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."

Hmmm, focus group, anyone?

[rocjoe71]

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...

Linux Asset?

[Anonymous Coward]

Since this code will be released under an open source licence it may possibly be a good source of code for improving Linux....

A different perspective

[gUmbi]

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.

Patience...

[PornMaster]

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!

[Antique Geekmeister]

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

I hope this change encourages Sun to go the open source route on core utilities, and spend their development time on the kernel and the compiler. While their hardware has been interesting, I really feel that it's not going to be a big driver for them in the face of AMD's now stable and quite inexpensive 64-bit architectures, which is the market where Sun should have focused their hardware development for the last 5 years.

ZFS impact on VxVM/VxFS

[PornMaster]

It'll be interesting to see the effect ZFS will have on the sales of Veritas Volume Manager and Veritas File System, which so often get paired with Solaris.

Re:Hmmm, focus group, anyone?

[pchan-]

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.

Nice how they wait until SCO legal cap in place.

[expro]

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.

Don't believe Sun about the open source release

[Anonymous Coward]

Sun is clearly just trying to make money off people thinking it will be made open source in a few months.

Watch, in a few months they'll have some excuse as to why it isn't open sourced yet.

They did the same thing with Java.

Do not trust Sun with this. ..They paid SCO money after all, let's not forget.

Solaris 10 and Java are great .. but don't switch to Solaris thinking it'll eventually be open sourced with an uninhibited GPL or BSD style license.

Re:Free and open source?

[omb]

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 Regular Expressions or Date-formatting.

For years I used to oppose DEC sending only marketeers to DECUS and to encourage them to invite a cross section of engineering 'nerds'; in retrospect I suspect that this helped prevent the capture of design exclusively by marketing

The failure to include many GNU products, by default, in Solaris Distributions, is the same thing. Without Linux Perl would still not ship with Solaris; ingnorant design despots within the cathederal would have continued an effective veto!

Today my heart soars like a hawk!

[Beaker1]

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.

Re:Woot!

[Anonymous Coward]

Solaris might someday run on PowerPC (again).

http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/78/4/news/13600 [systemnews.com]

Running Solaris inside Mac-on-linux or Mac-on-Mac would be cool.

Re:does it still suck to install and configure?

[discogravy]

Admittedly, Solaris is the only commercial UNIX i've installed, so I can't comment on other commercial unixes (althoguh I've used SCO and VMS and was Not Happy with them,) but compared to the various other flavors of unixes/linuxes, the install and initial setup of the system during OS install is hideous. Putting aside the lack of development tools (e.g., a compiler), root's homedir is /, you have to know to tell the installer not to automatically reboot so that you can get a console going and create your first user, /home is really a link to /export/home -- which root can't modify (WTF? -- you have to "unexport" home in a config file in /etc/ before you can do anything to it, like e.g., create a user's homedir[1],). the default shell is /bin/sh (ok, so is FreeBSD's, but really, would it KILL them to use something friendlier?) and the only other immediately available shells are ksh and csh (i think tcsh might be in Sol10...not sure; I know bash isn't.) More services than you can shake a stick at are enabled by default (chargen? time? wtf?) via inetd, sendmail enabled in /etc/rc ....it's hideous.

Honestly, this is not a knock against Solaris as a server OS in and of itself: all of these complaints are really not THAT germane when you're setting up a server and you're going to be checking over everything ANYWAY, but it'd be nice to not HAVE to change every little thing.

[1]This might be useful if you're going to have portable profiles and map user's homedirs vis NFS or something....but that's a pretty big assumption to make for a default install.

This might work once they release the x86_64 ver

[laddhebert]

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

Re:Not a beleiver.

[Tenareth]

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:Solaris is great!

[justins]

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 utilities like "compress" with the vastly superior open source tools like "gzip"

They include open-source tools like that with Solaris 9. The tools have always been available elsewhere. Before Linux and BSD became usable, SunOS and Solaris had the strongest open source community of anyone, since they made workstations people could actually afford.

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

That is not Sun's fault. For that matter, try porting most of the stuff you find bundled with a Linux distro to any other platform... hell, just try porting all the tools you need to build it...

Re:Am I th ONLY one here

[drinkypoo]

while I agree that 2.5.1 was great I think for me the Sun experience peaked at SunOS 4.1.4. It was still light and fast, and while it lacked support for lots of CPUs (the licensed sun machines made by other companies had their own kernel patches to support 8 processors etc - I forget who made them though) who had machines with lots of CPUs back then anyway? Almost nobody :)

Release cycles

[cpghost]

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.

Re:does it still suck to install and configure?

[Anonymous Coward]

/home is really a link to /export/home -- which root can't modify (WTF? -- you have to "unexport" home in a config file in /etc/ before you can do anything to it, like e.g., create a user's homedir[1],).

Uh, the automounter is there for a reason, use it. Just put your exported filesystems under /export. That wasn't too hard, was it?

the default shell is /bin/sh (ok, so is FreeBSD's, but really, would it KILL them to use something friendlier?)

You are not supposed to run things as root, it's not your cozy environment to hang out in. It's there for you to get out of bad things, like when you are in single user mode. Create yourself a user, plenty of shells exists and works on Solaris. If you want third party software then install the software from the software CD's, they're there for a reason. Both tcsh and zsh exists on them, so atleast one real shell is there.

As for changing all those things, get cfengine or whatever tool of your choice set up, it makes sure the actual configuration is the same as you want it to bed and you will not make any mistakes when you are installing computer 267 which makes it different from computer 384.

Re:Best quote ever! (On ZFS at least)

[diegocgteleline.es]

Why? They can't. Look at http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/bonwick?catname=Z FS [sun.com]:

"In particular, it has been shown that 1 kilogram of matter confined to 1 liter of space can perform at most 1051 operations per second on at most 1031 bits of information [see Seth Lloyd, "Ultimate physical limits to computation." Nature 406, 1047-1054 (2000)]. A fully-populated 128-bit storage pool would contain 2128 blocks = 2137 bytes = 2140 bits; therefore the minimum mass required to hold the bits would be (2140 bits) / (1031 bits/kg) = 136 billion kg.

That's a lot of gear.

To operate at the 1031 bits/kg limit, however, the entire mass of the computer must be in the form of pure energy. By E=mc2, the rest energy of 136 billion kg is 1.2x1028 J. The mass of the oceans is about 1.4x1021 kg. It takes about 4,000 J to raise the temperature of 1 kg of water by 1 degree Celcius, and thus about 400,000 J to heat 1 kg of water from freezing to boiling. The latent heat of vaporization adds another 2 million J/kg. Thus the energy required to boil the oceans is about 2.4x106 J/kg * 1.4x1021 kg = 3.4x1027 J. Thus, fully populating a 128-bit storage pool would, literally, require more energy than boiling the oceans."

Re:Am I th ONLY one here

[MajorDick]

The days when we would reflect on OS's about what was great tight and lean, 4.1.4, even 2.5.1 (by todays standards) are gone to pass I am sad to say.

I keep looking for a Enterprise server scale OS that DOENT have everything and a few dozen kitchen sinks thrown in.....

one thing bothers me...

[pgilman]

as the post says:

"Solaris will initially be 'free' (as in beer with an annual subscription fee for bug fixes and support)."

this model worries me, both with redhat and now solaris: if income arises not from the -RELEASE versions of the software, but rather from the PATCHES, what incentive is there to create a stable, bug-free -RELEASE? indeed, it would actually be to the companies' advantage to intentionally include bugs in the -RELEASE versions, in order to drive demand for patches...

Re:Am I th ONLY one here

[mre5565]

They started doing it for Solaris 7, it took a
long time, Solaris 8 then shipped, and in the
end they did a one time source release of
Solaris 8 (minus lots of bits held back for
reasons of 3rd party intellectual property rights
and crypto export controls). I still have
a Solaris 8 source CD .. cost under $100 at the
time as I recall (source code was free, "media
kit", was not).

The license for the Solaris 8 source was
restrictive, and given the limited source code
it wasn't useful for community source development
which was the original idea.

We'll see if Solaris 10 community source works
out.

But having the source code is still very useful
for understanding how stuff works, so I'll
be plopping another $100 or so for S10 drop.