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What Torvalds really thinks of Solaris

Stephen Shankland CNET News.com

Published: 21 Dec 2004 15:20 GMT

When Linus Torvalds successfully harnessed the talent of thousands of programmers to create Linux, the operating system that arguably suffered most was Sun's Solaris.

Now Torvalds and his allies face a new side of that old competitor. Sun has turned Solaris into an open source project. The company also is building its own community of programmers around Solaris, while promoting the operating system's deployment on the widely used computers with x86 processors, such as Intel's Xeon.

But the 34-year-old Finnish programmer isn't fazed by Solaris. In fact, he's downright dismissive, calling it a "joke".

Torvalds worked for years at now-struggling chip designer Transmeta, but he now plans to stay with his current employer, Open Source Development Labs in Oregon, "for the foreseeable future".

There, along with co-worker and chief deputy Andrew Morton, Torvalds is spearheading a new Linux development process: frequent small changes to the existing 2.6 kernel of Linux rather than a massive overhaul many months down the road. The result has been faster improvements.

Torvalds discussed Solaris, his improvisational programming style and other issues in an interview with ZDNet UK sister site CNET News.com.

What do you think of what Sun is doing with Solaris 10 -- technology improvements, open source, and the move to x86 chips?
I'm taking a very wait-and-see attitude to Sun. They like talking too much. I'm waiting for the action.

It seems to me that they have taken some action besides just grandstanding. They have resurrected the x86 version and added several interesting features -- containers, DTrace, and ZFS, for example -- that are available today in beta versions of Solaris 10. They're actively rounding up support from developers and software companies. And they announced that the production version of Solaris 10 on x86 will be available for free. What do you think about the x86 move and the new Solaris features?
Solaris/x86 is a joke, last I heard. [It has] very little support for any kind of strange hardware. If you thought Linux had issues with driver availability for some things, let's see you try Solaris/x86.