Free Solaris 8

quakeaddict writes "It seems Scott McNealy has some new ideas for Solaris 8 according to this article. " It's not free as in software, but free as in "no license fees". Evidently, this is going to be the center-piece of their new public-relations campaign, with the official rollout of Solaris 8 starting in February. However, a top Sun official also went on to say that Sun will "never" adopt Linux and expressed amazement that folks like IBM and others were "chasing after" Linux.

What was it Gandhi said?

First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then they join you? Sun is clearly somewhere between the ridicule and the fighting stages.
-russ

Remember folks

It's not just an operating system. Solaris is an "operating environment".

Let's see. Solaris=environment while linux=penguin. Environments (as we all know) get abused by developers whereas penguins swim around and micturate [dictionary.com] on the environment. Highly metaphorical, no? Ok, maybe no.

How Linux/*BSD (can,will) benefit from this.

What has been the major objection of many PHBs to using Linux on servers or workstations?
"We're not willing to trust something that's free".
Now that a defintively mainstream OS has become free (as in beer, alas, not as in speech yet), perhaps they'll start taking Linux more seriously.
Just my $0.02.

"If ignorance is bliss, may I never be happy.

He can be amazed all he wants

IBM is still embracing Linux, regardless of what Sun says. I think the real point is that Linux is portable across an amazing range of hardware. It is easy enough to leverage a known OS, with a good reputation, and an active community of open source developers. If you want it on your own hardware, you dedicate a team of programmers to writing device drivers and any other code you need specific to your iron.

Now I am well aware that AIX has some things going for it that Linux doesn't have ... yet. Solaris can say the same. But the question is whether Sun can sustain Solaris development as a freebie. If it gives them a platform on which to sell other stuff, probably for a while. I don't know what their costs and margins look like. We'll all have to watch and see if it works for them.

I for one am not going to criticize them for keeping Solaris closed source. It isn't my choice. It doesn't detract from the open source OSs that I have to choose from. Hmm. Linux CDs are still here. FreeBSD was still on the bookstore shelves at lunchtime.

Re:What are the Differences?

The most important difference is that Linux sucks substantially less.

More specific differences:

• Linux runs on a proper superset of the platforms Solaris runs on.
• Solaris is pretty strictly system V, while Linux is some SysV, some BSD, and some "other."
• Solaris uses the UFS filesystem. Linux uses primarily the Ext2 filesystem
• The obvious differences, like licensing (Linux is Free, Solaris is only pseudofree), sourcing (Solaris is single-source, Linux gives you choices), etc.
• On common hardware, Linux tends to be faster, especially for interactive tasks.
• (Personal observation) Solaris is stuck in the 70s and has obsolete administration tools; Linux is much more modern.
• Solaris might be faster on machines with 16 processors or more.
• If you need to do Java work, no surprise, the environment for Solaris is MUCH better.

Coolness

Free is one of the most misused words to ever have been thrown around, however, and I wonder exactly how much people will have to pay...

There's always something hidden. My school [ssu.edu] offered "free" OEM copies of Microsoft software this past semester (Win 98 SE, Win NT Workstation 4.0, FrontRage 98, etc.) through this agreement [ssu.edu] and naturally I was interested in picking up a few "legit" copies of Win NT. You guessed it, it wasn't exactly free - they weren't letting people take the CDs as they please.

Instead, you paid $5 for the "media" (although I don't believe it costs MS $5 to burn a CD in volume). Fair enough, I say, here's a $5 bill. Now hand me my NT!

Nope, you have to sign a contract first. Oh, this is some fun shit. I'm supposed to use it only on one machine, and only when it's in the best interest of the school, and I can forget about reselling it, or anything else...so I sign the contract and get my CD. Part of the contract I signed said that I'm only able to buy one copy - I guess MS isn't sympathetic to people with more than one PC, because if I can't buy more than one copy, and I can only use the one copy I do get on a sinlge machine, I'm SOL. Now was the software *really* free, or was it equal to the cost of the media plus agreeing to the contract?

Anyway, I got four friends to each buy me a copy and I slipped them each a $5 bill as soon as I got out of the university bookstore.

[bs]By the way, I have a couple copies of NT workstation available, $15 OBO :) Just kidding. I saw an anti-piracy expo at a recent computer fair [marketproshows.com] this past weekend and it turned me into a fine Internet citizen(TM). I even destroyed those other four semi-legally acquired copies of NT as per the agreement I signed.[/bs]

And patches too?

At my work, we got a bunch of new solaris boxes. Solaris has a pretty nice install, and is decently polished out of the box. On the flipside, it is missing a lot of things people take for granted if you come from the Linux or *BSD world, like gcc, perl and apache.

On a sour note, I had a bad experience with Solaris 7. If you wanted to set up diskless clients, you were out of luck - out of the box, setting them up was broken. To get the patch, you had to have a service contract with Sun (ie lots of money!) and then search for it for quite a while. It wasn't in any of the free patchsets they distribute over the net - its like buying a car and then having to pay the dealer to fix something that was wrong with it when you bought it! This really sucks - documentation and fixes should be free!

Solaris 8 supposedly has a lot of GNU tools (including the ones mentioned above). They're finally getting a clue it looks like....

Who's chasing who?

IBM, Solaris, Digital, SCO, SGI. They all used to crow about how their UNIX was better than everyone else's.

Bill Gates, meet everybody. Sorry guys, your UNIX is no longer needed.

Fast-forward to 1999. Microsoft is everywhere. While the UNIXes argued, the fox made off with the chickens. Everybody, meet Linus.

Most of the UNIX vendors decided to support, if grudgingly so, this tiny little OS we all built for the hell of it. Oh, shucks, it's kinda good, ain't it?

Scott McNealy, meet Linus. You tried to own the desktop, but that didn't work. You declared year X the year of the Network Computer. Sucks being ahead of your time by a year every twelve months, doesn't it. You tried to own JAVA, and you may yet. Ever heard of a "Pyrrhic Victory?"

It sucks taking Bill Gates' sloppy seconds, doesn't it Scott? You don't get no respect. Here's a stinking, good-for-nothing, operating system getting ten times the attention your precious darling ever could, and will.

But really, Scott, who's chasing who here? Free Solaris? Who'd a thunk it! So what, now you're going to just make the $ on hardware, right. That's what we've been trying to tell you along, if only you'd listen.

Fragmented UNIX is dying, and if you want to go down with the ship, don't expect us to come along. I don't want your operating system, not because it's expensive, but because you'd be just as bad as your Big Brother Bill, if ever given the chance.

So you'll give me Solaris. Thanks, but no thanks. Okay, it's more stable than Linux by a long shot. But the gap closes every day, old chap, and you're feeling the heat. So what, now you think we'll suddenly all switch, and wait for you to pull the rug out from under our lemonade stand like you're trying to do with Java? Fat @#$%ing chance.

We're not going to let you. Not now, not ever. IBM? Anybody remember how close to the brink they were, ten years back? I don't know about you, but they had a near-death experience, and they see the future.

Scott McNealy, meet the ghost of Computers Future. It doesn't include Solaris. Whether it includes Sun or not is up to you.

-cwk.

Who really benefits...

Actually, as a web server platform, Solaris is top-notch. The only thing that made it less attractive than Linux was the cost factor. For Sun, releasing a free version is a Very Good Idea. The whole point of the exercise is to get people hooked on your OS and therefore evangelize it to others. The same theory applies to the decision regarding BeOS 5 and others.

This is a good thing for several reasons, even though these aren't being GPLed. First of all, it gives Linux a little extra incentive to progress, as it better have more to offer than just being free. If Linux wants to survive, it had better be able to compete. As we all have learned by now, competition makes for better products.

Also, hobbyists like myself get a chance to play around with a new OS and see how it ticks. I intend to install BeOS when it comes out and see how it runs, and now I'll add Solaris to that list. I probably will only dabble in both, but it is an opportunity to broaden my OS horizons.

The only drawback I can see is that we may yet have an OS market Balkanization. With all these free OSes flying around, we need common standards to make sure that the free exchange of data can continue. Things like XML and other open file formats are crucial. The Linux ELF binary format is supported by both BeOS and Solaris via an emulation layer, but that's only a start. It would be nice to have the same apps work across multiple OSes.

Still, despite that, the release of Solaris is a good idea for all involved. Hopefully this free software boom will continue as companies find new ways to maintain good software development and expand new technologies while keeping the results of that research free for all.

Re:What are the Differences?

Solaris is a descendent of a long history of what were glibly refered to as "The UNIX Holy Wars". Basically, Bell Labs' UNIX was picked up by Berkely, poked, proded, added to, etc. and thus was born BSD. Sun began when BSD (renamed SunOS by an infant Sun Microsystems) became fairly stable and added IP networking to the kernel. System V UNIX was a derivative of Bell Lab's original UNIX and many of the features of BSD. After a while, many industry camps began to form around this new version of UNIX, and Sun worked very closely with this effort. The result was eventually SystemV R4, which was what Solaris was based on (replacing the now aging, but still much loved BSD-derived SunOS).

Ok, 'nuf background Solaris, being a SystemV derivative has a few key features that Linux does not. For example, the streams interface is, in some ways, superior to the way Linux kernel modules work.

On the other hand, the Linux kernel has: IP Masquerading/firewalling/port forwarding/packet marking; numerous filesystems that Solaris does not support; and of course, source.

The various Linux distributions go another step. Theoretically, Solaris 8 will finally ship with Perl! Linux distributions, however, usually ship with Perl, Python, Scheme, TCL, Fortran, C, C++, and many other programming languages (scripting and otherwise). Linux distributions also commonly have:

• 
  Relational databases
  The world's most popular Web server
  TCP port wrappers
  A slew of debugging tools
  A slew of editing/development tools
  GNOME or KDE (to which Solaris merely has CDE)
  Photo editing tools (e.g. Gimp)
  Network debugging/analysis tools
  Web mirroring software
  GUI builder (GNOME has one, I think KDE does)
  Shells: tcsh and bash
  

All of this, and did I mention source? Oh, and Solaris' turnaround time on security fixes is pityable.

Now add to this that Linux exists for SPARC, x86, ARM, Alpha, PowerPC and others.... well, Solaris just doesn't have much to compete on except that it runs real fast on real fast hardware. So, if you want to spend megabucks on a single-point-of-hardware, you can run Solaris on it.

I use Solaris at work, and I can honestly say that it occasionally makes me want to look into W2K (then the head trauma wears off).

Bridge for Sale!

Alright, while I think this would be Really Cool (TM) and all, I think we have to remember who we are dealing with here. The company which has recently proven it has more faces then a pair of dice: Sun Microsystems [sun.com].

These are the people who let the Blackdown [blackdown.org] Java porting effort do all the work, and then took it all from them with no credit [slashdot.org].

These are the people who have said several times (here [slashdot.org], here [slashdot.org], and as far back as here [slashdot.org]) that Solaris isn't just going to be free, but Open Source [opensource.org].

These are the people who pushed Java [javasoft.com] as an open standard, and then -- once many companies had tied their future to it -- pulled out of the standards process [slashdot.org]. Then, when others suggested going forward with a Java standard without Sun, claimed that their own public documentation was not complete enough for anyone to do that.

So, when they say Solaris is going to be "free", I have to say: "Sure, and I have a bridge to sell you. It's in Brooklyn. Great view of the water."

I think Sun's products are pretty good (they're certainly a hell of a lot better then Micros~1) and that Java still has a lot of promise, but I'm still not gonna trust Sun any further then I can throw an E10K [sun.com].

And Bill Joy

After seeing Bill Joy speak at "Sun Market^H^H^H^H^H^H Technology Days" in Seattle, I don't think McNealy deserves to keep all of one's contempt. Bill Joy showed contempt for UNIX, Open Source, and anything that wasn't Java.

Paraphrasing: "Open Source? I don't want to see the source, I want it to work and be documented." To which the audience applauded. (This after he talked about how he worked on BSD UNIX's source in the early 1970's to make it more stable.)
He said that it was impossible to build a reliable library of code when you couldn't guarantee that your code wouldn't overwrite other places in memory. (It makes me think of Larry Wall who says that a language tends to be inversely useful to the number of axes the author has to grind.)

Ah, time to think

Linux advocacy is nice until it reaches the point where you're kicking and scraping to convince yourself and others that it is the greatest thing since sliced bread. Solaris is a very good operating system on its native hardware (SPARC et al) it is however a little weaker on non-native hardware. You also have to remember that Sun is in the enterprise solution/packages business, not merely some hardware with a webserver on it like Dell and others. Since most of these packages are not development environments (the ones that are develope for Solaris on Solaris in a business to business sense for the most part) it would seem kinda silly for them to come jam packed with a bunch of source code and compilers, who is going to be using their brand new E10k ultra server box for hacking out some C++? Solaris also scales very well RIGHT OUT OF THE BOX, that is something I think open source people take for granted. Since you recompile the kernel to make changes it is really easy if you know what you're doing to scale it to a 10 node server farm. Solaris does this WITHOUT recompiling and does it very well. For the me toos out there that love to call it Slowaris, learn to read. There are what we called "system requirements" and we use that information to figure out if we can indeed run a certain piece of software on our hardware. Of course it runs slower on x86 hardware, it is natively run on SPARC machines! Solaris also likes to use alot of RAM, so you would be hard pressed to slap it on your old 486 with 16 megs of RAM. Come on people, quit the "if it ain't Linux we bash it" attitude. I think it's really cool that Sun is going to release Solaris 8 for free, I have my copy already. They aren't releasing it free to copy Linux (which should be stated as copying the GPL rather than Linux itself since Sun isn't trying to make the Solaris kernel run like the Linux kernel), it's an appetizer so sysadmins can get ahold of a copy and see if they want to invest in Sun or want to stick with what they have.

Re:versioning

Sun Skipped versions when they ditched SunOS, and decided to go with one product, which ultimatly became Solaris 7.

The version skipping to which the original poster referred was the jump from Solaris 2.6 to Solaris 7.

When the AT&T/Sun deal started, there was no notion of "Solaris", unless it was being discussed by marketoons and other types and not told to those of us in engineering at Sun. I suspect the notion of "Solaris" may have stemmed, at least in part, from the fact that SunOS 1.0 (well, "Sun UNIX 4.2BSD Release 1.0", or whatever it was called back then) through SunOS 4.0[.x] had SunView (a non-networked window system in which the low-level drawing library with which GUI applications were linked would do ioctls to lock regions of the screen and would draw on them directly) as the bundled window system, and the OpenWindows X11/NeWS-based window system was a separate product. I think they decided to bundle them together, and came up with the name "Solaris" for SunOS + OpenWindows.

The very first SunOS 5.x release came out as part of Solaris 2.0, but SunOS 4.x releases had previously come out without being part of a "Solaris" release, so people were less likely to think of 4.1.x-based systems as being "Solaris 1" than to think of 5.x-based systems as "Solaris 2".

As for the jump to Solaris 7, presumably the idea was that (as others have noted) they weren't exactly going to do a Solaris 3.x any time soon, so they got rid of the leading "2." and just went with "7". The OS component of Solaris 7 is still SunOS 5.7, however.... The marketoons probably contributed to this as well, on the theory that the new version would make a bigger splash with a new and different number, blah blah blah blah blah.

Re:Ho hum...

Uninformed opinions like this are the reason that our company has stopped hiring Linuxers...

Solaris a second-rate OS?? What is First rate again??

Linux was modeled after Unix why again?? And Sun being the largest Unix distributor means??

Your obvious bias would be offensive if it were not so laughable. Linux lags quite a bit behind in the technosphere, and though it is making massive inroads, it still does not compare to Solaris for mission critical applications.

My guess is that you have been running Linux for less than a year and have seen Solaris from a distance once or twice. Or you ordered the free ver. 7 and could never get it set up so you decide to trash it.

Please either educate yourself, or keep your mouth shut.

Jason Maggard
"Better to be thought an idiot that open your mouth and remove all doubt."