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Solaris 10 Released, Updated & Free (Like Speech)

Posted by Hemos on Mon Nov 15, 2004 07:53 AM
from the trying-to-remain-cutting-edge dept.
Sun Microsystems Announcements Operating Systems Software Unix Upgrades News IT
Sivar writes "Ace's Hardware and news.com.com.com report Solaris that 10 has been released. Improvements include a performance-enhanced TCP-IP stack to shed the "Slowaris" moniker and their much-vaunted ZFS (Z File System). Solaris will initially be "free" (as in beer with an annual subscription fee for bug fixes and support), and will reportedly be released under an open-source license later." As well, KingSkippus writes "MSNBC reports, "After investing roughly $500 million and spending years of development time on its next-generation operating system, Sun Microsystems Inc. on Monday will announce an aggressive price for the software -- free. Sun also has promised make the underlying code of Solaris available under an open-source license, though the details have not been released." An article at Computerworld also has the story from Jonathan Schwartz, Sun's president and chief operating officer."
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  • Woot! (Score:3, Funny)

    by superpixel2000 (777844) on Monday November 15 2004, @07:54AM (#10818966) Homepage Journal
    Can't wait to cram it into my iBook ;-)

  • Gentoo, Fedora and now Solaris (Score:5, Funny)

    by digid (259751) on Monday November 15 2004, @07:56AM (#10818976)
    Is it me or has slashdot named today as National Upgrade Day?

  • Previous Versions... (Score:5, Informative)

    by NitsujTPU (19263) on Monday November 15 2004, @07:59AM (#10818992)
    Previous versions of Solaris were quite expensive...

    Solaris 9 [sun.com]

    Solaris 8 [sun.com]

    Before the Dawn of Time [sun.com]

  • probably better than... (Score:5, Funny)

    by zegebbers (751020) on Monday November 15 2004, @07:59AM (#10818995) Homepage
    being free (as in without)

  • Hmmm, focus group, anyone? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by rocjoe71 (545053) on Monday November 15 2004, @08:00AM (#10818998) Homepage
    So are there people out there really chomping-at-the-bit to do Solaris open-source projects?

    I'm not being sarcastic, I'm just curious to know what sort of a gap Linux/BSD left behind that Sun felt the need to fill...

    • Re:Hmmm, focus group, anyone? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by draggin_fly (807754) on Monday November 15 2004, @08:04AM (#10819034)
      It's not so much a matter of people developing for Solaris because that won't happen except in an expensive commercial setting; it's about Solaris becomming more and more like another version of Linux. That's a good thing. As someone who has to administer a variety of Sun hardware, I'm happy. The Sun product line is among the best. What I want from Sun is more compliance with OpenSource projects and that's what the company is giving me. From the Linux developer end, Solaris may become just another platform, more like Red Hat or SuSE than AIX or HP-UX.
    • well, i wouldn't say i would develop an open-source project for solaris specifically, but sometimes you want or need to try to compile your program on another platform. i personally don't have access to a solaris machine, but now i can download and install it for free and test my software on it. if someone submits a bug on solaris, i can verify it, and if someone says that it doesn't work on sparc i can narrow it down from solaris bug to solaris-sparc bug if it works on my x86 install.

  • Solaris is great! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Sai Babu (827212) on Monday November 15 2004, @08:01AM (#10819017) Homepage

    In spite of:
    Start jumbo patch download.
    Head off to the bar.
    Come home, pass out, wake up after noon

    Check download, yee harrr almost done.
    Have dinner
    Check download, YES, start patch.
    Leave for Cancun vacation.
    (three weeks later) back from Cancun
    Patch almost complete, clean gutters, mow lawn, wash car.
    Ahhhh, now we're ready to rock and roll...

    Maybe it's time to retire the SS2. You think?
    Damn thing just keeps on ticking!

    • I guess you're not a Gentoo user, eh?

      Of course, if you had an Optimum Online cable modem, it would be more like...

      Start patch cluster download
      Get coffee
      Install patch cluster

      As for the speed of the patch installation, yeah, time to retire an SS2... though you wouldn't be putting Solaris 10 on an SS2 anyway... though you can get an Ultra 5 or an Ultra Enterprise 2 for less than a water cooling kit for your Athlon 64.

      • Re:Solaris is great! (Score:5, Informative)

        by abulafia (7826) on Monday November 15 2004, @09:40AM (#10819640)
        Administering Solaris has been, traditionally, as much work as administering 3 different Linux releases at the same time. The subtle distinctions between their various compilers, the oddness they did to X, and their refusal to replace their various shells and command line utilities like "compress" with the vastly superior open source tools like "gzip" meant that to do any real work, you had to spend a huge amount of time porting over your tools both ways.

        I honestly don't know what you're talking about. Perhaps if you came to Solaris from the linux world and expected things to behave the same...

        I used to maintain a huge pile of Sun boxes, and rather liked it. I was supporting FreeBSD boxes at the same time, and ditto. I started cursing a lot more after adding Linux to the mix, until I got used to it.

        It you take the time to set up your environment, Solaris is no worse than anyone else. Of course, I _do_ really like apt, and wish everyone would use it, now that I'm used to it. But dealing with patchclusters is actually quite a lot more straightforward than the where-the-hell-is-libsuxx0r-3.1.25.6r.rpm,-and-now -I-have-to-upgrade-glibc game, IMHO.

        And porting Solaris code to the non-Solaris world is often quite difficult.

        Maybe so, if you don't write portable software... all of mine compiles on Solaris, fBSD, and the various Linuxen without a tweak.

        That said, I'm glad I'm no longer a professional admin... I got really sick of it. But that's a different story.

      • The subtle distinctions between their various compilers

        Solaris doesn't ship with a compiler, hasn't for at least seven years. If you paid for their compiler and don't like it (sucker), use gcc.

        the oddness they did to X

        Yeah, including display postscript was a real bastard move. Including different window managers and KDE and GNOME is really annoying too. Why can't they just stick to CDE with no features, like the other surviving Unixes?

        their refusal to replace their various shells and command line util

      • Re:Solaris is great! (Score:4, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 15 2004, @10:33AM (#10820123)
        I guess "Antique" is right. If by "oddness they did to X" you mean the old Open Windows "Xnews" stuff, that got ripped out ages ago in favor of a stock X11 server, and Sun has gone with x.org for Solaris 10. Gzip has been part of Solaris since 2000. And I'm really curious about what you mean about porting Solaris code to the non-Solaris world; Solaris is pretty much the de facto coding standard of commercial UNIX, and since it's based on the UNIX98 standard, de jure as well.

        Anecdotal evidence: I know of a vendor who was approached by IBM to port their product to Linux; vendor said sure (especially since IBM was paying them :-) -- no problem, we'll just start working on moving our AIX version over. IBM's response was that it'd be a lot easier and faster if the vendor happened to have a Solaris version they could start with instead... .

  • A different perspective (Score:4, Interesting)

    by gUmbi (95629) on Monday November 15 2004, @08:11AM (#10819066)
    Considering that Sun's revenue has gone from $18 billion in 2001 to $11 billion in 2004 (link) [nasdaq.com], how is this going to help them?

    Seriously, is this move in the shareholders' best interest? It certainly won't increase revenue. Will it significantly reduce their development costs? Will this give them any competitive advantage at all?

    Jason.

    • Re:A different perspective (Score:5, Insightful)

      by jimicus (737525) on Monday November 15 2004, @08:33AM (#10819186) Homepage
      Sun aren't a software provider. They're a solution provider.

      Sun provide excellent hardware and software support and will work with you to reach a solution - but it's not cheap. Like most unixen, Solaris tends to be popular with companies which need the system to work (as in: the system doesn't work, the company ceases to exist in very short order) and are prepared to pay a lot of money for it.

      A few thousand $ for OS licenses fades into insignificance when compared with a few million $ for 24/7/4 hour support across an enterprise, while at the same time making a decent evaluation of the system much cheaper (and thus easier to justify).

    • Failed economy? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by SmallFurryCreature (593017) on Monday November 15 2004, @08:35AM (#10819206) Journal
      In the past you had the unix companies and the new upstart Microsoft. Unix was expensive and good, windows wasn't.

      However some people realised that at times you didn't need unix. Dos would do. Slowly MS sneaked its way into the business through the backdoor. On cheap clones doing simple tasks for wich the IBM's HP's and SUN's were just to damn expensive. A dos based Wordprocessor with its own printer may seem primitive but it worked. Sure multi user shared systems are nice but in a small office the old floppy network can work as well.

      But the old unixes still sold because while dos and later windows were getting better (lets face it they could hardly get worse) and remained a lot cheaper MS has never been able to compete with unix for the high end market.

      So MS sold the lowend, the unixes the highend and all was well.

      Until some fin stopped being totally drunk for a moment and made his own little unix and opened the source code to it. It most likely was just the right time, since other unixes had been free long before, but this free unix started to take off.

      Very slowly during the recent internet bubble it was sneaking its way into business just as MS had done with DOS. However this time the unixes saw not a tiny little crap unreliable single user no-networking OS coming from below but a increasingly capable unix like themselves. Except a whole lot cheaper.

      During the bubble SUN sold a whole lot of sun machines (with the solaris ofcourse) because money was cheap and the sky was the limit. HOWEVER not everyone saw the need to use super expensive hardware with super expensive software. Some went with windows and crashed a lot but some went with this new unix and with cheap hardware and crashed a bit more often then unix but less then windows and had plenty of money left over to spend on good admins.

      This new unix was a threat except that some unixes saw it more as "the enemy of my enemy is my friend". Linux was hurting unix but it was also hurting windows. So IBM and later HP asked themselves this. Do we fight Linux or do we join it and perhaps be able to attack Windows from below and above? Remember that with Linux in a Unix company like IBM you now got a complete set of price ranges. Linux on cheap x86 to score below windows. Linux on good hardware to be equal to windows. Unix on their own hardware for the highend.

      Now the problem was and is that Linux is free. The free speech is nice but from this flow that it is very hard to sell linux at the old unix prices. Worse with linux now getting closer and closer to unix capabilities it becomes harder and harder to justify the price difference.

      Sun has a very simple choice. Keep trying to sell very expensive hardware running very expensive software in a down economy while competing directly with very cheap hardware running very cheap software wich is almost as good. After the bubble the price difference is often more important.

      If they make Solaris as free as linux (remember linux can and is sold for money) then they remove at least one obstacle to their sales pitch. The only economic question is wether the loss in license fees is offset by an increase in hardware sales and support licenses.

      But it may also be that they have no choice. If your a salesperson losing sale after sale because people buy into the idea of a free unix then you either follow or just don't sell stuff.

      Sun ain't doing to well at the moment. I think that opening the source and making solaris 10 free is their attempt to compete better with IBM or worse Dell/Linux. They have little else left. People just don't want to buy Sun anymore for their websites.

  • Not a beleiver. (Score:4, Informative)

    by His name cannot be s (16831) on Monday November 15 2004, @08:28AM (#10819154) Journal
    I really don't see where the poster got the idea that the release would be free as in speech. Except maybe free speech in America.

    Sun has made no indication that this would be released under a real Free/Open source license. Sun's past history with this sort of thing has been, shall we say... dismal.

    Oh, they'll let us see the source. Sure as shit. Probably a clause that makes you "dirty" if you compile it, and sure as all hell it won't allow you to redistribute it, or patches to it. (like Sun's other "child" -- Java)

    Heck according to the article [theinquirer.net] I don't see any evidence that the license will be even "open".

    Good Job Sun. Your work in promoting linux is amazing.

    feh: To damn dull for a Monday.

    • Re:Not a beleiver. (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Tenareth (17013) on Monday November 15 2004, @10:10AM (#10819891) Homepage
      I happened to have the chance to have breakfast with Scott McNealy a couple months ago, and he made it perfectly clear that it would be completely open-source.

      This means, Linux can instantly say they got all their code from Solaris and be perfectly safe from SVRv4 IP complaints. That's one of his intentions.

      • Re:Not a beleiver. (Score:5, Informative)

        by Turmio (29215) on Monday November 15 2004, @12:25PM (#10821364) Homepage
        Linux cannot automatically take code from Solaris even if it was "completely open-source". Solaris must be licensed under the GPL or compliant license in order that to be possible. There are other licenses under which software is open source but despite that fact the source cannot be reused in GPL'd projects such as the Linux kernel. Remember kids, software under GPL is Open Source but Open Source software is not necessarily GPL'd.

  • Nice how they wait until SCO legal cap in place. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by expro (597113) on Monday November 15 2004, @08:29AM (#10819159)
    I think that the terms of the publicized SCO negotiation would make it very difficult for SCO to contemplate new litigation over open-sourcing Solaris. No new litigation is included in the fees, which seem to nearly drain SCO coffers.

  • Probably A Good Move (Score:5, Insightful)

    by blueZhift (652272) on Monday November 15 2004, @08:30AM (#10819167) Homepage Journal
    Releasing Solaris for free and open sourcing it, though the exact license is undetermined, is probably a good move for Sun. Solaris will probably not overtake Linux anytime soon, but being available for free should keep developers interested. And generally, it's better to have more choices than less. For a lot of people being able to choose Solaris will be a good thing. This won't make Sun a lot of money, but it should bring goodwill, which interestingly enough, is worth something in the shareholder's report.

  • Premature... (Score:5, Informative)

    by dohcvtec (461026) on Monday November 15 2004, @08:38AM (#10819217)
    Solaris isn't being released until later on today. According to the Solaris 10 Countup Page [sun.com]: While the secrets of Easter Island in the South Pacific remain a mystery, Sun Microsystems is planning to reveal new details regarding Solaris 10 on November 15 at its Network Computing '04 Q4 launch in San Jose.

    And according to Sun's NC04Q4 [sun.com] page: NC04Q4 opens at 12:30p.m. PDT on November 15, 2004.

    Now, premature announcements are nothing new for Slashdot, but it's hard to discuss much about Solaris 10 before it's officially released; each Solaris Express release has shown continuing strides for Solaris 10, but the Express (Beta) builds have not included ZFS or Project Janus, (a Linux emulation layer.) These are two of the biggest features of Solaris 10, but nobody outside of Sun has much information on them, so we'll just have to wait until later today :)

  • Am I th ONLY one here (Score:5, Insightful)

    by MajorDick (735308) on Monday November 15 2004, @08:42AM (#10819246)
    Who remebers when they were going to try the exact same thing with Solaris 7 ? I was so pumped I seriously considered a migration plan from our then RH 5.2 systems to Solaris.

    One comment from USENET I will NEVER forget was from a fellow who upon hearing of Sun opening the source to solaris said "Now I can open it up look at the code and figure out why the hell its soo damm slow, alas I can die a happy man" I busted out laughing because that was my initial reaction too.

    BUT The stability and security experience were great with 2.5.1 I couldnt have ever asked for more. I think I will always have a soft spot for solaris after a 2 year admin stint with 2.5.1

  • Red Hat shot themselves in the foot (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ChrisRijk (1818) on Monday November 15 2004, @08:49AM (#10819290)
    When Red Hat raised their prices, I think it suddenly made life a lot easier for Sun. For Solaris 10, Sun is charging $120/processor/year for basic support and $360/processor/year for premium support. Sun has been doing a lot of price comparisons with Red Hat (on same hardware) lately.

    Basically, with their pricing moves, Red Hat gave Sun a stick to beat them with. That said, I still expect Red Hat to continue growing, but they'll be coming under increasing pricing pressure as time goes on.

    PS If you consider basic laws of supply and demand, higher prices means less demand. In short, by raising prices, Red Hat stalled their own (unit) growth momentum.

  • Wait wait wait-- (Score:3, Insightful)

    by saintp (595331) <stpierre&nebrwesleyan,edu> on Monday November 15 2004, @08:53AM (#10819312) Homepage
    But Johnathan, I thought hardware was supposed to be free, not software. What gives?

  • Today my heart soars like a hawk! (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Beaker1 (624539) on Monday November 15 2004, @08:58AM (#10819341) Homepage
    As a person who's been admining Solaris in small to very large environments for 10 years now, and who has grown to really dislike the "commercial" linux offerings from SuSE and RedHat in the last couple of years all I can say is a real x86 version of Solaris is going to get the hard push into my data center. I really hope they can pull the rabbit out of the hat with this one and reinvigorate the company. Being a UNIX admin just isn't the same without Sun providing the OS.

  • Solaris 10 Stability (Score:5, Funny)

    by Xargle (165143) on Monday November 15 2004, @09:13AM (#10819437)
    From the launch site...

    Day 6: Did you know that Big Ben actually refers to the thirteen ton bell inside, named after Sir Benjamin Hall? The clock keeps excellent time and rarely stops -- much like Solaris 10, which offers new features aimed at increasing system availability and reducing unplanned downtime.

    This is a bit dodgy on both counts... from British Embassy website:

    At first, the bell was to be called "Victoria," in honour of the Queen. However, "Big Ben" was the name that came to be used. At the time that the bell was built, there were two well known men named Ben. One was a champion boxer -- Benjamin Caunt. The second Ben was Sir Benjamin Hall, a Member of Parliament who, as Commissioner of Public Works, had a great deal to do with the clock tower and the bells. His name was on the side of the first bell that had cracked. Either of these two men could have inspired the nickname "Big Ben," but no one is really sure which it was!

    Slight omission aside, the analogy for stability is pretty invalid given Big Ben broke almost immediately after being struck for the first time and was recast. The new bell (in use today) has a large crack in it, again from early in its use, which was filled in and the bell rotated so the clapper wouldn't strike the weak point. The clock itself is also regularly weighted with pennies to keep it accurate. Plus because of the crack the bell is out of tune.

    If solaris 10 is like this I'm not touching it :)

  • This might work once they release the x86_64 ver (Score:4, Interesting)

    by laddhebert (570948) on Monday November 15 2004, @09:59AM (#10819823)
    With this release, I don't really think they are going to gain market share where they want it. Sure, you'll see a lot of sparc v9 systems getting upgraded to it once stability checks are in place, but in my industries (chip design, geophysics) the switch was to an x86 platform running Linux since pure speed was critical. Now that x86_64 Linux kernels are available most businesses that I have worked with have started another switch: to Opertons. This gets past the memory limit per process that has been a hindering factor. I think once Solaris 10 is ported to x86_64 platform, which I read somewhere once that it will get ported, it will only be a matter of time before the software vendors that these companies use start to validate the OS. Once this happens, we could be in for a ride.

    Just my opinion based on past experience of course.

    -L

  • Best quote ever! (On ZFS at least) (Score:4, Funny)

    by 3770 (560838) on Monday November 15 2004, @10:25AM (#10820041) Homepage

    There was an interview with someone from Sun and he was asked if he thought that 128 bits (the address space of ZFS) was enough and he answered (paraphrasing):

    We are pretty comfortable with that. We could not store that much information on an earthbound media without boiling the oceans.

  • What's with all the naysayers? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Biff98 (633281) on Monday November 15 2004, @10:30AM (#10820092)
    Hey guys? Hello! I can't stand all these posters saying things like:

    1.) Solaris sucks anyway

    Solaris predates Linux by a year and it's roots SunOS 4.X date back to 1984. What's more is that Sun Solaris has always run on superior hardware. The SPARC line they are on now is clearly superior hardware than anything x86 you can throw around, except *MAYBE* (but I doubt it) the latest offerings from IBM. And I do mean the machines IBM has put out in the last 6 months! But, I digress, this is not about hardware, it's about the OS. Solaris is a bullet-proof "old pro" that will just keep going and going and going. It's got great manageability, pretty good GNU support, and superior support.


    Plus it has SMP support for UltraSparc III!

    2.) Why is Sun open-sourcing Solaris??? They won't make any more profit out of it, seeing as though they wouldn't be paid anything for Solaris???

    Why the hell does anyone open-source anything? To gain mindshare, to gain more users, to sell more (superior) hardware, to make Sun successful. Of course they're not going to make money by making Solaris open-source!

    Personally, I'm really happy Sun will be doing this. I think it's a great move, and will help everyone using SPARC hardware. I think Linux will benefit greatly by people looking at Solaris and deciding to make a few tweaks here and there.

    Honestly I don't know if they'll be able to open-source it all just because I think some of the lower level functionality of their hardware could be given away (think E10k extensions) if they release that code.

    I don't know that. All I know is that all you Linux evangelists out there should be welcoming a new "brother" into the open source community.

    -Steve

    • Re:does it still suck to install and configure? (Score:4, Informative)

      by Mark Round (211258) on Monday November 15 2004, @08:04AM (#10819032) Homepage
      JDS (version 3) is present in the current Solaris Express builds, so should be in the final product.

    • Re:does it still suck to install and configure? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Curtman (556920) on Monday November 15 2004, @09:08AM (#10819412)
      without a doubt, solaris has been the biggest pain to set up out of ANY unix i've installed

      I agree. I spent a week fighting with Solaris 10 preview for all the wrong reasons. It was basically an experiment to see how much GNU software I could pack into it. To my horror, once I finally got the thing installed I learned that it doesn't even come with a compiler. Sure you can add GCC to it, but there must be some art to making GNU's tools work properly with Sun's libc that is beyond me. The biggest problem I had was libtool seems to be completely broken with respect to shared libraries on Solaris.

      The good news is there are lots of repositories for Solaris binaries:

      Sun Freeware [sunfreeware.com] (Sun sponsored - mostly GNU in Solaris package manager form, can be installed with pkgadd)
      OpenPKG RPM [openpkg.org] OpenPKG Solaris 10 RPM's (Lots missing from here and needs to be compiled via the SRPMS)
      OpenPKG SRPMS [openpkg.org]Almost everything I use, I found here and compiled without problems
      Ibiblio [ibiblio.org]There's a bunch of binary packages here for x86 and SPARC Solaris, I didn't use any of them


      Anyone else looking to venture down this road, you should be warned that Solaris is really no fun to try to use as a desktop. Out of the box, Gnome is at version 2.2 or something, and has many many bugs (like Nautilus crashes when you try to drag desktop icons for example).

      Summary: Solaris is not ready for the desktop.

      /me ducks

      • Re:does it still suck to install and configure? (Score:5, Informative)

        by dohcvtec (461026) on Monday November 15 2004, @09:33AM (#10819584)
        To my horror, once I finally got the thing installed I learned that it doesn't even come with a compiler.

        True, but to be fair, no other enterprise UNIX comes bundled with the corresponding proprietary compiler, either.

        Sure you can add GCC to it, but there must be some art to making GNU's tools work properly with Sun's libc that is beyond me.

        This is a known "issue": AFAIU, the headers included in the GCC package you installed were meant for Solaris 9. Since Solaris 10 is still in beta, this ought to be forgivable, and the blame should go to the mainatiners of the GCC package you used, not Sun. However, Blastwave [blastwave.org], the excellent Solaris package repository you missed, has GCC packages that work for Solaris 10/Express.

      • Re:download links (Score:5, Informative)

        by dohcvtec (461026) on Monday November 15 2004, @08:49AM (#10819289)
        That is a link to Download Solaris Express (Solaris 10 Beta), not Solaris 10. Sun has been releasing (mostly) monthly builds of Solaris Express, and there have been quite a few advancements and improvements over Solaris 9. I think Solaris 10 is going to be a big release, but we'll all have to wait until later to download it: the announcement of Solaris 10 isn't until 12:30 PDT today, and the actual release of Solaris 10 probably won't be available until a later date. The most recent beta build (b69) says SunOS 5.10 December 2004 from either a uname or in /etc/release :(

    • Funky definition of mainstream (Score:5, Informative)

      by PornMaster (749461) on Monday November 15 2004, @08:12AM (#10819074) Homepage
      SunOS was in the mainstream before Linus began working on the Linux kernel, dude.
    • *counts Solaris machines in his lab at work*
      --Many
      *counts Linux machines in his lab at work*
      --A few
      *counts Solaris machines he has fielded for clients*
      --Many
      *counts Linux machines he has fielded for clients*
      --0
      *counts Solaris machines fielded to run his applications*
      --Hundreds
      *counts Linux machines fielded for his application*
      --1 (and I own it)

      I'd like to see more people running Linux, and I cant' seem to find a hard figure anywhere (I searched), but anecdotal evidence tells me that Solaris is pretty "main
      • Go hit the universities, office, and R&D environments. Solaris is still used as server class machines, but the last place I worked deliberately suspended all work and development with Solaris years ago because the workstations were overpriced and non-competitive with what a PC running Linux could do: they just weren't worth it in the desktop machine market.

    • Re:Free and open source? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by iCEBaLM (34905) <icebalm@icebalm . c om> on Monday November 15 2004, @08:27AM (#10819149)
      Yes it does. If it's not Free (as in speech) then it's not Open, it would be closed.

      Simply because you can see the code does not make it open source, you have to be able to modify it and also share those modifications for it to be open.
    • Having recently re-read ESR's Cathederal and Bazar paper, I come increasingly to understand that one, perhaps the _most_ important benefit of OpenSource is is that it provides an effective mechanism of _feature_moderation_.

      This provides some level of isolation from Design Despots inside academia or corporations and especially from the marketing departments of corporations, for whom no feature is too silly. Anyone who wants a concerete example of this just need to look at the Java implementation of Regula

    • See.. people talk about free as in beer and don't get it. The beer is free but that doesn't mean you don't pay for something.

      Increased water charges for all the extra flushes.

      That new play station game you bought your friend so he won't show pics of that fugly girl you hooked up with.

      cab fare, can't drive drunk.

      gym membership, atkins book and a lot of meat and cheese to lose the beer belly

      vodka, to numb the pain in the liver

      and more...

      There's no such thing as a free lunch or a free beer.

    • Re:But..... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by TheRaven64 (641858) on Monday November 15 2004, @09:00AM (#10819357) Homepage Journal
      If Solaris is open source, it becomes a strong Linux competitor. Small businesses can deploy it onto cheap hardware. Who are they going to pay when they need support? Sun. When they need faster hardware, who are they going to buy it from? Sun. I don't know if this will actually happen, but I suspect this is what Sun is hoping.

      • Re:Look at apple (Score:4, Informative)

        by Decaff (42676) on Monday November 15 2004, @09:00AM (#10819356)
        Java is "open source." Has been "since day one" (I guess). If it's so free why isn't it included with so many linux distributions? Because it ISN'T FREE. It's "open" - that ain't free

        You have it the wrong way round. Java is certainly free (you don't have to pay money to obtain it), but its not (according to some licenses) 'open'.

        Sun's Java is not supplied with some Linux distributions because these distributions have very specific licenses. These distributions often ship with other Java implementations (such as SableVM).
    • Comes in two flavors: SPARC (Sun & Fujitsu) and X86 (most PCs). The PC version is only 32-bit currently.

      I acquired build 71: it comes with Star Office 7 and Java Desktop.

      Had an old 500 MHz with 500 MB RAM laying around, and it loaded very smoothly. The OS didn't recognize the Diamond Viper video card after installation as it did during the install (strange). But no worries, put an Nvidia card in (GeForce2) and it runs better (faster) than my Sun 1500 at work. Sun and Nvidia have teamed up to supp

      • Release cycles (Score:4, Interesting)

        by cpghost (719344) on Monday November 15 2004, @10:29AM (#10820075) Homepage

        Last I checked redhat has had about 5 full releases since the gap of solaris 9 and 10.

        Is that really a valid argument? Release cycles are pretty arbitrary decisions that don't necessarily reflect the amount of change between one release and the next. Sometimes, less is more, because it hints at more thorough internal testing.

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