What Will Happen in IT in 2007? 318
An anonymous reader writes "ZDNet's Paul Murphy has set out his IT predictions for 2007. Featured among the completely predictable, OpenSolaris overtaking Linux is apparently inevitable within one year. From the article: 'By the end of the year the OpenSolaris community will be widely recognized as larger and more active than the Linux community.' Is 2007 the year of the OpenSolaris desktop? Other 'inevitables' include Microsoft's success with Vista, the continuing phase-out of Itanium, and the Cell processor powering most of the world's super-computers."
Re:There will be competition for Exchange Server? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:God, I hope so... (Score:4, Interesting)
The only hiccup I've run into running Linux or OS X (on non-mac hardware no less) is getting wifi working. A few internet searches later (other computer obviously) and voilà, they work.
In OS X you can run parallels but 99% of the Windows apps I use are available for OS X (for example, Office, Photoshop, Flash Studio, Quickbooks, Firefox, etc). Linux is a different story. That being said I have great luck running wine with photoshop and quickbooks. I've never tried flash but it's not needed. Open Office is a more than adequate replacement for MS Office. I don't use the extra 95% of tools available in those products anyway.
I like windows actually. I however love OS X. Linux is great as well. I cut my teeth using Linux in '95 while in college trying to get on doing Oracle DB development on HP-UX. I needed to be able to get around the shell and learn csh. Programming dot clocks to get your "new" video card to start X windows was an interesting learning experience. I'm forever amazed at the new distributions. Ubuntu (sp?), Fedora, etc. Ah the good old days of Slackware disk packages downloaded over ftp at the local Uni!
Tru64, Solaris (SunOS), hell even DR/MS-DOS in the days. Oh yeah Integer Basic on Apple ][ was great! Mac OS was pretty nice too, I was a bit sad to see OS 9 die. My first Mac with OS 9 & X dual boot made me see why so many people were into pre-OS X. 10.0 & 10.1 sucked IMO. However, 10.2 made my system exponentially faster, 10.3 sped it up even more, 10.4 was not such a drastic improvement, leading me to believe the OS is more mature now. I'd like to see that from an OS from Redmond. Windows gets massively larger per OS update. Granted Linux has as well. It however, includes almost 100% of what you need for an operational system. Windows just includes notepad
Ciao
Tried OpenSolaris... (Score:5, Interesting)
Anyway, from my working with it, I know the OpenSolaris is certainly full of themselves, and some denial, but I don't think they can live up to their own expectations. For example, any complaint or bug frequently got met with 'at least you aren't running linux!'. They trashed on lack of documentation in linux while I struggled to find some documentation on their stuff that seemed unwritten. They'd pick up a decade-old howto and say 'this is how linux requires you do it, versus our not-yet released way, see how crappy linux is'. When people talked about how woefully (understandably) incomplete their ACPI and suspend support was, they pointed at linux and said 'linux acpi support hardly works at all, so don't expect too much' despite the reality of 3 out of 3 generic motherboards I've tried worked splendidly with linux acpi. My laptop despite being one of their officially tested still doesn't have clock modulation and their acpi parser barfs on the DSDT that nothing else (not even intel's compiler) even warns on. People discussing panics/hangs are met with 'at least it doesn't crash as much as linux', despite evidence to the contrary. They are used to a closed, proprietary world of a select set of hardware and the open world if they make any headway in is going to give them quite the wake up call. They talk about how much better their driver support is, despite the glaring lack of drivers. Largely their efforts in expanding that involve porting drivers from the BSD projects.
Anyway, their current implementation does admittedly seem adequate for most server type activities if the hardware is supported. I could see a lot of hardware vendors happy about a system with a stable binary interface for drivers that doesn't require rebuilds for every uname -r, but hardware vendors face the market realities and put up with the pain if they want to play in the server space. I understand the hassle, but linux making a PITA for hardware vendors have given us a lot more driver source than we could have hoped for. For the market, probably the single best card they have is ZFS. They have done a good job of consolidating volume management, software raid, filesystem, stuff like snapshots, and paranoia of checksumming everywhere into a single implementation. In doing so they have done things more efficiently (such as RAID format on disk leveraging filesystem layer knowledge for better performance), and trustworthy (a controller failing to report data corruption is detected at a higher level). ZFS is impressive, and that was/is the one thing that makes me really want the rest of the platform to be usable for me day to day.
DTrace is much hyped, and very useful in the hands of good developers and good administrators, but I don't see administrators at large making use of it enough to deliver on the hopes Sun sets up for it.
Zoning is a nice logical extension from simple chrooting which is more comprehensive, and more efficient than the other extreme of virtualization, theoretically. However, with virtualization being ubiquitous and most of the market accepting the ever-reducing overhead for the flexibility, I don't know if Zones are going to excite anyone that much. The BrandZ extension of the metaphor gives it some flexibility, but again their Linux profile still doesn't run linux things just right, and a linux vm with the linux kernel already will do so today.
So you have a platform that probably won't need to be as successful as linux had to be in order for hardware ve
Try Leopard for ZFS (Score:1, Interesting)
I understand ZFS will ship with MacOSX Leopard. MacOSX market share will be bigger than OpenSolaris in 2007.
Re:Thanks Captain Obvious (Score:3, Interesting)
Predictions repository (Score:5, Interesting)
Interesting site for viewing predictions from folks.
Re:God, I hope so... (Score:5, Interesting)
Huh? (Score:3, Interesting)
To quote Lewis Black: "where can one find a drug that would make one so delusional." The Linux community, I'm sorry to inform him, is much larger and more active than he apparently understands. That's because it encompasses tens of thousands of products and technologies well beyond the server and desktop markets, which aren't even the biggest market so far as Linux usage is concerned.
Re:Tried OpenSolaris... (Score:5, Interesting)
Be that as it may, let me make a few comments.
1) Nevada is development code, not release. If there aren't bugs in your dev. code, then you're either the finest programmer since about 1960, or you're not doing anything.
2) OpenSolaris in general is not the place to go for release code; It's the community work, warts and all. If you want a production OS, you use Solaris10.
3) Having said that, let me also add that Solaris10 is documented. Heavily. Coherently. Completely. HPUX and AIX are close, Linux isn't even an also-ran in the documentation realm.
So let me talk about some of the good and bad we're seeing with Solaris10 in the real world.
Let me start by stating that dtrace rocks. Most admins don't write scripts in it, as you suspect--however, they do download them from programmers who give back to the community. Similarly, zones rock too--companies are using them to compartmentalise their environments (for example: one database instance per zone), which makes migration between machines a trivial process. BrandZ is an interesting offshoot, but is likely to be less important for users than for developers.
Hardware support (specifically non-Sun, x86/x64) hardware support is amazing. Really, Solaris will work on anything!!!
And if you believe that, I have a bridge to sell you.
OK, let's come clean. Hardware support is rapidly um... sucking less. It's still nowhere close to the Linux ballpark, and probably won't be for at least three years. That's not surprising from a company that continually tried to kill off their X86 offering for several years, before rather suddenly committing to it. Let me come back to this in a moment.
I'll readily admit that the anti-Linux sentiment is very strong in the (Open)Solaris world, but you should understand where some of the frustration comes from. Daily (hourly!), the various newsgroups and discussion forums receive posts that come across as, "I can do THIS in Linux, but I can't in Solaris. Why does Solaris suck so badly?!" The answer is usually that Linux has some nonstandard (and more than occasionally undocumented) extensions to standard Unix tools. In other words, this 'thing' will not work in Irix, AIX, HP-UX, *BSD, OSF/1, OS X, or any other Unix variant--only in Linux. Furthermore, if that behaviour is really necessary (it rarely is), then the tool is probably available as a source or binary download to anyone interested.
I can't comment on ACPI, other than to state that I have never used a computer for any length of time, running any OS, that did power management properly. That includes Linux (RHEL3 and older), Windows (XP and earlier), or Solaris (10, etc.)
Don't get me wrong here--Solaris on commodity hardware still has a ways to go. However, Solaris on Sun hardware (either SPARC or X64) is the best thing going in computing right now. For those two reasons, OpenSolaris really does have the potential to take the world by storm next year. The community has been presented with both a challenge (make this a true commodity-hardware OS), and a clear goal (behaving like Solaris10 on Sun gear). Furthermore, since Sun is feeding contributions back from OpenSolaris into Solaris, the 'official' OS will continue to get better.
In other words, the OpenSolaris community will thrive because there's an intriguing challenge facing them, and a clear reward as a result.
Paul Murphy (Score:3, Interesting)
Paul Murphy has no idea what is is talking about.
Re:God, I hope so... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:My BOLD Predictions! (Score:4, Interesting)
But then - that was always the case that DRAM prices are unpredictable.
Yaaayy!! Paul's begun drinking again! (Score:2, Interesting)
Nevertheless, these may be the most long-shot predictions I've seen yet. Servers/Users embracing Vista? Not likely. Open-Solaris being kick-ass? Hmm. Never tried it, but I gotta admit that the different *nix flavors are like that - ice cream with nuance.Don't matter to me 'cept that NetBSD is the hardest initial lockdown.
Everyone should have to be subjected to 'Babes in Toyland' at least once. How else do you learn?
Solaris vs Linux? (Score:5, Interesting)
The simple reason is: Worse is better [wikipedia.org].
Why do you think absolutely everyone on Linux was using Mozilla? It was the main Gecko program, and your other options kind of sucked. Mozilla got the job done, and everyone was developing for it -- you were guaranteed to have new and interesting stuff (Flash, Java, RSS, tabbed browsing, etc) on Mozilla, either before it was anywhere else, or within a month of it being implemented elsewhere.
Of course, some things never made it into Mozilla -- for instance, Amaya is both a web browser and a WYSIWYG editor, and you can jump into any webpage and edit, and save the new version somewhere -- there may even be a mechanism for re-uploading it. But there must not be that much demand for such features -- after all, most of us either use Notepad (or vim), or we use some nicely-done AJAX WYSIWYG.
You could point to Firefox, but remember: Firefox was originally named "Pheonix", because it rose from the ashes of Mozilla. Had Firefox been written from scratch, it would never have gotten where it is today -- old Mozilla bugs and all.
That is what will happen with Linux and OpenSolaris.
Linux is already much, much more popular than BSD or OpenSolaris -- or, for that matter, Plan 9. So, we take the best ideas from other OSes, so long as we can reasonably implement them, and we also toy with new things of our own. If I remember right,
The only way this picture changes is if Solaris is so ridiculously better than Linux that the few people hacking on it now are enough for it to surpass Linux -- keep in mind, there will be plenty more people hacking on Linux at the same time. This has happened in the past, on a smaller scale, but I just don't think Solaris is better enough -- remember, evangelizing won't work. You won't get me to hack on Solaris till it runs on my Powerbook, at least -- and you need people like me to make it run on that Powerbook. You need it to already be almost as good as Linux, if not significantly better -- and not just in a few areas I don't care about -- in order to get me to hack on it.
If you really want to replace Linux, come up with something that's both better enough that it takes half the time to write it in FooOS than in Linux, and can run a Linux kernel alongside it (do something tricky with UML, or something like what Apple did with Mach/Darwin), so that I can load up my nVidia driver and play Quake 4, and still hack around with something cool like, say, a new cluster filesystem. You have to do it right, though -- I should be able to load my Linux kernel, nVidia driver, and Quake4 binary (and maps) from my own FooOS cluster filesystem.
If you can do that, and provide compelling enough development tools to sway the Linux kernel devs, then we might actually lose the Linux kernel -- slowly -- and replace it with something better. Unless you can do that, Linux will remain the best we've got, now and forever.
Re:God, I hope so... (Score:3, Interesting)
You hear a lot of people saying this and I just don't think it's true. I've recently acquired a laptop for my mother (that's a good swap - stop it!) and she has never used a computer of any sort. Well, Windows is the obvious choice as it's so intuitive and user friendly says I. This is a myth that is cleverly enforced by the whole Windows GUI "Style Guide" meaning that most Windows apps have a similar "look and feel". If you've used Windows before it is indeed intuitive and user friendly. For the new user, however, it simply isn't!
Why is it then that Windows "power users" (for want of a better term) used to use the short-cut keys to accomplish most tasks rather than using the mouse - this was of course back in the day when every command available to the mouse had an associated key, or set of keys, to perform the same function from the keyboard.
With a command line, you just need to know what command to issue whereas with a Windows interface you need to know the command (ie which button to click, which box to tick) but you also need to know where to go to issue the command.
When trying to show my mum how to use the PC she is making notes. Does she have to draw each stupid window with some means of signifying which bit she has to click on? It obviously doesn't help that she's scared of the thing, like most people of her generation - a teacher at school when "computers" first arrived used to teach us kids how it all worked, and he spent most of the lesson telling us to stop pressing buttons and trying things. He offered a similar course to the other teachers and he found it hard to get them to even touch the computers at all!
I, personally, hate windows. It frustrates me enormously that I can't just issue a command to achieve what I want. Many of the more esoteric, and therefore useful, features of windows are hidden away down through a myriad of different pull down menus, select item, advanced button, select from multiple tabs, another advanced button, more damn tabs, more buttons - it's a nightmare! Aaaaaarrrggghhhh!
But I still got her a windows machine! Perhaps that says it all!
Re:What to say? (Score:5, Interesting)
2. Itanic is still dead. Wow. What a revelation.
3. Cell takes over HPC. Not gonna happen. See GPGPU for why.
4. Slowaris wins out over linux. Literally when pigs fly.
You got to be kidding... (Score:3, Interesting)
Say *what*?
I had a NeXT, I use Mac OS X daily, and even I didn't bother installing OpenDarwin. FreeBSD is far superior to Darwin in every respect but the ability to run OSX on top of it.
I don't recall anyone predicting that OpenDarwin would replace Linux. Where was this happening?