Comments on: Solaris Is Dead. Long Live Linux.

By: Pawel

Pawel — Sun, 05 May 2013 20:49:45 +0000

You’ve got to be kidding. Linux owns server market and another big player is MS. There’s nearly no UNIX in this.

By: shyam

shyam — Tue, 05 Mar 2013 14:02:29 +0000

hello
i want to do a course of unix admin
please can any one suggest me which flavour will be best in the market for system administration
and how about the openings for job seekers please suggest me

By: desertking

desertking — Tue, 25 Dec 2012 22:13:27 +0000

Kind of ironic you mentioned that Solaris is the space shuttle and the space shuttle was recently retired while the beetle keeps improving.

By: Bruno

Bruno — Fri, 14 Sep 2012 05:54:08 +0000

THANKS TO YOUR GREAT COMMENT! I AGREE WIHT IT ALL!

By: Sanjay Singh

Sanjay Singh — Fri, 04 May 2012 23:53:10 +0000

Solaris is superior in so many ways to Linux.

Linux is a great way for young people who don’t have any money to get used to Unix. But when the time comes to run serious Unix hardware for a business or for research or software development, the constant volatility and changes of Linux will cause you no end of grief.

The highly fragmented nature of Linux and its distributions has already created fault lines in the community where packages from one Linux will not run on another. Sure, you can compile from source, but if you’re running a business or trying to do research, even if you love software, you have better things to do than rebuilding something or re-installing the previous version of a key software package because the newer version didn’t like your previous configuration file.

Linus Torvalds comment about hoping Solaris dies is seriously lame. Its Windows he should be hating. If he had any marketing intelligence at all, he would have tried to make Linux more like MacOS and be really easy to use in order to displace Windows, while still exposing the technical aspects that the software people want to get at. Solaris is far ahead of the Linux community because it supported hardware well beyond the desktop PC’s that comprise the hardware of practically everyone in the Linux community.

Tech person to tech person, anyone with half a brain can see that the Solaris kernel is years, if not a decade ahead of Linux, is more stable, and outperforms Linux on more advanced processor architectures.

gcc was originally developed on Sun hardware, and ZFS is the most advanced file system in the world. Fujitsu Venus is twice as fast as Intel’s fastest while consuming 1/3 the power, making it about 6 times more efficient overall, and it will run Solaris. The people of Linux should recognize that Solaris is what Linux should try to be like, and should be thankful that it blazed the trail for Linux to gain traction in the low end of the market. Solaris is the unifying force for many best of breed technologies. Linux is like the Volkswagen Beetle of OS’s … the People’s OS. Solaris is the space shuttle.

By: glomgold

glomgold — Sun, 12 Feb 2012 06:07:11 +0000

I know this is an old post, but here’s hoping some Solaris drifters type the words “solaris is dead” into google and find this.

Solaris 11 came out and appears to be one hell of a system. Heck I benched it myself vs several nix’ in the arena. Solaris 11, an awesomely secure and powerful OS. The problem is lack of support which I don’t understand (well maybe I do, Oracle came in and killed the open Solaris community). So rather than battle a proprietary system, they went all out free.

HELLO YOU’RE DITCHING UNIX, THE KING OF OPERATING SYSTEMS! Remember back in 2003, project looking glass? Sure it was kinda frumpy looking, but the CODE under it was amazingly. If you, the reader out there are still a fan of Solaris, let us congregate and create a new community to make this OS ours again!

By: sebastian.tabarce

sebastian.tabarce — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

I don\'t think this changes things that much. It\'s not like Solaris was widely used before and this move from Oracle will kill it. For the regular user and hobbyst, Linux will always have more appeal because of the sheer number of people that use it and can help. That was before and after Oracle bought Sun, nothing changed. In the datacenter, as more and more things are moved to commodity hardware, all the UNICES lost terrain because Linux ate their lunch. We will still have AIX and Solaris standing because:
- IBM will continue to sell AIX on his big iron;
- Oracle will integrate Solaris and sell an integrated vertical solution - hardware, OS, database, middleware. From this point of view, the cost of the Solaris support contract was peanuts before the acquisition and will continue after.

Let\'s face it, since all the datacenter hardware moved to commodity hardware, the old UNICES lost their \"war\" with Linux.

Oh, and if I remember correctly, that 90 days clause was there before Oracle bought Sun, you got a free Solaris license only if you bought a new Sun machine.

By: rocteur

rocteur — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

What does the Korn shell have to do with Solaris ?

This sentence is nonsense!

Sure, there are still lots of Solaris fans around, old school Unix administrators who swear by Korn shell, but they are a dying breed.

Solaris uses the Bourne shell and the Korn shell has nothing to do with old school Unix. Ksh is a choice like KDE or Gnome!

Weird attack in an otherwise interesting article!

By: suhail_ansari

suhail_ansari — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Solaris is not going to die. It is worth over 500 million dollar business for Oracle. All big server vendors like IBM, HP and Dell support Solaris on their machines. Oracle Already said that they will continue supporting both Linux and Solaris. OpenSolaris project will also continue. There will be a healthy competition between Solaris and Linux which is good for innovation. I think that Oracle is adopting a MySql like model for Solaris. Most of the Solaris code and features will continue to be available as free and Open Source but some feature may be reserved for paying users which is necessary for Oracle to generate revenue from Solaris and it will also help in differentiate Solaris from other operating systems.

By: frontera000

frontera000 — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

UNIX is not dead. Solaris is based on UNIX, just as BSD and Linux are. To claim UNIX is dead, based solely on Solaris\' situation, is stupid. BSD UNIX lives on, as part of MacOS X.
Besides, OpenSolaris licensing has not changed. What is the author smoking?

By: pfuetz

pfuetz — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

So, what?

RedHat downloads are only 30 days! Else use Fedora!

So: Solaris 10 is 90 days! Else use OpenSolaris! What\'s the fuss?

All media currently going crazy, just for a small change? Nothing really important to report? Not even capable of reading all the glory details? That\'s called \"reporting\"? I call it spreading FUD!

Matthias

By: gkmoberg1

gkmoberg1 — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Christopher Smart,
Thanks for a good laugh. April Fools Day to you to.
-gregm

By: scottf76

scottf76 — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

I wasn\’t aware that opensource users actually cared about Solaris 10? This license doesn\’t affect opensolaris and Oracle leadership came out and said that they weren\’t changing anything in that realm.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/03/02/oracle_commit_opensolaris/

By: rkhalloran

rkhalloran — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

ksh was open-sourced some years ago: http://www.kornshell.org, and you can pull it onto your Debian/\’buntu box using apt-get install ksh93

I don\’t see Solaris dying anytime soon; there\’s too much existing SPARC iron out there that Just Runs. That said, the x86/x64 chips are giving a better bang for the buck in a lot of areas; if Oracle wants to get their money back on the Sun buyout, they need to catch up.

By: pfuetz

pfuetz — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

And, for a real good laugh, just read:

http://www.redhat.com/rhel/renew/faqs/#6

Sadly, all that FUD w.r.t. Solaris is not an April\’s fool\’s joke, it\’s real: FUD!

How, \”Christopher Smart\”, being real smart and writing an article about license conditions with RedHat?

By: unoengborg

unoengborg — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Who in their right mind would download Solaris without buying a service contract. The non free Solaris is typically used in large installations, where service contracts are standard procedure. Nobody is running the old propriatory Solaris for fun.

Modern OpenSolaris is another matter, it is modern full of features, and a joy to use on your server. ZFS with much more features than you find in the old propriatory Solaris, this is the real competitor to Linux.

This is no more strange than the relationship between Fedora and RHEL. My guess is that Oracle will increase their use of Solaris rather than kill it, as they have stated that Solaris will be for their high end installations.

By: hhemken

hhemken — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Oracle\’s executives are ruthless businessmen with big brains, big balls, and a whole lot of money. Underestimate them at your peril.

By: ctryon

ctryon — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

I tend to agree with most of the other posters here that Solaris is probably not going to die any quicker or slower because of this change. If you\'re worried about the price, you are probably already using Linux or OpenSolaris. If you want to use Solaris, you\'re probably talking about a big Sun server, which is already running something like Oracle or WebSphere or Weblogic or some other huge application that makes the Solaris support contract look like peanuts.

Anyone using Solaris probably already has a huge investment in infrastructure and \"brainpower\" based around the OS, so the addition of a support contract will be a small price to pay (assuming they aren\'t already paying for it).

The only audience they are cutting off is the hobbyist (who are not as trivial a group as you might think), which wants to set up a Solaris box at home to learn on, and maybe small organizations who are teetering between Solaris and Linux. Yea, they are cutting off their nose to spite their face, but that\'s hardly the same as \"putting the last nail in the Solaris coffin.\"

By: msacks

msacks — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

BSD is still used by many key software players/producers (especially in the security space). It\’s not going away. In spite of what the graph alludes to.

By: anothern00b

anothern00b — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

you speak of?

I do not like that you can not install Solaris without paying

UNIX but you have to do with it?

your article, unprofessional conduct

Oracle surely bring their products to the commercial market
and the different distributions of Linux are installed on more computers

... But I repeat the question

Unix has to do with that?

you think God? You know that happens within the OpenSolaris community?
As you know UNIX source code was developed by BSD?
.. the same code with which it is based on Linux Kernel

know anything about UNIX?

can not speak on behalf of the entire Linux community

Linux does not need to die either.

Unix is alive. It is within UX, AIX, OSX and also in Linux, do not forget

Best Regards