Lately I've been reading a lot about the speculation regarding IBM taking Sun over. As a graduate of an IBM preferred University whose curriculum had IBM mainframes at its core, and a java developer, I have a big interest in what might happen here. What I'm really interested in, though, is the future of these two operating systems.
Solaris can boast some pretty impressive titles. Sun touts it as the world's most advanced OS, and I will admit it has some pretty badass features. In particular, you can update a Solaris kernel WITHOUT REBOOTING. That's a Holy Grail type of feature. The new filesystem for Solaris also boasts some cool new features (although ext4 has many of the same features, though the stability is still coming, and XFS has had many of these features for quite some time, probably still representing the best stability/performance ratio though I have few hard numbers for ZFS.) I have also heard, though I again have no hard numbers, that Solaris is considered to be the most stable operating system on the market. By the same token, although Sun will insist that Solaris is 'open source' and will show the same types of development speed up that people have so often cited Linux for, it's barely open source. Companies like Apple and Sun have consistently demonstrated that they don't get Open Source and they don't even believe in Free. If you'd like to see a company that know how to make money on Free check out Redhat. GNU/Linux really and truly is Free with a big F like Free Speech (not free beer.) So while it's true that anybody who likes can contribute to Solaris you had better bet on flying pigs than on ready adoption of Solaris by the Free Software community. Thus, Sun's predictions about Solaris having security fixes at the rate that truly Free software are optimistic but empty. Think about it rationally: I am a volunteer developer. All I have when I get done making a contribution to any 'open source' project is my name on a piece of code n the internet. I might do this for a variety of reasons, from "I think it's kewl" to "I want respect from my peers" to "I have lots of programming skills but few other credentials and I want a programming job, here's a chance to showcase my abilities." There are scads of other reasons too. But in the end all you have is your name on a piece of code. Now on a Free Software project, be it a copyleft project (anything GNU, like GNU/Linux) or a non-copyleft (Apache or BSD or MIT) you have something more. If the organization maintaining the code suddenly decides to do something evil or stupid, you're welcome to take your code and go somewhere else. You can even fork their whole project and continue in a direction that helps you sleep at night (or that makes you MILLIONS OF DOLLARS.) But if you contribute your code to Sun or Apple, now they own it. If you ever try to use it in anything but their product they can (and WILL) sue you. They will make you regret ever downloading and viewing their code, let alone contributing your own. Erik's first law of F/OSS: A project with a Free license will have N volunteer developers, where a non-Free 'open source' project will have M volunteer developers where N >= 50 * M. It is remarkable that even those citizens of democratic nations who never exercise their right to vote will very seldom consent to being relocated to autocratic nations. I would tend to think that until somebody who gets it takes Sun over, or Sun gets their heads out their butts, we won't see the 'benefits of open source' coming to Open Solaris (or the newly 'open sourced' Sun JDK, also a joke by comparison with truly Free software.) So what do you listers think? Are the technical merits of Open Solaris great enough that the half-assed open source release won't be enough to stop them? Or perhaps the technical problems in the Linux internals are great enough that the benefit of Free Software won't be able to carry the day? Or is Linux going to leave Solaris in the dust? Erik Johnson ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For LINUX-390 subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO LINUX-390 or visit http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?LINUX-390
