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A Sun engineer on LinuxA Sun engineer on LinuxPosted Sep 23, 2004 15:58 UTC (Thu) by ami.ganguli (guest, #9613)Parent article: A Sun engineer on Linux
I'm actually curious about what they come up with and I wish them luck. I see no reason to believe that OpenSolaris will flop, but I doubt it will be as popular as Linux.
For whatever reason, Linux has emerged as the dominent Unix-like OS, despite perfectly good competitors in the form of the BSDs. The BSDs meet all of the requirements that Sun has: they allow proprietary extensions, they follow a more controlled engineering process. Despite this, Linux has captured the mainstream imagination.
The question that Sun needs to answer is: do the advantages of sticking with (what is becoming) a niche OS outweigh the costs. It costs them in R&D budget, it costs them in hardware support, it costs them in application support.
If Sun looks at the figures and concludes that, yes, they should stick with Solaris, then good for them. Any developers they fund to work on Open Source will, in the end, help the community.
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A Sun engineer on Linux Posted Sep 23, 2004 16:50 UTC (Thu) by philips (guest, #937) [Link] Main advantage of Linux is its price.
Ask anyone in business what keeps Sun floating around that long?
Well, it is used mostly on crappy Sun's hardware. Will see how good Sun will manage to make x86
With Sun/Solaris combination - you are assured that hardware will work ok with that OS. (Just
On flip, side - Solaris might be as crappy as Linux can be sometimes - we just cannot run it on
P.S. Hm... Probably it is not Sun's hardware which is crappy - but Solaris which makes it crappy.
P.P.S. Including into equation support by hardware vendors of Linux, Linux just shines, compared
A Sun engineer on Linux Posted Sep 23, 2004 17:10 UTC (Thu) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link] I don't understand your post... "Everybody loves it [Solaris]." vs. "Solaris makes [good hardware] crappy."
It's true that hardware selection takes more effort when buying a Linux box than a Sun box, especially for server grade hardware. So, buy your box from a reputable Linux vendor and get a service contract. Don't just throw Linux onto random hardware you have lying around and then expect it to be a well-tested, 100% reliable solution. (I'm not saying you did this -- I don't know -- but a lot of people do).
I last worked on Solaris in 2000. I remember banging my head into a bunch of SysV vs. BSDisms, and that the desktop environments (either OL or CDE) were truly poor. There also wasn't much of a support community for small problems.
So, though it got the job done, I sure didn't love Solaris.
A Sun engineer on Linux Posted Sep 23, 2004 23:49 UTC (Thu) by cajal (guest, #4167) [Link] Well, a lot has changed on Solaris since 2000.
Most of the shell utilities now accept the "-h" argument. There's Blastwave for automated
I tried Solaris (briefly) back in the 2.7 and 2.8 days, and then went with Linux. But I'm seriously
A Sun engineer on Linux Posted Sep 23, 2004 17:30 UTC (Thu) by jeskritt (guest, #4092) [Link] I'm currently a Solaris admin. Personally I prefer linux to Solaris. Not that Solaris is bad, but their command line tools don't have all the same features as linux (e.g. -h for human readable file sizes was only added in Solaris 9), though they are slowly adding functionality to them. The main complaints I have about Solarisis that I don't really like their packaging system and I really hate their patch system. It is horrible.
A Sun engineer on Linux Posted Sep 23, 2004 23:31 UTC (Thu) by hppnq (subscriber, #14462) [Link] Heh, I just spent 6 hours installing patches (not counting downloading the +100MB) in order to install an LDAP client -- on a fairly well maintained Solaris system.There is no way to script this, and I have 800 (eight hundred) systems to go.
A Sun engineer on Linux Posted Sep 23, 2004 21:12 UTC (Thu) by simlo (subscriber, #10866) [Link] I have tried to install a plain postscript network printer on Solaris. Scream! I gave up. On Linux: I started the printtool, give the IP number and it printed right away.Yes, this is the argument Windows users use against Linux, but you would expect these kind of things to work better in a expensive, commercial product than in something you just download for free, right?
A Sun engineer on Linux Posted Sep 24, 2004 0:10 UTC (Fri) by xtifr (subscriber, #143) [Link] I've been in the business for over two decades, and I strongly disagree. I agree that it's not the hardware, but it's not Solaris either. The thing that has kept Sun "floating around" for so long is the same thing that keeps MS where they are: the apps. And when you're discussing server apps, there's one that stands out like a 600 pound gorilla in a room full of tree shrews: ORACLE!
When Solaris was Oracle's primary recommended platform, Sun was flying high. They could literally do no wrong. Then, a few years ago, Oracle announces that now Linux is their primary recommended platform. And suddenly Sun is floundering, lost and aimless, and desperate to find a way back into the limelight. Anyone who thinks this is a coincidence is invited to invest in some interesting real estate deals I have going down Florida way.
The idea that it's all about the OS is something that only a geek could possibly believe. Nobody in the real world gives two hoots about the OS. Of course, the Sun fanatics want to believe that it's about the OS, because they don't want to admit that Sun was NEVER in control of their own destiny, and the Free/OSS geeks go along because they want to believe that it *should* be about the OS (they want to promote Linux or BSD on their own merits), and because they (at least some misguided subset of them) want to believe that nobody should care about Oracle, since you can just use MySQL for all your database needs (yeah, right).
A Sun engineer on Linux Posted Sep 24, 2004 1:17 UTC (Fri) by hppnq (subscriber, #14462) [Link] I agree with a big part of what you say. I do think, however, that Linux enthusiasts have one big, shining reason to be very vocal about the merits of Linux, other than the technical ones. It is the GPL. Companies, governments and universities all over the world are switching to Linux because of the freedom it provides, that leads not only to an excellent operating system, but also to a system that gives the user every possibility to make it even better.
A Sun engineer on Linux Posted Sep 24, 2004 3:30 UTC (Fri) by hppnq (subscriber, #14462) [Link] s/possibility/opportunity/ ;-)
A Sun engineer on Linux Posted Sep 23, 2004 17:21 UTC (Thu) by rcbixler (guest, #11917) [Link] > The question that Sun needs to answer is: do the advantages of sticking> with (what is becoming) a niche OS outweigh the costs. It costs them in > R&D budget, it costs them in hardware support, it costs them in > application support. I would be quite surprised if the figures really did add up, especially since Sun's real bread-and-butter is their hardware. It strikes me that Sun simply suffers from "Not Invented Here" syndrome.
A Sun engineer on Linux Posted Sep 23, 2004 18:56 UTC (Thu) by pflugstad (subscriber, #224) [Link] For whatever reason, Linux has emerged as the dominent Unix-like OS, despite perfectly good competitors in the form of the BSDs. The BSDs meet all of the requirements that Sun has: they allow proprietary extensions, they follow a more controlled engineering process. The problem with the BSDs is precisely that: they allow proprietary extensions. If a company contributes something to one of the BSDs a competitor could grab it and instantly be on a level playing field with the original developer. And then they can make changes and not be required to feed them back to the BSD base. That can't happen with Linux. GPL requries the changes get fed back. So companies such as IBM feel safe investing in GPL'd stuff because it can't be easily used by their competitors to get a leg up.
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