“When I interviewed Sun chief engineer Rob Gingell last August, he hinted at a blurring of the lines between Linux and Solaris, if not an outright merger. Said Gingell: “Five years from now, when all the tribes intermarry, who is going to know what’s Solaris and what’s Linux, and who’s going to care?” Read the editorial at ZDNews.
Solaris on Course to Merge with Linux?
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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I was really excited until I read the article. By looking at the title and blurb I thought that Sun was considering GPL’ing some Solaris code to go into Linux. I was ecstatic about this idea because I have heard so many ravings about the stability of Solaris. I haven’t used it much (only a brief 45 minutes while waiting for a professor to get back to his office), but I would think that this stuff could help Linux a lot.
Unfortunately they article is only about ensuring cross platform compatability between linux and solaris. This is a good idea I guess, but it is a lot less interesting.
Personally I think this is scary. Linux good, Solaris good, why mix the 2.
….chief technology officer Greg Papadopolous
He’s come a long way since buying the laundrette in EastEnders
Always wondered what his first name was
As the topic says… Sun is commiting suicide. I can name another company that deluted it’s brand with cheep comodity wares – SGI. If I’m going to buy a 30k box, I want to be damn well certain that the company selling it is behind the product 110%.
Lack of loyalty [on Suns part] is the exact reason I recomended/purchased my last Sun box two months ago. Sun is allover the place. They need to focus. Combining Linux with Solaris is like mating a thuroughbred(sp?) with a mutt.
Oh yeah – and pushing $800 10/100 NICs is another reason…
Sun can go to hell…
ahhh its quite amusing how the weak will try to survive by clinging on to linux. they will surely wither and die (like BSD *g* )
Could you give us a link to the $800 10/100 NICs.
I want to know where I can get one !!
NOT
http://store.sun.com/catalog/doc/BrowsePage.jhtml?catid=10972
There you go. So it’s not $800…it’s $695 – MY BAD!
Those card suck, BTW. It’s a cheap-ass chipset rebranded by Sun.
Had one in my U10. Don’t know how they managed to absorb 75% of the CPU on a 100/Full link when the interface is saturated….
Wow, and if it doesn’t work out, I can bang it with my $700 hammer.
Seriously, does Sun or its agents allow to install better quality PC NIC cards or the like, or does Sun lock all of that out for lack of drivers etc?
Folks I work with only need to buy at the bottom end of Sun HW list anyway so I’d like to know how much of build yer own is practical if you can get mobo & OS, and rest separately etc.
You can’t really “roll your own” with Sun hardware. Sun friendly IHVs (independant hardware vendors) are virtualy non-existant.
Don’t even think about building from parts. A 440MHz CPU that was used in U10 is retailing around $2500 from Sun. That’s just the cheap-ass CPU…
If you want to write your own drivers be ready to shell out quite a bit of $$$ for Suns developer stuff – you need Forte (or what ever they call it this week) to write Solaris drivers.
UNIX is a propriatory system. Sun can’t release UNIX source code to the free software community. There is probably some code in Solaris that Sun owns outright that they could contribute to Linux just like IBM has already been doing. It would be nice to have Solstice Disk Suite on Linux.
I believe that Sun could release a hybrid product since Linux’s kernel is released under LGPL instead of GPL. I don’t see the point here; there is nothing in the Linux kernel that the Solaris kernal lacks.
I don’t see why Sun would spend resources to bring Linux up to Solaris’ level rather than using the same energy to further improve Solaris. It just doesn’t make any sense long term. Sure Linux is the current buzz-word and there is some value in jumping onto that bandwagon with everyone else but when all the Linux hyperbole clears Sun still wants to be in business.
For at least ten year ago, maybe more, the *NIX community has been talking standardizing. Never happened, never will. The company in the lead never wants to be standard, that could give their lead away.
>I believe that Sun could release a hybrid product since
>Linux’s kernel is released under LGPL instead of GPL. I don’t
>see the point here; there is nothing in the Linux kernel that
>the Solaris kernal lacks.
The Linux kernel is GPL. View the file called COPYING in the root directory of the kernel source tree.
…what does SCO have to say about this? 😉
I like the analogy. Ever notice how purebreeds are never has healthy as mutts?
There’s no doubt that Sun would benefit by having some optional package to emulate Linux system/library calls. I can remember porting some code that had #defines for both Mac OS 9 and Solaris. To port that to Linux, it was far easier to start with the OS 9 stuff. Porting from Solaris would’ve been nearly impossible. That really shouldn’t be the case.
Of course the real effect of this would be in other direction. There’s so much more software for Linux that it’s become a more usuable system than Solaris. When I first started using Redhat a few years ago, that wasn’t true, but today while Solaris is more advanced under the hood, the lack of applications makes it harder to use. And porting Gnome is not going to help. As far as a workstation goes, it’s not much better than CDE. But if I could treat a Solaris workstation like a Linux box but have the increadible network transparency of Solaris, I’d be very happy indeed.
The article simply means that Sun will add compatibility features to Solaris that will allow it to run more software designed for Linux. No actual “merging” is planned.
David writes…
> …what does SCO have to say about this? 😉
Well I remember reading that Sun is one of the UNIX companies that is unaffected by anything SCO tries to do.
I got the following from CNET.
Two companies quick to say they’re not affected by SCO’s actions are Sun Microsystems and HP, the No. 1 and No. 2 sellers of computers running versions of Unix.
“HP did a complete buyout of Unix licensing from SCO,” HP spokesman Brian Garabedian said. “We have a perpetual license rather than per copy license for HP-UX…We don’t believe we have any exposure to the SCO lawsuit.”
Sun, too, bought out its Unix license, said John Loiacono, vice president of Sun’s operating platforms group.
“We bought our Unix license out….We are unencumbered for all things,” including Sun’s version of Linux, he said.
Linux is a hacked together toy. Solaris is a real OS.
They will never merge.
You do have to be a bit choosy, but if you have picked your PCI cards to match the chipsets used by Sun, plenty of el-cheapo network/video/scsi cards work just fine.
Yours truly,
Jeffrey Boulier