LWN: Comments on "Is Sun Solaris on its deathbed? (New York Times)"

Questionable professionalism

robilad — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 12:08:54 +0000

Given that Zemlin hasn't tried to correct the citation over the past week on a medium he has full control of his words over, like this comment section or his Linux Foundation blog, I think criticism of this smear job and Zemlin as the person behind it is warranted.

Rather then getting personal with the criticism, I think the more interesting question is about Zemlin's professionalism: Sun is a Silver member of the Linux Foundation. That's the same level like Red Hat.

How much sense it makes for the Linux Foundation to have someone in Zemlin's position going around smearing its members in the New York Times, is something for the Linux Foundation membership and board to think about.

Is Sun Solaris on its deathbed? (New York Times)

nettings — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 10:44:54 +0000

martinfick, thanks for your critique.

assuming for now that zemlin's utterances are not misrepresented, i still find it perfectly valid to criticize him on the basis of those (admittedly sparse) quotes. a marketing guy should know what he's doing when feeding juicy quotes to the press.

linux has never needed bad-mouthing of competitors, much less fellow open-source operating systems it has taken many good ideas from.
when linux started out, it did not have a strong market position either. such aspects have always been second to technical merit and freedom among the open-source crowd.

despite its long commercial history, *open* solaris is a fledgling project with its own set of promises (and problems). it deserves some leeway while it grows, not bickering from the open-source camp.

i for one am very happy to see that most lwn readers are irritated by such "analyst" bullshit from a foundation that is very much regarded as a representative of the linux community (whether that's true or not).

as to my choice of words, having checked all possible connotations of "jerk" in a few dictionaries, i apologize. what i should have said was: i consider his statements idiotic and unworthy of a representative of a significant linux institution, for the reasons stated above.

Is Sun Solaris on its deathbed? (New York Times)

martinfick — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 17:13:10 +0000

Wow, there are quite a few judgmental remarks here (parent poster and others) about a guy who has a few snippets with very little context quoted in the article. Perhaps you don't agree with his assessment, or the fact that he appears (again, he is perhaps being quoted willy nilly) to be making these quotes on the part of a foundation representing linux.

But, he really is not saying anything terribly evil and I certainly don't think that he qualifies as a "jerk" because someone else wrote an article quoting him. I expect more out of LWN commenters than I do out of some guy being quoted in an obviously low content article. Nothing he said about an OS (not eve a person), was nearly as disparaging as your comment about him. At least you control how your words are used and in which context they are used on this system, what's your excuse?

Not overly helpful

Nelson — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 15:26:13 +0000

The thing Mr Zemlin failed to mention is Solaris Zones. I haven't used them but hear that they provide greater security than a chroot and more performance than full-system virtualization. I think that's more important a technology today than ZFS or DTrace.

Isn't that the problem with Solaris? There is a lot of "I haven't used it but the specs are nice" or "I haven't used it but I'm told it's amazing. Eventually that catches up with you, don't you think?

I think the Solaris marketing is a decade off. In this world of java, .net/mono, ruby on rails and the like, how many people seriously need to dtrace that often? It's included in OSX, it is on a lot of desktops and it's not like that many people use it regularly. Great tool, great technology, just not something that is as critical as it was 5 to 10 years back. More importantly, how many people talk about it that have never actually used it? Isn't that just hype and FUD? That doesn't mean people don't love having it in their pocket but do you switch platforms for it?

Zones looks great too but how many different virtualization technologies are competing right now? 5 years ago, could have been a differentiator, now it's a requirement.

ZFS is another example, it specs amazingly. There are some very legitimate concerns raised by some filesystem folks (basically, by the time we have ZFS sized datasets, will access patterns and storage technologies be such that the choice of algorithms is the right one) but nobody really cares about those concerns, bigger numbers are sexier. Other than that, is it better enough over the alternatives? Not too many places have outgrown ext3 and ext4 is now here as is XFS and at least a few interesting clustering technologies (ocfs, gfs..) Again, great technology but do you change what you're already doing for it? I'm not bashing the technology but Windows showed, good technology isn't what wins, it's part of it but it alone doesn't win.

I think the world is better with more competition from AIX and Solaris but they're just slow to pick up on what is needed to really compete. It's never good when a lot of people talk about your technology but don't actually use it, personally, I think it's almost a poison pill because you can start to actually believe that you're better than the competition even though you're taking a beating in the market. OS/2 was that way, and it was ugly inside IBM the way that all went down. It's an engineering Vietnam war.

Is Sun Solaris on its deathbed? (New York Times)

nettings — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 14:36:27 +0000

i'm with most of the posters here that this is a really misguided statement.
my sincere hopes are that solaris stays alive and kicking, so that we have an alternative os to bootstrap the internet from after the first big linux worm (and vice versa).

diversity is good. solaris has many very interesting aspects, sun is generally a well-behaved company as far as companies go.

otoh, marketing babble is bad. the linux foundation appears to have some very interesting (if disquietening) aspects i will keep an eye on in the future, and zemlin is obviously a jerk.

(a linux fan since 2.0.32)

Is Sun Solaris on its deathbed? (Info World)

emk — Sat, 27 Sep 2008 16:49:44 +0000

Yeah, I'm also saddened by these remarks. While I have no particular interest in Solaris as an operating system (aside from features like DTrace), Sun has certainly contributed to the community. And they do distribute OpenSolaris under an OSI-approved license.

This is a tasteless and inapprorpriate jab from the Linux Foundation. It's no more attractive coming from Linux people than it is from companies who've made similar jabs about Linux.

Is Sun Solaris on its deathbed? (New York Times)

zooko — Sat, 27 Sep 2008 15:47:04 +0000

A Nexenta user pointed me to the Solaris Emancipation Project:

http://opensolaris.org/os/project/emancipation/

Is Sun Solaris on its deathbed? (New York Times)

zooko — Sat, 27 Sep 2008 13:42:09 +0000

I think various people are working on improving that kind of problem. For example, David Bartley recently announced a version of Debian running on Solaris using the GNU libc instead of the Sun libc:

http://lists.sonic.net/pipermail/gnusol-devel/2008-Septem...

That is exciting to me because it eliminates a licensing issue that prevents Solaris from becoming an official Debian kernel.

Is Sun Solaris on its deathbed? (New York Times)

jasonjgw — Sat, 27 Sep 2008 06:07:03 +0000

One of the problems with OpenSolaris is that, apparently, a working system
cannot be built without non-free Sun development tools. I haven't seen any
evidence of a sustained effort to fix this. "Free, but shackled" is Richard
Stallman's apt term for this kind of problem.

On the positive side, I'm sure we'll see more healthy competition between
OpenSolaris and Linux at the kernel level, as between Linux and the BSD
systems.

Is Sun Solaris on its deathbed? (New York Times)

k8to — Sat, 27 Sep 2008 02:32:39 +0000

I meant engineering, professional services, product management, corporate officers.. anything!

Basically I view sales as completely unreliable.

If I were IBM's strategic planners, I would invest significantly in Linux but continue to charge a premium for AIX, which might result in sales saying AIX is better -- but this is just a theory, I don't know anything.

Is Sun Solaris on its deathbed? (New York Times)

trasz — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 22:41:16 +0000

By other groups, do you mean engineering? No idea, I don't have any contact with these. What I do see is a shift from _sales_ trying to make clients migrate from AIX to Linux to _sales_ saying "actually, AIX is better".

Is Sun Solaris on its deathbed? (New York Times)

oak — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 19:44:16 +0000

> When we sum things up - no growth on desktops, decline in market share
on smartphones, IBM no longer trying to migrate it's customers to Linux
from their proprietary operating systems

Well, Linux share on all kinds of embedded devices (digi-TVs, NAS etc) and
subnotebooks would seem to be growing, wouldn't it? And these segments
have faster growth rates than desktop computers I think.

> - it may be possible that the future will be Microsoft and Apple.

Future of what?

Is Sun Solaris on its deathbed? (New York Times)

rsidd — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 18:13:52 +0000

Hm - it's nice to see that most linux users (or at least, most lwn readers, or at least, most lwn readers who take the trouble to comment) are bothered by this sort of negative talk from the Linux Foundation. First, as other comments have pointed out, Solaris has features (zfs, dtrace) that linux users can only drool over. Second, open source is our friend. The more popular opensolaris gets, the more content providers and hardware manufacturers and software writers will need to conform to open standards and not just cater to a single platform. That can only help linux.

I have been seriously considering opensolaris for a new laptop: the only drawback that I see is its lack of bluetooth support, but I could always keep a linux partition just for that purpose. Windows is no use to me, largely because of its lack of interoperability with other systems.

Is Sun Solaris on its deathbed? (New York Times)

jonquark — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 17:24:59 +0000

With respect, I don't think we should judge desktop usage share based on the usage of your blog. (Given that you have an account here your readership is likely to be somewhat biased)

Stats from a wider range of sites show linux at 0.5%-2% with OSX between 3% and 7%

If you can't beat Microsoft, join them

mheily — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 16:44:55 +0000

Zemlin's premature obituary for Solaris reminds me of the Monty Python sketch "Bring out your dead" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=grbSQ6O6kbs

I'm sure Zemlin can't wait to throw Solaris on the cart and have a duopoly of Linux and Windows. This guy is a marketing troll that just happens to be the head of a non-profit Linux advocacy group. Don't feed the trolls, especially if they claim to be your friends.

Solaris as a server operating system has some good features that Linux doesn't have yet. Linux has many other features that are better than Solaris. The whole idea of SuS, POSIX, FreeDesktop.org, et al, is that you can have multiple implementations of a Unix-like operating system that can interoperate. Innovations in one operating system can be standardized and adopted by other systems, so that all can benefit from the common pool of ideas. We are already seeing the best parts of OpenSolaris integrated into other systems; e.g. FreeBSD and MacOS have ported ZFS and DTrace. Equivalent Linux features (e.g. SystemTap, btrfs, cgroups) are not as good as what Sun already created and is giving away for free.

"Those who do not understand UNIX are condemned to reinvent it -- badly".

Not overly helpful

nye — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 15:40:20 +0000

greater security than a chroot

I feel somebody ought to point out that chroots are *not* intended to be used for security, and don't really add any. Root can trivially escape a chroot, and non-root processes can be secured to the same degree without them. They might provide some marginal extra barrier, but this is rather akin to locking a prison with string.

If you can't beat Microsoft, join them

proski — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 14:50:57 +0000

Actually, journalists tend to cite the most provocative parts and exaggerate things a bit. I reserve my opinion until Linux Foundation has a chance to explain its position directly.

Is Sun Solaris on its deathbed? (New York Times)

pcampe — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 13:54:25 +0000

Shouldn't be the Linux Foundation oriented towards technology, performances, security, and old fashioned things like these? We can have all the marketdroid language from the sales reps of Linux established business, that know what to say and usually have something to say.

Linux Foundation should observe that ZFS is million times better than anything else in Linux, and they must work on this instead of embarassing us for they language. In fact, ext4 will lack many features that ZFS already have.

Is Sun Solaris on its deathbed? (New York Times)

k8to — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 13:49:53 +0000

Maybe I am naïve, but I presume sales will always say dumb things that are half truths and there is no avoiding it. Do you know if this view is reflected by actions taken by other departments/groups?

Zones vs Full Virtulisation

drag — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 13:49:32 +0000

Container-style approach is very popular in the webhosting industry. It's especially useful for folks that are doing variations on the 'Linux + Apache + MySQL + PHP' theme. Like using postgresql or Ruby or whatever, sinec it's difficult to find places that support that sort of thing.

Or if they want to run other types of services, like email or whatever.

People will run hundreds of virtual Linux systems on a single computer. They tend to be quite a bit cheaper then a full Xen-based environment..

Email?

pcampe — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 13:48:17 +0000

>(And don't forget to tell your investors that your Perl scripts are Ruby.)

This will actually results in a dramatic performance improvement if you are using a RHEL Perl :)

Is Sun Solaris on its deathbed? (New York Times)

landman — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 13:01:24 +0000

FWIW: on my blog, with a small 3000 visits per day, we get 65% windows flavors, 25% linux, 6% MacOSX.

I know that there are lots of MacOSX users. They just don't seem to be hitting my blog.

I have spoken with others in different spaces, and they report relatively similar statistics, though some times the windows and linux switch places.

For a desktop presence that is "so obviously larger" than Linux, it appears that (from the several months of data we have gathered) that Linux is being used as a desktop OS by more than 4x the number of MacOSX users.

Looking at web-logs should be simple, and a relatively accurate gauge on who is using what to browse the desktop. Sure, some might argue that its just a bunch of ninnies sitting in data centers on their servers running X and firefox ... But that would be pretty weak reasoning. What's more interesting to me is that the Linux browser user base appears to be more than 1/3 of the windows browser user base. Obviously qualified as "from hits on my blog". But this is really the only objective measure we have of any OS penetration on desktops.

To keep the context, yes we see Solaris. 0.4% of views. 0.1% is iphone.

Is Sun Solaris on its deathbed? (New York Times)

trasz — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 11:33:22 +0000

Another fun thing is, they ommited MacOS X, which already has an order of magnitude bigger market share on desktops than Linux has - and it's growing, while Linux' popularity on desktops does not.

When we sum things up - no growth on desktops, decline in market share on smartphones, IBM no longer trying to migrate it's customers to Linux from their proprietary operating systems - it may be possible that the future will be Microsoft and Apple.

Is Sun Solaris on its deathbed? (New York Times)

tzafrir — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 11:10:53 +0000

In my mind Sun has the image of a company that sells propritary versions of free softwares. StartOffice, Solaris, MySQL, VirtualBox.

According to my very limited understanding, this is not exactly a sustainable model of operation in the long run. If so, what is thedir motivation to develop free software?

Unix is tradmarked

alex — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 11:09:33 +0000

Unix is trademarked term for officially licensed operating systems. The correct term for Linux is that it is a broadly POSIX compliant operating system. The propriety Unix's are also POSIX operating systems. It's often corrupted when people refer to Unix-like systems.

Zones vs Full Virtulisation

alex — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 10:54:44 +0000

Zones and Branded Zones are indeed a useful feature for getting multiple separate lightweight partitions in your system. They are probably directly analogous to Linux's OpenVZ and the Containers namespace solutions which are slowly trickling into the mainline kernel.

However I'm not sure how much real traction they have. They do allow better resource utilisation that full virtualisation but I suspect the margin is being chipped away. The market seems to have bought into full virtualisation a lot faster than these container based approached.

Not overly helpful

k3ninho — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 09:38:02 +0000

The thing Mr Zemlin failed to mention is Solaris Zones. I haven't used them but hear that they provide greater security than a chroot and more performance than full-system virtualization. I think that's more important a technology today than ZFS or DTrace.

K3n.

Is Sun Solaris on its deathbed? (New York Times)

Seegras — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 09:14:24 +0000

*BSD isn't dead either. I think "Solaris" as such will die, but OpenSolaris will live on. There IS a place for a lot of different open source operating systems.

But there is not much space for closed source systems..

Is Sun Solaris on its deathbed? (New York Times)

trasz — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 08:20:54 +0000

You might not have noticed, but IBM's position on Linux changed somewhat in the last years. Now it's just a AIX for the poor, with a lower functionality, performance, features etc, but free. Go speak with their sales.

Email?

dmarti — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 06:28:03 +0000

Any au courant marketing person knows that "email is dead" and it's all about .* 2.0 now. Post it on your blog or better yet, Twitter with an @ to the

(And don't forget to tell your investors that your Perl scripts are Ruby.)

Is Sun Solaris on its deathbed? (New York Times)

sbergman27 — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 06:11:39 +0000

Come on. The handwriting is on the wall. Like, you don't have to be a freakin' Kreskin to see it. ;-)

Is Sun Solaris on its deathbed? (New York Times)

error27 — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 06:09:07 +0000

Hearing this from the Linux Foundation is all very interesting and good but does netcraft confirm it?

Is Sun Solaris on its deathbed? (New York Times)

k8to — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 05:31:53 +0000

A fine idea. I have done so.

Is Sun Solaris on its deathbed? (New York Times)

flewellyn — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 03:48:15 +0000

Your mom is a legacy operating environment.

Now surely you have something more constructive to say than that?

Is Sun Solaris on its deathbed? (New York Times)

lysse — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 03:12:44 +0000

> technology laden, cash rich industries such as banking.

Er, not any more... ;)

Is Sun Solaris on its deathbed? (New York Times)

sbergman27 — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 00:04:46 +0000

Complaining about this amongst ourselves is not going to do much good. Direct your complaints here:

info@linux-foundation.org

Their contact us page indicates that's probably the best place to send feedback of this nature.

If you can't beat Microsoft, join them

robilad — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 22:58:20 +0000

Good luck to the Linux Foundation with their very own version of Microsoft's 'Get the Facts' campaign.

Is Sun Solaris on its deathbed? (New York Times)

rahvin — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 22:51:55 +0000

2 Billion is NOTHING. It's a single acquisition. Sure they could lose a minor amount of money for years with the cash on hand but without growth the stock tanks and they become an acquisition target. The danger isn't SUN going out of business tomorrow it's that they will be bought out by someone or that they will slowly bleed themselves dry in much the same manner a certain company by the name of Santa Cruz Operation (The original one) or SGI did.

UNIX, the proprietary version, is dead. It was dieing when SGI and SCO got into trouble and it's long since dead. The only people still using it are the ones that were already using it. Based on trends most of them will switch to Linux by the end of the next decade as they upgrade. The proof of this is to look at IBM. AIX for the legacy customers, all systems can run Linux so the customers can switch to Linux as they convert applications from AIX. The proof is also in NASDAQ switching to an entire Linux backend a few years ago, a contract I might add that SUN used to hold and I believe IBM now holds. Legacy clients are switching, and eventually all of them will switch because the benefits of being vendor neutral are major.

Is Sun Solaris on its deathbed? (New York Times)

lmb — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 22:41:24 +0000

Having money is not the same as being able to spend it to fund development.

Other than that, yes - premature gloating is indeed decidedly unhelpful.

But then, DTrace is only a technology detail, as is ZFS (see btrfs). The question is not about short-term or even mid-term features, but about scalability and sustainability of the (development) model.

And I would agree with Zemlin then; on that side, Linux has a clear lead. Sun has deep pockets, but at the end of the day, it is still just one company. They leverage projects from the FOSS community elsewhere already,because of the advantages this has for them (lower cost of development etc), essentially running a mixed-source shop.

And so I would predict that it is only a matter of time until they apply the same to other parts of their OS - say, the kernel - as well.

Is Sun Solaris on its deathbed? (New York Times)

vmole — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 22:28:18 +0000

He's using the word "Unix" in its proprietary/licensed system meaning, as a code for all the various proprietary Unixes, like AIX, etc.