The de-commoditization of the OS

So the DTrace team is currently at USENIX ‘04, where yesterday we presented our paper on DTrace. The presentation went quite well – though it’s a bit difficult to jam so much content in 25 minutes! The reception to the work was very positive, and even the questions largely praised DTrace. The only wrinkle in the whole operation came with the last question, from an employee of IBM. To paraphrase:

DTrace seems great, I imagine many people would be interested in this, etc. etc. When are you going to port it to Linux?

I’m afraid that my answer was probably perceived as a bit politically incorrect; it was roughly:

Look: we believe in choice; we believe that people should pick the best operating system for the task at hand. We’ve been busting butt for the last three years on DTrace to make Solaris the best operating system for many different tasks. Enough said…

To be clear: this is not an attack on Linux. But there is a fundamental disagreement out there: many seem to believe that the operating system is a “commodity” – that all operating systems are basically the same. We disagree: we believe that the operating system is a nexus of innovation. And we believe that we’re proving that with Solaris 10 technologies like DTrace, Zones, ZFS, etc. etc. You certainly don’t have to agree with us; we believe that you always have the right to choose Linux and that there may be many great reasons to do so. But please stop asking if we’re going to port these features to Linux – if you want to take advantage of our OS innovation, run Solaris.