Blogging on OpenSolaris

I mentioned a few days ago I downloaded the openSolaris live CD and will take it for a spin someday.

Indeed today is a very fine day where the usual badminton session was canceled, and girl friend is yet to be found.

I threw the openSolaris CD into the drive and booted it up.

Maybe I am really obsolete, but again I am amazed when it can detect most of the chipsets of my cheapo Dell laptop. It even automatically detected the wireless networks for me and boom here I am, blogging on openSolaris through the Live CD.

Here is a screen shot using the screen capture utility.




I plan to ditch the Fedora 8 in my another office machine and replace it with openSolaris, just for the sack of experimenting.

For now the weakness I have found is there are far fewer software packages available for download, and the package manager seems weaker than Ubuntu's.

Personally I feel that openSolaris has a lot of potential. If Sun plays the cards right, it could even match and compete with Apple's OS X one day (remember the underlying kernel of OS X is BSD-based, which has a very close lineage to Solaris).

Note so far the software development has mainly fallen into two extremes: open-source projects like the Linux kernel (i.e. the Bazaar), and closed-source projects like Windows (i.e. the Cathedral).

My take is both ends have their benefits and disadvantages, and a reasonable alternative will be to have a hybrid model that inherits the advantages from both models.

Advantages of
Open Source: Freedom, transparency, project decisions will be more on technical merits than business choices (e.g. barring competitors from entering by creating a obfuscated standard)

Closed Source: Centralized management of features, coherent development plan

In this respect, openSolaris seems promising, if, and only if it doesn't shift too much to either the open-source (not likely) or closed-source model.

Though open source purists are often skeptical when commercial entities involve in software projects, there are a number of high profile open source projects that fall under this category.

The QT toolkit is a very successful example where the software is maintained by a for-profit company. Users can choose to use the software for free provided they don't use it for commercial purpose, and agree to contribute back to the open source community. QT is owned by Trolltech, which in turn is recently bought over by Nokia.

Another example will be Mercurial, a distributed version control software, which is backed by Selenic.

In the long run, the introduction of openSolaris though further complicates the OS landscape, it nevertheless forces all the major OS vendors to reckon the reality, and in the end, it is us the consumers who will benefit in this war of desktops.