Adam Leventhal's Blog

Solaris 10 in the news: week 1

It's been just over a week since we officially launched Solaris 10 and the reactions from the press have been all over the map. Consider these two declarations:

Not many open source aficionados will realize the impact, but by making Solaris 10 free and capable of operating on any kind of hardware, Sun is making a coup in the server market.
...
As a result Linux will probably not grow much beyond its current market share of about 10% leaving Red Hat and especially Novell with a big problem.

link

Sun's announcement of the launch of free open source Solaris 10 has garnered a mild positive response from the investment community. However it also has raised a lot of skepticism from the technical community. The current plans are not good enough.

link

In case you didn't notice the URLs: those are the same guy posted about 20ns apart. Why the sudden reversal? slashdot! Yes, the Linus-loyal quickly rose to Linux's defence citing the multitude of reasons Open Solaris will fail.

It will be a while before anyone knows the relative success or failure of Open Solaris -- we're not even sure of the terms of the license -- so this is last challenge I'm going to rise to. But look: the Linux that exists today is a direct result literally and philosophically of its community. And while Solaris has so far been developed by a closed community, it also reflects the timbre of that community. For example: Linux adheres to a spartan philosophy of debugging help -- ergo no crash dumps; Solaris takes a different tack -- we require projects to come with debugger commands to examine crash dumps. It's the community that defines the project and, as is evident, it's the community that defends it, but don't discount the very real Solaris community.

The dumbest slight is against Solaris's hardware compatabiIity: do you think Linux always ran on as much stuff as it does now? Of course not. A month ago, did Solaris run on the (sick) new laptop I'm typing this on? Nope. The hardware these two operating systems support doesn't define their communities, bur rather the reverse. When people can hack up Solaris to work on their gear, they will just as they've been doing on Linux for years.

I can't wait for the license to be announced, for opensolaris.org to open for bidness, and to have people start contributing code from outside of Sun. Does anyone really doubt that these things will happen? The only question is if Open Solaris will take off -- wait and see.