The Unix Horse Race

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.