[Klug-general] Methods of Gaining Linux Skills to Work in Industry

[Karl Lattimer]

> Hang on did I not read that Sun were giving up on Solaris and is
> turning to Linux so give it a couple of years and Solaris will be
> legacy.

The Solaris kernel is now released under suns open source license,  
and will never become legacy, the kernel is far superior in design  
than Linux and is far more coherent.

Sun are shipping Ubuntu on some of their servers now, this is related  
to hardware support rather than replacing their existing software  
stack. Ubuntu already has J2EE and J2RE 1.6 available so for sun to  
move their software stack to Ubuntu is easy as pie. The hardware  
support in Linux is far superior to Solaris, but this is a historical  
issue which Sun were fighting about 15 years ago when it was still  
SunOS.

> Hmm oh hang on what is actually happerning is Sun are thinking about
> releasing Solaris under GPL and so we will end up with a sort of
> Solaris/Linux/BSD high breed could be very intresting certainly an
> area to watch.... ie pick your kernel and your software depending on
> what your application is and what works best.

The BSD license is incompatible with the GPL, the Sun open source  
license is intended to not be viral and therefore intended to allow  
it to be used commercially and derivatives thereof, its the same  
license as the Sparc processor is released under and thats why most  
digital cameras have sparc chips, these days you can even find  
cameras running opensolaris. Linux is pretty much incompatible with  
the solaris license because of the viral nature of the GPL. There  
fore although software stacks may be mixed, the code cannot. We will  
never see a hybrid OS like the one apple produced with Xinu which is  
a mix of Mach and NeXT. Using the microkernel (superior design, just  
look at Hurd) nature of NeXT coupled with the hardware support and  
more up to date features of Mach (pre-emptive for instance).

The difference between the solaris kernel and the solaris operating  
system comes down to a few application stacks which are designed for  
enterprise business, for instance Java Directory System. I actually  
have a fully licensed copy of Solaris 10 Enterprise Edition if anyone  
would like to try it out. Its a really, really good OS, faster than  
Linux in many respects

The thing about solaris is that its not really a desktop operating  
system, although the Java Desktop System (JDS is a confusing acronym)  
is based on gnome 2.4 but tweaked to look/work more like windows. It  
is pretty crap actually, however using it as a server is way superior.

90% of software that builds for Linux will build on Solaris without  
any changes, that 10% generally relates to any Xorg stuff and a few  
other screwed up Linux ways of doing things, or screwed up Solaris  
way of doing things, remember Solaris isn't 100% posix compliant so  
there will always be problems.

Allen: OpenSolaris is not the same as Solaris, as previously  
mentioned although a huge amount of Solaris has been opened up there  
are still some pretty unique software stacks which Sun are keeping to  
themselves.

K,