Archive for the 'Solaris' Category
Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008
Ted Ts’o Dissects “What Sun was trying to do with OpenSolaris”
Ted put together a great set of insights into what Sun may have been up to with OpenSolaris. Ted has a great way of cutting through the marketing BS and gets right to the heart of what’s going on. Obviously I completely agree with him on a few issues. Do any of these sound familiar? I think I’ve covered some of this before here, and here, and here.
From Ted:
So that explains why it’s take three long years to try to get basic open source development tools (such as putting Open Solaris source code in a distributed SCM located outside of the Sun firewall) for Open Solaris. It was never was Sun’s intention to try to promote a kernel engineering community, or at least, it was certainly not a high priority for them to do so.
So if you run into a Sun salescritter or a Sun CEO claiming that OpenSolaris is just like Linux, it’s not. Fundamentally, Open Solaris has been released under a Open Source license, but it is not an Open Source development community.
I find it unbelievable Sun’s executives still forge ahead as though there are no issues - this was a half baked plan when it launched and unfortunately Sun has to cut costs and can’t invest what’s required to do this right (not to mention Sun also made some big mistakes - anyone using the CDDL?). In the meantime, Sun and its investors have missed out on the huge Linux boom that quite honestly… Sun was best positioned to take advantage of. Oops…
Jonathan, what community are you looking at - where is it? Please show me. (I’m sure your shareholders would be interested too.
Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008
Ubuntu 8.04 “Hardy Heron” arrives tomorrow
Unless you’ve been without internet access for days, you should know by now that Ubuntu’s next release is due tomorrow and that is always an exciting time. So fire up your fastest mirror tomorrow and see how much bandwidth you can grab before a billion others do the same ;)
I really like the direction Mark is taking with Ubuntu on the server. One, it offers a competing model for the industry compared to the RHEL/SLES model, two Ubuntu is pushing the technology further (e.g. KVM) and making it very easy for users to adopt (ala Microsoft Windows), and finally, it’s one platform that does well in many circles from desktop to server (ala Windows). So while Red Hat, Novell and Oracle fight over what’s left of Sun’s Solaris install base and grab some of the Windows opportunity, Ubuntu is driving straight into the Windows Vista SP1 Party with a fresh alternative. Now let’s just get those “Apple-like” Ubuntu systems we need with all the Adobe apps on them ;-)
Ubuntu article: http://www.linuxworld.com/news/2008/042108-ubuntu-linux-takes-on-enterprise.html?page=1
P.S. I claim absolutely no insight into what amount of sheer stupidity or drunkenness led to that Microsoft video link. I think sogrady said it best with just, “words fail me”.
Thursday, April 3rd, 2008
Are April Fools’ posts for fools? Are you fooled? I pity the fool
Ask a good IP lawyer you know whether Jonathan *could* do this if he suddenly wanted to… ask your IP savvy lawyer to read the Solaris 10 license, then the Contributor Agreement, patents that could cover Solaris and explain to you what IP a vendor could still control or use against you if you were to start making OpenSPARC chips, ship Solaris around the world, etc… You may also look at what Solaris products you actually might use on a server… and the IP/licenses associated there. Have you seen anyone benchmarking Solaris 10 and publishing results online? Oh, that’s right, it’s not allowed (See the post from emantion near the end). Was that a surprise to you considering all the “open” messaging you may be hearing? Did you confuse OpenSolaris with Solaris 10?
Then consider that while the CDDL isn’t too bad, it was intentionally developed to be incompatible with the GPL and the only open source OS to really matter, the Linux kernel. (Sorry BSD guys… I know… you’re hurt, but … sorry) Once you have an answer from your astute lawyer, I’d ask, would having all that power and control in one vendor concern you? Could they take it away?
http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/a_new_strategy
I pity the fool.
Now ask your lawyer to read the GPL license that comes with RHEL, Debian, Ubuntu, Asianux, OEL or SLES (ignoring MSFT/Novell for the moment). Simpler? Want to post a benchmark comparing any Linux distro’s performance? Go right ahead. Can any 1 vendor stop you? No…
Continuing this line of thought, now look at where all the other industry vendors participating in mass open source collaboration are heavily investing right now, today, and tomorrow. You can read about this over at the Linux Foundation (yes, the second plug for this fine work). Or you can look at Apache or even one that surprises me daily, Eclipse.
http://www.linux-foundation.org/publications/linuxkerneldevelopment.php
And some actually are still surprised that Red Hat keeps growing amid pointed attacks from Sun, Microsoft, and Oracle? “First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win.”
Winning was just the next step ;-) Congratulations Red Hat, Novell, Debian, and Ubuntu.
Sunday, March 30th, 2008
Microsoft Windows 7 going to look a lot like Linux?
It seems like Sun and Microsoft, for all their anti-Linux crusading are both sending strong signals that their OS’s will in the future look a lot more like Linux…
“First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”
Monday, March 10th, 2008
NVIDIA Quadro Driver runs fastest on… Linux? What, not Windows??
It’s true, the NVIDIA graphics driver for Linux appears to best Windows and Solaris - and by a wide margin. I think the “Linux support” issue can be somewhat put to bed finally - except for ease of updating with kernel revs… now that is usually a pain still. I am somewhat amazed at how strongly Windows secured a last place finish… I wonder how much is due to the driver and how much to the OS…
By the way, if you’re wondering how a company got away with comparing performance with Solaris (which is not allowed per the Solaris license), you should note that they used the Solaris Express Developer Edition which I can only assume does not have the clause preventing non-Sun licensed parties from publishing Solaris performance results (I have not read that license myself, but am guessing Phoronix did - or they secured permission from Sun…).
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=nvidia_workstation_perf&num=1
Thursday, February 21st, 2008
Stephen O’Grady covers the OpenSolaris debate
A must read. I can’t say I’m entirely surprised by the balanced view Stephen posted this evening - it’s O’Grady at his best. I am a bit surprised he weighed in at all though - as he put it, there are a few things he’d rather do “Including having a few of my fingernails pulled out.”
Despite the painful picture that portrays, I’d recommend his post as a very well articulated and valuable Q&A to read if you’re interested in the topic. Sometimes the best work is the hardest… but I’m already brainwashed in Linux myself so it comes easy to me ;-)
Friday, February 15th, 2008
Emily Ratliff covers Roy Fielding’s Departure from OpenSolaris
I love feed technologies - I just saw Emily posted on Roy Fielding’s departure from OpenSolaris. She made one point that I had to chuckle over:
To date, Sun has received 578 patches[4], which represents a rate of 0.6 patches a day (first patch dated 6/17/05, there were some earlier undated contributions). Linus gets more patches while he is brushing his teeth than OpenSolaris gets in a week.
And one that just really irked me about just how messed up Sun has been on its approach to building a Linux-like community:
For me, the realization that Sun just doesn’t get it, and never will, was crystallized the day I was turned away from an OpenSolaris Users’ Group meeting for refusing to sign an NDA.
Perhaps I should have applied for a job at Sun and tried to fix it myself. However, I think this strategy starts at the top and so Sun would have to offer me a very high position to fix this big of a mess.
Thursday, February 14th, 2008
“I told you so” in order? Roy Fielding resigns from OpenSolaris
http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/ogb-discuss/2008-February/004488.html
In my opinion, Roy came up short in fully describing the issue, but he did a great job focusing on the thread at hand regarding OpenSolaris and trademark. The fact is, Sun is not an open source community or development player. Sun wants all the benefits of saying it’s all about open and freedom, yet, Sun does something completely different. Nearly 3 years into OpenSolaris, the development is still behind the firewall inside Sun. Nearly 3 years into OpenSolaris, open source community developers would have to get Sun engineers to agree to accept code. Nearly 3 years into OpenSolaris, developers have to contribute copyright co-ownership to the corporation, Sun, in order to contribute to OpenSolaris. Nearly 3 years into OpenSolaris, there are still essential parts of the Solaris OS that are still not opened under a free license (they call it the OpenSolaris Binary License… aka proprietary). I could go on and on… but let me refer to Roy’s view below.
Will Ian be next to resign? I can’t believe he really believes this is the right execution of what sounded like an “open” strategy 2 years ago… I knew better, but many fell for the bedtime story that sounded sweet. Some will still argue that Sun’s great, open, etc., but they’re brainwashed; anyone who really knows what’s going on should not be fooled at this point in the game. “Open”Solaris is an OS that is created by 1 company, with no outside input or control and has a code repo on opensolaris.org… besides that, what has it done to contribute or help any community of users?
Some choice quotes:
Sun didn’t just make vague statements to me about OpenSolaris; they made promises about it being an open development project. That’s the only way they could get someone like me to provide free labor for their benefit. Given Sun’s recent track record on breaking promises, another one doesn’t surprise me at all.
…
Most of the stuff in that letter about Sun’s responsibilities in
regard to “International Trademark Law” is nothing more than
snow being tossed in the eyes of technical folks who don’t have
access to their own lawyers.
…
In fact, if it weren’t for the extremely pig-headed way in which Indiana was thrust on the community as Ian’s private domain, it could have easily been a unifying path for
all of the distros. It could have given them a gate within OpenSolaris in which to collaborate, instead of doing all of their work in separate communities outside OpenSolaris.Indiana is just another private marketing team within Sun that is making private decisions about “OpenSolaris” that aren’t even in line with the internal processes of Solaris Engineering, let alone the published governance model of the OGB.
…
Sun agreed that “OpenSolaris” would be governed by the community and yet has refused, in every step along the way, to cede any real control over the software produced or the way it is produced, and continues to make private decisions every day that are later promoted as decisions for this thing we call OpenSolaris. Rather than be honest about it and restructure the community to correspond to this MySolaris style of over-the-wall development, Sun prefers to lie to the external community members while ignoring their input.
…
This well is poisoned; the company has consumed its own future and any pretense that the projects will ever govern themselves (as opposed to being governed by whatever pointy-haired boss is hiding behind the scenes) is now a joke.
…
There’s nothing particularly wrong with that choice — it is a perfectly valid open source model for corporations that don’t need active community participation. IMO, the resulting code tends to suck a lot more than community-driven projects, but it is still open source.
In any case, I am done with it. I hereby resign my status as a Member of the OpenSolaris Community, effective immediately.
Monday, January 21st, 2008
An interesting follow-on commentary to my Linux and OpenSolaris post
I found this post interesting and if you can read Spanish, I encourage you to check it out. While it appears Sergio disagrees with me on economics driving participation (and hey, disagreement is allowed), you can see he then builds off my argument by offering four constructive rules to building an open, developer community. I liked his post and encourage you to check it out. It seems Sergio would also agree with Mark Shuttleworth from Ubuntu on the structure that drives participation.
http://www.lapastillaroja.net/archives/001454.html
El caso es que una licencia libre es condición necesaria pero no suficiente para crear una Comunidad. La licencia es como la ley, pero luego viene el reglamento, que, para que se forme una Comunidad requiere:
Friday, January 18th, 2008
Mike Strosaker Takes on Sun’s Predictive Self Healing Claims
Mike Strosaker has a couple points to make about Sun’s claims of predictive self healing relative to Linux. One thing I’ve noticed is that Sun (and Microsoft) always compare one of their features to Linux on Intel/AMD and ignore the capabilities of Linux on Power, Itanium or Mainframe platforms (which, btw are growing faster than Linux on x86). It’s time to wakeup and realize that Linux runs anywhere and takes on the capabilities of the hardware platform.
Check it out Mike’s comparison here for the details: http://zombieprocess.wordpress.com/2008/01/10/predictive-self-healing-on-linux-on-power/
Sun frequently touts their “predictive self-healing” implementation in Solaris 10. I wonder if that bullet point would be further down the list if they were familiar with the error detection, prediction, and correction capabilities of Linux on POWER platforms. In fact, the Linux on POWER implementation precedes the Solaris 10 implementation by at least a year (Solaris 10 was released in January 2005; SLES 8 had this solution for POWER in 2003, and RHEL 3 had it in 2004 at the latest).
Friday, December 7th, 2007
Comparing “open source” projects? Start by asking why does the project exist.
I’ve thus far made no mention of OpenDS and the wildfire reporting that has ensued, but there was one aspect of this situation I commented on to Stephen O’Grady and others on #redmonk when it came out that bugged me. It was a question: “how did it ever get to this point?”. How does a company - a profit seeking company, not a wild tongued developer - even get into an OpenDS situation? I believe the answer is that many people have wrongly assumed that the label “open source” indicates a project is disentangled from corporate affairs. Let me explain.
It’s not my place to determine whether any of the current buzz words today that mingle corporate led open code projects under various licensing and governance constructs are “right” or “wrong”, but I do have a strong opinion that the independent open source projects often have a leg up in building communities, participation, and multi-vendor investment (and often that’s their goal). I also think it’s foolish to expect any single company, commercially led project should behave in any manner other than a commercial business driven by stockholders would. I’m not defending or accusing Sun or any of the OpenDS developers; I’m focusing instead on what fundamental misunderstandings of “open source” may have led to all the hype that’s ensued.
I’ll start by saying I believe the “open” in “open source” projects is not well defined consistently and so confusion abounds when people compare “open source” X project to “open source” Y project. The compare is flawed in that each project may have a completely different reason for existence. Commercially run open source projects are inherently different from non-corporate, multi-vendor, open collaboration projects. That does not mean one is more “evil”, “good” or “bad” but rather that they’re apples and oranges. However, for whatever reason, the ability to view code has led to people lumping them together in the same classification called “open source”.
Linux and OpenSolaris are so different, I cringe whenever I hear people compare them (and yet I get dragged into doing comparisons myself to prove it’s not proper). It’s not that any one approach is by definition right or wrong - they have different reasons for existence. I do believe strongly that “Linux” is a great approach for its community’s goals - but Linux starts with a community, not a vendor’s goals. And so it becomes an issue when you compare a commercially driven project to a community led project - the reason for their existence is entirely different. There are different situations and goals that warrant a different project governance, control, license, and decision making construct for these projects.
Look at Eclipse. For full disclosure, I work at IBM. I’ve also only been at IBM since 2005 so Eclipse “happened” before my time. While Eclipse’ roots trace back to IBM, I don’t believe IBM had a single product that used Eclipse when it was “open sourced”. Some intelligent visionaries at IBM saw that the world needed an extensible IDE and platform for building out the next generation of desktop applications. Eventually Eclipse added Eclipse RCP and today IBM has Lotus Notes, Symphony, Rational, WebSphere and probably other Tivoli and IM tools and products built on Eclipse. Adobe, BEA, Borland, Oracle, SAP (competitors) are all “Strategic Members” of Eclipse and all have products that use Eclipse code (as do many other commercial software vendors). Did IBM intend to make money on Eclipse itself or intend to help its software competitors with code?
What was IBM’s goal then? Could it have been to disrupt the status quo, to change the landscape, foster open standards, build an ecosystem of investors, and ultimately move the industry forward? (something even a vendor as large as IBM could not do alone) I think we all know the answer to that. Just look at the results: a huge membership of Eclipse.org - look at how many of these for profit companies are using Eclipse in their own products. Could Eclipse’ structure be anything other that what it is to have the same impact? I don’t believe so.
Very few Eclipse “members” actually make money on selling the Eclipse code itself - they generate revenue using Eclipse in their products and extensions of the code. These members also reduce cost through collaborative, community based shared development. There are economic drivers and business value moving Eclipse forward. The revenue has moved from selling the IDE or RCP code to selling ancillary products/services leveraging and extending the code. What part of Eclipse Foundation does IBM own and control at Eclipse.org? Answer: None. How many times does “IBM” appear in the Eclipse Foundation Governance Bylaws? Answer: 0. With this independence, the Eclipse community has chosen Eclipse’ future, moving towards the needs of member users, towards innovative new developments, and ultimately has created a very malleable, extensible codebase upon with hundreds (maybe thousands) of products rely - whether IBM liked it or not.
It amuses me to see the OpenSolaris community now in a riff over Sun naming the Project Indiana OpenSolaris distro… well… OpenSolaris (second time’s a charm?). As a corporate company can decide, Sun has chosen to own and control all of the copyright and trademark IP, the Solaris architecture decisions, governance appears to “report” to Sun, Even the OpenSolaris community’s “Constitution” mentions Sun Microsystems, Inc. and is marked with a Sun copyright at the bottom. Sun employees hold 6 out of the 7 Governance Board seats, and all of the opensolaris.org infrastructure is owned and managed by Sun. Anyone who does contribute code must first sign over copyright to Sun, the company. This is not “like Linux” at all and it irks me when people compare them as if they’re similar products that should be compared.
So what standing does any “community member” have to tell Sun not to name Project Indiana what Sun wants to name it? This is not a “Foundation” or independent not for profit project. Sun is ultimately in this to make money on the productization of Solaris (why… after two years are there no competing commercial *Solaris distros as we see with Red Hat, Novell, Oracle, Ubuntu, etc?). The only group with standing to tell Sun what to do is Sun’s stockholders. It could only have been delusion or sheer blindness that led some community members to overlook that OpenSolaris has a different reason for existence and hence differing goals and mission as something like Linux. You cannot and should not compare them and you absolutely should not assume one “should be” like the other.
Look at the results. Start with how many people have contributed code to OpenSolaris (and look at what they’re contributing if you have time). OpenSolaris is Sun’s own project - I can confidently state there is no outside development of any significant substance directing the architecture of Solaris / OpenSolaris different from what Sun the company would have done anyway. Two “community developers” (Juergen Keil and Richard Lowe) account for nearly 40% of all accepted contributions - just two developers. Only 84 developers have contributed anything at all - ever (including small typos fixes, accepted or not). Outside contributors must have a Sun employee review, approve and integrate their code. And after two years, it seems some are starting to just realize, this Sun controlled model may not be the best approach. Those who do suddenly “wake up” have been relying on a false assumption. They assume OpenSolaris exists for them or should be like Linux or some other “open source” project they know about - and the reality is, it never was. It’s all about Sun’s stockholders.
What about Linux? There are approximately 2,000 Linux kernel contributors to each release alone (this does not include the massive work going on above the kernel). Looking at the commercial contributors to Linux, you will find a “who’s who” of IT and electronics vendors (also take a look at the LF membership). With Linux, copyright of the Linux kernel code is retained solely by the authors, there are many non-profit foundations supporting the components of a Linux distribution, and because decision making is merit based by community members, no one company controls (or stops) what goes in. Step back to the start of Linux and it’s obvious the intent for this project’s existence was very different than Sun had for OpenSolaris.
So returning to the subject of the post, I have come to the conclusion that much of the “open source” hype and “hurt feelings” are rooted in fundamental confusion about what “open source” means especially in single-vendor led and controlled projects. The only reason anyone should be surprised by anything Sun does with OpenSolaris, OpenDS, or any of the other Sun open source projects it controls, is because that person has fundamentally created an expectation that access to source code meant more than just that - and that is a flawed assumption.
Commercially led projects are created for commercial reasons. “Community members” should not force their own expectations on these projects or they’re likely to see disappointment, frustrations, and unnecessary hype when the company does something counter to what is expected. The same holds true for other companies as well, including IBM. Consider this Q&A about commercial project expectations from Stephen O’Grady back in June:
Q: Do you think that this Open Commercial Development represents an ideal hybrid of open source and commercial development philosophies?
A: It all depends on your expectations. If the idea is that some of the benefits of open source - be they community QA and bug reporting, feature suggestions, and so on - will be realized via this model, then yes. If the intent, however, is to build a vibrant, open source style community, a la Eclipse, then the answer is no, it isn’t.
It all starts with having the right expectation. Is Sun at fault on anything with OpenDS or OpenSolaris? Hey, no one’s perfect, but who can know for sure? Some may point to poor communication of its intent and goals for the projects (and improper comparisons to Linux). Too often I see Sun executives trying to position OpenSolaris as “like Linux”, but those who do research and homework, will likely understand the reality the hype-driving-community often ignores. Is this the “holy grail”, “silver bullet” answer to squash the hype? Absolutely not; communities will speculate forever. However, it’s easier to stay out of the hype if your message is consistent and clear.
You might be wondering what kicked off this massive post today? The answer is odd, but it was a quote from Bruce Perens in an El Reg article. In case any of the above post left my position to question, I agree with Bruce and this quote seems a great place to end.
“In general open source is only going to work if you let it be a community led project. Sun has had a hard time learning this, and some of their open source projects have had a hard time getting outside contributors, because Sun has insisted on owning the whole thing,” Perens said.
Thursday, August 23rd, 2007
Linux user community growing by “orders of magnitude” is a problem, says Sun…
http://www.cio.in/news/viewArticle/ARTICLEID=3589
“Over the last five or 10 years, orders of magnitude more people in the world know Linux environment than know Solaris. This is a problem,” said Ian Murdock…
Why again is this a problem? (Update: please also see the comments, where Ian points out, “I said it’s a problem for Solaris adoption, not that it’s a problem in itself.”)
It’s great to see Linux growing - a real challenge to Microsoft even - it’s only a problem when you’re hanging onto a legacy platform… not sure I can agree ;-) Just think of where Windows would be had Linux never happened… I doubt anyone would argue that without Linux, Solaris would have posed just as much a threat…
After all this time, Sun still has not figured out how to leverage Linux rather than just try to kill it… what a lost opportunity - not to mention, a disservice to shareholders. At least Marc Hamilton, Sun vice president of marketing for the Solaris group, is able to recognize where the growth is:
Also during the meeting, Hamilton said the company continues to see rapid adoption of Intel servers running Linux.
Thursday, August 16th, 2007
The Register: “IBM embraces - wtf - Sun’s Solaris across x86 server line”
Guess even IBM can surprise people at times. A lot of people at Sun and IBM put a lot of hard work into this and should be commended for what was not a clear path at times ;-)
As expected a number of people have overplayed the significance (flame wars abound I’m sure), but once the dust settles, things should be clearer. And also remember, this support is not entirely “new” (check out the date).
I’ll link to El Reg simply because Ashlee as usual made me laugh:
http://www.theregister.com/2007/08/16/sun_ibm_solarisx86/
Oh, and one last thing: Solaris is a binary operating system that comes with a commercial license so please remember that when some people misinterpret Solaris to be some open source activity.
Tuesday, July 24th, 2007
Enterprise Linux Log: “OpenSolaris users group to Ian Murdock, Sun: You’re missing the point”
If you watch my space here regularly, you probably would not be surprised that I find community reactions to something like this both interesting study and at the same time amusing. Jack Loftus wrote the article but it seems another colleague of his was in attendance. I was in attendance at this meeting as well (yes, shocking I know - my first one… and probably last). What I witnessed was in-line with what the article describes. In all fairness to the “Solaris camp”, it’s hard to see what value a Project Indiana is going to bring to the OpenSolaris table other than to make it more like Linux and perhaps closer to Linux in areas Linux users take for granted (package management, install, usability). But what does that offer the Linux crowd that Sun is obviously trying to steal (hint, Linux users already have these benefits…)? At the same time, does it really help the Solaris user? So while it takes Sun two years likely to get Indiana viable, Linux will only improve on what it already has in that time, and so what benefit will be there in 2009/10?? Further, this is just Sun - OpenSolaris is Sun-only - it’s one vendor… when did open source community users start contributing to vendor-dominated projects (hint, they haven’t).
I can say good luck Ian but I certainly do not envy his challenge ahead - especially when it was evident the NYC Solaris faithful were not exactly asking or waiting for Indiana to help them. I was not impressed by Indiana. I’d instead call it the Solaris Makeover Challenge. Oh wait, maybe IBM has already done that. :-)
I was slightly to actually offended at some of Ian’s jabs at Linux that are now the Sun “party line” and I suspect Ian knows full well these FUD lines are not entirely true (my how things have changed from being the LF CTO…).
Ian made it clear [now that he's at Sun marketing Solaris] that the only reason people use Linux is “because they couldn’t afford Sun workstations and Linux was free” and “that’s how Linux happened”. HA! I started using Linux because Windows 95/98 were horrible. Yes, free also played a part but just because things are free does not mean millions of people use them (look at all the BSDs, MINIX, Evolution, etc, etc). Then the other shameless argument was “Linux breaks compatibility” which is a small, small % of the use cases out there - sorry, doesn’t fly - not to mention that many of those “Linux breaks” are actually modernization technologies which the lack thereof are the same reasons Sun users are flocking from Solaris (hint, when did you last see a modern Solaris shell? Solaris in HPC?). Shameless because I also thought that was Ian’s job at the FSG…
Another interesting point from Ian was that he flat out stated that multiple distributions is the greatest weakness of Linux… which I tend to think of as a benefit. While we’d have to agree to disagree on this point, I’d like to think that if one Linux vendor is asleep at the wheel (takes 8yrs for the next release) or perhaps does something that I don’t like (i.e. partner with X company) then I have choice - I can switch with relatively very low pain from one Linux distro to another (perhaps just over time). I’ve seen customers do this successfully - they didn’t receive the support they expected and tests with other vendors proved other Linux providers better. It’s not that there was a problem with Linux or even the vendor, it’s that vendors interface customers through people and sometimes people make mistakes. Switching lets you avoid poor performing people.
Just think… what happens when you only have 1 source for you platform (think Windows, Solaris). Have you seen Windows or Solaris “fall asleep at the wheel” and maybe “milk customers without reinvesting”? I think that’s what you’ve probably seen since 1999. Remember when Sun launched Solaris 8/x86 only to take x86 support away? Then bring it back again in Solaris 10???
Sure, Sun flashed DTrace and ZFS onto the Solaris user base and wowed them with something modern… but if Solaris is so powerful and modern, why does the license prohibit publishing performance results? Linux is the opposite - Linux creates competition, drives competitive and cooperative investments and in the end customers get choice from competing vendors. And with Linux - it may not be the distributors competing that benefits customers - it could be Motorola competing with Apple needs feature X and to get feature X into Linux, Motorola invests in X which is later picked up by Red Hat and Novell. It could be the maker of the fastest network card on the planet trying to tweak Linux’ TCP/IP stack that makes Linux have superior networking performance… Something to think about…
Anyway, a snippet from the article that I recommend reading:
The user’s group meeting last night all but confirmed this was precisely what was happening - at least with OpenSolaris users in NYC anyway. Ken Milberg, Linux site expert and contributor to this blog, said some audience members started to notice that Murdock’s plans for OpenSolaris were starting to resemble Red Hat’s strategy with Fedora. It didn’t gel. “Sun pretty much admitted that this strategy made sense, and more or less were admitting that is was time they starting talking about an ‘innovation strategy’ too,” Milberg said. Thing is, the Sun users kept saying they were already satisfied with OpenSolaris.
And yet Sun and Murdock continued to lay out the case for Project Indiana, to “mixed results,” Milberg said. One unidentified attendee reportedly blurted out “all this does is help Sun, what does this do for someone using Linux?”
Thursday, July 19th, 2007
MBM: Sick of the Solaris FUD train on Linux scalability? DaveM has some thoughts…
I noticed Dave Miller is getting a little sick of the Solaris FUD about Linux. Unforunately, Dave does not seem to have figured out permalinks yet so you have to actually scroll way down the page to get to his two posts “Solaris scalability…” and “The Solaris FUD machine continues…” (update: I was pointed to the direct URL below)
http://vger.kernel.org/~davem/cgi-bin/blog.cgi/2007/04/10#bonwick_scalability
Some choice quotes from Dave regarding Sun’s FUD that Linux “doesn’t scale” are below. I’d also add that over 77% of the world’s largest scaling supercomputers now run Linux - not Solaris. Topping that is the fact that 8 out of the 9 systems SUN places in the Top500 (look at NEC/Sun too) run Linux and you can see which platform Sun chooses for scalability! Anyway, back to Dave:
Last time I checked, Linux scales the crap out of Solaris. Regretfully, Solaris cannot make use of the advanced SMP scaling techniques Linux has such as RCU locking, but that disappointment is no reason to spread the FUD around like this.
The one thing everyone knows for sure is that the only real consequence of Sun openning up Solaris is that now the entire world gets to watch how glacial Solaris development is compared to Linux and how miniscule the community behind Solaris is.
What you have to understand is that they aren’t specifying how large this new machine is, but since we know that they’ve been running Linux on 1024 cpu machines for quite some time at SGI you can be sure this machine is likely enormous. And here’s the punch line, Solaris has never even run on a 1024 cpu system let alone one as big this new SGI system, and Linux has handled it just fine for years.
Wednesday, July 11th, 2007
Oracle 11g for Linux is Here
Saw this today: http://www.oracle.com/features/hp/oracle-database-11g.html
Ok, I added the “for Linux” b/c I’m sure they still support all the usual platforms. I actually saw this today and thought… hmmm… what will happen to all those 10g (or pre-10g) Solaris, HPUX and Windows systems when those customers go to upgrade? Solaris and SPARC are on their way out, Windows = Microsoft and Oracle hates that, and HPUX is on a rotting Itanium vine and many users wouldn’t dare go there… I suspect with Oracle going to Linux as its primary OS of choice (RHEL based) we’ll probably see yet another round of thousands of systems moving onto Linux.
Thursday, June 28th, 2007
Even Sun chooses Linux over Solaris for high performance
Found this section of Roland Dreier’s blog discussing Sun’s new Constellation system quite humorous:
One other thing I noticed is that the Sun press stuff is billing the Constellation as running Solaris, while the actual TACC page about the Ranger system says the cluster will be running Linux. I’m inclined to believe TACC, since running Solaris for an InfiniBand cluster seems a little silly, given how far behind Solaris’s InfiniBand support is when compared to Linux, whose InfiniBand stack is lovingly maintained by yours truly.
Did you know that of the 7 systems Sun placed in the Top 500, 6 of those 7 are running Linux and only 1 runs Solaris? Who said “Solaris is a better Linux than Linux”?
Wednesday, June 27th, 2007
The current crop of Linux distributions, Ubuntu, Fedora and Solaris 10…
I often tell those who ask about Solaris and (or vs) Linux to just download Solaris 10 and give it a try… see for yourself, why listen to me. It appears Indigo Jo did just that all on his own. From Indigo’s blog:
As things stand, it’s not worth it for any Linux user to migrate to Solaris 10, even if it is free.
Indigo Jo also seems to have chosen Fedora 7 over Ubuntu which is an interesting twist of late… I’ve heard of a couple (literally 2) people moving back to Fedora - not a trend by any stretch, but I like v7 and might eventually move one of my systems to Fedora to leverage the Xen/KVM workloads… maybe…
Monday, June 18th, 2007
Europes top optician, Specsavers migrates EVERYTHING to Red Hat Enterprise Linux
URL: http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/0,1000000121,39287602,00.htm?r=1
Did you ever wonder why Microsoft and Sun are creating as much FUD about Linux as possible these days? Here’s something you don’t see that often, but represents the value companies are reaping from Linux. A market leader in Europe is migrating everything to Linux - Windows and Solaris all migrating to Linux. An interesting point was that Vista pushed them into this direction!
And what server hardware are they running their operations on? Fujitsu-Siemens, Intel based servers (yes, they’re supposed to be the “other half” of the Solaris/SPARC equation..). This is a great story for Linux and for Red Hat.
Who are they?
Specsavers has been voted Britain’s most trusted optician by Reader’s Digest, and claims to be the market leader in contact lenses. It is also the largest provider of home-delivery contact lenses in Europe.
What are they doing?
Britain’s leading optician, Specsavers, has migrated from Windows to Red Hat Enterprise Linux in all its 830 stores.
The chain says it has already seen a reduced need for maintenance and improved reliability in a radical across-the-board shift from Windows 2000 to the open-source operating system, with some sources quoting a six-figure sum in licence-fee savings alone. The company is also phasing out Sun’s Solaris on its head-office servers in favour of Red Hat.
“With our new store system, every single business-critical application is running on Red Hat, from the till to the test-room hardware,” said Nigel Spain, Specsavers’ global architecture manager. “We were convinced that Linux would have a major positive impact on our business and Red Hat has delivered exactly what it promised.”
Saturday, June 16th, 2007
IBM and RHEL5 achieve highest level security rating
This is big news in the federal sector and has a lot of applicability to many of the financial sectors these days. The government is “red” hot on Linux and this only positions RHEL even better.
Red Hat Linux has received a new level of security certification that should make the software more appealing to some government agencies.
Last week IBM Corp. was able to achieve EAL4 Augmented with ALC_FLR.3 certification for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, putting it on a par with Sun Microsystems Inc.’s Trusted Solaris operating system, said Dan Frye, vice president of open systems with IBM.
“This is the highest level of security function that anybody has,” Frye said. “We have delivered LSPP functionality in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and we have certified that at the EAL4 level of assurance.”
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