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)."

Sun and standards

[germinatoras]

A lot of us like to accuse Sun of being no better than Microsoft at a lot of things. This may be true on some level, but this is definitely a step in the right direction. While their motivation may be purely profit-driven, at least they are taking the approach of "Linux is getting popular, so we should be more like it", rather than "We need to squeeze every last $0.01 out of our locked-in customers".

Lately, Sun seems to be establishing a good track record for openness. They've created a fairly decent platform-independent programming language and development environment, and have made their Solaris environment look more like the other Unices out there. They are starting to come out with Linux products, or at least are talking about them. Even the source code to Solaris 7 used to be available for purchase on CD-ROM (although they may have backed away from that).

I hope that this is more than just a bid to recapture lost market share, but a real committment to play fair and adhere to open, published, and somewhat popular standards.

It only makes sense

[Anonymous Coward]

Solaris doesn't make Sun any money. It's the hardware that keeps them afloat. Every developer they've got working on Solaris is a salary that doesn't go to working on the money-making hardware.

Running Linux as their main system allows them to get an OS for free. Granted, it's not quite as polished or stable as Solaris, but they don't have to apply any development effort, people are willing to give their work away for free!

And vice-versa

[Alethes]

I think it's the fact that Linux apps will run almost out of the box on Solaris that makes the move wise. This means Sun now has the thousands of Linux software developers as a resource.

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

[Ungrounded Lightning]

Solaris isn't open source by any means, but it's a free download on SPARC and until recently Intel platforms, and you can download the source after agreeing to Sun's license. You can make changes to the source, recompile anything you damn well please, and contribute changes back to Sun (I have done so myself), the only thing you can't do is redistribute it.

And if they'd done that ten years ago, when I (and others) had a significant need to hack up some min or features and no budget to buy into their source distribution package it wouled have been wonderful - and might have headed off the obsolescence of Solaris.

Now, with Linux (+ GNU utilities + X + Gnome|KDE), and Free/Open/Net BSD, and Mach, and the rest of the Open Source world, it's too little too late.

I've reverse-engineered OSes on IBM, Control Data, DEC, Mac, and Altos when useful to add features or custom hardware. But with Spark's RISC instruction set and Sun's insistance on keeping both hardware and software closed, the cost/benefit balance was tipped.

I retired my last Solaris home machine on Dec 31, 1999, rather than upgrade it for Y2K.

At work:
- The serious networking software development is now done on NetBSD and variants. BSD desktops.
- The ASIC development is still partly on Solaris ... because we still have legacy machines from when that was all the tools would run on. But the simulation farm was ported to Linux long ago. New machines are PCs and the Sun boxes will run - mostly as legacy desktops - until they die or become too painful to maintain.
- And of course the administrators are still on Windoze - though it wouldn't surprise me to see them move to Linux in the near future.

Ugh...

[timbrown]

Just as long as it doesn't standardise around the Linux kernel</kidding>

Seriously though, to what end? Although it looks nice on a specification list to boast of LSB compliance, from a brief perusal of the latest [linuxbase.org] version of the Linux Standard Base (1.3.pr3), this could have the potential to break backwards compatibility with previous Solaris releases (maybe).

Re:One of the most proprietary?

[lvv]

I worked with Unix for more then 20 years. I installed and worked with at least 15 brands of Unix-es, most of them commercial. I am certified (by Sun) Solaris System Administrator. Most of my income comes from supporting Solaris shops as consultant.

Yes, I believe that Solaris is most proprietary, which means difficult to support for those who support not only Solaris. Proprietary in the sense - don't adhere to historical Unix standards (posix != unix) and suffering from Not Invented Here syndrome. I will agree that most of commercial unix-es are proprietary. And I also agree that Sun contributed a lot to Unix and that pre SysV it had very decent product.

By my observation many of Solaris sysadmins worked only with one Unix - Solaris. This is probably why there is so much controversy about calling it proprietary. The same as Windows users who know only Windows become very defensive about MS products.

Solaris is 10 years ahead of Linux in some areas

[Anonymous Coward]

Given that Linux 2.4 and previous are very similar to SunOS 4.1.3, one could fairly say Solaris is about 10 years ahead of Linux 2.4. Linux 2.6 will be a big improvement with its new threading models, and bring Linux up to about the Solaris 2.6 level (1996) in some areas.

With Solaris 2.0 (SunOS 5.0) Sun went to a modular kernel architecture.

In 1994 Solaris supported hot addition of CPUs and memory to a running system.

In 1997 Solaris supported hot removal of CPUs and memory from a running system.

In 2000 Sun supported 1M simultaneous processes.

I will give Linux credit for supporting Intel PAE extentions. Solaris supported similar capability on Solaris with Solaris 2.6, and Intel PAE on Solaris 7.

Re:One of the most proprietary?

[MikeApp]

Solaris 8 was a free download for systems with 8 CPUs (IIRC) when it was current.

Solaris 9 is a free license and download for single CPU boxes. It has been free since it was released.

Service contracts for hardware include OS updates. Every sane business will have some sort of service contract for their servers. The prices you see quoted really only kick in if you buy a secondhand box or a clone.

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

[Ungrounded Lightning]

SPARC and SBus are open, fully documented IEEE standards. Nowadays Sun uses PCI for I/O expansion. You wouldn't know "closed" if it bit you on the ass.

That is now. This was then.

Back when the Sun 4 was current, finding out anything about the SBus was like pulling teeth - and signing away your soul.

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

[Anonymous Coward]

That is now. This was then.

This was then also.

Ever since the first real SBus machines (SS1 4/60) came out in 1989 (well over ten years ago) there have been full SBus developer's kits that Sun gave away to anyone that asked. That included hardware specs, software/firmware specs, reference designs, Etc. They even came with a sample SBus card handle. I got two of the kits just from going to SUG and Usenix-type exhibitions back then.

The first Sun 4 machines weren't even based on SBus, they were based on the very popular (back then) VME bus, neither proprietary nor "closed".

My favorite quirks:

[Ayanami Rei]

/etc/hosts and /etc/netmasks are soft links too /etc/inet/hosts and /etc/inet/netmasks. It would make sense if /etc/inet was designed to store host dependant information that could be mounted via NFS. However, there are files like /etc/defaultrouter which are NOT in there, which is confusing!

There are other little quirks. Solaris does something weird when you use NIS during startup. It sets your netmask to a 24-bit default before trying to find an NIS server via broadcast even if you have the /etc/netmasks file set. So if your netmasks come from NIS but your NIS server is not on the same subnet, then you are treated to a hang at bootime.
You have to change the netmasks line in /etc/nsswitch.conf to files only to get it to use that netmask, and live without a NIS distribution list. Or modify the boot script to use the one in /etc/netmasks explicitly.

Also I hate how interfaces are identified via IP explictly (there is no way to assign two interfaces the same IP address, it balks and says device busy) This may simplify routing code but it makes designing interesting network topolgies more difficult (and the related hosts files, YOW)

I could go on... but I like Solaris more than any other commercial Unix so I shouldn't be TOO hard on them. ^_^

Re:You can already

[turgid]

That's true, but most (not all) of the API's are already in there. A lot of Open Source/Free Software libraries have been migrated into the Solaris WOS (and are supported by Sun). I can't think of all of them off the top of my head but they're in /usr/sfw/lib on Solaris 9. Also, you get a lot more (but unsupported) if you install the Companion CD (which installs in /opt/sfw). So, for many applications, it's just a case of giving ./configure the right paths, and stuff Just Works(TM). I agree that being LSB compliant would be good, and an improvement, but a lot of the (important) stuff is already there.