OpenSolaris Is One

That was quite a launch, this time last year; hundreds of bloggers, hundreds of thousands of words. I think it kind of worked. As of now, geeks choosing a server-side OS for geek reasons have a handful of choices: Linux, Solaris, one or two of the BSDs. I care about the geeks and I don’t care that much about the CIOs, because during the first decade of my career, while the CIOs were talking about MVS and VMS and Tandem Guardian and AS/400, the geeks were quietly saying “Unix” and generally Getting Shit Done. If we can give hands-on people good technical reasons to use Solaris, they will; otherwise not. I still want a GNU/Solaris userland, please. Want Dapper Drake on Solaris? Done. [Update: That Nexenta Alpha 5 is now out, with Dapper, OpenSolaris 40, 11,800 packages, JDK via DLJ and tons of other juicy Gnu + Debian + Ubuntu goodness.]