Check out Alvaro Lopez’s superb piece Why I do think OpenSolaris ought to work with Debian. Call me a radical, but I think that easy installation and upgrading are important. I think Linux got where it is because it was basically easy enough to install and basically good enough to get a lot of jobs done. I think that having apt-get or equivalent Just Work is the single most important value-add Solaris could get. Turn it around: I think a lot of people who need what Solaris has to offer are never going to find out until apt-get or equivalent Just Works. Out of the box. So, thank heavens for OpenSolaris.org, where they’re chewing over Alo’s rant. Smart things are being said, and Eric Boutilier points out there that Gentoo, OpenPKG, and others are looking at this. But then there are people who claim to be Solaris fans saying ignorant, idiotic things like “Linux as a whole does not have anything good to offer, except that ‘it’s free’”. Earth to OpenSolaris: Every community has a few morons; please learn to ignore yours. All this is pretty well a sideshow for the existing Solaris customers, but if we want Solaris to, you know, grow, this is how to do it. Good on ya, Alo, and hang in there, you’re 100% right.


author · Dad
colophon · rights
picture of the day
July 21, 2005
· Technology (90 fragments)
· · Open Source (82 more)
· · Solaris (27 more)

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