Although a little crusty, if you call February 2005 crusty, and I do, this study on Linux 2.6 and Solaris 10 just floated past my desk. Some of it's right, but some of it's FUD, as expected from a "sponsored" study by IBM and Red Hat. Let me address some of the wrong points here.

Although the study begins by noting that Solaris is available on SPARC, x86, and Opterons, it spends the majority of the time comparing Linux x86 to Solaris SPARC. How about comparing apples-to-apples, fellows, like Linux on SPARC to Solaris SPARC, or Linux on Opteron to Solaris on Opteron? Comparing the two OSs on different hardware architectures doesn't make sense when talking about performance or market volume. I also want to remind people here that Solaris is a single code base. There are not separate SPARC and x86 source trees. Every feature available in SPARC is also available in x86 and Opteron.

As I opened with, this study is a little crusty now, but just to be clear, here's our Contributor's Agreement.

Lots of FUD around CDDL. I don't understand how CDDL will "isolate Solaris' contribution to those individuals with interests in no other projects." While it is true that you cannot link together CDDL and GPL files, there are a lot of open source projects out there licensed with other licenses. I count 55 open source licenses on OSI's web site, not including GPL. This overly broad statement is misleading. We're already seeing contributions from people, and they all aren't "dependent on the efforts, resources, and interests of Sun and Fujitsu." A Linux distribution isn't all GPL, and Linux isn't the only open source project out there. Sorry for bursting that particular bubble.

No, our approach is not "a variant on that used by MySQL." Not that MySQL's is bad -- it's just different. They use a dual-license, GPL and a commercial license. The majority of Solaris is licensed under CDDL, but there are bits and bobs with different licenses.

DTracing Java isn't "a goal", it's a reality. Adam Leventhal has blogged extensively about it.

Although this study was written before our big launch in June, I think we can safely say now that UFS is open source.

I don't have a complete VMware roadmap at my disposal, but it looks like they have a Solaris-as-a-guest-OS under way, and they've announced AMD Opteron 64-bit support.

In conclusion, beware of "sponsored studies." Do the study yourself. Read the licenses yourself. There is no one tool, and that includes an OS, that's right for everyone. Do your own comparison and make the choice yourself, but make it an educated choice.

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