OpenSolaris governing board threatens dissolution (The H)

Posted Jul 14, 2010 17:07 UTC (Wed) by pboddie (guest, #50784)
In reply to: OpenSolaris governing board threatens dissolution (The H) by trasz
Parent article: OpenSolaris governing board threatens dissolution (The H)

I already mentioned "nicely packaged up distributions", didn't I?

Yes, but you make it sound like gloss when, in fact, decent package and dependency management is essential, as various other people have already pointed out. It was also a major priority of Project Indiana: you know, the thing where the Debian guy was brought in to add things that people found indispensable in Linux.

One thing I missed is cheaper workforce - more people know Linux, so it's easier to find a sysadmin.

You know, a load of people prided themselves on knowing Solaris and SunOS before it, especially amongst adopters of Linux, so Linux didn't exactly start off with any numerical advantage in this respect.

However, in technical aspects, from filesystems to things as basic as synchronisation (Linux still uses anachronic spinlocks), Solaris is years ahead. Thus my question.

Well, the "years ahead" Solaris isn't seeing that much action in, say, supercomputers, so it doesn't hold all the good cards by any means. Why Linux is used so widely isn't just down to specific technology.

As for the license and company parents - same thing in Linux, except that GPL is more restrictive (according to Stallman's interpretation it's viral) and you have several corporations instead of one; not much of a difference, I think.

You cannot be serious! Firstly, the CDDL is a copyleft licence, but one that isn't compatible with the GPL, which says more about Sun not wanting to relinquish control of their software than it does about the GPL. Secondly, there are corporations developing Linux but they influence the direction of the project mostly on technical merit, not on having a bunch of puppet bureaucracies set up by a single corporation, which have obviously worked out so well for all of Sun's other open source projects, too.

So, apart from various technical essentials that were neglected in Solaris for about a decade or so, plus various community and licensing considerations, what else would make people switch to Linux? Isn't this like asking what the Romans have done for us? Maybe more than you're willing to accept.