[rescue] [geeks] Solaris being discontinued? Rumors flying

[Liam Proven]

On 6 December 2016 at 19:54, Dave McGuire <mcguire at neurotica.com> wrote:

>   The five or six people who don't think Unity sucks will still have it
> if they want it, because the source code is out there.

It is indeed, but no other distro offers a current version. Arch and
Fedora had ports but they are long dead. That worries me, I must
confess.

> I doubt that'll
> be the case for Solaris, unless someone values history and their field
> over their job and leaks it before they leave.  That really needs to
happen.

But the source is _already_ out there -- it's the basis of Illumos and
all the other spinoffs. No, it's not the current release, but I think
it's only 1 behind, isn't it?

I don't know WTF Oracle was thinking when it took it closed-source
again. That seemed suicidal to me. There was considerable community
interest and involvement and still is.

I have never used SunOS or Solaris in anger, though, or any other
commercial Unix since SCO Xenix/Unix. (Not counting Mac OS X, which I
have only ever used as a desktop OS.)

What do folk think of the FOSS versions?

There seem to be quite a few, many with the GNU userland:

http://wiki.illumos.org/display/illumos/Distributions

Dyson sounds quite interesting to me -- basically Debian but with the
Solaris kernel and SMF as the init system. (How that works under the
covers I have no idea. Does SMF work with the GNU libc and userland,
or are there really both Solaris libc and GNU libc?_

The GNU userland plus Solaris kernel sounds like the best of both
worlds to me. TBH the Linux userland is the only one I really know
well, and I find myself disoriented at the OS X shell prompt and lost
at the FreeBSD one. And I suspect many people are the same -- I've not
really worked with commercial Unix at all since about 1990, but quite
a lot of Linux in the last 20y or so.

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