It’s all too often that I read posts such as this one and can’t help but to think that the writer is a tad on the myopic side of things… so much so that after a paragraph or two it becomes apparent that the writer hasn’t actually used Solaris in its current incarnation. And I don’t mean “used it” as in “I installed it and played around with it for a few hours/days, didn’t like the default GNOME theme, and promptly replaced it with Debian Etch” or some such. I mean “used it” as in implementing it in a real world production environment with an attempt to treat its features as the tools they are instead of toys.
In particular, I take issue with this comment from Mr. Zaitcev:
“This is the problem OpenSolaris is facing today in the nutshell: it has no breadth. It has a very limited number of excellent technologies, such as ZFS.”
No breadth? Care to, well, add some breadth to that statement, Mr. Zaitcev? Making a comment like that doesn’t mean you can toss out just one perceived example and end your argument at that.
It would appear that all of Mr. Zaitcev’s experience with Solaris/OpenSolaris comes from reading 3rd party accounts of the big new features in Solaris. This is exactly what I referred to in my opening paragraph… all these anti-Solaris pundits more than likely have zero hands-on expeience with the stuff they’re harshing on. People like Mr. Zaitcev read anecdotes and stories, come up with their own idea as to how things are based on those stories, and produce comically uninformed jabs posts such as the one linked above.
No breadth? Just what is the breadth that Mr. Zaitcev thinks is missing? Is breadth in this case even quantifiable? Is his supposition based solely on the age old (and aged) driver count argument? Does Mr. Zaitcev think that all Solaris is, is an ancient kernel which happened to have a few new concepts tacked on top of it?
I would bet that if Mr. Zaitcev sat down and tried to use Solaris in a real-world environment, he’d soon learn that Solaris has everything one needs in a data center environment… he just hasn’t discovered them (or read about them, natch) yet for himself. Who knows, perhaps he’d even appreciate them.