that’s whacked

Is Sun Solaris on its deathbed?

Thursday, Sep 25. 2008  –  Category: OpenSolaris

… that provocative question is the title for InfoWorld’s latest article here. I saw the article come through on one of the lists I’m on, and well… it’s crap.. the author tries to pass it off as an objective article debating the future of Solaris. To present both sides, he gives:

• 14 paraphrased paragraphs fed to him by the Linux Foundation executive director detailing why Linux is better.

• 4 paragraphs from a Sun marketing director on why Solaris is better.

hrm.

Here’s the thing…. I like both Linux and OpenSolaris. I’m not sure why all this animosity has to exist? What does (Linux Foundation Executive Director) Jim Zemlin have against OpenSolaris that makes him make unfounded claims^Wlies for? I’d be much happier if we went head to head on technology instead of FUD (which, I might point out, is something Linux-heads used to decry Microsoft for). In fact, may I point to an article from May of 2007 in Businessweek where none other than Jim Zemlin himself asks Microsoft to stop engaging in FUD (though that particular FUD was around IP and patents).

Perhaps Jim is scared because his empty claims that nobody uses DTrace or ZFS are just that… empty.

I was at the office today listening to my coworkers talking about improving the performance of Songbird, and how we can optimise things like our database interactions. What amazing tool are we using to do this? Shark & DTrace. What platform are we doing this on? Mac OS X. What platforms benefit from this work? Every other platform… our Linux builds, our Windows builds, and yes… even the OpenSolaris builds built by our community.

I was at the Toronto MozCamp last weekend and Mozilla developers there were talking about how they use DTrace to profile and improve performance of Firefox and XULRunner. I’m willing to bet anything that they aren’t doing that on OpenSolaris (correct me if I’m wrong mfinkle).

So uh… yeah, sorry Jim. But none of the people I cited above are “Sun Microsystems sales representatives”. The technology is good. Don’t spread your own FUD about how nobody is using it, or how it has no traction when you have nothing to back that claim up. I bet a helluva lot more people are using DTrace than SystemTap. Here’s the thing… when you spread baseless slander like that instead of actually talking about your own technologies, and citing concrete technical reasons why they are better (why not talk about LVM, or SystemTap?), then you just sound like …. well, like one of those Sun sales reps you just slagged.

My favourite bit was where he suggests Sun should GPL DTrace & ZFS instead. In two consecutive paragraphs, Jim goes from (paraphrased): “Nobody even uses that stuff, we have competing technology!” to “Sun should give it to us.”. Nice, really slick there Jim.

Continuing in this vein of poorly-written drivel, the article then goes on into why OpenSolaris is better, saying ‘”I think Solaris is absolutely a great OS,” says Neil Wilson, a former Sun employee who later left the OpenDS project. Solaris is “absolutely far superior to Linux for the cases where the hardware support is there,” he adds.’ This is… might I venture, more of the same unsubstantiated crap. Only here at least it’s one sentence instead of 14 paragraphs. Say WHY it’s better, instead of just a random quote with no basis or facts to back it up.

I’d like to see us move away from this kind of crap-journalism to more objective articles grounded in technical facts and benchmarks than just ghost-written pieces by directors peppered with random quotes.