Hi, >As a Solaris admin, I'm so looking forward to GPL Solaris. May I ask: what do you expect will be the results of releasing Solaris with GPL instead of CDDL ? (if an when) (which is quite a difficult question...) It is difficult to tell ; I assume that ZFS , the 128 byte solaris file system , will be migrated to linux (there is currently some user space trial to do it, not in maturity yet as I understand). I also assume that the interoperability between the two OS will be improved: for example, currently you can mount linux from solaris only in ReadOnly (and only if you install some packages). You can mount ufs from linux only ReadOnly (there is support also for mounting UFS in ReadWrite ,but if is considered unsafe).
Moreover, I assume that the patch of grub in solaris (support to UFS and more) will be merged into mainline (It will occur it seems also regardless of GPL for solaris).
Re: GPL Solaris.reddragdivaJanuary 12 2007, 18:19:01 UTC
The added hardware compatibility for Solaris x86 will be marvellous! Imagine genuine Solaris running on almost any laptop available, with wifi ...
The cross-fertilisation of code as well as ideas is the big thing. Solaris and Linux are very different beasts with very different purposes and development histories; they have a lot to learn from each other.
One thing I love about Solaris is that Sun understands its big fanbase is working sysadmins; they go to a lot of effort to make Solaris usable, predictable and not overwhelmingly painful to the working sysadmin. Linux is good enough and industrial-strength, but as Unixes go it's actually a weird one. FreeBSD remains my favourite for general sanity and lack of headaches (except 5.x, which was subtly broken in far too many places), but has very little commercial user base compared to Solaris or Linux.
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>As a Solaris admin, I'm so looking forward to GPL Solaris.
May I ask: what do you expect will be the results of
releasing Solaris with GPL instead of CDDL ? (if an when)
(which is quite a difficult question...)
It is difficult to tell ; I assume that ZFS , the 128 byte solaris file system , will be migrated to linux (there is currently
some user space trial to do it, not in maturity yet as I understand).
I also assume that the interoperability between the two OS will
be improved: for example, currently you can mount linux from solaris
only in ReadOnly (and only if you install some packages).
You can mount ufs from linux only ReadOnly (there is support
also for mounting UFS in ReadWrite ,but if is considered
unsafe).
Moreover, I assume that the patch of grub in solaris (support
to UFS and more) will be merged into mainline (It will occur
it seems also regardless of GPL for solaris).
Cheers,
RRX
Reply
The cross-fertilisation of code as well as ideas is the big thing. Solaris and Linux are very different beasts with very different purposes and development histories; they have a lot to learn from each other.
One thing I love about Solaris is that Sun understands its big fanbase is working sysadmins; they go to a lot of effort to make Solaris usable, predictable and not overwhelmingly painful to the working sysadmin. Linux is good enough and industrial-strength, but as Unixes go it's actually a weird one. FreeBSD remains my favourite for general sanity and lack of headaches (except 5.x, which was subtly broken in far too many places), but has very little commercial user base compared to Solaris or Linux.
I liked this post from lproven: free software has sex, proprietary software is sterile. And going GPL means you've just increased your available gene pool.
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