Hacker News Reader

Comment by spudlyo | Hacker News Reader

"We will continue to grow a vibrant developer and system administrator community for Solaris." -- I really wonder how.

They really killed the wrong Solaris. If they embraced the GNU userland (as OpenSolaris did) they would have had a much better shot at getting more raised-on-Linux admins and developers to embrace their OS. As it is, the current BSD flavored Solaris tools are so crufty and incompatible it leaves many Linux users with a distinct loathing for the OS.

View on HN

Did OpenSolaris use GNU userland? Or are you confusing the official branch with on of the forks? BSD isn't dead, and is different but not in bad ways. Don't bad mouth something (BSD) because you don't use it.

Companies are much less likely to embrace GNU anything, GNU just doesn't fly that way. BSD license is much more permissive, and therefore much more attractive to companies.

OpenSolaris had a GNU userland. The BSD ancestry of the Solaris userland isn't the problem. The problem was the senseless defaults and cryptic command structures ("shutdown -g0 -i5 -y" instead of "shutdown")

Here is a barbaric and senseless default. Do a crontab -e without $EDITOR set and you'll be dropped into ed. I realize that it's the "standard editor" but the joke stopped being funny when I needed to edit a file with it.

There is nothing BSDish about Solaris. Solaris is as SysV as it gets.

Last I heard, Solaris 11 was based on OpenSolaris Indiana with the "new" userland and IPS rather than the "crufty" stuff. I guess we'll find out when 11 Express comes out (and no sooner, thanks to the new "no peeking" policy).

I won't.

Oracle took a very clear stand about how they intend to generate value, one I cannot agree with and that I will not enable. I am an enthusiast of open-source and free-software, of value created by sharing and openness instead of ruthless competition and secrecy.

I was considering the use of OpenSolaris in a production environment, mostly due to ZFS. Now I won't. Maybe I'll think again about ZFS if and when FreeBSD takes whatever they can and fork it into a filesystem and toolset that's useful for me. These developments go completely against what I want and what I believe.

Enjoy your legacy products and your short-term profits, Larry. It won't last long.

I'm going to shy away from BSD implementation of ZFS too, Oracle probably has a bunch of patents on that too.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com