[advocacy-discuss] "What is OpenSolaris" page

[Laurent Blume]

John Levon a écrit :
> I'm genuinely confused: what parts of the OpenSolaris don't make Solaris
> a better Solaris? Which features are retrograde steps?

It's targeted officially at desktop, servers, HPC. And it has a
*6-months* expected life, 18 months support. This is a Linux timeframe,
not a Solaris one.
My last Solaris 2.5.1 servers went out of commission last year.

I know I've asked for a faster release of some new features, for
*desktop*, and there, it's obviously going forward. Not knowing what an
OS will look like only one year from now doesn't quite fit with my
expectations. OpenSolaris is a mutating thing, evolving very fast, by
design.
Nothing wrong with that per se, but don't try to convince me it's
Solaris. By definition, it doesn't fit with Solaris' image.

The complete inability to upgrade from Solaris. How can it be a better
Solaris, when it can't even upgrade one?
Hopefully it *will* be, one day (and Alan Coopersmith's recent post on
the Solaris x86 m/l shows how that may come to be). But right now, it's
just something else, a mix of flavours, GNUish, Linuxish, Solarisish,
still striving to find its own identity.

Don't take me wrong, I'm not saying it's not useful, and won't introduce
good things. I just can't see the path. For all its proclaimed
transparency, Sun isn't clear about it so far.

Laurent
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