Solaris Might Become LSB-compliant

lvv writes "Register: according to Sun's Jonathan Schwartz, Solaris - one of the most proprietary Unixes, might become LSB compliant OpenSolaris. Also some info about future of Solaris desktop (Gnome)."

Commercial vs. proprietary

[yerricde]

Proprietary: Having a good OS and making money at it

No. Software that produces revenue is called "commercial". The term "proprietary", when used in the context of copyrighted works such as software, refers to licensing that restricts your users.

Re:Sun and standards

[Richard_Davies]

> While their motivation may be purely profit-driven

Um - aren't pretty much all (profitable) companies profit-driven?

I mean Microsoft, Red Hat, Sun, IBM, etc - none of them are charities right?

Re:One of the most proprietary?

[Anonymous Coward]

Let me be the first to say, what the FUCK are you talking about? You made the original statement, perhaps you should have looked up the definition of proprietary first.

Re:One of the most proprietary?

[yomegaman]

In Slashdot-land the word 'proprietary' doesn't have a well-defined meaning, it is just a general-purpose pejorative.

Re:you all realise

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you're making a false assumption... If Solaris becomes LSB-compliant then it can install any LSB-compliant packages just as easily as on any other platform, but Sun could still release their software in a Solaris-specific manner.

For example, Debian is LSB-compliant (or working at becoming) by supporting RPMs in addition to its default packaging system. Any LSB-compliant software will install fine (once Debian's compliancy is finished), but you could still release a .deb which takes advantage of specific Debianities that other LSB-compliant distros don't have. (I'll admit the analogy is weak because Debian's .deb package is well documented, but the concept still holds.)

Re:you all realise

[Anonymous Coward]

Actualy if they are LSB complient it mean all those hords of Linux developers can now have skills ported over to Solaris. Solaris developers arn't going to chuck their Solaris experience just to develop for Linux. Sun is a hardware company and as such Solaris runs better on Sun boxes expecialy if programs are optimized to the hardware. Think of it as layers. There is teh LSB layer that can be used to compile Linux code out of the box on Solaris. Now there is the Solaris layer that has optimized syscalls that developers can use to get more performance out of their program. What Sun is doing is making sure that if you need the power that a Sparc chip can give you, you are not going to overlook it just because XYZ program will need some investment to port to Solaris. Sun has had Linux binary compatabiliy for a long time now. LSB complience just goes one step further.

Re:One of the most proprietary?

[1nt3lx]

GCC is a good compiler. It's neither as good as Compaq's C compiler on Alpha nor is it as good as Sun's compiler on Sparc, however. GCC couldn't even make 64 bit binaries until the 3.0 release.

Although, the compiler is a minimal issue, I use Solaris as my desktop at work and we run it on the production servers. I've also worked with Tru64, etc. I've never worked with a UNIX so broken out of the box. It's a good 4 hours of work before you can comfortable use a Solaris system. Unlike many other UNIXes, which require post-installation work but aren't as ugly. (Ever service enabled by default, open mail relay, /bin/sh, insufficient path, hideously outdated drivers, 30,302 patches to apply, broken patches, patches that re-enable services you've disabled.)

We recently purchased a Sun Fire 150 system to use for a few web-services. The system came preinsatelled with The Solaris Operating Environment version 8. It presented a minimally impressive configuration menu but it wasn't able to configure the NICs because it couldn't figure out what they were.

Solaris may technically be a good Operating System, however I do not find it particularly excellent. I'll take MacOS X (or Server) over Solaris anyday. I'll even go so far as to say I'd rather use Debian than Solaris.

Re:Sun and standards

[be-fan]

There is a difference between profit driven and profit obsessed. Microsoft is profit obsessed. Almost *everything* they do is there to further their own bottom line. Other companies (IBM and RedHat for example) are profit driven, in that making a profit is their number one priority, but they do non-profit oriented things as well that help the community. Just take a look at all the open source IBM projects. [ibm.com] Do those help IBM? Maybe to the extent that they enable enterprise level applications and thus create a demand for more IBM h ardware, but that's indirect, and still helps the community in the process. Compare this to Microsoft's open source projects. Let's see, the only one I can think of is the CLI. Not only is the CLI directly profit-related (the more people that use it, the more people that are tied into Windows.NET) but it doesn't help the community a whole lot because it's under a draconion license.

Re:And if they'd done that ten years ago...

[lemkebeth]

You wrote:

At work: - The serious networking software development is now done on NetBSD and variants. BSD desktops.

That is quite ironic as Sun's OS used to be a BSD at one time.

Re:It only makes sense

[ToasterTester]

Speed has nothing to do with real production servers. Solaris is a fine example of that, it appears sluggish to newbies, but as the load increases Solaris and your app's don't bat an eye. Plus all the features it has to support dynmaic reconfiguration and other HA features. Linux is good and will continue to mature. Yes, Linux Beowuld clusters are fast, but they are special purpose servers not day-to-day production workhorses. Linux is still mainly used in the same small niche it always has. Also Solaris scales better than Linux, but a lot that is Sun hardware. Intel systems can't scale as well as Sun systems. IBM and others are working on Intel based NUMA systems that will address scaling with Intel. Also Linux HA features are still in very early development stage.

Re:And if they'd done that ten years ago...

[sirinek]

Upgrade it for Y2K? What were you running, 4.1.3? I'm pretty positive all the later versions had Y2k patches that you could freely download from Sun's site.

siri

Re:One of the most proprietary?

[alsta]

Your frustrations with Solaris are most likely due to, forgive me if I sound condescending, inexperience.

I have never heard of a Sun Fire 150. Sun has a Fire V100 and Fire V120. These have two ethernet interfaces, which I think are called dmfe[01]. I don't have access to one so I can't verify that. You can figure this out by using prtconf(1M).

To harden a Solaris box takes a little time. But it shouldn't take 4 hours. You basically need to make sure that RPC services are turned off and that you step through inetd.conf.

Patching Solaris is a breeze compared to various Linux distributions, including Red Hat. Apply the latest MU and then either use PatchPro or Recommended clusters.

You're right, Solaris isn't exactly point-and-click. Perhaps you should, as you suggested, stick with MacOS X.

Re:Solaris is one of the Least Proprietary UNIXES

[Chanc_Gorkon]

Um, JFS2 came out with AIX 5.1. Actually the 5.x series goes by AIX5L (for Linux Affinity). I do agree that saying Solaris was proprietarty was a bit ridiculous. Most UNICES are very open as compared to Microsoft. Even IBM is going more open. IBM has Linux running on everything. OS's will make noone money because everyone needs one and one is usually included when you buy a system. Pure software companies, except for maybe games, will not exist in the near future. The only way they will is if they have something nichy that is only needed by a few.

Why not...

[joto]

The directory hierarchy, and location of important files on Solaris can only be called one thing: confusing. So I bet they've always wanted to clean it up somewhat, but once they do it, it's better if they do it one big change, rather than piecemal, which will break things continually (instead of once).

And if you are going to clean it up, you might as well look at how other people have done it. As for going for full LSB compliance, that might be a bit overkill, and a very surprising move away from the NIH-principle Sun usually follows. But I don't think it's going to have too many negative consequences.

Re:You can already

[Wesley Felter]

But if that software uses Linux-only APIs, it won't compile on Solaris. If Solaris adopts LSB, most Linux apps will compile without needing to be ported.