Articles / What if Solaris was Free?
What if Solaris was Free?
osOpinion has a rather thought provoking column about Solaris and Linux: "If you look at what the Linux community is doing now, it has already been done by Sun. Solaris can do everything Linux can do, but better. After reading the following text, ask yourself one simple question: What if Solaris was free?"
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Free?
Free as in free beer or freedom? As long as it wasn't under something GPL-ish, It still wouldn't stand a chance IMHO.
what about the source?
Solaris can be free (no licence fee) but the source?
Free doesn''t mean succesfull.
And Linux is not Slowaris!
A better idea
When was the last time Sun, DEC, HP, SGI, et. al., all ran a single version of *nix? I sense an end to the maddness of the *nix wars, and about time too.
Linux has momentum in its favor. The best thing that Sun could do is not to make Solaris free of charge, but to share code with the community for those things that Solaris currently does better than Linux, to improve Linux and increase its performance on their hardware.
Applications developers are tired and frustrated with supporting umpty-ump variants of *nix and would love to support a single version that will run well on a wide variety of hardware. Applications translate into hardwre sales.
If Sun was to take a small percentage of the development staff working on Solaris and assign it to work on Linux development, and if SGI, DEC, HP, Amdahl, IBM, and all of the other hardware vendors that are begining to support Linux, the impact would be huge.
My suggestion would be for them to get together and lease some office space in Palo Alto for their Linux developers. Set up a dozen cubicles for the general Linux community developers to drop in and work. Set up a first class testing lab where Linux developers can test their software on a variety of equipment. Use some of their ample CPU power and network bandwidth to host CVS trees.
Much of the damage done by the *nix wars can be undone with a little effort. We cannot turn back the clock, but we can stop the continuing divisions and increase the pace of development for both systems and applications code.
A pipe dream? Perhaps. But when you consider that this would require a fraction of 1% from the development budgets of each company involved, the cost involved is almost trivial. The potential benefit is enormous.
Just my two bits ...
Solaris does everything better?
Don't get me wrong, I love Solaris, but the "Solaris does everything better" is the biggest load of bull I've heard in years.
This guy's obviously never run Solaris on x86.
I've seen supporting evidence
Everyone I know who runs a UNIX variant in real life is running Solaris. I've never ever encountered anyone in real life running Linux. It doesn't matter what Solaris has to offer as much as how well it's marketed and it's marketed a hell of a lot more than Linux.
Linux probably has better multimedia support but the multimedia users are so miniscule, they'd quickly vanish after a few graduating classes. The problem is the turnover rate of Linux users is so high, most of our user base is college students who don't stick to it after graduationg. Entering students who comprise half of the Linux population would start installing Solaris every September and we'd lose half our users every June.
Solaris / Linux
Don't get me wrong, either. I love Solaris. I work for a multi-million dollar Java/CORBA e-commerce company: www.ecential.com (www.ecential.com) I have 3 boxes in my office: a Sun Ulta 5 running Solaris, a Pentium 400 running Linux, and a Pentium 450 running Windoze NT. I keep the windoze box around to run Borland's JBuilder, but have been running their 100% pure java IDE beta on my Linux and Solaris box for the past month. I now use the windoze box solely to play Total Annihilation.
A make of our entire e-commerce product takes about 20 minutes on the Sol box, it takes about 14 minutes in my Linux box. Needless to say: I'm on my Linux box most of the day. The Sun is great for certain things. The filesystem is dog slow. They both have their advantages. We serve many clients off of suped up Enterprise 450's and also SMP Linux boxes. Don't let anyone tell you that no one uses Linux in a professional environment. I'd say that over the past year the momentum has swung dramatically toward Linux.
From my Linux box,
-Scribe.
A good summary of why Linux would still reign supreme
There is a very good response in one of the "talkback" postings on the OSO site. Might want to check it out (www.vestris.com/db-cgi...).
Solaris 7
Solaris 7 is a dramatic improvement over Solaris 2.6 which on the server side of things was impressive. Solaris 7's file system is much faster than it once was, and includes logging support over any "hard" file system including a file system mounted on / It also provides BIND 8 and the latest Sendmail which Sun has traditionally ignored.
Solaris 7 is in many ways superior to Linux. Memory support, logging file system, self-adjusting kernel, dramatic scalability, multi-threaded everything, great (if not quite perfect) development environment that can compile about 95% of all Linux software, fantastic interactivity under heavy load (much better on the UltraSPARC systems, however) and support for most of the upper end of the hardware picture. Its TCP/IP stack is multi-threaded and very capable. Its NFS and CacheFS are supreme if you have used them for a while - while Linux has always suffered from gawdawful horrible NFS (Coda is cool but not yet standard). Solaris has tools to monitor, study and act on many different performance statistics had fairly slow filesystems, particularly for deletion, but that is a thing of the past with Solaris 7.
Solaris vs. Linux
Solaris IS free for "educational" purposes. It can do a lot more than Linux in the Enterprise environment, but the one thing holding it back is the source. Sun is opening doors to developers lately though, and maybe it'll be 100% open source someday, but I doubt it. On a Sun you can't go wrong with Solaris, but leave it at that, Linux is much better, and easier for personal use on an x86 based machine. Don't get me wrong, I like Linux a lot.
The real question: What if Linux wasn't free!
And the simple answer is that nobody would write ignorant articles on the subject "What if Solaris was free". I guess we would rather see stuff like "Why MS put Solaris to sleep" and "What if the internet was free" or "Why the intenet never had a chance, buy a cdrom now". Yes, the company with the right to innovate saw the future of the PC in the cdrom.
/jarek
Solaris Highlights???
Sorry Michael you're wrong on all points... Here's why.
- Highly scalable (64 processors)
The most powerfull super computers in the world run Linux variants more specifically puma, beowulf, etc. Sun's HPC effort is an abysmal failure. Go see top 500 .org. E10K's are only for eBay and the like.
- Already runs on 64-bit SPARC chip (Intel doesn't even have one yet)
Yes I-N-T-E-L doesn't, thought we were talkin' Linux?!?!
Just days after S7 was released UltraPenguin was released - 64 bit
on the UltraSparc. It took Sun several years to release 7, and it took a loosely knit group of developers a mater of months to go 64 bit with Linux. We'll see how long if EVER it takes Sun to port x86 to the new Intel 64 bit proc.
- Has been proven in the industry
Lixux is used by more ISP's than anything else, and endorsed by companys like Sun, HP, IBM, Compaq - I'd say It's proven, besides Redhat passes the POSIX test suite, Solaris doesn't...
- Has the support backing of a major company (Sun)
Solaris only has Sun to support it, Linux just has the support of every person on the planet who doesn't want to contribute to a behemoth.
- Runs everything Linux does (Mail, DNS, FTP etc...)
No - Solaris can't run half of the things that Linux can, things like half of the software linked to this most Leet site.
- Already has many software packages ported to it.
You can get an rpm for anything, but Michael misses the point, when I build 'em my se'f they DONT DUMP CORE ya lamer
- Now has Star Office
Is it just me or is Star Office so slow it's almost unuseable?
I hope they keep giving it away for free, that way nobody will bitch about it...
why not?
I ordered Solaris 6 from Sun as a developer, it cost about £30UK all in. I got Solaris 7, Sparc and Intel versions, and it runs just fine on my x86 systems. I also run RedHat 6.0, with KDE. The box set of Redhat retails about £80UK over here. It doesn't work out of the box, it required some basic knowledge of Linux to get X running period, and as of today I don't have a working ppp daemon, and can't use the X font server. Solaris installed in less time and ran out the box.
Solaris is what we use at work, because we can run it on servers that Linux is not COMMERCIALLY viable on. This is because we use BIG Suns with a good support contract from Sun. This is not available with Linux yet, though I dare say it's not far off.
I agree Linux is faster, but it's also less stable. I had hardware problems installing RedHat where a duff SIMM caused it to sig 11. Solaris didn't bomb, it raised an error. And lets face it if you NEED speed you buy a bigger box, or more of them. I can scale Solaris to ridiculous proportions. How fast do you need it?
Solaris does have problems, most noteably that it is largely commercial, and expensive in that environment. But surely a free source approach to the OS, at least by opening the doors to adopt free source software into the Sun package will improve Solaris, and maybe some of the benefits will feed back to Linux. Maybe RedHat will release a version that works complete out of the box...?
Good Advertisement
Thanks for your advertisement for solaris. If we all support each other then the world we live in will soon be much better.
Very informative too.
Yaeh
Well, looks like this thread is about to end.
Sun just released their source code. Like 2 seconds ago. Weird, eh? ;)
-Dave
Oh my God.
Fusion, The Man - if there's anyone fooled into thinking you aren't talking out of your ass, then I'd be surprised. Solaris unreliable or "a throwback to the 70s?" I hope you really aren't that stupid.
Verrrry Strange
I have to agree with Dave Brooks. The timing of this article really is strange. My two cents on this is that since SUN acquired StarOffice and they're announce a 2 to 1 Stock Split could only mean something else.
I believe this to be a ploy from SUN to up their stocks.
I am still waiting for them to dump their StarOffice products on CD's and send them to every PC User via mail the same way as AOL is doing -- (: my guess.
what if solaris was free
So? It runs best on SPARC hardware, for example if I wanted to do JMF or Java 3D development, I'm stuck using either Solaris SPARC only or Windozer, so what? Free BSD is out there for free, and its the real-deal Unix, even Yahoo runs it, but it hasn't caused Linux to dissapear, even though some claim it runs Linux in emulation better than Linux runs itself.
A better question. What if Linux wasn't free?
What if Linux wasn't free? Would this thread even exist. I dought it. If Linux hadn't been developed and wasn't free and Open Source, then Sun probably wouldn't be doing what their doing anyway.
All the differances between the the OS's aside. IMHO, Linux or better yet, the Linux movement, is responsible for many of the changes taking place in the computer industry today. If Linux were to disappear tomarrow (I dought it), we would still need to remember it's impact.
So ask yourself this simple question. What if Linux wasn't free?
NFS v3
I believe Linux 2.4 will include support for NFS v.3 as reported by the Linux Journal -1-9-0-0- 2000.
QUIT WISHING AND WATCH SGI
Of the many companies claiming to support Linux, you should take a look at some of the contributions SGI is making.
People complain about NFSv3, well SGI has provided that support for Linux. Add advanced filesystems (promised, albeit, not yet available) like XFS - superb. Kernel debugger. IO enhancements. Memory size enhancements. OpenVault, GLX, STL, the list goes on.
IRIX is a superb *nix, with a ton of great features, many unknown due to their horrible PR and marketing... Just because Solaris has such a high level of corporate deployment does NOT make it the best OS on the market. If that were the case, we'd all be praising Windoze here. oss.sgi.com (oss.sgi.com) starts you off - take notice of this effort. SGI appears truly committed to this - and given SGI's future roadmap, we'll be benefiting from this for years to come.
Just think, a company with a vested interest in bringing their commercial *nix features to Linux - providing a threaded ip stack, HARD real-time scheduling, etc, etc, etc. Pretty cool for all of us.