Submitting a review for consideration is easy; please first read Slashdot's book review guidelines. Updated: 2008114 by samzenpus
All trademarks and copyrights on this page are owned by their respective owners. Comments are owned by the Poster. The Rest © 1997-2009 Geeknet, Inc.
Already Open (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Already Open (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
I agree. There isn't enough to set it apart from its competitors for it to survive without Sun's active support. I think OpenSolaris is dead dead dead.
I'm wagering it isn't the only Sun offering that's going to be given the boot either. I have a real suspicion that they'll cut OO.org loose too.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Already Open (Score:5, Funny)
I would, but it keeps dying. Don't believe me? Ask Netcraft.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Isn't that some kind of justice that BSD in one form reached 10% Desktop use share as OS X?
If we listened to what people said, iPod would never take off, Apple would release 5-10 tablets and go out of business like 5 times, it would be year of Linux on desktop, Microsoft would be dead like 10 times etc.
Oracle is a OS company and produces Linux? I have gave up reading after it. Yes, I didn't read submission even and proud of it. Just like I just laughed at ''Java is doomed'' junk.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
ZFS, Nuff Said
Re:Already Open (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Re:Already Open (Score:5, Insightful)
Without the Sun-paid developers, would OpenSolaris keep its development momentum?
Another similar question is: Even with the Sun-paid developers, can OpenSolaris keep its development momentum? I very much doubt it, in fact if you look at the trends, you could say that solaris lost that momentum years ago. The only thing that keeps the interest in opensolaris today is ZFS (which is great, but it doesn't make the traditional filesystems irrelevant - LVM and traditional raid suck, but it works and it can do almost everything that ZFS does, even if its a bit slower and crappier), and it's impossible to release big innovative features like ZFS every few years, things like zfs only happen one time every n-decades.
My take: Ellison is not going to follow the anti-Linux competitive attitude that the old Sun had. Its clear that Linux is here to stay, and Oracle couldn't win a fight against Linux, because pretty much everyone except Microsoft and Apple back it. I can't guess what they will do with opensolaris, but it's clear that they aren't going to start a war against Linux, because that would mean starting a war against the huge and increasing share of their Oracle Linux customers.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Maybe the next version could be called NetSolaris. We could install it on very large toasters.
I always wondered if they [wikipedia.org] would run Linux. But you cleared it all up now. It's just so obvious.
Linux is the biggest fish in the "open" space. (Score:4, Interesting)
So, what is the chance that Oracle will spend resources on OpenSolaris? The probability is exactly 0.
Oracle -- along with Intel and Cisco -- is notorious for viewing engineers as dots on a graph and rating them on a bell curve, firing the bottom 10% annually. These companies do not waste any money or time on "underperformance" by either engineers or products. If a product does not produce any revenue, then it is abandoned.
This shark-like mentality has gained popularity in recent years among American companies.
Parent
fuck you (Score:4, Informative)
you're probably right. As much as I wanted to find fault and prove you wrong, I can't and now I'm just bitter.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
They can cut off the project's oxygen pretty easily, actually. Most of the project's ecosystem consists of sun-sponsored resources (websites, source code repositories, they also host the mailing lists) and since Oracle will be purchasing Sun's rights they can easily revoke the rights to the binary-only blobs that are required to build a complete and bootable copy of the source tree (if you can't build it, you can't run it -can you?).
Oracle is in a great posistion to kill off Solaris. Considerting that there
Re: (Score:2)
That makes it hard for them to stop anyone who has the resources and desire from starting their own product based on the OpenSolaris code, but it doesn't make it that hard for them to kill OpenSolaris as an actively developed Sun project.
Not, I should hasten to add, that I think they will do that, just that they can. And if they did, I doubt there'd be a big community keeping OpenSolaris alive after they did. It might survi
Re: (Score:2)
And why would Oracle want to prevent if from being forked?
But maybe they could release it also under GPL.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
True, but unless you have the powerhouse ( with a vested interest ) like sun working on it, it might as well be dead as it will stagnate.
Re:Already Open (Score:5, Interesting)
It would be kinda hard to kill since the code is already "open" and out in the wild. Oracle can't prevent the current code base from being forked
The notion that once you make something open source, you can't revoke that, is interesting. It's widely believed, but I've seen very little legal analysis to support that belief. What little I've seen from open source lawyers has said that it might NOT be true. I'd love to see a test case.
Some of the factors that would affect a particular case are whether or not the open source license involved is a contract or a bare license. Bare licenses ARE revokable at will by the licensor. In Rosen's book on open source licensing, that is one of the reasons he recommends against using them, in favor of making sure your license is a contract. This is interesting, because one rather prominent open source license, GPL, is not a contract, according to its authors. They are quite insistent about that.
If a particular open source license IS a contract, then whether it is revocable or not will depend on the terms of the contract. Even then, it may be possible to revoke it, if the licensor is willing to suffer a penalty for breach of contract. Contract penalties are almost always just monetary damages, not an order of specific performance. I'll leave it to others to speculate how that would work out.
Another issue is sublicensing. With some open source licenses, if you give me your software, I get my license from you. If I then give the software to a third person, they get their license from me. With other open source licenses, the third person gets their license from you, rather than getting a sublicense from me. GPLv3 is one of the latter kinds of license--it has a specific statement in the license that you cannot sublicense it.
For licenses that are not sublicensible, what happens if the original licensor simply announces that they are giving out no new licenses? People who have the software could still distribute it, free of risk of copyright suit, since they have a license to distribute. But the recipients would not have a license, so they could not redistribute. It might take a way to kill off some open code this way, because it could take a while for all the current owners of copies to stop distributing, but those would probably eventually go away.
Note that I am NOT saying that open source licenses ARE revokable. Just that no one has given a convincing reason that they are not, and that almost nothing else in contract/licensing law is irrevocable, so the notion that open source licenses are irrevocable should be treated with skepticism at this point.
Parent
Complete rubbish (Score:5, Insightful)
Now that they own an entire OS stack, they have no need. If nothing else, I expect unbreakable Linux to fade away rather quickly once the acquisition is complete, as well as Oracle shifting the focus of all future DB enhancements to have a Solaris focus with Linux as a secondary, as was the case historically.
Perhaps FUD - Complete rubbish (Score:3, Interesting)
If I wanted to capture business from Sun, I'd start a rumor that Oracle was going to get rid of big parts of Sun.
And, just to add insult to injury, the rumor would have them laying off the people Oracle most wants to retain!
--dave
Re:Complete rubbish (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Complete rubbish (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Not really, they could quite easily adapt Linux to support those processors, it already runs on Sparc and supports the T1 at the very least, i wouldn't be surprised if it already supported the T2+... And the SPARC64 processors these days are made by Fujitsu anyway..
Re:Complete rubbish (Score:5, Insightful)
There's a good proof of concept Linux that's run on a T2000, but how many years, how many staff and how many debates on LKML would it take to get from a POC to something you could bet your company on?
Honorable bird in hand beats however many in the South Atlantic (;-))
--dave
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Solaris is not need for UltraSPARC. That's a myth.
UltraSPARC needs Solaris to live on is the more likely scenario.
In the next 12-18 months the we are going to see a fair amount of cheap x86/x64 multicore come on line. I mean more than 8 cores.
For the most part this is going to obsolete the SPARC. Since SPARC development has slowed to a narcoleptic snails pace.
I personally love working with Solaris. It's consistent and strong. Linux is still not up to the Enterprise levels that Solaris is. But man Linu
Don't believe it.... (Score:4, Interesting)
opensolaris - the regular SXCE builds are Sun's testbed for new updates, patches, fixes and technology updates...
It's noted as 5.11 for the version, codenamed Nevada.
It's very similar to the way the unix kernel builds happened at one time (to be honest I haven't looked lately to know if they still do this or not) - in that the even number release is production and the odd numbered release is development...
Unless Oracle intends to kill off Solaris altogether, I don't see them killing OpenSolaris.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I can tell you as a IT Director in finance that they have come pushing Unbreakable into big accounts, and want to cut Redhat off at the knees as much as possible. So the opening salvos have already been sent, and sinking Redhat and getting all Ora
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Actually Oracle also employs some high level kernel developers. A lot of the FS work that has been done lately has been done by people with Oracle email addresses.
time to steal features (Score:4, Interesting)
For anyone already committed to OpenSolaris, there are some obvious things to do: (1) Celebrate the fact that it's open-source, which limits how badly you can be screwed. (2) Write a plan to start transitioning to Linux or FreeBSD or whatever. (3) Help to organize a community operating outside of Oracle that will coordinate on maintaining the OS with security patches for the rest of its lifetime.
For anyone else, now would be a good time to think about stealing features. I know a lot of people really like DTrace. Well, it's already been ported to FreeBSD, and the Linux port seems to be nearing completion.
Re: (Score:2)
How much penetration did OpenSolaris ever achieve? I know a few guys that through it up just to take a peak, but I doubt very much that there are that many production machines out there. It always struck me as more of a curiosity. But I dunno, maybe it's all over the place.
Makes absolutely no sense (Score:5, Insightful)
Why would Oracle kill Solaris? Their first public pronouncement on the Sun takeover specifically mentioned Solaris next to Java as the reasons they want to acquire Sun. Killing Solaris would be almost as much of an about face as killing Java.
Solaris represents one of Oracle's differentiators. It has features that Linux can't due to licensing concerns, namely ZFS and DTrace. It gives them the opportunity to add value to their offerings, as opposed to being simply a reseller, which is what they'd be if they'd favour Linux.
What's more, Oracle's database is well-known to run better on Solaris than on any other operating system. Killing Solaris would remove that competitive advantage.
The only reason Oracle supported Linux so strong is that they didn't have an OS of their own. When they acquire Sun, they will.
Re: (Score:2)
I don't think anyone doubts that Solaris will go on. But I see little advantage in Oracle's case for continuing to dedicate resources to OpenSolaris.
Re: (Score:2)
What was the advantage to Sun to have OpenSolaris? Whatever it was, Oracle will likely have the same reason to continue dedicating reasources to OpenSolaris as Sun did.
Re: (Score:2)
Indeed. Also, support for Solaris will be a revenue stream for Oracle as well. Solaris on big-boy hardware in the data-center isn't going anywhere any time soon. However, OpenSolaris only attracts people trying to do it on the cheap. Oracle can move those people to Unbreakable and plug up the money drain that is OpenSolaris.
Re:Makes absolutely no sense (Score:4, Funny)
I think Sun hardware is really more of a vanity thing in business nowdays
OMG! THANK you for making me post this! I NOW understand the Oracle-Sun merger! They're both "vanity" business models! Its been bothering me since the merger was announced
Wow. That is some kind of evil genius. I'm going out to buy some Oracle stock.
Parent
Dead?? (Score:3, Interesting)
One of my favorite quotes... (Score:5, Interesting)
If operating systems are weapons, Solaris is a World War II German railway gun with a cracked breech block.
- Charlie Stross
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
You sure you had 16 cpus?
The E4500 has 8 slots, 2 cpus per slot, but you need to use at least one of those slots for an IO board otherwise you have no scsi and no networking, so the practical limit is 14 cpus...
Re:One of my favorite quotes... (Score:5, Interesting)
I had a similar experience when I was at N.E.C. We were showing off one of our fully redundant servers to some execs from a Wall St. firm (I won't name them, but they are still in business, but with a merger). While my manager was talking about how fail-safe the server is one of the execs walked around behind the rack and just jammed his pen through the fan in the back to see what would happen.
Luckily back-up fans spun up and everything was fine, but there were a lot of sweaty foreheads in the room...
Parent
Look at the bright side -- ZFS for Linux! (Score:3, Interesting)
I've long been immensely frustrated that you can't get kernel-space ZFS (sorry FUSE) compiled into a Linux kernel because of inane licensing issues*. Someone should write a patch for those of us that want to compile it ourselves on the theory that the FSF would be insane to sue a personal user of open-source software for daring to compile it with other open source software of a different flavor.
* Porting ZFS to Linux is complicated by the fact that the GNU General Public License, which governs the Linux kernel, prohibits linking with code under certain licenses, such as CDDL, the license ZFS is released under. [Wikipedia]
Re:Look at the bright side -- ZFS for Linux! (Score:5, Informative)
I've long been immensely frustrated that you can't get kernel-space ZFS (sorry FUSE) compiled into a Linux kernel because of inane licensing issues*....
Well it is a good thing FreeBSD does not have a restrictive license like that. FreeBSD 8.0 will have ZFS with zpool 13, and here is how to use it.
http://wiki.freebsd.org/ZFSQuickStartGuide [freebsd.org]
Cheers!
Parent
Dtrace on FreeBSD (Score:4, Interesting)
Parent
Re:Look at the bright side -- ZFS for Linux! (Score:4, Informative)
The problem with that is that ZFS is not just a filesystem, it's a complete "IO stack". It's everything that does from the VFS to the device drivers. Sun didn't improve their old stack, they wrote a new brand system and they left the old system there.
Such thing would not be tollerated on the Linux main tree, it would be considered a very ugly design mistake. For them, the IO stack would need to work for ZFS and for FAT, and they would never buy the logic of "ZFS is special and needs special treatment to be better than the rest". If ZFS was released, Linus & co wouldn't accept it until ZFS is modified to fit the Linux IO stack, and/or they modify the Linux I/O layer to fit what ZFS needs.
Parent
One word: Dtrace (Score:4, Informative)
This just in... (Score:5, Insightful)
This just in: "Mass Speculation" also suggests:
1) The world will end in 2012
2) Man never landed on the moon
3) Vaccines cause autism
4) Technology = magic
5) Science is infallible
6) Religion is infallible
7) Windows is better than Mac
8) Mac is better than Windows
9) Mac is better than *nix
10) *nix is better than Mac
11) Windows is better than *nix
12) *nix is better than Windows
I really need to meet this "Mass Speculation" guy. He seems to be all over the board on things.
Solaris internal to Oracle (Score:4, Interesting)
I think most people underestimate how much solaris oracle uses internally...
There is marketing hype.. then reality
OpenSolaris == Fedora (Score:5, Interesting)
The value of OpenSolaris to Sun is the same as Fedora is to Red Hat Enterprise Linux; it's the cutting edge release that allows the new features to be added without compromising the stable release. It's improving as a desktop operating system, but that's not the real point of OpenSolaris. Solaris is primarily a server operating system and that's where it excels. It manages to include things today such as ZFS and Dtrace that will one-day have equivalents in Linux. These technologies are already mature on Solaris. Code from OpenSolaris is also used by the Sun OpenStorage platform and presumably will be the basis of the Sun OpenNetwork platform.
Before I'm modded down as a Linux-hating, Solaris fan-boi, I'm posting this from my home Linux workstation, sat next to my OpenSolaris server. Sometimes it's about the technology itself and not technology religion.
Let's ask the customers... (Score:4, Interesting)
Kill Sun Solaris and Oracle commits suicide. Makes no sense at all. Won't happen.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
FTFY
Re: (Score:3, Informative)