

Solaris is no longer free - ax0n
http://www.cuddletech.com/blog/pivot/entry.php?id=1120

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ghshephard
Sun was embracing Open Source to some degree - though they were always a
little schizophrenic on that policy, and never really held to a clear position
for about 3-5 years in the middle - but the last few years they seemed to "get
it". While this is a minor change (it doesn't appear to affect OpenSolaris) it
does seem to be indicative of Oracle taking a few (small) steps away from that
position.

But, on the flip side (and I say this as someone who learned Unix on SunOS 2.6
in 1998 - I still type ps -ef, and as a Joyent user, though tcsh has given way
to bash in my finger memory) - Solaris really is an edge operating system for
the masses, somewhat more akin to AIX. Pretty much the common (server) OS for
the masses is Linux, with Open/Free/NetBSD making up the majority of those not
going with Windows.

The only people I know using Solaris these days (and this is just an anecdote,
so be gentle :-) are people running Oracle or other environments that need to
be enterprise robust on vertically scaled system, people using sparc gear, or
people who have a legacy investment in Solaris. This is sad - as few as five
years ago, Solaris was still a popular choice for new companies - the OS was
just so rock solid stable.

I'd love to hear a YC survey on OS choices for server backends - my bet is
50%+ on Linux/BSD, less than 10% Solaris.

I'm wondering what percentage of the remaining 40% is Windows, and if AIX ever
gets a vote. I'm presuming HPUX is not chosen for new companies any more, and
I fervently pray that everyone steers clear of SCO.

~~~
mey
Personally I've migrated from FreeBSD to Ubuntu for my at home server tasks.
At work, I've seen a variety of deployments, never one of Solaris. I'd say 30%
Windows, 60% Linux, 10% FreeBSD (instance installs (host and vm's), not
including embedded systems like routers) is what I've seen over the past 5
years are work.

Of Linux I've seen SUSE, RHEL, and Ubuntu widely used. I've seen deliveries of
Sun Servers with Solaris installed that were wiped to be replaced with Linux.

On the Windows side, I've seen environments where it's Windows Server heavy
require drastically more resources to maintain, but that's another
conversation.

Of course this is all anecdotal as I've also never seen anyone deploy OSX
Server in any capacity :)

What I really think it is, is people use what they are familiar with or what
they can get support for. Solaris has disappeared mostly from the desktop, so
people are less familiar.

Hell the last time I tried to experiment with OpenSolaris I couldn't get it
booted in VMware (graphical corruption), so I never had a chance to get
familar with it myself.

To bad too, DTrace and ZFS always sounded fantastic.

~~~
mbreese
_I've also never seen anyone deploy OSX Server in any capacity_

I've done it, but it wasn't very pretty. Well, I mean the admin tools are a
pretty GUI, but underneath it is all a BSD, but instead of being able to
upgrade components, you're tied to a vendor that doesn't really update things
that way. For example, I had 2 G5 Xserves running 10.3 (Panther) and one Intel
Xserve running 10.4 (Tiger). Unfortunately upgrading the version of Python or
MySQL on the systems was a royal pain in the ass. Custom configurations is
also odd, because they do a lot of custom stuff to the point that it isn't
quite a *nix. But if you run off the shelf things designed for a Mac Server or
need to use one of the Core Media frameworks they would be good. However, for
typical web stuff, they really aren't that good of a server. Great hardware
though... I'd love to rip out the Mac OS and put Linux of them.

To put this back into context for the post, OSX Server is probably deployed
less often than Solaris.

------
iigs
Solaris has gone back and forth between fully commercial, to free + free
updates, to commercial, to free without updates, to now commercial again.

In my experience using solaris at the bottom-end has been kind of a non-
starter for a decade now because Sun yo-yoed the licensing enough to remind
people they shouldn't use it.

Honestly, good riddance. Oracle can go figure out what they're trying to do
and this will motivate the open source OS hacker community to get the relevant
features of Solaris implemented (or surpassed) in other OSes.

~~~
umjames
DTrace would be nice for starters.

~~~
forkqueue
Yup, DTrace and ZFS are pretty much the only things Solaris brings to the
table above what Linux offers.

Interestingly I've never come across any pure Solaris shops that run ZFS, I
suppose because if you're conservative enough only to use Solaris, you're too
conservative to trust ZFS.

~~~
buster
Zones too. I think they offer more then what the usual jail does. Never really
used both of them, but.. yeah, zones sound nice, too :)

Also, solaris is probably the most stable OS i've ever worked with.

~~~
forkqueue
Solaris zones are awful, and a good example of where Linux is far superior to
Solaris. The creators of Zones seemed to have user-mode-Linux as their model,
and it shares most of the annoyances of that too. It's not virtualization, and
it's not a jail - it's a middle ground which is good for neither.

Agree with you to some extent on stability - I've seen Solaris boxes with a
load of 300+ still up and running although unusably slow, where Linux would
almost certainly have died from resource starvation. In general use, both
Linux and Solaris are pretty damn reliable though.

~~~
buster
Whats so bad about zones? It's clear that they are no virtualization. As you
said it's a middleground, more capable as jails but not virtual, which is fine
if you don't need it?

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riffic
this doesn't change the status of OpenSolaris.

~~~
Niten
No, not directly. But they're trying to squeeze as much money as possible out
of hardware and licensing by limiting users' ability to run Solaris for free
on beige boxes, and that does seem to tilt the odds in the open question of
whether Oracle will continue to let OpenSolaris thrive, or whether they will
marginalize it to maximize short-term profit.

I say short-term profit because, in taking this course, Oracle seems to forget
that many of the part-time tinkerers and educational or small business users
whom they've just priced out of Solaris will be the ones making "enterprise"
purchasing decisions in the future. This revised licensing agreement ensures
that such users will be more comfortable and familiar with the competition
instead--Linux, BSD, even Windows (Microsoft has done a fantastic job ensuring
that their software is affordable in the education and small business sectors,
while simultaneously maintaining a healthy profit margin in enterprise sales).

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rbanffy
Solaris 10 used to be "free as in beer".

My biggest fear is that some Oracle exec seems this a a way to meet his
revenue target at the expense of making Solaris irrelevant and risking the
same for OpenSolaris.

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jorgecastillo
But OpenSolaris is still open source. If the community believes OpenSolaris is
such an important asset to lose I am sure they can pick up the development if
they want. And we already have the most important OpenSolaris technologies in
FreeBSD so it wouldn't be that big of a deal anyways.

------
patrickgzill
My guess: they are about to ship ZFS deduplication in released version of
Solaris (right now dedupe is only in OpenSolaris), and realize that they can
bump up their numbers, at least temporarily, by trying to charge for it.

------
gcb
and the earth is no longer square

