back to article OpenSolaris spork ready for Oracle challenge

A spork of the open-source edition of Solaris, OpenSolaris, is ready to start taking on Oracle's official Unix operating system. Project OpenIndiana is due to be announced on Tuesday in London, along with a first development release of the desktop and server operating system. OpenIndiana comes the week ahead of Oracle's mega …

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  1. James Legg

    It's not based on the illumos core just yet, but it will be

    From openindiana twitter stream:

    "Our first dev release will be based on build 147 of the OpenSolaris codebase. Illumos isn't in there yet - but soon when it's ready :-)"

    http://twitter.com/openindiana/status/24189401693

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Stop

    Just make sure

    ..you don't use any Ora patented technology. Otherwise Oralawyers might sue off your pants.

    Better go with Linux, BSD, Haiku if you don't want to risk a very expensie fight with Oralegal dept.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Thumb Down

      BS, Like Using Linux is a sure way of not being sued...

      Several major Linux users have been sued by MS, Sco... for patent, copyright ...

      The only way to get protection against something like this is get a LICENSE and pay $$$.

      Redhat, IBM, Oracle indemnify all their users against lawsuits.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Flame

        @AC: Nice, Mr OraShill

        You are twisting my words - what I said is that using Solaris exposes you to the risk of being sued by Oracle, a company who have demonstrated their willingness to do exactly that.

        MS only bitched about Open Source; the SCO lawsuit is now over without any success for SCO. Oracle is determined to extract hundreds of millions out of Google and you bet they will do the same with any major user of a "free" Solaris.

        Surely they have some provisions buried in their license terms that will legally expose you if you don't use the retarded SUN tools, (say) but some GNU technologies like a proper grep, find, xargs or gcc on their holy Solaris.

        Mr Larry is a greedy tycoon and I say boycott his technologies completely !

  3. asdf
    FAIL

    exactly why bother

    Linux will even run on that dog slow architecture SPARC (probably better than Solaris). What is the point of running open source Solaris without the support contract? Linux is better, just as cheap, at least as open, faster and with RHEL more stable than a plug and pray community build of Solaris. Not just that but with GNU/Linux you get Unix tools that have actually been updated since 1990 (no xargs in find command, wtf). I guess if people can't let the Amiga go then OpenSolaris will linger in the enthusiast nerd camp for awhile.

    1. Giles Jones Gold badge

      Experience

      I guess some people want to play with it, get experience with it as there are quite well paid jobs looking after Solaris and Unix OSes.

      It's quite hard to get the experience running Linux as the pace of change in Linux is much faster IMHO.

      1. SynnerCal
        Black Helicopters

        And more experience

        From what I've seen both Intel-based versions of Solaris were used as a first step to wean hard-pressed users from Oracle's SPARC "heroin" (And yes, I am comparing Oracle to drug dealers). Hopefully the OpenIndiana distro will still be usable for this.

        Oracle are hypocrites of the first order as far as I'm concerned. FOSS when they want to use it (RHEL->OEL) is great, but the spawn of Lucifer when other folks want to use it (i.e. OpenSolaris). Personally, given the zeal with which they're forcing customers to buy _their_ (expensive!) support contracts and only run it on _their_ expensive kit - it'll be a long time before I recommend anyone to base a new project on Solaris, and I think I'll be looking for an "exit strategy" (Linux probably).

        Strangely enough, I've noticed that my Solaris/Intel kit is running a lot worse after the latest round of patches. Then again I am using Dell rather than Oracle gear (hence the icon choice).

        Hopefully, Hurd will be able to screw Oracle over the same way he did HP. :p

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Flame

          You Forgot The Java

          ..lawsuit

  4. alien anthropologist
    IT Angle

    Yawn...

    Who is interested in running Open Solaris, when there is Linux? With proper support and SLA options available from large vendors (like Novel, Redhat and Oracle)? With a clear road map, active development community, large corporate support (h/w and s/w), etc. etc.

    Open Solaris is even less relevant than El-Reg's Friday afternoon non-IT article....

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Go

    A Little Anecdote

    A few months ago Deutsche Börse (the German Stock Exchange in Frankfurt) decided to dump Solaris and VMS.

    They will be an all-Linux, all-x86 and all-C++ shop in a few months. They are a leading derivatives trading platform and their objective is to get trading speed to less than 2 milliseconds delay per transaction.

    I also heard Linux is big in NY finance, but I don't know the exact figures.

    Richard's Commie-tech running Big Finance. That's an irony !

    1. Jay 2
      Linux

      Solaris -> Linux

      Yup, have seen our XETRA (something to do with Deutsche Börse) kit move from Solaris/SPARC to RedHat/x86. Similarly wheres I used to deal almost exclusively with kit running Solaris, I hardly touch it now as I spend virtually all my time looking after Linux kit.

  6. Kebabbert

    @asdf

    How is Linux better than Solaris? Linux has no ZFS nor DTrace nor good scaling, etc. Linux is also unstable, and when you upgrade the Linux kernel you need to recompile the source code. That is bad design. Oh, forgot, "Linux has no design and will never have" - Linus Torvalds.

    .

    @Strongtype,

    2ms is really bad. There are faster exchange systems, like 10 times faster achieving ~0.2 ms. For instance NASDAQ new system.

    1. Jesper Frimann
      Headmaster

      Linux and Scalability.

      Linux scales just nicely.

      http://www.ideasinternational.com/benchmark/ben020.aspx?b=d54ab8c2-4e36-4395-986a-e1ae5f29aacc

      Number 2, 3, 4 and 5 are LINUX submissions. And that is on 3 different processor architectures. So saying Linux doesn't scale is simply not correct, I actually think it's pretty impressive to be in the top on so many different processor architectures.

      Also notice that the fastest Linux submission has almost 4 times the throughput of the fastest Solaris submission.

      Or what about Java, a place where Oracle owns the whole stack.

      http://www.ideasinternational.com/benchmark/ben020.aspx?b=40939518-fdf1-4ba8-855c-d8974a41c323

      Best Linux submission is 20,499,538@256 Cores the best SPARC result is 1,757,035@256 Cores. (http://www.spec.org/osg/jbb2005/results/res2008q4/jbb2005-20081027-00552.html)

      Now that is almost a factor of 12 in throughput.. read my lips NO MORE TAX.. I mean sorry.. It's still early and I haven't finished the fist cup of Mokka.

      And please don't start with that it is the number of threads that counts.. The linux JBB2005 submission uses 1024 threads vs the 512 of the Solaris on SPARC submission.

      // Jesper

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Up

    Ex-Solaris console jockey in tears at Linux mirroring...

    Bring it on, Illumos, OpenSolaris or even Oracle 11 express.

    I could cope and even enjoy working with linux if basic things like RAID got sorted but the trouble is that the linux community devs scratch an itch until it works enough for them and then move on, a few years later the wheel gets re-invented and half-written just because a new idea comes along. It just never works 100% properly ever.

    This linux server in ruins I have here can either have RAID LED's working but shit disk performance, or great disk performance and no RAID LED's, leaving me and the engineer to a game of Seagate-roulette when guessing which is the failed disk I need to pull - you can guess now why I have a server in tatters.

    Good hardware needs a good OS to make these extra features that proper servers have work as they should. Any hardcore *nix admin knows this, AIX, HP-UX, Solaris, BSD and Linux.

  8. alien anthropologist
    Linux

    Scaling? Maintenance?

    We run Sun x86/64 h/w kit. Loads of them. All using Linux. Have servers with an uptime of over a year. Hooked up to storage systems of more than 50TB (yes, and RAD works just fine when properly implemented). Running high speed backbones using Infiniband.

    Kernel and o/s issues? None. Though we have had problems with Sun screwing up firmware and causing soft CPU lockups in the kernel (bug confirmed and fixed by Sun via a CMOS upgrade).

    We also have a few Solaris boxes on Sparc kit. Also rock solid.

    Point being? There's a reason why 483 of the top 500 biggest and baddest computer clusters in the world run Linux. Nor Solaris. Not AIX. Not Windows.

    And it is for those very same reasons that Linux is used by so many - including us. Yes, it has all to do with ability to scale, the very little maintenance needed, the flexibility Linux and Open Source provide.. to name but a few.

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