the firmware on that box, maybe it didn’t recognize the drive properly (probe-ide from the OK prompt)…

      Really, it loads just fine, and it should not be a problem on an ultra 10.

      You just have a lot of angst in you due to some bad experience, but don’t let that impare your ability to properly troubleshoot a techincal issue. I’ve had similar issues with Linux (not that exact one, but others) that were just as frustrating. If I had a beef against Linux, I could very well do the same thing and decree “Linux is a POS!”…but I know that a tech issue is just a challenge that needs to be overcome.

  • 2005-11-16 4:24 am
    Shaman

    Oh crap, how did I forget this? Today one of my top SEs had his old Ultra5 Solaris box hacked. We found out about it because we got an e-mail from a firewall bot reporting that it was sending out short UDP packets in a DOS stream.

    The kicker: he was running Sun’s firewall on it and Sun’s version of OpenSSH, which is how we think they may have got access. There was nothing at all in the firewall log, and it took a while to find the rootkit but it was there. See, Solaris 9 has very weak randomization features… which OpenSSH could take advantage of, if Solaris had such features…

    I wonder if the Solaris 10 install will crap out on his machine, too… if he decides not to install Debian on it, which is unlikely. Hey, it has its original Sun drive, so it stands a better chance than my Ultra10 at least. ;)

    • 2005-11-16 5:51 am
      derekmorr

      I don’t understand your commend. Solaris 9 has /dev/random. There are patches for Solaris 8 (and I believe 2.7) that add /dev/random as well. OpenSSH can use /dev/random on Solaris.

      Perhaps you are referring to the TCP initial sequence number randomization? By default, Solaris doesn’t use strong randomization for this, but just edit /etc/default/inetinit and set TCP_STRONG_ISS to 2. That’s a standard part of my post-install lockdown procedure for Solaris.

      Or perhaps you meant that the attacker compromised your machine because the admin didn’t patch OpenSSH?

      So I don’t understand your comment. It doesn’t seem that you’re describing a flaw in Solaris; rather it seems like it was the fault of a lazy sysadmin.

      • 2005-11-16 6:10 am
        Robert Escue

        Don’t bother, shaman is the troll famous for saying “OpenSolaris is vaporware”.

  • 2005-11-16 4:38 am
    kaiwai

    Solaris is opensource; the only parts that aren’t opensource are some drivers and parts that SUN doesn’t own; as those parts are replaced with opensource, kosher verions, you’ll see more code committed the opensource version.

    Solaris 11 will be the first Solaris released to be based 100% on the opensource version of Solaris – that gives SUN plenty of time to replace the stuff required with opensource components.

    As for Linux vs Solaris; the *ONLY* reason why Linux grabbed marketshare, wasn’t because of anything to do with ‘superiority’ the simple fact, Linux was a cheap UNIX clone that ran on relatively reliable low cost x86 hardware.

    Its adoption first started off in ISP’s, which have razor sharp margins – they wished to cut costs where possible, Linux is the solution. As the Linux boom came and went, companies saw it as an opportunity to replace expensivce UNIX servers doing mundane tasks, and instead replace them with Linux – all the UNIX feel without the UNIX price tag.

    Fast forward to 2005, and we have an OpenSournce Solaris, its free for any tom, dick and harry to use; if you don’t want support, you can still use it, even in a commercial environment – I don’t know about you, but it appears that Solaris has out Linuxed Linux – not only has Solaris matched Linux dollar for dollar in terms of pricing, but also Solaris has something that Linux doesn’t have – branding.

    Solaris is a rock solid; scalable UNIX with the same branding and feel good factor that associates itself with reliability, scalability and security – couple that with the work free; and believe me, it won’t be long until you hear stories of people saying, “we’ve moved from Linux to Solaris because of….”

    • 2005-11-16 8:13 am
      iwbcman

      If and when Sun manages to grok the word “community” then you might be able to talk about Sun having out-linuxed linux. But up to this point Sun has never grasped what community means. Every attempt Sun has made to spur community involvement in projects hosted by Sun has simply not panned out. Of course this may change with OpenSolaris – but it is far too soon to be able to accurately judge if this new community will develop its own dynamic and emancipate itself from Suns’ stewardship.

      Linux is community, linux does not “have” one, it itself is community. To use a quote from Michael Moore- “who’s your daddy?” – when someone in the OpenSolaris community answers this question it is Sun, for Sun writes the operating system, the drivers, etc. When someone from the linux community is asked there is no single answer and this is what makes linux a community.

      I look forward to the day when OpenSolaris joins linux in becomming a true community, OpenSolaris is but a baby, Suns’ baby, one day it might grow up and leave daddy, emancipation, but until this day arrives there is no real point of comparison between Sun and linux. Sun may have chosen a free software license but OpenSolaris is still an in-house developed OS and Sun remains propietor and progenitor for OpenSolaris. Until that day arrives the free license is but a promise.

      I, however, do not ever see the possiblity of OpenSolaris really taking control of its own future -either it declares certain aspects of the OS design off limits allowing the decisions made by Sun employees to define the platform or it risks breaking the platform and in so doing the support of Sun. At this point the community forming around OpenSolaris is thriving due to the fact that that which it is focusing on does not bring it into conflict with Suns’ software engineers- their focus is on userland software, that which does not form the core of the OS, and that which Sun did not develop. In time this will surely evolve to community developed drivers – again this poses no conflict, unless Sun decides not to support the new drivers, but at what point does Sun say no to changes to the core OS – this is the boundary that defines the community, defines what OpenSolaris is.

      Perhaps Sun will wisely allow OpenSolaris to pursue its own path but unless the needs of the development community are identical to the needs that Sun has of Solaris there will be a point a divorce between OpenSolaris and Solaris. A trully free OpenSolaris will not benefit from Sun support or the corporate sponsorship affored to Solaris. And how useful such a OpenSolaris might be will be defined by the sheer numbers of people who know the system and how to solve problems using it -again community becomes the answer to the question of its value.

      • 2005-11-16 8:46 am
        chekr

        hey you are right, the community for OpenSoalris is small but since when has this stopped any FOSS projects from bearing fruit; NetBSD & Enlightenment come to mind as successful projects without hoards of devs.

        And then there is also the fact that OpenSolaris is very young, as in less than 6 months in the public.

        You make it sound as if the interests of Sun and the community are mutually exclusive. Sun have participated in many Open Source projects such as X.org and Gnome with no problems that I can see (admittedly they do not own these), they will not *own* the OpenSolaris community once the CAB establishes governance anyway.

        I highly doubt there are going to be any rifts between Sun and the community, if the Linux Kernel can last this long with it’s governance model then I am sure the OpenSolaris community will do just fine.

      • 2005-11-16 10:02 am
        kaiwai

        I have a feeling that OpenSolaris will be received alot better due to the technical nature of ‘geeks’ – this is a genuine commercial grade UNIX, in its entirity, available for mear mortals to have a look at – the cool geek factor alone is enough to attract atleast those willing to look.

        OpenOffice.org was rather blah; Office suites, to be honest, aren’t exactly sexy beasts – they’re pretty boring in the grand scheme of things; however, with Solaris, one also has to take into account that SUN has a LARGE number of vendors and companies who make up the SUN ecosystem in regards to value added service providers and resellers for SUN – many will be adding features to Solaris for their OWN customers – so you’ll see not only part time geeks, but paid ones as well.

        Whether Solaris is a success isn’t so much whether it is a success as an opensource entity; I think going by how things are developing, its a full gone conclusion that it will work. The bigger question I think is whether it actually brings the must needed customer and revenue boost that SUN is hoping to garner from it.

        They’ve already won support from the biggest server producer – IBM, what I’d love to see is the Solaris PPC port pushed up a notch and BAM! its on the POWER server giving AIX a run for its money – hey, but we can all dream a little ;)

    • 2005-11-16 1:42 pm
      Snapper

      “Fast forward to 2005, and we have an OpenSournce Solaris, its free for any tom, dick and harry to use; if you don’t want support, you can still use it, even in a commercial environment – I don’t know about you, but it appears that Solaris has out Linuxed Linux – not only has Solaris matched Linux dollar for dollar in terms of pricing, but also Solaris has something that Linux doesn’t have – branding. ”

      I have to agree with you on this. Sun is competing with a linux brand, namely Red Hat in the enterprise. What people do at home on projects is irrelevant because there is no $$ to be made, so this does not directly matter.

      Corporations (US, at least) do need to know that there is a company behind something as important as an OS, especially when mission critical apps are deployed. So, how do you play on a level playing field with Linux? The way Sun is doing.

      Linux does have a great mindshare at the moment, but one of the problems I see with Linux (and I like it myself, as well as Solaris) is that the amount of churn with Linux makes it hard for enterprise customers and application developers to say “OK, we will develop our enterprise app to run with version X of Linux.”

      Major vendor developers who support enterprise apps on Linux like to pick one or several that have marketshare and look like they will be around for awhile…and my findings are that Red Hat is the way they go.

      Knowing this, Sun is then competing with Red Hat. Now, since Solaris is free to use, or for pay with support, this levels the playing field.

      It will be interesting to see how things go.

  • 2005-11-16 5:01 am
    Shaman

    >As for Linux vs Solaris; the *ONLY* reason why Linux

    >grabbed marketshare, wasn’t because of anything to

    >do with ‘superiority’ the simple fact, Linux was a

    >cheap UNIX clone that ran on relatively reliable low

    >cost x86 hardware.

    Not true. If it wasn’t superior, people would have stayed with Solaris and SCOX. Or moved to Windows. Have you looked at SCOX and Sun’s sales of software and their stock history recently?

    Fact is, Linux became superior some time around when version 2.4.16 was released. At a guess, 2001? Benchmark other *nixes of the time versus NetBSD and Linux of that era and your eyes will get REALLY wide at how badly they get trounced. Or, you won’t know what you’re looking at. ;) It’s about that time that IBM got really serious about Linux, SGI started porting their XFS, etc. etc. I guess you weren’t paying attention.

    >Its adoption first started off in ISP’s, which have

    >razor sharp margins – they wished to cut costs where

    >possible, Linux is the solution.

    So, you’re saying that TCO for Linux is much lower than other operating systems? I concur. And, obviously the performance was there.

    > all the UNIX feel without the UNIX price tag.

    All the UNIX feel and features without the price tag. You’re discounting the features and the performance which is just wrong. How do I know? I moved from Solaris to Linux in my… wait for it… ISP venture. Which is still going, and has just deployed wireless broadband up to 14Mbps over about 40% of SouthEastern Ontario, as an aside.

    > but it appears that Solaris has out Linuxed Linux

    It’s definitely just you. Solaris is interesting and drastically improved, but it is still heavyweight, unproven and not free as in libre. It also doesn’t have anything like Debian’s package management. I’ll go out on a sturdy limb here and say that Solaris isn’t going to win many Linux converts.

    Latest hasn’t been static, either. It’s now got hot-reboot and its TCP/IP stack has improved about 10% in the latest kernels.

    > Solaris has something that Linux doesn’t have –

    > branding.

    Wow. You’ve convinced me. I must switch right now!!!

    Er, wait. This is the same company that dropped the ball on practically all their software products including but not limited to SMB connectivity, firewalling, Javastations, Netra, RAQ… it’s getting late and I’m too tired to come up with a full list.

    > Solaris is a rock solid; scalable UNIX with the

    > same branding and feel good factor

    You’ve got me again… I feel good about Solaris! Yes, I must switch!!!

    Er, wait, this is the same Solaris that wouldn’t install on my Ultra10 and that got my SE’s machine hacked today? But… erhm… I feel good?

    >believe me, it won’t be long until you hear stories

    >of people saying

    I sure won’t be holding my breath.

    • 2005-11-16 5:20 am
      kaiwai

      Jesus Christ all bloody mighty; *grabs young whipper snapper by the scruff of the neck and points out him that kaiwai has used Linux for well over 9 years, and thus, actually has a f*cking clue about what he is talking about instead of being yet another ‘one minue kiddo’ who jumped on the linux bandwagon, along with the iPod bandwagon, because ‘thats what all the cool kids are doing’*

      Price/reliability, Solaris, OpenServer/UnixWare were a bloody rip off; little wonder Linux garnered so many customers; Linux was GET (Good Enough Technology) – it may not have been superior, but for what the customer required, it was ideal and suited the task.

      In regards to the ISp example, I am referring to 8/7 years ago; you know, before the LInux fanboys like you jumped on the bandwagon; the people like you, who bashed UNIX for years, then suddenly see Linux as he panacea to the great Satan (Microsoft).

      Oh, and I’m sorry, they won’t win over Linux zealots; they’re unimportant to SUN – they don’t buy hardware as hording is a better description of what these geeks do – and there is little chance of them wanting to purchase a licence, be it a Solaris or a Red Hat Linux one.

      Red Hat, just like SUN, realise that their bread and butter are customers who are not only willing but able to pay for their software and services; sorry, little Ultra 5 running zealots such as yourself are work $0 to them – and worse, you make the OpenSource world look like a joke – filled with out of touch zealots hell bent on ‘either my way or the high way’ stances.

      Those of us who have *real* jobs *realise* that no one wins in an operating system war and no one dies in it; Solaris will live, along with Red Hat and Windows – market shares changing between them, but none will suddenly disappear off the radar.

      Oh, and don’t count companies out just because there hasn’t been a massive press release in months – shock horror, some companies actually just get on with business as they see running their business as a higher priority than being a poster boy for their hardware and software suppilers, be it SUN or Red Hat.

    • 2005-11-16 1:48 pm
      Snapper

      “Er, wait. This is the same company that dropped the ball on practically all their software products including but not limited to SMB connectivity, firewalling, Javastations, Netra, RAQ… it’s getting late and I’m too tired to come up with a full list. ”

      Solaris runs oss software just fine.

      If you like Linux, so be it. Nothing wrong. Don’t feel threatened because someone has an opinion favorable to an OS that you don’t care for. No big deal. You don’t need to convince everyone your decision for your ISP was the right choice for you.

      In the end, as a person who evaluates technology and puts it to use, it is necessary to put personal emotional issues aside and evaluate and re-evaluate solutions as conditions change. This is what you did with Linux at some point, and if you stop doing it and a better solution becomes available, it may just turn out that your competitor will undermine you and run you out of business.

  • 2005-11-16 5:01 am
    jjmckay

    Very few posts in these comments on this topic are actually on topic. They don’t use their minds. Their minds use them. That’s ego.

  • 2005-11-16 5:02 am
    Shaman

    …some Sun apologist is busily scoring my messages down. Truth hurts? I think so. Those who want a dose of it might wish to read comments below score 0.

  • 2005-11-16 5:10 am
    Shaman

    Spend those mod points!

    —

    2002: Linux runs Oracle faster than Solaris by a wide margin. Oracle gets behind Linux and touts it as the best thing for Oracle.

    2005: Open Source gets major database platforms in MySQL, Firebird and PostgreSQL. Sun releases Solaris under a restrictive, shared-source style license.

    Oracle moves to Solaris 10 even though Linux continues to outperform Solaris by a considerable margin, and claims that it is supporting an Open Source operating system when in fact it is not using OpenSolaris.

    What’s next… one wonders.

  • 2005-11-16 5:12 am
    Shaman

    Go on, censors… spend those mod points.

    —

    Find Solaris in the top-10 supercomputers. Not there? You can be an apologist for Sun if you wish, but until the most recent Solaris 10 distribution, Solaris was nowhere on the map – we are talking *weeks ago* now since Solaris crawled back into relevance. It has yet to prove that it’s appreciably better – indications are that it is quite a good UNIX but not outstanding with the exception of one tool – Dtrace – which will shortly find parity on other architectures, believe me. ZFS and Zones are impressive versions of things already out there, so don’t prattle on about them, please.

    Thing is, Linux is still in that space, and still providing the goods that Solaris needs to now prove it can parallel – and there are things that it CANNOT parallel. There are very good, compelling reasons that so many have left Sun in their wake. That’s the facts.

    Oracle itself announced that performance on the Linux operating system was so far and away better than anything running on Solaris (YES, the aging and poorly-managed SPARC architecture is also to blame) that it more or less had no choice but to make Linux its platform of choice. Of course, they gushed lovingly on and on about it to make it seem like it was all their idea… but truthfully, it was the customers. Go back and look at various press releases and benchmarks from Oracle – do your own footwork, the story is out there.

    Regarding “Stalinist,” Open Source is all about democracy as opposed to oppression – think it through. Statements that Open Source is communism is the exact opposite of the actual truth – Open Source is software by democracy if ever there was such a thing – Linux could be forked at any moment and Linus could but watch it happen – THAT sir is the precise opposite of an oppressive communist rule.

    The CDDL is more like shared-source than open-source. The OSI has approved many (too many) open source licenses, but in the case of the CDDL, code that goes into the operating system may never get out – and the same is also true of the existing code. I’m not saying Sun is wrong for doing that, it’s their code and it’s their choice… but that doesn’t mean that those of us who favour Open Source as in “libre” will have anything to do with it. Nor will many of us support it in any way; that’s our choice.

    And finally, a vignette. Years ago I was at a Sun performance metrics training course in Markham, Ontario and there was an Oracle customer there. He was there to find out what he was doing wrong – because they were getting 300% performance out of a $10K x86 system running Linux as compared to their $250K Sun system running Solaris (would be S5.8 then, at a guess). After wrestling with the course and with Sun SEs that were also there in various incarnations, he finally stormed out of the room at a break and announced that they’d never do business with Sun again. And right there, I knew he was right, Sun’s line about “throughput versus performance,” etc. was all bunk, which I’d been suspecting for a while… but unable to prove because we had done no Oracle installs on Sun equipment large enough to max out the hardware at that time. To make a long story longer, that was the end of my relationship with Sun – it was weeks after that, and I was deploying on Linux and a revolution in our business that culminated in tremendous bottom line improvements in profit as a result of money not spent in vain on Sun hardware and Solaris.

    I’m already expecting to be called a troll and for various and sundry to claim I don’t know what I am doing as an admin, but the fact is, I still have some Solaris machines in use and was certified up to 32 processor enterprise systems when I shit the bed and walked away from Sun’s parlor.

    As a final insult, a couple days ago I decided to resurrect an old Ultra 10, downloaded the Sun CDs, threw some 40GB drives into the box and attempted a Solaris 10 install. But no! Solaris wouldn’t install for love nor money… after much hair-pulling and swearing, I got it down to where it would fail on “swap space in use, cannot install” by formatting and labelling the drives manually. So what did I do?

    Linux orion 2.6.14.2 #1 Mon Nov 14 16:33:00 EST 2005 sparc64 GNU/Linux

    That’s it for me.

    • 2005-11-16 6:28 am
      nick_th_fury

      Go on, censors… spend those mod points.

      —

      I actually enjoyed reading your posts. Till you started repeating them. Give it a rest. I think allot of people like myself read at -5 anyway. So mod points mean nothing. Why would I want some zealot I never met to censor for me?

  • 2005-11-16 5:13 am
    Shaman

    Spend the points… they’re like pez!

    —

    Here are my thoughts about this Oracle’s Solaris move….

    http://amjith.blogspot.com/2005/11/oracle-and-solaris-10.html

  • 2005-11-16 5:47 am
    Shaman

    >Jesus Christ all bloody mighty; *grabs young whipper

    >snapper by the scruff of the neck and points out him

    >that kaiwai has used Linux for well over 9 years

    Impressive. I ran an ISP off Linux briefly in 1994 on a 386 with a Cyclades 7-port, 8-wire serial board. I’m thinking that puts me at kernel 0.9c. But before that, I was running a Circle MUD off THE first Slackware distribution over a serial connection to a 32-line PCBoard BBS I operated at the time. At least, I think it was Circle… we’re talking nearly 12 years ago here. That puts me at least two years ahead of you, and I’m guessing you didn’t start an ISP with your first Linux venture. But hey, if it makes you feel good to blurt out and call me a young whipper-snapper, I’m all for it.

    Oh, BTW, to replace the 386 with Cyclades card, I bought a SPARC10 and put two 16-port 8-wire serial cards in it running Solaris 2.3 and ran our ISP off that until 1995, when I bought some Xylogics terminal servers. The SPARC10 stopped PPP termination duty and went to running ERPC, etc. etc. At the time, it was a pretty sweet setup before the Internet boom hit and digital NAS boxes came down to earth.

    Still with me, bigshot?

    > before the LInux fanboys like you jumped on the

    > bandwagon

    Only six years ago you’d have accused me of being a Solaris fanboy. That was my focus at the time. Sick of being wrong yet?

    > there is little chance of them wanting to purchase

    > a licence, be it a Solaris or a Red Hat Linux

    You got that right, buster. A lot of us are tired of paying for software that’s a day late and a fistful of bucks short. Er, wait. Is that a contradictory statement?

    >little Ultra 5 running zealots such as yourself are

    >work $0 to them

    I don’t have an Ultra 5. One of my SEs does. By “my” SE, I mean someone who works for me. You do yourself a disservice here by assuming you know just what level I’m on. Or what Sun systems I might still own – there’s at least nine.

    Oh, the word is “worth.” As in “worth $0.” Which is what your opinions are worth, in my view. FYI.

    >Those of us who have *real* jobs

    Ahahah… you mean digging ditches? Defending the country? Building tomorrow’s energy sources? Oh my, this is really hubris on your part. How do you do up your shirt with your chest all puffed up like that?

    > Solaris will live, along with Red Hat and Windows

    Who said otherwise?

    > don’t count companies out just because there hasn’t

    > been a massive press release

    Heck no. I’ve counted Sun out at this point, and look at how many press releases they’ve had recently! Reams! Ah, but that’s a bit unfair… Sun at least has some buzz and Solaris has come a long, long way since 5.9. But they ain’t exactly set the world on fire reaching parity. I’m interested in their Niagara chip, but mostly out of morbid curiosity.

    > some companies actually just get on with business

    > as they see running their business as a higher

    > priority than being a poster boy for their hardware

    > and software suppilers, be it SUN or Red Hat.

    You’ve got a funny way of doing business. Don’t tell your customers what you can do for them – yeah, that’s a marketing plan with “winner” written all over it.

    BTW, most of our Sun boxes do small, non-critical tasks now. Here’s a little snapshot of a E250 cobbled together out of a pile of drives (and some drives that customers gave to us because they moved away from Sun, it has to be said). We have some user shells on it, mostly just for prototyping software.

    Device Relocation Information:

    Device Reloc Device ID

    c0t8d0 Yes id1,sd@SFUJITSU_MAB3091S_SUN9.0G00D13919____

    c0t10d0 Yes id1,sd@SFUJITSU_MAB3091S_SUN9.0G00D39761____

    c0t12d0 Yes id1,sd@SIBM_____DNES30917SUN9.0G17S349__________

    c1t3d0 Yes id1,sd@SSEAGATE_ST12400N_SUN2.1G00536887

    c1t5d0 Yes id1,sd@SSEAGATE_ST12400N_SUN2.1G00540228

    c0t0d0 Yes id1,sd@SIBM_____DDRS39130SUN9.0G2A9420__________

    c0t9d0 Yes id1,sd@SSEAGATE_ST39173W_SUN9.0GLMC0691600007922J09A

    c0t11d0 Yes id1,sd@SIBM_____DNES30917SUN9.0G182629__________

    c1t2d0 Yes id1,sd@SSEAGATE_ST32430N_SUN2.1G00644101

    c1t4d0 Yes id1,sd@SSEAGATE_ST32430N_SUN2.1G00482307

    I have some more externals, but I just haven’t got around to using them. Probably won’t until one of the others fails. And to me, that’s the state of Solaris in my company today.

  • 2005-11-16 7:20 am
    Haicube

    I just wanna second the the person saying “We moved from Linux to Solaris because….”…

    It is looking good for Sun, that means more delicious software for the world to see… I’m happy for them. Good job Sun!

  • 2005-11-16 7:36 am
    CaptainPinko

    if you recieve enough down mods do your posts start with a lower initial value? because whether or not Shaman is right or wrong his juvenile antics are really a spoiler. If you get modded down deal with it or post an insightfu comment which entices us to look down there.

    —

    I think it goes to show that 12 years of Linux experience mean jack in a mature discussion since his/her antics over shadow and points he may have.

    Other than that I think this just really reiterates what I said perviously in a recent Sun story that I really think they’re a getting the momentum to make Solaris and real player in the *nix/OSS/community/hobbyist sector which is important because when it comes to install something they’ll push for what they know. I think in 12 or 16 months OpenSolaris will be out there in the same league as Linux or FreeBSD in terms of pro-user/guru community.

  • 2005-11-16 12:57 pm
    thrope

    And yet I found out today Oracle won’t support Sun Studio 10 (or 9 or 11) for Pro*C compilation.

    The latest they seem to be aware of is Sun Studio 8, from almost 2 years ago.

    Good to see Oracle getting on top of the platform.

    It is also interesting that the 10.1.0.4 patch set for Solaris is 50MB bigger than the original 10.1.0.2 download it is supposed to patch! Makes you wonder about the quality of code when the patch is actually *more* than a complete rewrite…

  • 2005-11-16 1:04 pm
    Robert Escue

    John Brady and a few other Sun employees talk about Oracle RAC, including the hardware Oracle uses internally:

    http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/johnbrady?anchor=rac_many_small_or…

    Here is a snipped portion:

    “How are customers doing this in the real world? In fact, how are Oracle deploying RAC themselves? Oracle have consolidated over 70 separate database instances into one single global instance using Oracle RAC. And they decided that the best architecture to deploy this on to achieve their targets of performance and availability was a 4 node cluster. And the platform for this? A cluster of Sun Fire 12Ks, each with 36 CPUs.

    In fact, since then these systems have been upgraded, and the CPU count increased. Larry Ellison seems very happy with these big Sun servers. (If that link is broken, here is another link to a cached copy of that article on Google.)”

    So does this mean that Oracle is going to drop Linux like a hot potato, or is there a technical reason for the shift? And I’m reasonably sure it’s not just about cost because if you cluster you would pay the per CPU or core costs regardless of hardware.

  • 2005-11-16 1:15 pm
    csi-silicon-valley

    Was at the Gartner Symposium Down Under today, so had the change to chat to Sun and Oracle…

    At the Sun booth…

    Q. How does the Oracle announcement affect you guys?

    Sun: Thank GOD, we were getting hammered by Oracle on Linux. Oracle on Solaris x86 is going to kick ass.

    Q. You’re shipping alot of your Opteron boxes, Solaris x86 must be gaining more momentum.

    Sun: Yeah, if the customer doesn’t want Solaris on SPARC, we give them Solaris x86 on AMD or Linux on our AMD boxes. It’s about choice.

    Q. Linux? You guys do Linux? How much Linux do you guys ship on your boxes?

    Sun: Yeah we do, we ship 4 times as much Red Hat as we do Solaris x86 on our AMD boxes. But that’s going to change with the Oracle announcement. Linux is dead.

    Some minutes later at the Oracle booth…

    Q. How does the announcement about development on Solaris affect you guys?

    Oracle: They invested alot of money in this new development partnership, so our development team loves it.

    Q. So you guys will develop on Solaris solely?

    Oracle: Doubt it, we have over 500 developers on Linux, it’s still our long term strategy and base development platform. We also have a Windows development team.

    You guys can make up your own mind.

    • 2005-11-16 1:37 pm
      Robert Escue

      Actually if people wanted to deploy Oracle on Solaris x86, they could dodge a bullet in terms of CPU licensing costs by using Containers and Zones to limit the amount of CPU’s or CPU cores Oracle uses. Oracle has already stated that the use of Containers and Zones is acceptable:

      http://www.oracle.com/corporate/pricing/partitioning.pdf

      I just can’t see the same thing being done with Linux, unless something new has come out recently.

      • 2005-11-16 1:51 pm
        Shaman

        >I just can’t see the same thing being done with

        >Linux, unless something new has come out recently.

        There are a handful of virtualization methods for Linux. Xen is probably the most interesting and powerful of them in terms of performance. I can’t think of a reason why you couldn’t do what you’re describing on Linux.

        One thing I will say, competition is good. Without Linux, you can bet high on this: Solaris 10 wouldn’t be nearly as good an OS as it has become.

        • 2005-11-16 2:07 pm
          chemical_scum

          One thing I will say, competition is good. Without Linux, you can bet high on this: Solaris 10 wouldn’t be nearly as good an OS as it has become.

          And without Linux there would be no OpenSolaris.

  • 2005-11-16 1:32 pm
    Shaman

    > shaman is the troll famous for saying “OpenSolaris

    > is vaporware”.

    It was vaporware. Sun was rapid-fire blasting out press releases about OpenSolaris months before there was any such product, and I was good and damned tired of it. I detest vaporware.

    My “antics” are a result of this ugly censorship software. Using it, someone with an opposing point of view can just make messages disappear from the average person’s sight. There’s no rebuttal, just a Score -1 and the message is gone. The Internet is about open communication, and it’s very apparent that a lot of mod points are being spent on here to just stifle that open discourse.

    • 2005-11-16 1:56 pm
      Robert Escue

      No, your antics are no longer being tolerated by those of us who are sick and tired of your half-baked trolling. I have an Ultra 10 at home that not only have I been able to install and use Solaris 10 on, I have successfully installed and used Update 1 Beta for Solaris 10 on the same machine. For that matter I have Solaris 10 running on an E3000 (4x 400 MHz, 4 GB RAM, 6 9 GB disks), and the E3000 is not supported! So maybe the problem isn’t the hardware, but I suppose that is Sun’s fault as well.

      • 2005-11-16 7:06 pm
        segedunum

        No, your antics are no longer being tolerated by those of us who are sick and tired of your half-baked trolling.

        Well, from my experience there is more than an element of truth in them. The fact that it makes you uncomfortable is rather irrelevant.

        Many universities and educational establishments in particular have long been die-hard Sun buyers, and have spent a great deal of money. One place I know in one large school in a university the IT guy there was as die-hard Solaris, pro-Mac and anti-Linux as they come. Eventually he just had to genuinely ask himself why the large Sun server they had bought for six figures (not to mention Sun’s support) was being totally outperformed by cheap x86 boxes (but that doesn’t mean they weren’t good quality) running Linux and even BSD for running their content management system. In the Zope and Python, and even Java, communities it is a puzzle that has long had people scratching their heads. No other Unix-like system has ever had those inexplicable problems. In the end they just had to go with something that actually worked and that was a Linux server.

        Eventually everyone has had to come to the conclusion that this is the sort of thing, and they are the sort of customers, that Sun does not care about. Well, that’s fair enough – until you have no customers left. Don’t talk about throughput. Crap performance has been a given in the SPARC and Solaris world for some time, and Sun is going to have to work extremely hard to win any kind of reputation back.

        I know the Sun fanboys like to pretend that everyone moved to Linux (and x86) because it was cheap. I’m afraid the cheapness was just an added bonus. Better performance and cheapness is a killer. Solaris 10 is certainly an improvement that Sun have badly needed, but the idea that many people around here that Solaris 10 is going to make waves is just plain laughable.

        I have an Ultra 10 at home that not only have I been able to install and use Solaris 10 on, I have successfully installed and used Update 1 Beta for Solaris 10 on the same machine.

        And how long did that take you? There are those of us who have a life to get on with rather than spend time on getting Solaris 10 to install. I can do a stage 1 install of Gentoo faster than it takes Solaris 10 to install.

        • 2005-11-16 7:48 pm
          Robert Escue

          So in one case somebody decides to go to Linux, boy that has me wondering why we spend all of the money we do on Solaris and Sun hardware. And if you believe that, I have a bridge to sell you. I have never bought the “Linux on x86 beats SPARC” crap, mainly because like most everything that comes from Linux users, it is like comparing apples and oranges. The last one I read was on DBAZine where some “DBA” compared a E4500 to a Linux cluster running on up to date Xeon hardware. The SPARC was configured with half of the memory the Xeon machines had amongst other things:

          http://www.dbazine.com/olc/olc-articles/ault8/view?searchterm=e4500

          Read the section “RAC – Many small or a few large nodes?” for what a Sun engineer feels about clusters using Oracle RAC:

          http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/johnbrady#rac_many_small_or_a

          If this is the kind of comparisons you are talking about, I wonder what the results of such a test would be like using modern hardware instead of scenarios that put Solaris at a disadvantage. Or is that asking for too much to have a fair and balanced comparison?

          Maybe crap performance is what you are accostomed to, but it certainly isn’t what I am accostomed to.

          Do you pick an OS by how fast you can install it? What difference does it make, maybe to a Linux zealot it does but let’s see:

          1. Start the machine

          2. Insert the DVD

          3. Answer questions about configuration

          4. Start install and walk away

          Or if I wanted to automate it I could use JumpStart and type one command and walk away, or I could create a Flash Archive from CD, DVD, tape, boot it and walk away.

          But that is just me.

          • 2005-11-17 12:31 am
            segedunum

            <i.I have never bought the “Linux on x86 beats SPARC” crap, mainly because like most everything that comes from Linux users, it is like comparing apples and oranges.[/i]

            No it isn’t. It’s slower.

          • 2005-11-17 12:49 am
            Robert Escue

            Nice troll.

          • 2005-11-17 11:05 am
            segedunum

            Nope, there are people out there who have experienced poor SPARC and Solaris performance first hand. No amount of throughput foboffs from Sun fanboys cover it.

            There are actually people out there doing this, and even the most die hard of people do not run Sun and Solaris because it’s Sun and Solaris. Or maybe they do, because they have to paint over the fact that the stuff they blew most of their budget on is crap.

            Feel free to call everyone else a Linux zealot if you like (you’re not a Solaris fanboy, are you), but it doesn’t alter the reality of the situation.

          • 2005-11-17 11:26 am
            segedunum

            The last one I read was on DBAZine where some “DBA” compared a E4500 to a Linux cluster running on up to date Xeon hardware.

            More memory, and yet the Xeon is cheaper. I would imagine that is Sun’s problem and no one elses’. You compare what’s available with what’s available, which means it is an apples to apples test. If Sun have hardware available that is more expensive and has less memory then that’s their problem.

            Sun have announced that the way they are going to treat multicore processors is going to be done in a way which will make Oracle’s licensing look much nicer to Oracle, and Oracle then announce their support. Go figure.

            If this is the kind of comparisons you are talking about, I wonder what the results of such a test would be like using modern hardware instead of scenarios that put Solaris at a disadvantage.

            It’s not the hardware (although that’s bad enough), it was the internals of Solaris. Solaris’ threading system and other internals, although there are many accusations of “this is the way Solaris is supposed to work”, are just not up to the job with the vast majority of software out there that people want to run.

            For too long Sun has played the line of “It’s Solaris, it’s SPARC, it’s Unix and it’s expensive – so it must be good!” for too long. That ended several years ago, and it isn’t coming back.

          • 2005-11-17 1:07 pm
            Anonymous

            More memory, and yet the Xeon is cheaper. I would imagine that is Sun’s problem and no one elses’.

            The orignal post is about Solaris. You seem to be confusing the performance of the operating system with the performance of a specific hardware system. Solaris is available for Xean and Opteron. Do you have evidence that Solaris 10 is slower than Linux on the running on the same hardware?

          • 2005-11-17 7:53 pm
            segedunum

            You seem to be confusing the performance of the operating system with the performance of a specific hardware system.

            Nope. It’s the problem of the hardware and the OS combined – mostly the OS.

            Solaris is available for Xean and Opteron.

            Since no one is using Solaris in any significant way on that hardware for me to gain any data or information I’ll have to reserve judgement on Solaris in that environment.

          • 2005-11-18 5:48 am
            Anonymous

            mostly the OS.

            >Solaris is available for Xeon and Opteron.

            Since no one is using Solaris in any significant way on that hardware for me to gain any data or information I’ll have to reserve judgement on Solaris in that environment.

            If you’ve never compared Solaris with any other OS on the same hardware (SPARC or x86) how can you claim that it is slower. Slower relative to what OS?

            One of the few benchmarks I can find has Solaris ahead (slightly) on the same hardware:

            http://www.anandtech.com/systems/showdoc.aspx?i=2530&p=5

            Perhaps you refer to Solaris 9? 8? 2.6?

            If the majority of benchmarks were to confirm your claims I would agree with you, but since this is not the case I cannot.

        • 2005-11-16 8:22 pm
          Smartpatrol

          Eventually he just had to genuinely ask himself why the large Sun server they had bought for six figures (not to mention Sun’s support) was being totally outperformed by cheap x86 boxes (but that doesn’t mean they weren’t good quality) running Linux and even BSD for running their content management system. In the Zope and Python, and even Java, communities it is a puzzle that has long had people scratching their heads.

          Performance is one thing what really matters is who are you going to call at 3am when your cutom Gentoo Linux Server goes tits up? Bob the guy that set it up originally that hasn’t worked there for 2 years? This extremely important concept of long term supportability is totally lost on the average OSS advocate. This is what makes the difference in costs associated with IT in a corporate environment.

          • 2005-11-16 8:38 pm
            Robert Escue

            Watch out, don’t confuse the issue with facts!

          • 2005-11-17 11:15 am
            segedunum

            Performance is one thing what really matters is who are you going to call at 3am when your cutom Gentoo Linux Server goes tits up?

            I never said they were running Gentoo, and although I wouldn’t in this scenario and this organisation, I actually wouldn’t have a problem doing it if that was what I had to work with. You get something that works, leave it, have a mirrored back up of the same server and then test things on it. It’s not rocket science, and you do that no matter how much support you have.

            Gentoo is actually easier to support and administer than Solaris believe it or not. Sun make sure there are certain things you have to call a Sun engineer out for – like installing or configuring the operating system! Hence the convoluted and crap install procedure in Solaris.

            Bob the guy that set it up originally that hasn’t worked there for 2 years? This extremely important concept of long term supportability is totally lost on the average OSS advocate. This is what makes the difference in costs associated with IT in a corporate environment.

            Yada, yada, yada, yer, you need to convince us that all that expensive Sun support is actually good for something. I get the picture.

            I am no OSS advocate, and like most people in these situations I want something that works – regardless of how expensive something is where I want and need to convince myself and my bosses that it’s good ;-). OSS, more than most software, with the right people and support (which is available), does work, is cheaper, is more performant and is what makes the difference in costs in a corporate environment. I know Sun wants to be King Canute, but it isn’t going to work.

          • 2005-11-17 1:02 pm
            Robert Escue

            What nonsense is this “Sun make sure there are certain things you have to call a Sun engineer out for – like installing or configuring the operating system! Hence the convoluted and crap install procedure in Solaris.” Is this another lame attempt at trying to say that Linux is better? In other words I had it right the first time, nice troll!

          • 2005-11-17 7:59 pm
            segedunum

            “Sun make sure there are certain things you have to call a Sun engineer out for – like installing or configuring the operating system! Hence the convoluted and crap install procedure in Solaris.” Is this another lame attempt at trying to say that Linux is better? In other words I had it right the first time, nice troll!

            Ha, ha, ha. So it’s true then?! Errr, and I never mentioned Linux anywhere in relation to that. Please get the Linux chip off your shoulder. That’s what Sun do. That’s based on experience with being a part of organisations that have used Sun in the past. The vast majority of the configuration, the maintenance and the general fannying around with Solaris and Sun stuff just isn’t necessary.

          • 2005-11-17 8:31 pm
            Robert Escue

            Oh and when was the last time you worked with anything made by Sun? Enlighten me. And I like the “Linux chip on my shoulder” right where it is, get over it.

  • 2005-11-16 2:48 pm
    mini-me

    C’,mon oracle!

    OS X has been here for 6 years now and it’s *NIX based…how hard can it be to port it over to the mac!

  • 2005-11-16 3:03 pm
    Shaman

    >I have an Ultra 10 at home that not only have I been

    > able to install and use Solaris 10 on

    Well yay for you! Using only the defaults, Solaris 10 failed to install on mine, from CD. Repeatedly. I even asked one of my SEs to give it a whirl while I took care of something else. Debian installed in one shot. Are you trying to say my experience is invalid?

    >your half-baked trolling

    Well, as it so happens, I checked out my message points. It turns out that four of the negative modpoints were used on my reposts. That actually means more people agree with me than don’t.

    Your problem is that you don’t want to see someone else’s point of view, especially when it’s a strong view. What’s more, I think I’m right and I’ll continue to happily say so.

    If OSNews tries to censor me, it’ll be fun. I’m really good at that game, and I hate being censored.

    • 2005-11-16 3:41 pm
      Robert Escue

      Well there are only so many things that can go wrong with an install, so considering that Debian installed successfully, that either means the CD’s were made with bad media, the ISO images were bad, the CD burner writes bad CD’s, or the user. You tell me since you have exonerated the hardware. All I can say is I have never had an install failure, and I have installed Solaris 10 on a number of SPARC and x86 machines.

      And just because the Linux trolls agree with you doesn’t mean those of us who like a serious troll and flame free discussion agree with your comments. That in itself says nothing about the quality of the posts. The vast majority of my comments don’t get modded at all, that doesn’t mean they are bad, it just means nobody is willing to use their mod points on them. And the same goes for others who post here as well.

      My problem is you spouting your Linux drivel in response to some Sun articles or posts here. If you don’t like Solaris, fine. We are well aware of your position concerning Sun and Solaris. You want to be respected and at the same time troll and flame. Well you don’t always get what you want. If your comments were even remotely on topic it would be one thing, but more often than not they are off-topic and inflammatory that add nothing to the discussion. I’m glad you think you are right, because I don’t think so.

      If you have a problem with Oracle choosing Solaris over Linux, complain to Oracle. Some of us could care less what you think.

    • 2005-11-16 4:12 pm
      CaptainPinko

      This isn’t censorship… your comments are still there and you are free to conintue to post garbage. Merely you comments are being flagged as low-quality (and they defeinitely do not contribute to the discussion and in fact impede it).

      Your freedom of speech does not trump our freedom to ignore you. Until your posts are _DELETED_ you have no right to complain. Especially whene several ppl have made it clear that it is not the content but the manner that you are presenting. Personally, I modded one of you comments up and 3 of them down in this thread. Now I wish I could add you to a foes list so I could you could get -5 filtering since your signal:noise ratio is way too low. You hear OSNews editors? Can you add an “Ignore Cretin” button?

      Frankly, by your behaviour, if you are a day over 15 I’ll be surprised.

    • 2005-11-16 4:38 pm
      Arun

      Well yay for you! Using only the defaults, Solaris 10 failed to install on mine, from CD. Repeatedly. I even asked one of my SEs to give it a whirl while I took care of something else. Debian installed in one shot. Are you trying to say my experience is invalid?

      Yes your experience is invalid. Ultra 10s are supported in Solaris 10. I am pretty sure that even the Solaris express builds would install without a hitch.

      In this case the problem in the system is between the chair and the keyboard. If you had politely asked for help and posted your experience trying to obtain information on what is failing I would have been more sympathetic.

      But you are an Anti-Sun troll, I really don’t want to waster my modpoints modding you down. I’d rather mod someone with important points up.

      • 2005-11-16 7:13 pm
        segedunum

        Yes your experience is invalid. Ultra 10s are supported in Solaris 10. I am pretty sure that even the Solaris express builds would install without a hitch.

        Based on experience, Sun enthusiasts have a pretty broad definition of ‘without a hitch’.

        If you had politely asked for help and posted your experience trying to obtain information on what is failing I would have been more sympathetic.

        Why bother? The stuff that he’d described shouldn’t be happening, especially considering it doesn’t happen with other operating systems at all.

        In this case the problem in the system is between the chair and the keyboard.

        You’re probably right. Few people can be bothered to see a Solaris install through to the end before they die.

        • 2005-11-16 11:02 pm
          Arun

          Why bother? The stuff that he’d described shouldn’t be happening, especially considering it doesn’t happen with other operating systems at all.

          Exactly the problem he is describing shouldn’t happen and most likely won’t. So if it is too good to be true … it usually isn’t is apt here.

          You’re probably right. Few people can be bothered to see a Solaris install through to the end before they die.

          I am sorry you feel that way. I can safely say that 98% of the worlds population can’t install any operating system thought the end before the die.

    • 2005-11-16 6:41 pm
      Anonymous

      Shaman is just another troll. Just another Linux fanboy.

    • 2005-11-16 7:20 pm
      Anonymous

      I think that Oracle is doing what it does often : pure marketing. (never been in an Oracle seminar? was full of special effects)

      7 years ago, they presented the IFS, Internet FileSystem at Antwerp.

      It was the days of the e- and the .com and Oracle 8i.

      It should not start a post-war in the quest of open source sainteté and morality.

      Oracle is not an os seller, they have an excellent rdbms but they have parasited it with tools à la mode release after release. Now it is full of Java. 🙂

      Java is said by some 35+ year developers to be a “just coming and soon gone” language and my pov is that I don’t like this choice but it allow a dba to run the gui installer from a workstation runing Windows or Linux to an Aix, Sun, Linux,.. server. Cool.

      But I do most of my dba work in a cli with Putty or with an old freeware become less cheap : Toad. I don’t expect a software used for database management to need a gui written in a specific java version to be installed.

      As a software performance and k.i.s.s. minded individu,

      it hurts me a lot.

      Sun hardware and Solaris is the development platform used by a lot of “enterprises focused” software companies.

      Because even in the unique *nix (or *nux) world, you are not guarenteed to make your in-house software work with each instance of unix, Sun is a very good candidate for an enterprise, cheap related to other hardware-os server sellers with high quality support. And it is with a good open source

      Sun is in the mood, so Oracle talk about Sun?

      Possible.

      Anyway I don’t see in this a benchmark consequence.

      henriavelabarbe

      —-

      I want spherocracy

  • 2005-11-16 3:25 pm
    Shaman

    Missed this:

    > Solaris runs oss software just fine.

    Mostly, yes. I have a full GNU development environment on a Solaris box here, although we use Sun’s assembler. We still support customers with Suns, although I’ve just remembered we have a pile of SPARC 20s and 5s in our storage that have come back from customers. We replaced them with (ugh) Windows servers. Not by our choice. ;)

    Maybe I’ll make a Jabber server out of one some day, just for fun. Probably not on Solaris, though.

    Solaris was missing some modern libraries, features and interfaces in 5.9 (such as a random device, in the standard distribution), I haven’t been able to install S10 yet to see if they’ve added them.

    From OpenSSH, for example:

    “WARNING: the operating system that you are using does not appear to support either the getpeereid() API nor the SO_PEERCRED getsockopt() option. These facilities are used to enforce security checks to prevent unauthorised connections to ssh-agent. Their absence increases the risk that a malicious user can connect to your agent.”

  • 2005-11-16 7:09 pm
    Anonymous

    Please stop drinking heavily before coming on OSNews.

    I’ve made plenty of case for you to consider me skilled and knowledgable, but I’m being called a troll, etc. etc.

    Accurate and thoughtful rebuttals didn’t appear, just accusations of my trollhood and inability at a keyboard. Which is what I expected. I’ve been on the ‘web long enough to know reverse-trollism. ;)

  • 2005-11-16 9:38 pm
    Shaman

    >Performance is one thing what really matters is who

    >are you going to call at 3am when your cutom Gentoo

    >Linux Server goes tits up?

    There are plenty of organizations to call. But, anyone running a server on Gentoo probably hasn’t through the equations through very well.

    Regarding the install, the CDs are not damaged, and the system was told to repartition and use the whole disk, deleting any existing data. That failed. So I formatted it by hand and labelled it, with the partitions I wanted them. Again the install failed, so I tried again and asked it to destroy all data, which still failed. So I repartitioned by hand again, this time making UFS on each partition. Still no go. Handed it off to my SE, who beat his head against it for about an hour or so. No go. Updated the PROM to the latest release, no change.

    Debian went on there in one pass and it’s even booting off two drives mirrored now. So, geniuses, what exactly did I miss? What miracle of wisdom can you impart on this poor neophyte to get Solaris 10 installed on my Ultra10?

    (I won’t be holding my breath)

    • 2005-11-16 9:56 pm
      Robert Escue

      So where did it fail? What CD? Are you aware that you can install the system from CD 1 and skip the others and install them at a later date? And don’t be a smart ass, you want help or not?

    • 2005-11-16 10:08 pm
      Smartpatrol

      I will take a guess. Its an Ultra 10 right? What size is the IDE hardrive or is it IDE at all? is it the original IDE hard drive that came with the Computer? The reason i ask is that Ultra 10’s being PC Like can probably accept the larger hardrives however the Sparc edition of Solaris probably doesn’t have the drivers to handle some of the larger drives like Debian would. My guess is if you put a single drive <10GB in, it would work just fine.

      • 2005-11-16 11:13 pm
        Arun

        As far as I know the only limitation on the Ultra 10 with drivers is the 137 Gb limit because the controller doesn’t support LBA48.

        Using Solaris 10 a 40GB drive should work in an ultra 10.

  • 2005-11-16 10:03 pm
    Shaman

    > What CD?

    The 1st CD.

    And no, I don’t want help at this point, but thank you for the offer. I’ve now invested half a day putting eJabberD and a few other interesting apps on the Debian install I did. I highly recommend anyone running a Jabber server invest in the time to look at eJabberD, it’s quite nice, and so far it’s been much less problematical in my meager testing this afternoon.

    Off-topic aside: One of the things that really irked me about Jabber 1.4.x server is that it absolutely will not even start if the system you are using doesn’t have the same PTR as the domain you are running the server on – so if you want, say jabber.mydomain.com you have to configure DNS with that PTR to the server’s IP, which makes it a hassle trying to run a Jabber server on an existing server. What’s more, it doesn’t issue an error saying why the server wouldn’t start. eJabberD seems to suffer none of those problems, and doesn’t insist on sending login information to jabber.com. It also has a nice administration system using HTTP. I’m impressed with it, despite its version status.

  • 2005-11-17 2:32 am
    Anonymous

    sun and oracle are friends..

    remember sun threatend to do their own DB software that would challenge oracle.

    Why would oracle want to risk any market share? McNealy and Larry are golf buddies and they made the rational decision.

    solaris was their main OS before, and again it will be again.