Comments on: To Sun: Good Job on on the JRE License, But I’ve Got Another Job For You http://redmonk.com/sogrady/2006/05/16/to-sun-good-job-on-on-the-jre-license-but-ive-got-another-job-for-you/ because technology is just another ecosystem Thu, 28 Aug 2008 18:27:41 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.6 By: stephen o'grady http://redmonk.com/sogrady/2006/05/16/to-sun-good-job-on-on-the-jre-license-but-ive-got-another-job-for-you/#comment-1987 stephen o'grady Wed, 24 May 2006 02:32:45 +0000 http://redmonk.com/sogrady/wp/?p=858#comment-1987 Dan: i've used - and contributed to - Blastwave, and i applaud their efforts. more, i think it's critical that those efforts be leveraged going forward. but i think it'd be wise for Solaris to consolidate on Debian's software so as to seamlessly leverage skills from the Linux community. Bryan: not bad news, precisely, but if Solaris begins losing a volume audience to distros on the basis of package management, that would seem to be less than ideal. Nexenta is great, don't get me wrong, and i'm happy to see it. but i don't think Solaris should leave that problem to distros, lest they find themselves in a situation to Linux a few years down the line; one in which everyone has solved the same problem using different, incompatible means. Dan: i’ve used - and contributed to - Blastwave, and i applaud their efforts. more, i think it’s critical that those efforts be leveraged going forward. but i think it’d be wise for Solaris to consolidate on Debian’s software so as to seamlessly leverage skills from the Linux community.

Bryan: not bad news, precisely, but if Solaris begins losing a volume audience to distros on the basis of package management, that would seem to be less than ideal. Nexenta is great, don’t get me wrong, and i’m happy to see it. but i don’t think Solaris should leave that problem to distros, lest they find themselves in a situation to Linux a few years down the line; one in which everyone has solved the same problem using different, incompatible means.

]]> By: Bryan Cantrill http://redmonk.com/sogrady/2006/05/16/to-sun-good-job-on-on-the-jre-license-but-ive-got-another-job-for-you/#comment-1986 Bryan Cantrill Wed, 17 May 2006 17:18:11 +0000 http://redmonk.com/sogrady/wp/?p=858#comment-1986 You're blowing away Solaris to replace it with an innovative OpenSolaris distro, and this is supposed to somehow be bad news for Sun or for Solaris? Seems to me that it's more vindicating than anything else -- I would much rather Nexenta thrive than Solaris accidentally step on Nexenta by trying to usurp Nexenta's differentiator. Is Debian packaging great? Sure. Is is better than System V packaging? Probably, but making that switch for Solaris is an expensive proposition: for better or ill, many Solaris enterprise customers (to say nothing of Sun itself) have customized tools around the extant Solaris packaging. Which is not to say it can't or shouldn't be done, but rather to say that a primary reason for open sourcing Solaris was to allow for new choices for customers by allowing new distributions to innovate in new ways -- while still taking building on Solaris bedrock. So to me, it's much more relevant that you were able to make a new choice here than it is that a particular technology is absent in Sun's distribution of Solaris... You’re blowing away Solaris to replace it with an innovative OpenSolaris distro, and this is supposed to somehow be bad news for Sun or for Solaris? Seems to me that it’s more vindicating than anything else — I would much rather Nexenta thrive than Solaris accidentally step on Nexenta by trying to usurp Nexenta’s differentiator. Is Debian packaging great? Sure. Is is better than System V packaging? Probably, but making that switch for Solaris is an expensive proposition: for better or ill, many Solaris enterprise customers (to say nothing of Sun itself) have customized tools around the extant Solaris packaging. Which is not to say it can’t or shouldn’t be done, but rather to say that a primary reason for open sourcing Solaris was to allow for new choices for customers by allowing new distributions to innovate in new ways — while still taking building on Solaris bedrock. So to me, it’s much more relevant that you were able to make a new choice here than it is that a particular technology is absent in Sun’s distribution of Solaris…

]]> By: Dan Davies Brackett http://redmonk.com/sogrady/2006/05/16/to-sun-good-job-on-on-the-jre-license-but-ive-got-another-job-for-you/#comment-1985 Dan Davies Brackett Wed, 17 May 2006 14:35:15 +0000 http://redmonk.com/sogrady/wp/?p=858#comment-1985 Well, there *is* blastwave and pkg-get, but they have their own set of ideological incompatibilities with the Solaris Wad Of Stuff. That said, Blastwave is better than nothing. It also occurs to me that there's another wildly popular operating system out there that doesn't have an automated package installation mechanism: Microsoft Windows. But the Windows world solves that problem differently: rather than having a nasty, intricate, terribly complicated, viciously-hard-to-grok software dependency graph that's exposed to users, they have a nasty, intricate, terribly complicated, viciously-hard-to-grok dependency graph that only developers ever have to worry about. Well, there *is* blastwave and pkg-get, but they have their own set of ideological incompatibilities with the Solaris Wad Of Stuff. That said, Blastwave is better than nothing.

It also occurs to me that there’s another wildly popular operating system out there that doesn’t have an automated package installation mechanism: Microsoft Windows. But the Windows world solves that problem differently: rather than having a nasty, intricate, terribly complicated, viciously-hard-to-grok software dependency graph that’s exposed to users, they have a nasty, intricate, terribly complicated, viciously-hard-to-grok dependency graph that only developers ever have to worry about.

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