OpenSlowLaris

So I noticed that Solaris released their sourcecode today. I think it's probably truly a watershed day in IT history; Solaris is fairly stable, albeit (in the past) hobbled by the sparc processor architecture, and now free to roll up on your X86 machine of choice. The rumormill says that Opterons are the new sparcs, and all I can say is "It's About Time!"

I ran some informal, poorly-controlled benchmarks between sparcs and x86/linux boxen and the only scientific finding I can share with you is this: Slowlaris is not just a catchy name. I'll be interested to see how the OpenSolaris thing shakes out. I spent about five minutes looking for the license - It's not easy to find; but it allays my fears to some extent. I was concerned that OpenSolaris would have some kind of hidden bomb that would 'contaminate' developers so that they couldn't work on linux anymore without raising questions of intellectual properties. Well, it appears that Sun is playing nice this time 'round; they're using the "CDDL", and OSI approved license.

Well, kiddies, if you want to get your hands dirty on some 'real unix', you know where to go.

I almost didn't make this entry, because the very first paragraph on the OpenSolaris site is a blatant request for bloggers to disseminate their thoughts about the release and basically do their marketing for them. But what the hell; it is important.