Jason Perlow on 'Unixification II' -- this looks important

I don't pretend to know enough about whether ZDNet's Jason Perlow is right about Linux missing the boat when it comes to massive scaling, and how OpenSolaris has the upper hand in the world of big iron.

He goes into a lengthy discussion of the ramifications of OpenSolaris coming under the GPLv3 license and what that would mean for Linux. He says that he can see the Free Software Foundation and Richard M. Stallman embracing OpenSolaris, as well as Debian moving away from GNU/Linux to something that could only be called GNU/OpenSolaris.

He wrote the "Unixfication II" item in response to another OpenSolaris/Ubuntu entry called "What Ubuntu Wants to Be When it Groups Up"

Pretty heady stuff, all around. Again, I have no idea if there's anything to this. All I know is that the OpenSolaris 2008.05 CD runs like crap in 512 MB of RAM. But the MilaX spin on OpenSolaris -- a "Damn Small" take on the Sun OS -- runs great.

Here's a few excerpts from Jason's "Unixfication" piece:

But what about mainframes? Those got big amounts of memory and I/O, right? The IBM zSeries mainframe implements Linux on a hypervisor (zVM) and is also partitioned, so essentially it runs lots of little virtualized systems at once. This again is not true monolithic scalability, this is using virtualization technology to perform resource allocation. It's wicked cool, it will be a great solution for a lot of customers, but it's not where Linux kernel development should end. We will still need bare metal monolithic scalability for some time to come - the hypervisor hasn't eliminated the traditional computing model yet, because many kinds of apps should not be virtualized - such as anything requiring heavy I/O -- and I suspect it will be a while until it becomes the conventional way of doing things.

...

Linux and UNIX will eventually merge into the same operating system. Who's kernel and what the kernel ends up looking like and who's pieces it incorporates is irrelevant. The question is, how difficult are we going to make it for ourselves to get there?

...

If OpenSolaris is released under GPL version 3, then we now have the inevitable situation where there are two GPL-licensed Oses in the wild. This has never been an issue before, because Linux was the only game in town. From the perspective of the Free Software Foundation, GPL3 is going to be the preferred license under which many, if not all - with the possible exception of the Linux kernel itself - will fall under. That means with OpenSolaris, we would have a complete GPL3 OS stack. Unless Linus decides to change his mind and move Linux to GPLv3, our favorite kernel is likely be left behind. You got that right people - Free Software Civil War.

The FSF has always referred to Linux as GNU/Linux. This isn't just Richard Stallman being bitter - this is the official name of which the Debian distribution, which forms the basis for Ubuntu, is referred to. It might be a little bit of a stretch, but what if the OpenSolaris kernel and many of its other components were to fall under the auspices of the Free Software Foundation? Surely, Sun would have to give up some control, but if you follow the natural course of things, GNU/Solaris is not out of the question. With the "Kosher Certification" of the FSF and Richard Stallman, migrating Debian to a Solaris kernel would simply be an academic exercise. Or to put it this way -- "GNU -is- UNIX" would become their new motto.

We can avoid all the petty squabbling and unpleasantness as a result of a GPL versioning divide between the two players if Linux is changed to GPL3. Sun can then cooperate and license its OS into GPL3 as well, and we can get on with more productive work of engineering the Free Software OS of the future.

Again, read the whole damn thing here. And the first article here.

From my humble corner, I'm not sure whether or not there needs to be one monolithic kernel to handle everything from the biggest of big iron all the way down to plain-vanilla servers, personal desktops and embedded devices.

I'm not even sure this is what Jason Perlow is getting at, but I have a feeling if there's a demand for a Linux kernel aimed at massively huge-scale computing, that will happen. Certainly the open-sourcing of Solaris will provide more competition for Linux, but there's room enough out there for everybody, I figure. And whether or not the "open" part of OpenSolaris will extend much beyond the i386 architecture is, in my mind, more of a question than a certainty.

And if the OpenSolaris CD didn't run like a two-legged dog on my 512 MB box, I'd think the future quite a bit brighter for OpenSolaris. Hell, if I wanted an OS that only ran with 1 GB, I'd use Vista.