LITTLEBLACKDOG.COM

Wow, After several years of Sun Micro going after every $ they could get they finally rethink their position on the Solaris OS.

http://cnn.netscape.cnn.com/news/story.jsp?floc=ne-main-9-l7&flok=FF-APO-1700&idq=/ff/story/0001%2F20041115%2F0731813250.htm&sc=1700

This means a great savings to many that use the OS and I hope that many of you who have not used it will try it out now that it will be open source.

/1f1

Posted: Mon Nov 15, 2004 7:31 pm Post subject:

yet another major IT company haing their products go open source.

ya know, with Solaris going open, only micr$uck is the only one that charges for their o/s now.

soemthign to think about for sure

although i'm wodnering what is the benefit of Solaris over other open source o/s? I mean i cant really think of any reason why i'd go for it over other soltuions

still a good call though, good show Sun

Moderator Joined: 26 May 2001 Posts: 8155 Location: Borneo

I only believe that Sun will open source Solaris when i see it and there are still a lot of companies that make money out of their OS. But the commoditization will hit Microsoft hard. Especially that of Office.

Posted: Mon Nov 15, 2004 9:07 pm Post subject:

csign wrote:
I only believe that Sun will open source Solaris when i see it and there are still a lot of companies that make money out of their OS. But the commoditization will hit Microsoft hard. Especially that of Office.

As you can see, that though puts a big smile to my face

Posted: Mon Nov 15, 2004 10:20 pm Post subject:

Someone in this here LBD forums said in a thread which I can not find, that the free version of Solaris was limited to 1 or 2 CPUs. So they'd still make their money on the Sun Fire clusters.

Just because it's open source now doesn't make it more accessible, it was free long time ago even for x86. So.... what's the big deal? They better not pull another SCO move in a few years.

Haven't you guys read that article about how Sun is co-oping with M$ just to protect themselves?

Moderator Joined: 26 May 2001 Posts: 8155 Location: Borneo

The x86 was free but was not as good as the sparc. And the sparc was free but most sparc machines are already Sun machines (or came with a license) so that doesn't really count

Posted: Tue Nov 16, 2004 11:18 am Post subject:

so it doesnt really offer too much once you get right down to it

Moderator Joined: 26 May 2001 Posts: 8155 Location: Borneo

It has one great feature. If that works it will be great

Posted: Tue Nov 16, 2004 12:06 pm Post subject:

csign wrote:
It has one great feature. If that works it will be great

sorry for being ignorant, but what is that one feature that owuld make me choose it over others(apart from being free)

Posted: Tue Nov 16, 2004 1:06 pm Post subject:

creed wrote:
so it doesnt really offer too much once you get right down to it

Actually it does, for those who have Sun systems they are no longer required to purchase license upgrades every time they add CPUs. Yes in fact the 1-2 CPU license has been free for a long time. For those in this category there is really no difference. Here is where the big difference comes into play; if I have a 14 CPU e4500 for sale and I have a customer that would like to buy it and maintain it they would have to purchase a license. Previous Solaris OS licenses did not transfer, so now I can sell a system without having to worry about a fee for the license and it makes the gear more profitable in the used market. A lot of loyal Sun customers were getting screwed on the back end when they tried to sell there older systems. Basically you would have hardware worth 2k- 3k and a license fee 3 times that. My experience in the leasing business has been that over a period of time the Sun equipment has gone from a must have, to a must stay away from. I hope this decision changes the general mentality of the industry... Very Happy

/1f1

Posted: Tue Nov 16, 2004 1:12 pm Post subject:

ok now that explains it much better. although i still dont know of any reason why id' want a 14 processor system, much less a sun. to me it's like macs, more expensive to do the same focuntion as a PC.

I speak from a almost total ignorance of SUn's server products though, so that is probably where the performance really lies

Posted: Tue Nov 16, 2004 2:39 pm Post subject:

It is an interesting development. I think fast1 has clue here, and I also think Sun is working on promotion of the OS. Everyone knows Linux because they can download it to the spare PC. And they learn it because it Is Not The Other. Here is a chance to learn, legally, a good OS, actually a great one, and on used equipment too. Suits Sun well, suits the investment in the community too. Not a bad move, and someone taught Schwartz a thing or two, good luck to them.

Posted: Tue Nov 16, 2004 3:26 pm Post subject:

it will definitely be interesting to see how things play out. afaik, AIX, UnixWare (Novell's Unix??), and whatever SCO's Unix is are still pay for, along with a host of hobby OSes like Yellotab's Zeta, SkyOS, etc.

the only problem i have with another free OS is its will most likely make it harder for driver developers to pick a platform and stick with it. perhaps this is what M$ has up their sleeves. dilute the free (as in beer and speech) market so that nothing ever gets done and the development effort is spread so thin that projects stagnate and die out one by one.

what license is this being distributed under? can anyone fork of Solaris and start their own project or is it one of those you-can-only-contribute-code-back-to-the-parent-company opensource licenses (which effectively get people to do their work for free). if it's GPL compatible, i'm sure it would be nice to move bits of Solaris into Linux or other GPL'd software

Moderator Joined: 26 May 2001 Posts: 8155 Location: Borneo

creed wrote:
csign wrote:
It has one great feature. If that works it will be great

sorry for being ignorant, but what is that one feature that owuld make me choose it over others(apart from being free)

dtrace

And hohlecow, Unixware is SCO too

Stray Dog Joined: 09 Nov 2000 Posts: 58 Location: USA

Having seen the LWD frontpage link to Sun's news release on Free Solaris 10, and then reading Sun's article on Lxrun ("... an emulator for executing Intel and ELF linux binaries on .... Intel x86...") at:
http://developers.sun.com/solaris/articles/lxrun/
can anyone comment on how well one can run linux programs and X-window managers (I'm partial to KDE) under Solaris 10? Also, is there a performance penalty for Lxrun compared to running linux apps natively?

I've never tried any Solaris, is there any compelling reason to run it vs a solid linux distro?

Thanks.