Solaris 10 Released, Updated & Free (Like Speech)

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."

Re:Well

[Anonymous Coward]

That should be: Hello Sun/Microsoft patent cross licensing deal!

Read and weep!

Re:Hmmm, focus group, anyone?

[draggin_fly]

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.

Time to fire up vmware!

[Thaidog]

ZFS alone is worth the install.

Re:Solaris is great!

[thogard]

You run Solaris on a SS2? God intended only BSD flavor unixes for the SS1 and SS2 so you should sun os 4.1.4 with its patches and enough bsd and gnu utils so your tab completion still works. The SS2 is only what 13 years old these days? Put a real OS on it and it should keep going at least as long as my SS1 which only about 15 years old now and still kicking. How many /. readers aren't that old :-)

Re:It will be accepted in the mainstream

[Antique Geekmeister]

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?

[iCEBaLM]

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.

Probably A Good Move

[blueZhift]

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.

Re:A different perspective

[jimicus]

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?

[SmallFurryCreature]

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.

Am I th ONLY one here

[MajorDick]

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

[ChrisRijk]

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--

[saintp]

But Johnathan, I thought hardware was supposed to be free, not software. What gives?

Re:But.....

[TheRaven64]

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.

Actually, that fits.

[Stormbringer]

Everybody knows you don't buy beer: you rent it.

Also good for Linux, too

[AShuvalov]

Linux really need a positive competitor, which is called "coopetitor". And I beleive the cooperation part may outweght the competition.

What is Solaris, really? In long run, all that remains will be just a kernel and a very basic libc. All the rest - Solaris will share with Linux. They will have same desktops, same developer's tools, same Java, same web and database servers.

30% of Sun software engineers will work on semi-proprietary, sort of open source Solaris. 70% of them will be dedicated to GPL projects. I think we all must send them a very warm welcome and wish all the success to Solaris, too.

What's with all the naysayers?

[Biff98]

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:Hmmm, focus group, anyone?

[mnmn]

OK heres what I'm looking forward to.

Better sun hardware support in BSD.

More scalable threading for Linux/BSD

Robust ATM networking for Linux/BSD

Possibly a Solaris for my Alpha 533MHz system.

nVidia drivers for Solaris x86

A knoppix-like live cd of solaris with leaner libraries.

A much reduced-bloat Solaris

Most important: custom compiles of Solaris kernels for speed.

So yeah people who have been using Solaris, and own tonnes of the cheap Sun hardware, will be interested in projects coming from the opensourcing of solaris. Its not about any gaps Linux/BSD left behind, the world of computers is huge, there are plenty of niche areas, not to mention Sun hardware support and some networking technologies which in the Linux kernel refuse to leave the EXPERIMENTAL stage like ATM.

Having solaris 'zones' in Linux in parallel to UML and chroot wouldnt hurt either.

Re:Woot!

[NetFu]

What would be even cooler would be a REAL Unix on Apple hardware running the Apple OS X GUI. :-)

Ooops, already got it.

Really, I don't see the point of having Solaris running on Apple hardware unless you want a more unstable Unix. Mac OS X is Unix through and through. The only thing that isn't is the standard GUI Aqua, but Solaris has its own GUI, too.

If I'm going to install an alternative Unix on my Mac, it'll be something like Linux using a more standard GUI like KDE or Gnome.

Re:Not a beleiver.

[Anonymous Coward]

While I don't trust Sun completely either, remember, there is one previous example of Sun releasing a huge pice of free (open source) code: OpenOffice.org. The source code for Openoffice.org is actually dual licensed, with one of the licenses being GNU GPL, or in some cases GNU LGPL (and the other one being SISSL). Thus I would not be surprised (I even think it is rather likely), that when Sun release Solaris 10 as open source, they will probably chose either GNU GPL as their license (possibly dual licensed with som other license of their own), or at least make (at least) one of the licenses they chose GPL compatible (there are quite a few free and GNU GPL compatible licenses to chose from).

I'd bet Sun has seen what most of us have known for a long time: Being compatible with GNU GPL leads to a more successful free software (open source) project, because GNU GPL give us, as developers and users of free software, a feeling of security. Once the source is released under a GNU GPL compatible license we know from experience that it most likely will live on as free software for as long as anyone is interested in using and improving it.

Also, GNU GPL compatibility makes it possible to create GPL'ed derivaties that may reuse code from any other software project that is either GPL'ed or released under a GPL compatible license and most free software is today either released under GNU GPL or a compatible license (and there are several good reasons why that is the case). I'd be very surprised if Sun had not already understood this, and the release of OpenOffice.org under GNU GPL indicate that they really do understand this.

Re:How about some facts?

[Phragmen-Lindelof]

When I was getting ready to go to ANU [anu.edu.au] recently, I had the choice of using the Sun machines at ANU or lugging a (heavy) Linux laptop from my department through the airports (4 flights each way).
Which did I choose?
The laptop, of course. I had enough trouble with Suns at the Max Planck Institute in the summer of 2003. I got a static IP from the ANU IT people, bypassed the ANU system and everything worked fine. I sshed into my office computer and used my U.S. email (kmail) instead of getting an ANU email account. I gave my "big" lecture using the laptop - I wrote my lecture in latex, created figures using xfig, "compiled" and obtained a postscript file and ported the screen output from gv to the data projector. If I had needed anything from my U.S. computer, I was sshed into it and could have viewed a ps file (e.g. of an older paper) if I had wanted or needed to do so. (I believe my lecture was well received; at least this is what everyone told me.)

(begin rant) By the way, Australian universities have been getting screwed by the government since 1975 and they could use all the political support possible. ANU is probably the best supported university and by U.S. standards the support is not good. The other universities are in trouble. The people at ANU were really great; if I were younger and a student, I would consider going to ANU. As a professor, you have to make a financial sacrifice to stay in Australia; many really good ones do stay but approximately 35% of mathematicians in OZ have left over the last 10 or 15 years. If you are "Howard", feel free to spend more on higher education; this "let each university do what it is best at" stuff is a (sad) joke. (Who needs anything more than biochem. and a medical school to be a university? English? History? Geology? What are they?) (end rant)