OmniOS Community Edition r151048 has been released. For those of us that lost track of the Solaris world – OmniOS is a distribution of illumos, which in turn is a fork of the last release of OpenSolaris before Oracle did what Oracle does and screwed everyone over by taking Solaris closed source again. OmniOS focuses on being a server operating system.
For this release, the userland is now built with gcc 13, and it contains various improvements for AMD Zen 4 support. The which command has been replaced by an implementation in C rather than csh, dtrace has seen some improvements on machines with a lot of CPUs, and so, so much more.
Solaris was a real missed opportunity. And mostly was because of self harm.
First they crafted a license with just enough open source compatibility, but clear separation from GPL2. The apparent reason was blocking Linux from stealing stuff from their kernel, including valuable items like ZFS.
However it completely backfired, since they needed more from Linux compared to the other way around. With limited hardware drivers, lack of file system support, and especially missing a community to develop new features, their opening of the source code was not as helpful as imagined. (Yes, BSD was/is compatible. However how much have we seen activity on that front)?
Second, they could not decide what market to focus on: software development (Java), enterprise software (J2EE and others), server hardware (SPARC later AMD), services (I think cloud was called “grid” back then), or something else. Maybe they did not have enough “runway” to switch to a better track. But at the end of the day, they could not convert their otherwise excellent stack into a cashflow. (And had to sell to Oracle).
Anyway, I miss the excitement of those days. I really wanted to try Open Solaris as a daily driver.
sukru,
Well, to be fair, CDDL was actually a good license for FOSS projects like ZFS,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Development_and_Distribution_License
The crux of the incompatibility problem lies more so with GPL2, which does not play nice with others and is difficult for other licenses to be compatible with. The GPL 2 is so discriminatory to other licenses that even GNU themselves couldn’t make GPL3 and GPL2 compatible, Consequently GPL3 projects can’t share code with GPL2 licensed linux code, which is asinine and counterproductive for FOSS đ
Yeah, Sun helped shape so many technologies and I had a lot of respect for what they were doing. Alas, their desktop solutions were pummeled by an unrelenting microsoft monopoly. Simultaneously they were loosing more and more of the data center market to free clones including linux. They open sourced so much technology to stabilize their market share, but sadly they weren’t able to recoup revenues leading to Oracle’s takeover. I don’t like Oracle being bad shepherds of Sun’s original projects, but they won because they have the stronger business model. It’s a hard lesson to hear if you like FOSS.
I used solaris at university. It’s where I got most of my *nix education.
This is true. OSI and FSF both recognize the CDDL as a FOSS license, and the incompatiblity could probably be fixed by rebasing CDDL on MPL 2.0.
Anyway, it’s not like it matters now. Illumos could switch to a using a different license for new code if they wanted to.
They weren’t as point and click as MS, and they weren’t even as user friendly as Linux was. Yeah, early Linux was user friendly comparatively. (Ignoring MS would never have let them get a foot in the door, like they did every other OS.)
Let’s also not forget the rise of x86 here. Intel was running everyone out of the room. AMD and POWER held on, but SPARC, MIPS, Alpha, etc. all died. Arm has started being able to challenge x86 because embedded CPUs and microcontrollers are everywhere and x86 has reached market saturation.
MS and Linux usability at Dell prices would have been a good combo, but that wasn’t Sun.
Flatlander_Spider,
CDE sort of felt like windows NT 4 and could have used a visual refresh like windows 9X. In terms of installing 3rd party applications I agree it was more difficult. But I don’t agree that linux was any easier. It’s main advantage was being free.
Yep, such was the wintel monopoly effect. Illegal monopoly tactics were rampant and it took way too long for regulators to intervene only after the market damage was already done. It sure would have been nice to see the hardware & OS landscape evolve with a level playing field where where we all could have gotten more choice. It’s kind of a shame that new markets were needed for alternate architectures, but at least we were lucky enough that ARM was able to grow in a new market.
Well, honestly I can’t agree that linux usability was a selling point back in those days, especially in the context of desktops. IMHO Suse linux had the best desktop experience, yet ironically other more hardcore distros ended up becoming more popular. I think it’s pretty clear why, linux wasn’t growing due to desktop users, rather it’s growth was almost entirely in the server space where it corresponded to the server market it was talking away from unix vendors. Being a relatively cumbersome desktop OS didn’t affect the server market.
Alfman,
They actually tried to build a better desktop than CDE. Of course Sun, being Sun, had to do it with Java: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_Desktop_System
Okay, the desktop was not 100% Java (unlike some other operating system called Netware). However it still felt slower compared to Linux based Gnome on the same hardware. To be honest, this could entirely be because they did not have hardware accelerated drivers for the UI.
In any case, the end result was something that tried to mimic Linux desktop, with (subjectively) worse results.
Flatland_Spider,
Are you referring to the ease of install back then? When livecd’s were popular, and you could just pop in a (free) cdrom from Ubuntu and start exploring the desktop?
If so, yes, at that point of time Linux was much easier to use.
sukru,
Yes I would include those. I tried literally dozens of linux live CDs from Linux Format magazine. I put a lot of miles on knoppix! I always looked forward to giving them a spin but I have to be honest, in the early years desktop linux was relatively bad. Often you had to do without sound or networking and sometimes even video would be stuck on ugly VGA modes. Even more recent linux live CDs still went on to use very slow generic VBE drivers instead of device specific ones because they have better compatibility this way. It’s not necessarily their fault that drivers didn’t exist, but regardless of why linux wasn’t always the ride in the park it is today. Still, as a consumer I had more time than cash, so leaned towards free distros over everything sun was selling!
alfman, sukru,
Are you referring to the ease of install back then? When livecdâs were popular, and you could just pop in a (free) cdrom from Ubuntu and start exploring the desktop?
If so, yes, at that point of time Linux was much easier to use.
I’m talking about the CLI.
My frame of reference is mid-2000s FreeBSD, Linux, and Solaris. By that time Gnome and KDE had been ported, so the GUI experience was fairly similar between the three. Hardware support varied, but the GUI wasn’t hurting.
GNU tools had more features and came standard out of the box with Linux.
The FreeBSD userland was nice. This is where I really started working with FOSS operating systems, so GNU was not my first *nix userland. I really liked tcsh. It has some very nice features that I liked, and I setup bash to be tcsh-like for a long time.
Then there is package management. FreeBSD had ports, and the Linux package managers were in full bloom at this time. There were websites with Solaris packages, but I could never figure out how to install software from them.
Solaris was much more barebones. With more experience I can to realize it was a modeling clay which needed to be customized and molded to the task. It’s like other enterprise software, in that the admin team makes the decisions on what the world looks like.
That is nice for people who know what they’re doing, but other people want to go bowling with the bumpers on. I’ve come to appreciate the what Solaris was doing after the fact, and I really wanted to love Solaris back then. However, I didn’t want to spend my time tweaking the system. How to customize AT&T ksh, I think that was the default Solaris shell, wasn’t something people were asking for.
I get FreeBSD or Linux installed, and I would be ready to go with minimal tweaking. Which gets to my point, the FOSS *nix OSes had a community making decisions about what they would look like, and it produced Unix-like OSes with a good OOTB experience. Even a distro like Arch had a good OOTB experience.
Sun also hired Debian founder Ian Murdoch to “linuxize” Solaris in 2007, so Sun even admitted Solaris wasn’t as user friendly as it could have been.
Flatland_Spider,
I agree with your timeline, things improved when ubuntu showed up. I felt Suse had done a lot of legwork before ubuntu, it just didn’t become as popular.
Yeah, that makes a big difference actually.
I’m curious where/when they admitted that, but regardless it would make sense because Sun started open Solaris in 2005 and would have wanted more open source talent.
Sun was something else. They produced some amazing tech and great ideas.
I’m not sure anyone had any idea how to monetize Sun tech without alienating Sun’s audience. If Sun had been a government funded research lab, they would have been amazing, but they were a business which peaked during the Dot Com bubble. Sun was never able to monetize Java the way MS was able to monetize C#, and never realized they needed to get dirty with the proles like MS and x86 did.
I guess the business to look at is Red Hat. Have upstream development and beta projects, and then fork the stable, corporate product off of that. Also, don’t feel bad about cutting the clones off and pointing everyone to the upstream projects.
Anyway, I’m not sure anyone had any idea about how to save Sun.
I have a computer running OmniOS at home, although I’ve been too busy to finish setting it up. The zone commands, CrossBow networking system commands, and everything else has been really intuitive, simple, and great. It feels like a non-GUI Debian server system, and if all you want is a server OS to run supported open source software (software support is . . . okay) with native ZFS and lightweight containers it’s great. It would probably be fully great with better modern Devops automation stuff like ansible, but as a home server to mess with and run a few useful things, why not. It’s a lot easier running Postgres or NginX on Illumos systems than desktop software like Firefox and Gnome, so it’s a good fit.