Comments on: OpenSolaris what needs to come next, or, the day Ian Murdock joined Sun http://www.lewiz.org/archive/2007/05/10/opensolaris-what-needs-to-come-next-or-the-day-ian-murdock-joined-sun/ everyone has a shangri-la to find Thu, 24 Jul 2008 00:39:12 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.6 By: inomine| http://www.lewiz.org/archive/2007/05/10/opensolaris-what-needs-to-come-next-or-the-day-ian-murdock-joined-sun/#comment-10188 inomine| Thu, 10 May 2007 19:22:24 +0000 http://www.lewiz.org/archive/2007/05/10/opensolaris-what-needs-to-come-next-or-the-day-ian-murdock-joined-sun/#comment-10188 If you make Solaris more like Linux, then what happens to all the stuff that makes Solaris great? At a normal, day to day user the Solaris kernel has very few things going for it over Linux. Yes, they can fix a lot of the front end stuff, slap together some nice installer, get a package manager sorted, setup and foster a forum. But why switch? At the moment the massive advantage that Linux has is that a lot of things have finally started Just Working(tm). People switch to Linux because it's free, it doesn't have some of the retardedness of Windows. So, why would someone want to switch to Solaris. Sure, ZFS is very nice, so is dtrace, the solaris linker, the kernel, so on and so forth. But this is stuff that you care about at the sys-admin level, at the hacker level, not the user level. You see, the problem now is that you've, not necessarily you personally, have gone ahead and evengelised Linux for years. So the people have come. And I think it's worth noting that in a lot of cases they came because they hated MS, not because they wanted Linux. Now, having spent all this time getting comfortable you want them to switch? Suddenly, the big MS demon isn't there to push them onto another OS, Solaris has to give them something to pull them in, and I don't think it will happen. Therefore, while it's nice to sit back and hope, unfortunately Linux has successfully won the alternative OS brand, and to now shift it from there will take years, and maybe even decades. If you make Solaris more like Linux, then what happens to all the stuff that makes Solaris great? At a normal, day to day user the Solaris kernel has very few things going for it over Linux. Yes, they can fix a lot of the front end stuff, slap together some nice installer, get a package manager sorted, setup and foster a forum. But why switch? At the moment the massive advantage that Linux has is that a lot of things have finally started Just Working™. People switch to Linux because it’s free, it doesn’t have some of the retardedness of Windows. So, why would someone want to switch to Solaris. Sure, ZFS is very nice, so is dtrace, the solaris linker, the kernel, so on and so forth. But this is stuff that you care about at the sys-admin level, at the hacker level, not the user level.

You see, the problem now is that you’ve, not necessarily you personally, have gone ahead and evengelised Linux for years. So the people have come. And I think it’s worth noting that in a lot of cases they came because they hated MS, not because they wanted Linux. Now, having spent all this time getting comfortable you want them to switch? Suddenly, the big MS demon isn’t there to push them onto another OS, Solaris has to give them something to pull them in, and I don’t think it will happen.

Therefore, while it’s nice to sit back and hope, unfortunately Linux has successfully won the alternative OS brand, and to now shift it from there will take years, and maybe even decades.

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