[ug-bosug] Sun hopes for Linux-like Solaris

[Sriram Narayanan]

On 5/10/07, Manish Chakravarty <manishchaks at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hello Everyone,
>
> There's an interesting article on ZDNet:
> http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/software/soa/-Sun-hopes-for-Linux-like-Solaris/0,130061733,339276057,00.htm
>
> titled "Sun hopes for linux-like Solaris"
>
>
> There is one para which says
> "Linux and Solaris are cousins that stem from the same Unix heritage, if
> not from the same source code. But Linux fans simply have a hard time
> trying Solaris, Murdock said on Tuesday."
>

I attended this particular talk, and quite a few of the tech crowd in
the audience felt that his talk lacked content. I actually intend to
write a well thought out mail to him about this. Hsi talk was titled
"What is a Linux guy doing at Sun ?". The few good points that he did
make were:

a) Linux has POSIX extensions. Solaris believes on strict POSIX
compliance (which is a good thing according to him as well as those of
us who love standards compliance).

b) The Linux installers are user friendly now-a-days, where as the
Solaris 10 installer is not. He showed screenshots of the time zone
selector in Redhat Linux and on Solaris. The difference in user
experience was apparent.

c) He pointed out that making Solaris Linux like would be an
interesting problem to solve because on the one hand we'd want POSIX
compliance and stability that Solaris provides, while on the other
hand, we also want to use all those fancy apps that are released in
the Linux world but which make use of POSIX extensions. He proposed
zones as a possible solution to address this requirement.

d) He stated that he liked Sun's committment to gradually let go of
ownership of OpenSolaris, and cited a recent event where Sun
management was talking about releasin OpenSolaris under the GPL, and
the community folks responded with a "No.". He asked us to consider
whether the Fedora community would ever be able to interact the same
way with Redhat.

But apart from all this, his talk was mostly content free. This was
the feeling of a majority of the audience and we were all talking
about this in the hall as well as out of it. I've said this before and
I'll say it again, simply because Ian Murdock represents a lot of
Linux culture, heritage and thinking. Much is expected from a person
of his stature and accommplishment. I, for one, was shocked that he
didn't even mention either Belenix or Schillix or Martux. All that he
mentioned were SXCR and Nexenta. Loyalties to Belenix apart, I have
felt as a Belenix end user and tester, that Belenix gives a quick
start into OpenSolaris like no other distro. Even Linux distros for
that matter - they all take longer to start on my laptop in LiveCD
mode, have been put together by much larger groups of people, and are
released after much longer periods of development.

If anything, I actually came away feeling very proud of Belenix and
the BOSUG, and am filled with lots of ideas of concrete action plans.
More on that in another post.

-- Sriram