The OpenSolaris-based Illumos Project Announced

[joffe]

Did actually anyone mention that OpenSolaris was crippled? I once made the mistake to install it on a test server. It was only then that I discovered that you had to pay in order for the update functionality to work. No money = no security updates.

This has never happened on any OpenSolaris install I have made, and I've made a few. That's very strange.

Did you install Solaris Express or Solaris 10 by mistake or something?

[kebabbert]

Are there papers which backup this? Otherwise it's a pure FUD.

Backup what? A research paper saying that "BTRFS is a copy of ZFS"? Are you serious?



Would you like me to ask you:
"Are there any research papers that say "Linux scales well" or "Linux is stable"? No? Then it is pure FUD to frighten Linux' competitors".

Not very clever, heh?

[V!NCENT]

Who cares about what Solaris has to offer? What matters is that as much software as possible is free software. That alone justifies the project in my book.

[kraftman]

Regarding BTRFS and FTrace or Systemtap - they are just copies. Solaris shows the way and ZFS and DTrace are provenly good and delivers today. Linux may have grand plans for the Solaris copies, but I doubt Linux devs will succeed. For instance, BTRFS will always be lagging behind ZFS. It takes at least 5 years, before version 1.0 of filesystem is let into the server halls. When BTRFS is v1.0 it will take another 5 years of debugging and development before it is let into the server halls. Meanwhile, ZFS will continue development and new functionality. BTRFS will always lag behind.

And, does BTRFS provide data safety like ZFS does? I doubt that. I think that if Oracle where serious about BTRFS, then Oracle would dedicate a full team, not like now: one full time paid developer. I think Oracle will bet on the original: ZFS and let BTRFS handle it self. ZFS is better than BTRFS, why develop two identical products, and one product is a copy of the other?

Are there papers which backup this? Otherwise it's a pure FUD.

[kraftman]

I agree that Unix market share is diminishing, but I think you are wrong on many parts.

According to a survey on behalf of HP, Solaris has the brightest future:

http://www.itpro.co.uk/623683/unix-still-a-hit-for-mission-critical-systems?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+ITPro%2FToday+%28IT+PRO+-+Today%29

"According to the Coleman Parkes findings, the current operating system of choice for mission-critical systems is Solaris... HP-UX was in second place, followed by Windows."

It means that Solaris still has lots of customers and it is most used by all Unixes. Solaris has been shipped 13 million times, and OpenSolaris also several million times. All in all, Solaris/OpenSolaris has been shipped in almost 20 million licenses.

It means Coleman Parkes thinks so. It doesn't mean Solaris still has lots of customers and it also doesn't mean it has the brightest future. I'm not sure if BSD is Unix or Unix like system, but I guess it's more used then Solaris.

[kebabbert]

Why do they care that much. The only place where Solaris matters is among servers but even there it's been losing market share for a long time and has already a tiny marketshare, it's not poised to be popular on the desktop nor on mobiles or supercomputers, sooner or later ZFS will face Btrfs and DTrace - FTrace, so there's getting less and less incentive to keep it alive besides for legacy setups. Of course I oversimplified the issue but not by a lot, you get the main points.

I agree that Unix market share is diminishing, but I think you are wrong on many parts.

According to a survey on behalf of HP, Solaris has the brightest future:

http://www.itpro.co.uk/623683/unix-still-a-hit-for-mission-critical-systems?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+ITPro%2FToday+%28IT+PRO+-+Today%29

"According to the Coleman Parkes findings, the current operating system of choice for mission-critical systems is Solaris... HP-UX was in second place, followed by Windows."

It means that Solaris still has lots of customers and it is most used by all Unixes. Solaris has been shipped 13 million times, and OpenSolaris also several million times. All in all, Solaris/OpenSolaris has been shipped in almost 20 million licenses.

Solaris is the reference platform OS for Oracle database - this was outspoken long before Oracle bought Sun.

Regarding BTRFS and FTrace or Systemtap - they are just copies. Solaris shows the way and ZFS and DTrace are provenly good and delivers today. Linux may have grand plans for the Solaris copies, but I doubt Linux devs will succeed. For instance, BTRFS will always be lagging behind ZFS. It takes at least 5 years, before version 1.0 of filesystem is let into the server halls. When BTRFS is v1.0 it will take another 5 years of debugging and development before it is let into the server halls. Meanwhile, ZFS will continue development and new functionality. BTRFS will always lag behind.

And, does BTRFS provide data safety like ZFS does? I doubt that. I think that if Oracle where serious about BTRFS, then Oracle would dedicate a full team, not like now: one full time paid developer. I think Oracle will bet on the original: ZFS and let BTRFS handle it self. ZFS is better than BTRFS, why develop two identical products, and one product is a copy of the other?

[kraftman]

(mission critical certified Linux is there, but we KNOw Solaris works).

Are you suggesting Linux doesn't work there? Or just saying you didn't try nothing except Solaris?

[kraftman]

Why would people care about linux or *BSD? They only matter on servers and phones, why should they be a big deal?

Because Linux matters on servers, phones and in HPC. It also matters more on desktops then Solaris and *Bsd. Btw. woah, OpenSolaris wasn't fully open source They wanted to cheat us or something?

[vermaden]

Good attitude for targeting 100% binary compatibility, we could say that it will be same 'way' as CentOS is for the RHEL distro ... and that is propably best choice they can make.

Pity they do not have an OS itself (no working ISO images, just codebase), but that is a good start.

[RealNC]

Did actually anyone mention that OpenSolaris was crippled? I once made the mistake to install it on a test server. It was only then that I discovered that you had to pay in order for the update functionality to work. No money = no security updates.