The big
OpenSolaris launch is today;
there’s a
huge crowd of
bloggers giving you the deep
technical poop, so I’ll stick to sports metaphors.
I don’t know what the word “Unix” means legally, but if it’s got a real
fork(), it’s Unix to me; that includes GNU/Linux and the
BSDs and Solaris.
Which is to say, they’re more alike than they are different, and they’re all
pretty good.
Nobody cares much about the history now; it’s about fast, reliable,
and cheap, and that’s as it should be.
If you look at the core engineering teams for Linux and Solaris, neither of
them is dramatically bigger than the other, so I think the race is pretty fair.
My personal take? At the moment Solaris is ahead in scaling and
observability and production management. The good Linux distros are ahead in
installing and packaging (“In the Beginning there was nothing. So God said
apt-get install light”) and user interface.
Is there a downside?
The BSDs might get crowded out in all the excitement, and that would be sad.
Aside from that, it’s gonna be fun to watch.
And the people who are lined up to bet are waving real money, lots of it.
