Stupid article

There’s a really badly written article called Sun hopes for Linux-like Solaris over at ZDnet in Australia.

It would appear from the article that Sun can’t use “Linux tools” such as bash, because they’re GPL and Solaris isn’t. For one – bash isn’t a Linux tool. Secondly, Sun ships bash. What sort of morons write this garbage (the article, not bash)?

There’s a kernel (no pun intended) of truth in the article, though you have to think a bit laterally sometimes to detect it. It seems to be talking about the currently Sun-internal Project Indiana.

Sun’s packaging (which they inherited from SysV) indeed sucks and needs fixing. But Linux has sucky packaging systems too – step forward rpm and say corrupt DB environment.

Sun’s contributed massive amounts of code to GNOME, and GNOME ships with Solaris 10. Nothing to change there then.

Sun’s hardware support for x86 isn’t good enough, although it is getting much better. Sun’s hardware compatibility list is however a poor indicator of what works and what doesn’t – it doesn’t include SATA chipsets that Sun use in the Thumper for instance.

It is hard to see how they’d be able to merge any code (ignoring licensing issues) from Linux in to address considering the different driver models and Linux’s cavalier approach to interface stability. But they have got versions of FreeBSD’s drivers in Solaris 10 already, so perhaps it is possible. More drivers would be good.

I think there’s some changes in Sun Studio 12 so that the tools support gcc flags. I’m not overly convinced that’s a good idea, but they’ve not broken any existing argument handling, so that’s fine by me.

What things do you think Project Indiana should do to improve Solaris?