Alan Hargreaves' Weblog

More on Martin Fink's Blog

Martin has corrected one misperception (which I'll mention later) and written a response to all of the commotion that his blog stirred up. I certainly hope that my response fell into the category of "thoughful criticism".

Martin, you mention that there were a few good questions, yet you didn't really address very many of them.

I'm am actually glad to see more folks getting in to the blogging arena, and it's good to see people writing their own text, regardless of other opinions. The discussion is everything. Thank you for the correction that you did make about the developer community, as you no doubtedly saw, you certainly hit a nerve with some people over that one.

As you asked for corrections to real errors, I am slightly disappointed that you overlooked a few that I pointed out.

The big one that I harped on is that you are under the mistaken impression that Solaris for SPARC, Solaris for x86 and Solaris for Opteron are all different beasts. They are not. Solaris is built from a single code tree (and has been done so for quiet a long time) When compared to the amount of common code, the architecture independant stuff does not really amount to a lot.

The license

There really is not any point on speculating about the license that will be used. We have given the commitment that it will be OSI compliant and Jonathan has spoken to the press about time frames. No-one outside of Sun and few people inside (certainly not me) have seen the contracts that outline exactly what we own, so speculation on what we can open source is also a moot point, save to say, that we'd look pretty silly with all of this build up if we then went for a license and governance model that was not truly open, and I for one do not like looking silly.

Janus

Indemnification is also a moot point. There is no linux kernel code involved. Janus is an implementation of the the public interfaces.

I wrote a lot more in my initial reply to your blog Martin. I'd be interested to see if you are prepared to correct what I perceive as errors, or at least enter into discussion about them.

Posted at 08:22PM Nov 29, 2004 by Alan Hargreaves in Open Source Solaris  |  Comments[8]

More on the timing of open-sourcing Solaris

In an article at Computerworld Patrick Thibodeau interviewed Jonathan about open-sourcing Solaris.

The article was titled Schwartz Says Solaris Can Be Completely Open-Source

There are some great "soundbites" in this interview.

What's the time frame for releasing open-source Solaris?

We will have the licence announced by the end of this calendar year and the code fully available [by the] first quarter of next year.

Well folks, that's the best timetable I've heard published publicly.

Some other good quotes.

Is there anything preventing you from making all of Solaris open-source?

Nothing at all. And let me repeat that. Nothing at all.

Here is the one that folks are so good at misquoting him on. The answer is pretty clear (well I would think so on reading it).

Is Solaris in competition with Linux?

No, that's like asking if Solaris is in competition with the open-source movement. Solaris is in competition with Red Hat. Solaris will be as much the open-source movement as anything else. The competition ultimately is going to be had and be seen between companies that have competitive offerings.

There are a few other good questins/answers in there, but why not simply head off to the article and read the whole thing?

Posted at 08:02PM Nov 29, 2004 by Alan Hargreaves in Open Source Solaris  | 

Solaris Express 11/04 is coming

The decision has just been made (inside the last hour). Solaris Express 11/04 will be build 72 and should be available on or around November 30.

The big thing for this one is...

64 bit Solaris on AMD.

Other enhancements include...

• Webmin
• Intelligent Platform Management Interface - implementing IPMI. IPMI is an x86 industry standard for remote sensing and lights out hardware management.
• The new login screen and logo (had to get that in)
• Apache Version 2

There are also enhancments to...

• Dtrace (which I'm sure that Adam will discuss)
• System V IPC and Other Resource Controls
• New and updated drivers (e.g. support for the S2io Xframe 10gb ethernet adapter)

As usual, the documentation will be available for free at docs.sun.com.

I found that some of the changes meant that I had to address a problem in the bcf driver in order to get my network working (and nort panicing the notebook. I'm communicating these back to Murayama-san.

There's more in here than what I have listed, these are just the initial highlights. I'm sure that others will make their own highlights lists shortly (I may even add some more myself later).

Enjoy Folks.

Posted at 11:24AM Nov 24, 2004 by Alan Hargreaves in Solaris Express  |  Comments[8]

Reply to a reply on slashdot "Linux - Sunisms debunked"

There was a reply to a story on slashdot about the Solaris 10 launch that I felt I could supply some answers to. I'm not Scott or Jonathan, but I can certainly speak to some of what you ask.

Shoot your marketing department. (Score:5, Interesting)
by Soko (17987) Alter Relationship on Friday November 19, @01:26AM (#10862308)
(http://www.arstechnica.com/etc/linux/index.html)

At the end of the launch event Jonathan Schwartz made an impromptu speech; I didn't hear most of it, as I was too far away, but he did end his comments with something about Slashdotters. I ambled over to Schwartz and said, "If anyone here is going to get an article onto Slashdot, it's probably going to be me (since NewsForge and Slashdot are both part of OSTG). Tell me what you'd like Slashdot readers to know."

"Tell them that we're returning to our roots," Schwartz said, referring to the company's renewed focus on the Solaris operating environment.

"And we want developers back on our side. If there's more for us to do, we'll go do it," McNealy added. It was the first time all day that I felt that the two had broken character and simply told me what was on their minds.

As a long time Slashdotter who has had to use and deploy Solaris on occasion, let me tell Mr. McNealy and Mr. Scwartz what's on my mind about Sun. I know they'll be reading, so here goes:

First, cut the marketing BS. No press wars with Redhat, IBM or HP. No trumped up, spin laden press releases about Solaris 10. I don't even want to see a comaprison paper. Give me a technical white paper about what the OS can do and STFU - I then can see for myself whether Solaris 10 is a good or great OS. I can also then decide for myself if it's a good fit in my architecture. Most on Slashdot are technically adept - that's why we can run and support Linux or *BSD without Redhat's help. It's the PHBs who require that kind of hand holding, not us. (Hey, I just invented a new comic book villian - Spin Laden, the Marketing Terrarist!)

The problem is that your's is only one of the opinions out there. We also have folks screaming for comparisons. What you also need to realise is that Sun is a for profit company. So is RedHat. Companies compete. Sometimes it looks ugly. On this particular issue, Jonathan has been misquoted so many times as equating Linux with RedHat. This is the case being put by those who are not reading all of what he is saying, or simply don't want to understand it. We most certainly do not equate the two. What we are getting at is that a lot of the commercial world do, and RedHat does very little to discourage this as it directly impacts their income (companies try to make money). Large shops want to have the third party vendors support their product on the platform that they deploy. Generally in the Linux world, the vendors qualify RedHat. As the RedHat execs joked about at the shareholders meeting, this qualification process can be expensive (up to around $4 million I think was quoted from memory), so it's not done for a lot of distributions.

I like the name Spin Laden :)

Open your dev process, as well as your code. I don't (necessarily) mean provide CVS access, I mean accept and credit quality patches to the code base. Open code would mean we can fix our own damned stuff when things in Solaris break and get our jobs done, while benefiting anyone else who has the same bug - we tend to like to share the fact we're smart enough to repair someone else's broken code. For large contributions, pay the contributor and pay him well.

This one I can say something I think you'll like. The development process is part of what is being opened up as a part of the open sourcing. It's also one of the issues being discussed in the pilot. I believe that one of the presentors mentioned that at the event, but don't recall who off the top of my head (probably Jonathan though).

Stay away from the rest of my systems unless I ask you in. No embedded Java in the OS, no Sun only core stuff (think Microsoft and Kerberos 5), just a big box of properly impelmented tools that I can use to make systems work, work well and work reliably. Your products will be sharing my network with other vendors, so play nice whenever you can. If that means re-writing some Solaris code to put into linux so it interoperates properly and GPLing it, so be it. That way I know that you're concerned about me and not just "maximizing value".

Sun's history is of playing nice with the other vendors. In fact we go out of our way to write to the open standards. I'd be interested in hearing you expand on this paragraph, as I'm not really clear on exactly what it is you are wanting us to do (seriously I am).

Contriubute to the industry. Some of us think RMS is a real looney, but we have the utmost respect him and his contributions. Mr. Gates, IMHO, does not contribute to the general cause or making my life easier unless there's a price tag, be it in dollars or having to shut out one of his colleagues - he calls them compeditors - from my architecture. Real contributions move the whole industry forward, and provide new opportunities for everyone to make a little $_CURRENCY, not just a select few.

In what way are we not contributing to the industry? We have a lot of folks working with projects like GNOME, X.Org, Mozilla, Open Office. We are the largest commercial contributor of code to the Open Source movement. We're opening the crown jewels (Solaris), what more would you have of us?

Censure that person who 'escorted' out the interviewer. We like plain talk. We know you have fiduciary responsibilities, and most of us try to take those into account, but trying to hide what you really want to say doesn't wash. If you hate linux or love it, say so, and say why - with no spin on the matter. Speaking of plain talk, you'll get some from us. We know you're the head of a big, powerful Corp., but you should be willing to learn from us. When it comes to putting the tech on the floor, we are your betters, not your underlings.

On the escorting out, I have to agree with you on. For goodness sake, the guy was talking with the COO of the company at the time. A little patience and tact surely would not have been too difficult.

We certainly are willing to learn from and listen to our users and customers. Part of the problem of speaking with no spin, is that it will still be read as if we are spinning, so that leaves us looking worse than we want to project. Folks get cynical of companies. If you want to read about what we are doing without the marketing spin, straight from the engineers, I can recommend blogs.sun.com.

I'd prefer to think that we are closer to equals when it comes to the tech stuff. We can all learn from each other. That's part of the reason we are open sourcing Solaris. It would be arrogant to say that we have all the best engineers and nobody outside could possibly contribute anything of worth. In reality, we have some damn good engineers, but there are also folks external with great ideas and skillsets.

Lastly, put your engineering department off limits to marketing personnel. OFF-LIMITS. Spin Laden should be shot on sight (by a Nerf gun, of course) if he dares tread where something cool is being made. No "That's a killer system, and we can leverage it to sell..." baloney please. I'm still loathe to implement AD because it's actually proprietary technology, even though it would make administrating my network a little easier.

When marketing doesn't talk to the engineers, we see things like ZFS being renamed to Dynamic File Service. I'd rather at least keep up some conversation with them. Like I said, if you want to see what we are talking about without the marketing spin, check out the engineers blogs.

Thanks for tuning in to my little rant. HAND.

Hey , if no-one rants, we don't find out about the concerns. I even had my own little rant the other day (read further down the blog if you're interested

Posted at 09:01PM Nov 19, 2004 by Alan Hargreaves in Solaris Express  |  Comments[2]

And here comes the Solaris 10 FUD from HP

Not even a day after the launch and already the FUD starts to flow. One recently brought to my attention was Martin Fink, at http://www.linuxcio.com/FBlogNov04.html. Martin Fink is HP's Linux Vice-President.

Martin takes it on himself to inform folks about what Sun is not telling about Solaris 10/x86.

I'll try to correct some of his misperceptions. The headings are below are Martin's. I won't quote the actual article, you can read it in his blog.

Is it really Solaris?

Martin's argument here is that because SPARC is big-endian and x86 is little-endian, and that applications compiled for SPARC will not run on x86, that it can't really be Solaris.

Sun has never claimed binary compatibility across different chip architectures (as against our claim of compatibility across multiple releases of the OS). I suspect Martin would be surprised to learn that Solaris on SPARC and Solaris on x86 are actually built from the same source tree... (you know, kind of like Linux for x86, linux for SPARC, linux for ...).

He also makes a comment about moving data between Solaris SPARC and Solaris x86. I can only assume that he means physically moving disks as folks have been shipping information across networks for ages. Yes, if you try to move a disk with a ufs filesystem on it between the two architectures you will run into problems. However, ZFS is endian-neutral, so that problem goes away.

Is it really open?

Martin states that Sun has only ever talked about open sourcing Solaris on x86. Didn't I already mention that Solaris is built from the same source tree? It's going to be both.

While we have not decided on the actual license we will be using (which would explain why we have not announced it), there is commitment that the license will be OSI compliant.

Why I don't think SUN will use the GPL

As I've already stated, OSI compliant. The GPL is not the be all and end all of open source licenses. It may be what we go for, it may not. We don't know yet. As such I can't really offer a lot of comment here, but he's certainly entitled to his opinion.

Who can check-in code?

Unfortunately I'm involved in some of the discussion on this so there is not a lot that I can say, except that we would look pretty silly if we were to call it open and not allow external check-in to the open source code.

Linux inside; Well, maybe

Martin treats project Janus as an admission that there are more linux applicatoins out there than there are solaris applications. And this is news how?

It would be pretty arrogant not to acknowledge that there are some good linux applications out there that have not been built for Solaris. OK, so if we run these under Janus, we get the hardening that is Solaris as well as all of the cool stuff in 10 with regards to observability of tools like DTrace.

What we also get is server consolidation. Think about multiple instances of Janus inside Zones running on something as beefy as a V40Z; along with running your Solaris applications as well. Oh yes, you could also factor in the resource manager as well for sharing out the zones in a fair and predictable manner. Certainly sounds interesting to me.

Is Janus Indemnified?

Mu. That is, the question does not make sense.

We have not built a clone of a linux kernel, we have written to the kernel API. All of the code is our own. Indemnification does not enter into it.

Applications need developers

He continues to harp on about the admission of more applications available for linux here and tyhen goes on about how linux now has a collection of more than 9000 developr tools on freshmeat and another 12000 under development. I don't know about you Martin, but thats a few too many for me. We and a lot of third parties have been developing for Solaris for a long time. We're pretty happy with our toolset. You may not have noticed, but a lot of the tools that are made available for linux also actually compile and work under Solaris (there's a shock, hey!).

He asks where the applications for Solaris are going to come from. Hmmm OK, off the top of my head how about we start with Oracle, Sybase, Veritas and Siebel. There's a lot more, but I don't have a list handy.

Where will the developer community come from?

Martin claims that there is no developer community for Solaris. Martin, you are sadly mistaken.

You only have to look at places like http://www.blastwave.org/ for a single example of this.

What problem is SUN trying to solve?

Martin makes some good points in here about what opening up code can achieve, however he is still under the delusion that Sun intends to control the codebase. Again he tries to say that Solaris SPARC and Solaris x86 are two entities. Didn't I already point out that Solaris is built from the same source tree?

And who says we are trying to turn Solaris into Linux?

I would have thought that many of the benefits that he has already mentioned would be sufficient. We also know that there are folks out there who want to work with Solaris. The feedback we are seeing in the pilot programme certainly confirms this.

Ah, but what about TCO

In this topic, Martin questions the sustainability of Sun's Solaris pricing plan. What he overlooks is that Sun is more than an Operating System company. Sun also sells hardware, support, middleware and applications. He again flogs the dead horse about Solaris SPARC and Solaris x86 being two different beasts. Do I have to say it again? They are built from the same source tree.

He also speaks about server shipments from various companies and how we compare, again questioning Sun's viability. I won't go into depth on the figures, it's a huge paragraph. One thing I will mention though is that there already in excess of a million Solaris x86 licenses out there. Our demise has been predicted more than a few times in the past 23 years. Guess what? We're still here.

He asks how many people are interested in running Solaris on x86 hardware. You only have to go back to when we deferred Solaris 9 to answer that one. The backlash was incredible.

In the end

I could say that if Martin doesnt understand our strategy, then that's good for us and bad for HP. I think the main point that Martin has missed is that Sun is not an OS company. We are not a server company. We are not a storage company. We are not an applications or middleware company. We are a Solutions company. Unlike most of our competition we can provide a soltion from the hardware, through the kernel and middleware up into user space. We also don't have to pay anyone in order to provide it, as we own the IP. OK, A customer doesn't want to run on SPARC Solaris or x86 Solaris, why should we then not sell them hardware that is capable of running Linux or even (shock horror) Windows?

In a way I guess it's predictable that the FUD has already started. I have faith that those who make the real decisions can tell the difference between FACT and FUD.

Update

I mucked up the url for blastwave when I saved this. It's right now.

Posted at 02:57PM Nov 17, 2004 by Alan Hargreaves in Solaris Express  |  Comments[7]

Sun, Solaris, Open Source and Slashdot

At the moment I keep getting the following message whenever I try to post to slashdot.

Sorry, but according to our tests, you are trying to post from an open HTTP proxy. Please close the proxy or ask your sysadmin or ISP to do so, because open proxies are used to spam web boards like this one.

If you have questions, mention that your proxy is at XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX on port 8080.

I mailed Cowboy Neal, but have not had a response on this.

I do hope they fix this soon. I don't believe we have an open proxy, what we have is a proxy with around 33000 people behind it.

Anyway, here is the response that I was trying to make to Solaris 10 Released, Updated & Free (Like Speech).

I find the bashers who claim that Sun is going to play a bait and switch with Open Sourcing Solaris a continuing amazement.

There is a commitment from Jonathan and from Scott that Solaris will released under an OSI compliant license. That's a pretty clear statement.

I am one of the engineers taking part in the pilot. The pilot is coming along nicely and there is a lot of good discussion going on. There are things that are still being ironed out, but progress is being made, and its not just internal folk.

The thing that won't surprise me is that when it does get released as advertised, is that the foksk who are bashing now are not going to come out and say "Oops, guess I was wrong". But that's slashdot.

Update

Looks like it is just one of the Sun proxies that slashdot doesn't like. Strange. I managed to post against the article now.

Posted at 10:15AM Nov 16, 2004 by Alan Hargreaves in Solaris Express  |  Comments[1]

An observation on the election results

As I'm about to head off home here in Australia, I can't help but notice somethng about the US election results as they stand right now, and wonder at the significance of it.

It appears that it is a necessary but not sufficient condition for a state to have a shoreline border in order for John Kerry to win it. When you look at the breakdown within states too, it appears that the counties that were closer to water were the ones more likely to favour him.

Wierd huh?

Posted at 07:38PM Nov 03, 2004 by Alan Hargreaves in General  |  Comments[4]