If you read only one article about why we’re doing what we’re doing with Solaris, read this one: Q&A: Sun’s Top Operating System Brass Talk OS Strategy. This absolutely nails it.
What’s the single biggest advancement Linux has brought to the industry?
It’s an interesting question, and one that in my opinion has a very simple answer: Package management—or, more specifically, the ability to install and upgrade software over the network in a seamlessly integrated fashion—along with the distributed development model package management enabled.
It used to be that operating systems were big, monolithic products, and applications were big, monolithic products you put on top of them. If you wanted to deploy, say, a web application, you sourced the middleware stack (which itself was probably several big products too), you sourced the operating system, and you (often painfully) had to integrate the two yourself (or pay a big company lots of money to do it for you).
These days, you increasingly just “apt-get install whatever“.
In this world, where does the operating system end and the application begin? The line is increasingly blurred—for when applications are deployed using an OS facility, seamlessly integrated with the OS itself, is the result an application or a feature of the operating system? In fact, in a very real way, all software looks to become part of the operating system—or, at least, this has certainly been the trend in the Linux world.
What does this shift mean to the industry? For one thing, those of us that build operating systems as monolithic products have to change—it’s what users expect, and with a componentized operating system rather than a wad of stuff, it becomes far easier to push new innovations out into the marketplace and generally evolve the OS over time. Indeed, refashioning Solaris as a “distro” is the essence of Project Indiana—and package management is the key technology that will hold it all together.
So, the next time you read about how Project Indiana aims to make Solaris more “Linux-like”, keep in mind that what we’re actually “copying” is the distro model, not Linux itself—which, after all, is a kernel, and has nothing to do with the package management and so forth the distros (you know, like Debian) built above it. This, better than anything else, highlights the opportunity for Solaris: What people really know when they say they know “Linux” is the environment that exists around the Linux kernel—the distro—all of which Solaris can deliver, and more.
I saw my first Sun workstation about 15 years ago, in 1992. I was a business student at Purdue University, and a childhood love for computers had just been reawakened. I was spending countless hours in the basement of the Math building, basking in the green phosphorescent glow of a Z29 and happily exploring every nook and cranny of the Sequent Symmetry upstairs. It didn’t take too long to discover, though, just a short walk away in the computer science building, several labs full of Sun workstations. Suddenly, the Z29 didn’t have quite the same allure. A few months later, I walked over to the registrar’s office and changed my major to computer science. (OK, advanced tax accounting had something to do with it too.)
Everything I know about computing I learned on those Sun workstations, as did so many other early Linux developers; I even had my own for a while, after I joined the University of Arizona computer science department in 1997. But within a year, the Suns were starting to disappear, replaced by Pentiums running Red Hat Linux. More and more people coming through university computer science programs were cutting their teeth on Linux, much as I had on Sun. Pretty soon, Sun was increasingly seen by this new generation as the vendor who didn’t “get it”, and Sun’s rivals did a masterful job running with that and painting the company literally built on open standards as “closed”. To those of us who knew better, it was a sad thing to watch.
The last several years have been hard for Sun, but the corner has been turned. As an outsider, I’ve watched as Sun has successfully embraced x86, pioneered energy efficiency as an essential computing feature, open sourced its software portfolio to maximize the network effects, championed transparency in corporate communications, and so many other great things. Now, I’m going to be a part of it.
And, so, I’m excited to announce that, as of today, I’m joining Sun to head up operating system platform strategy. I’m not saying much about what I’ll be doing yet, but you can probably guess from my background and earlier writings that I’ll be advocating that Solaris needs to close the usability gap with Linux to be competitive; that while as I believe Solaris needs to change in some ways, I also believe deeply in the importance of backward compatibility; and that even with Solaris front and center, I’m pretty strongly of the opinion that Linux needs to play a clearer role in the platform strategy.
It is with regrets that I leave the Linux Foundation, but if you haven’t figured out already, Sun is a company I’ve always loved, and being a part of it was an opportunity I simply could not pass up. I think the world of the people at the LF, particularly my former FSG colleagues with whom I worked so closely over the past year and a half: Jim Zemlin, Amanda McPherson, Jeff Licquia, and Dan Kohn. And I still very much believe in the core LF mission, to prevent the fragmentation of the Linux platform. Indeed, I’m remaining in my role as chair of the LSB—and Sun, of course, is a member of the Linux Foundation.
Anyway. Watch this space. This is going to be fun!
One word: Device drivers. (Ok, that’s two.)
One of the biggest problems for any developer building an operating system for the x86 is device support—how do you get your cool new OS to run reliably across the seemingly endless collection of hardware that is “the x86″? No matter how cool it is, it won’t seem very cool if it can’t talk to the hardware.
One time honored technique (at least in the academic world, and at least since I joined that world in the mid-1990s) is to use Linux’s huge collection of device drivers. Typically, that means creating a shim so your kernel can talk to the Linux device driver layer and, of course, making sure the licenses are compatible.
Not sure I understand the rationale behind GPLv3, since there are rumblings that v2 and v3 won’t be compatible, and since it doesn’t look like Linux is going to adopt v3 anytime soon. But Solaris adopting GPLv2 makes a whole lot of sense from my point of view just for the device drivers and the resulting boost to overall usability.
David Berlind: “With barely five days to go before long-anticipated January 30 launch of Vista is history, a familiar problem and the linchpin to adoption of any major operating system upgrade (Windows Vista qualifies) is crashing the party: backwards compatibility. Intuit, developer of one of the world’s most popular accounting applications used in small, medium and large businesses (Quickbooks), has notified its customers by email that Windows Vista is incompatible with some of the features of Quickbooks 2006.”
Mary Jo Foley: “Is it Intuit’s fault that its older products don’t work on Vista? Or Microsoft’s fault for changing the operating system in a way that it breaks them?”
George Ou: “As it turns out, it isn’t QuickBooks 2006 itself that has the problem with Vista but all the Intuit and third party add-on software that communicates with QuickBooks 2006 that’s the problem. More to the point, it’s the intercommunication between all those applications and the fact that they’re using forbidden techniques that have been banned since 2001 with Windows XP certification requirements that’s the issue. Intuit admitted to me that they declined to seek Windows XP certification for all these years and they’re just now making the necessary modifications for QuickBooks 2007. The reason this is relevant is because most software that is certified for Windows XP will automatically be compatible with Windows Vista.”
David Berlind: “So, while Microsoft’s response doesn’t point the finger directly at Intuit as the culprit in this situation, it makes it clear that its certification programs — programs that Intuit has apparently eschewed since 2001 — are the centerpiece of its efforts to guarantee backwards compatibility.”
Interesting discussion. Whose fault is it? It doesn’t really matter, as the end result is the same—Microsoft potentially loses customers (those who won’t upgrade to Vista because QuickBooks will break), and Intuit potentially loses customers (those who won’t upgrade to QuickBooks 2007 but rather will move to an on demand solution like NetSuite—customers tend to dislike forced upgrades).
David Berlind’s observation is interesting though, namely that Microsoft has been using its certification programs to limit the scope of the backward compatibility problem to a well defined subset around which it can presumably do thorough compatibility testing. Note that Red Hat too only guarantees backward compatibility for a subset of its platform, and that the LSB doesn’t cover the entire Linux platform either, just the subset that’s import for application portability.
What are the lessons here, from my point of view? First of all, and not surprisingly, backward compatibility matters, and it matters (or should matter) to both sides. Second, to achieve that backward compatibility, both sides have to work at it, and because a typical platform has so many moving parts, limiting the scope is key to understanding the “contract” between OS and application. Finally, some formal way of stating “I am following the contract”, such as a certification program, can make compatibility a lot easier to articulate to mutual customers.
Related: On the importance of backward compatibility, More on the importance of backward compatibility
