So among your alternatives, I’d say that right now, they’re _not_ selling the
OS (at least for smaller systems), but to some degree or another, they’re doing
all the rest.

They did sell the OS at one time; but that was probably more than 10 years
ago.

IMO where their history is mixed is in effectively _communicating_ what they’re
doing. I _think_ they’ve gotten the message that even if big iron is where the
big markups are, that desktops and universities are the mindshare that
provides tomorrow’s customers; there’s certainly been a lot of improvements
on that front. That doesn’t preclude them from doing silly things in the future,
but since there were alternative distros not long after they opened up
enough of the code. Now, there’s even at least one that at least aspires to
being commercial (the unlimited version of Nexenta). So at least on x86,
development needn’t strictly depend on Sun, although I think they’d have
to stray pretty far before it would be practical for someone else to try to fork.

As a user, I strongly disagree with your earlier statement “Quality issues
shouldn’t be a problem if there is no support for device today.” Even
on a mere home desktop (nothing compared to a multimillion dollar
financial institution, or a nuclear power plant), I may be doing enough
different things at once in terms of home infrastructure and my own
services, that I’d want at least a clear distinction between what was
near or at production quality, and what wasn’t (or wasn’t known to be).

There has been recent discussion about different levels of hoop-jumping
corresponding to different levels of integration vs aggregation, or support,
or whatever, possibly even to be reflected in the eventual repositories,
so that one could distguish between supported/unsupported or stable/unstable. It’ll doubtless take awhile for everyone to agree on
the taxonomy and procedural changes, but the mere fact that it’s being
discussed means that people know that a single track process can’t
be responsive to a range of different expectations. And I think that’s
bound to extend from integration or aggregation process on one end, to
which packages in a repository are or aren’t eligible for support on the other
end.

Another point is that it’s not all Sun folks supporting bureaucracy and
all external folks wanting everything to happen faster and easier. There
are a number of external folks, who, while they might want some minor
changes, are at least as conservatively inclined as any of the Sun folks,
having used Solaris since the days when it did have a quality problem.
I fall in that category, and I know I’m not alone.

Finally, I was looking at some pages that give history on Sun’s quality
obsession with Solaris, and I just realized something: this isn’t about
building a new community, nor about corporate vs organic, it’s about an almost-open-borders policy being applied to an existing sizable but very
tight-knit community with an established set of values. Inevitably the
immigrants will be at a disadvantage until they understand the language,
and that the existing values have worked well enough to build something
they want to come to, and have no less reason for being there than those
that they bring with them.

You may very well be right. However, while I can certainly see Sun very clearly under-investing and over-marketing its Open Source development efforts, I don’t have proof one way or another whether it was born of malice or incompetence. So I was giving the benefit of the doubt by applying Hanlon’s Razor: “Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity. ”

What Sun’s motives are doesn’t really matter all that much, though. What’s more important that people understand that net result is that Open Solaris doesn’t have most of the advantages that a project which has a broad and diverse open source development community. If it makes people feel good because it just happens to be released under an open source license, well people are entitled to their illusions. Just having an open source license doesn’t mean much, though, if there isn’t a development community to go with it — and that community is getting strangled by Sun’s control freak issues.

I actually disagree Ted - I don’t think it’s “trying” - it’s a conscious investment decision to under-invest but over-market and oversell a “nice” story publicly without really leveraging a distributed development investment model or giving up any control. I think you were subtly implying a similar point, but thought I’d an my view…

To be fair, Project Indiana is supposed to solve the packaging problem, and the reviews that I’ve read seems like it is trying to create an “Ubuntu-like” desktop and packaging experience for Solaris. I’m not sure why it would be superior to a Linux desktop, and Solaris still suffers from the problem that (as you’ve pointed out) most open source programs are tested in Linux and less likely to be tested on Solaris, and thus it might not even compile on Solaris without modification. (I remember when the default was that most sources downloaded from the Internet or Usenet worked on SunOS by default, and it was a crapshoot whether it worked on HPUX or Ultrix; my, how times have changed. That’s fundamentally a network effect, and simply being “just as good” as Linux isn’t necessarily going to help Solaris win over new users.

So Sun is trying. Whether they are trying hard enough, or enough to matter, only time will tell.

What I’ve found is that absolutely nothing has changed since Bryan Cantrill’s mail posting from twelve years ago. Whilst amusing, it was painfully obvious that Bryan didn’t have the faintest idea how to reply, and that’s the way things are. Within Sun there is still a strange mindset that, regardless of anything that gets discussed, Linux is merely an upgrade path to a mature OS in Solaris, and even now, x86 is merely a stopover on your way to proper SPARC hardware. I’ve experienced this kind of attitude with Sun before over things like Cobalt and their previous forays with x86 servers, and it makes me and a lot of other people distrustful of them still. It gets even weirder when you realise that Sun is selling a reasonable amount of x86 based machines, which are sales they would have once lost, and about three quarters of those servers they sell are running Linux, even though that has saved them from ever decreasing revenue and profit.

As for OpenSolaris, I just cannot for the life of me understand what’s going on there. It’s said that Sun wanted a community of application developers and what they got was a kernel hacker community. From where I sit, I can’t see that they have got either of those two things, and won’t get them in a month of Sundays. If you’re getting 0.6 patches per day, and it takes forever to commit a patch to anything, then you don’t have a kernel development community. As for an application developer community, it was obvious Sun needed one years ago. Linux users are spoilt with apt, yum, yast and various other package management tools that allow them to upgrade and patch systems quickly and easily, and install software quickly and easily. Doing that on Solaris, still, is an exceedingly painful process, and much of the software you will build on Solaris is open source software designed for a GNU toolchain. Even now, getting a GNU toolchain on a Solaris system is like smashing stones for blood (/usr/sfw/bin looks the same now as it did years ago), and you’re doing all that to install software that can be put on to your average Linux distribution in a few minutes maximum. The logical answer is probably not to try.

I can’t understand the OpenSolaris trademark thing. Sun have a site called OpenSolaris, but you can’t call the derivative OpenSolaris? What the hell is that all about? It’s like rearranging deckchairs on the Titanic while the band plays some ragtime tunes. I’m not going to try and understand it in all honesty.

The thing is, if Sun is serious about Solaris surviving then it needs an application and a kernel developer community - especially an application developer community. They desperately need a sane packaging system of some sort so that a wide variety of open source software can be installed, tested and generally supported. Particularly in academia, this is what has made a lot of people just plain dump a lot of expensive SPARC and Solaris systems for x86 and Linux. It’s cheaper to switch than troubleshoot. If you install MySQL, Postgres, Python or something else on a Linux based system, the simple fact is that it is far, far better supported there in terms of people testing and documentation than Solaris. Ahhh, documentation. Have you tried to find anything on Sun’s site?

Case in point. In a university a few years ago some pretty serious threading issues were encountered when running Python and Zope on a Solaris and multi-processor SPARC platform where requests would be served one at a time. Now, in a community setting where source code is open throughout the stack, that kind of problem could be troubleshooted in a collaborative manner rather than in the dark. As it was, Sun isn’t interested in Solaris running Zope, Python or indeed a great deal of open source or other software well, the wider community simply weren’t interested in troubleshooting a closed source system (probably because the people writing the software don’t run it), and it was cheaper to move to x86 and Linux.

If you’re laughing at the name Slowlaris, you don’t know the half of it.

In terms of the kernel developer community, it seems as though an edict has come down from JS about making Solaris open source, but the people implementing it are not motivated to make it work nor do they see any benefit. In reality, Sun needs a kernel hacker community if they want Solaris to be relevant or survive. Maintaining an operating system, a kernel and a bunch of drivers is an expensive thing to do. Devices exist from high-end servers to low-end NAS systems, and the fact is that only Linux can bridge the gap between them today. It’s a huge ask for a proprietary system, or a proprietary system trying to become an open one, to do that. Even AIX will probably get consumed by Linux at some point, as Linux becomes cheaper to maintain and port to newer architectures. Mind you, if Sun truly did what they say they would with OpenSolaris then it’s entirely possible that many companies could provide cheaper support for Solaris than Sun!

As it is, Solaris still takes hour after hour to install, it takes an absolute age to boot up, you don’t get a decent set of modern userland tools, you don’t have a toolchain that will compile and install most open source software, you don’t get a sane package management system, installing software over multiple systems is a nightmare, you don’t get virtual terminals……. The list is endless. All OpenSolaris can possibly hope to do is get Solaris into a reasonable state for people to download and use, solving the problems that Linux distributions (and BSDs) solved years and years ago - using much of the same software and replicating a lot of functionality.

Given that Sun are obviously calling the shots over OpenSolaris’ direction and its governance, I cannot see why any open source developer in his/her right mind would want to contribute anything (not just code) to OpenSolaris or what they would gain. There is an implied reciprocation that something will be given back when an individual contributes something to a project, and that just isn’t there with OpenSolaris. Goodness. Even the name is a problem before you’ve even got to any source code.

I’m well aware that Benchmarketing is definitely left to the experts — because they can come up with results that have nothing to do with reality, never mind customers trying to make a dollars-and-cents decision. I’ve talked to a number of customers who were quite serious about Solaris being slower than Linux on their workloads. I’ve even participated in head-to-head benchmarking wars where I helped tune Linux systems to beat out Solaris on-site at a customer (this is where both Sun and IBM had teams on-site and usually a fixed time to deliver a better performance and/or better price performance on a customer workload). And yes, there are workloads where Linux did lose out, but they generally tended to be on the higher end machines — and more often than not, it was because Solaris had done finer grained locking than Linux had in some particular system call or VM code path. (And as we all know, finer grained locking penalizes you on uniprocessor and small SMP boxes, but is critical for performance on large SMP boxes; see again my observation about how the traditional Unix systems tend to optimize for the manufacturer’s higher margin boxes, even if it penalizes the low-end.)

You didn’t say Solaris has a better desktop environment? OK, so why do you think Solaris is “a more stable, easily managed desktop environment”? Especially in terms of “easily managed”, once you get to Project Indiana, both Linux and Solaris are using mostly the same upper-layer desktop software stack, so I’m not sure where you get “more easily managed” from. I’m just curious to hear where you think Linux could be improved.