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Open Source Operating Systems Oracle Sun Microsystems Unix

Illumos Sporks OpenSolaris 161

suraj.sun sends in this news from The Register. "If you were hoping that someone would fork the OpenSolaris operating system, you are going to have to settle for a spork. You know, half spoon and half fork. That, in essence, is what the Illumos, an alternative open source project to continue development on the core bits of OpenSolaris, is all about. ... Development on OpenSolaris has all but stopped, so Garrett D'Amore, a former Sun and Oracle software engineer who worked on Solaris for many years, decided to do something about it. ... What Illumos is doing is taking the core OpenSolaris kernel and foundation, which is called OS/Net or ON inside of the former Sun, and creating a repository and development community around that. ON includes the kernel, C libraries, shell and shell utilities, file systems, and networking functions of OpenSolaris. 'We are not a distribution in a normal sense,' says D'Amore. 'It is more of a code base.' And one that Nexenta, Belenix, and SchilliX, who do create alternative distros for OpenSolaris, can in theory base their future releases upon if they don't like what is — or isn't — coming out of OpenSolaris."
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Illumos Sporks OpenSolaris

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  • by Anonymous Coward

    I hope they decide to use the FreeBSD userland on top of the OpenSolaris kernel. The FreeBSD userland is the premiere UNIX-like userland environment available today, and is also released under an extremely liberal license that maximizes everybody's freedom.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      Here I was, thinking that GNU was the premier userland, at least in terms of the number of users who depend on. Oh, wait, I see what you did there, you started a GPL-vs.-BSD license flamewar.
      • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Coward
        How do you count premiere? Features? How about code quality? Compare these two for a trivial example:

        FreeBSD cp.c: view [freebsd.org]
        Coreutils cp.c: view [gnu.org]

        The latter is embarrassing and the person should be ashamed to call himself a programmer. And this is, by far, one of the better-written GNU parts. I have long felt that the FreeBSD tools are better suited to being paired with Linux than the GNU tools are, as they both (FreeBSD & Linux) maintain similar coding standards, and the FreeBSD tools are better docu
        • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

          by Anonymous Coward

          Well, and the BSDs also like to ignore standards like POSIX, e.g. OpenBSD having an nm without the -P option, some other BSD deprecating od in favour of some other tool that is even less standardized and certainly not part of POSIX.
          They also since years don't manage to get such simple things like includes in the system headers right, you usually need to sprinkle random #include into code that works on almost all other systems (almost since in that regard they are quite similar to Solaris).
          Not that I doubt

    • Re: (Score:2, Troll)

      by afabbro ( 33948 )

      I hope they decide to use the FreeBSD userland on top of the OpenSolaris kernel. The FreeBSD userland is the premiere UNIX-like userland environment available today, and is also released under an extremely liberal license that maximizes everybody's freedom.

      You're aware, of course, that Solaris is based on SysV...sorry, for a moment I overlooked the point that you're just a BSD troll.

  • Does Opensolaris have something unique to offer than Linux doesn't?
    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      No, but perhaps the codebase is cleaner and has fewer bugs? Clearly, someone is interested in it.
    • by captrb ( 1298149 ) on Tuesday August 03, 2010 @02:29PM (#33128680)
      Zones, ZFS, and DTrace don't have equivalents in Linux with feature parity.
      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        Unless I am confused, "Zones" are virtual machines. If you think there is no equivalent, I guess you are not familiar with Xen or KVM, or the dozens of other VMs out there. ZFS is available as a FUSE driver, and Linux already has attachable debugging, although perhaps not with "feature parity."
        • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

          Unless I am confused, "Zones" are virtual machines.

          This is easy, you clearly are.

          If you think there is no equivalent, I guess you are not familiar with Xen or KVM

          Yah, we've heard of that too. http://prefetch.net/blog/index.php/category/solaris-xen/ [prefetch.net]

          although perhaps not with "feature parity."

          Exactly.

          • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

            Would you perhaps like to explain to me and people like me how "Zones" are different from "virtual machines?"
            • by berashith ( 222128 ) on Tuesday August 03, 2010 @02:54PM (#33129134)

              one kernel shared amongst the zones, not VMs populated with independent OSes. The zones can "loopback" filesystems, so /usr is only created once . Each zone has independent configs for users and such, and is visible as files from the global OS. VMs dont have a global OS, they just sit on a hypervisor.

              this is the first 5 seconds of differences. The biggest thing to note is they are nothing alike.

              • Ok, so how is this different from OpenVZ or FreeBSD jails?

                • by nathanh ( 1214 ) on Tuesday August 03, 2010 @03:31PM (#33129682) Homepage

                  OpenVZ and FreeBSD Jails are equivalent conceptually to Solaris Containers. The difference is the extent to which they've been implemented. Sun went the whole hog and made Solaris Containers "first class citizens". All the user space tools were modified to understand zones. All the documentation was updated. All the application suites were updated. They're not a ill-supported second-rate tack-on so you can tick the "we've got that" feature box.

                  If you want the analogy, it's like Microsoft saying "don't use Apache, we've got a webserver too" and pointing to IIS. In theory, true. In practise, bullshit.

                  • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

                    by mr_da3m0n ( 887821 )

                    If you want the analogy, it's like Microsoft saying "don't use Apache, we've got a webserver too" and pointing to IIS. In theory, true. In practise, bullshit.

                    I am annoyed at how I have been 'defending' Microsoft lately -- but you might want to revist that analogy since IIS7 is actually a pretty decent web server now :)

                    On topic, I think it's worth mentioning that the current OpenSolaris codebase doesn't support sparse root zones, which makes me sad. IPS apparently doesn't account for them at this point. Last I checked, they were still discussing wether to implement them or just scrap them in favor of full root zones with ZFS deduplication.

                    OpenSolaris is still use

                    • Something or other is keeping them from allowing sparse roots, I imagine this has something to do with the new packaging system. As I recall, someone has gotten the inherit-pkg-dir properties to be allowed, and the resulting zone worked fine. I became curious when they didn't mention upgrade-ability, but then I became distracted and/or hungry and thought nothing more on the subject. This bug supports the pkg root cause though: http://defect.opensolaris.org/bz/show_bug.cgi?id=2550 [opensolaris.org]
                  • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

                    by beardz ( 790974 )
                    FreeBSD jails are certainly no longer ill-supported second-rate tack-ons. Care for virtualised network stacks per Zone? ;)
                • less setup, doesn't require a kernel patch (which i think OpenVZ does) http://cgrouphacking.blogspot.com/ [blogspot.com]
              • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

                by eknagy ( 1056622 )

                Linux VServer is very similar (one kernel, multiple contexts, shared memory, optionally shared or dedicated filesystems, optionally shared or dedicated network interfaces, minimal overhead). Debian has vserver enabled kernels in the repository - not sure about other distributions, because I don't really care ;)
                I am running a dozen of less important and/or discountinued and/or shitty services in these vservers and I just love them.
                The funny thing is that you can run KVM and Vserver on the same server (and ma

            • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

              by kg8484 ( 1755554 )

              Wikipedia has a decent article [wikipedia.org] on the subject.

              [A] zone does not have its own separate kernel (in contrast to a hardware virtual machine)

            • by Massacrifice ( 249974 ) on Tuesday August 03, 2010 @03:01PM (#33129242)

              explain to me and people like me how "Zones" are different from "virtual machines?"

              Zones share the same kernel. Much, much less overhead than full-blown VMs, both in setup and resource use. You can flavor your zones to be Linux or BSD compatible. You can give them their own (virtual or physical) network adapters. Think Apache Virtual Hosts, but at the OS layer. Or a midaway cross between a chroot and a VM. It's really nice stuff.

              • Re: (Score:1, Informative)

                by Anonymous Coward

                Zones share the same kernel. Much, much less overhead than full-blown VMs, both in setup and resource use.

                This used to be true, but thanks to market pressure, VMs are competitive in the resource and overhead areas. For example, with kernel same-page merging it's possible to run multiple VMs and overcommit memory usage with relative transparency. Now that processors have virtualization extensions (and have for several years) the expensive operations (from a CPU standpoint) are now cheap. The benefit of VMs,

            • Re: (Score:1, Informative)

              by Anonymous Coward

              Would you perhaps like to explain to me and people like me how "Zones" are different from "virtual machines?"

              Zones have 1% overhead:

              http://blogs.sun.com/bmseer/entry/virtually_no_overhead_solaris_zones

              Virtual machines (specifically VMware) can have 36% overhead:

              http://blogs.sun.com/BestPerf/entry/sun_x4270_virtualized_for_two

              Zones are super-charged FreeBSD jails (they're explicitly mentioned as a source of inspiration). They add the ability to mount /usr and other file systems (and even raw disk device

        • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

          by Anonymous Coward

          Zones are not VMs. FreeBSD jails are probably the closest thing to it. Virtualization technologies are eventually going to render both of those obselete, I think, but it hasn't gotten there yet. And if you think a FUSE driver is any kind of substitute for a full implementation, you have no business running a data center. Even FreeBSD's port of ZFS isn't always up to snuff, and it's leaps and bounds beyond the FUSE driver.

          Look, you've obviously picked a "side" and you'll pull out any comparison you need

          • FreeBSD jails are probably the closest thing to it. Virtualization technologies are eventually going to render both of those obselete

            Right. FreeBSD jails, AIX LPARs, and Solaris Zones are all about the same thing, with perhaps AIX LPARs and Solaris Zones being the two most scalable.

            And I don't think that full virtualization or even paravirtualization is going to replace these technologies anytime soon. They are far more scalable, far easier to setup, and have had high availability features for years that

        • by nathanh ( 1214 ) on Tuesday August 03, 2010 @03:10PM (#33129382) Homepage

          Unless I am confused, "Zones" are virtual machines. If you think there is no equivalent, I guess you are not familiar with Xen or KVM, or the dozens of other VMs out there.

          Yes, you are confused, which probably indicates your lack of familiarity with Solaris Zones.

          Xen, KVM, VMware, Sun Logical Domains, and Sun Virtualbox, are all examples of hardware virtualisation. They simulate a hardware platform; a virtual machine. Each VM has its own kernel and scheduler and memory space and device drivers and virtualised storage.

          Solaris Zones is an example of operating system virtualisation. There is no direct equivalent on Linux. There is a single kernel for all the zones. A single set of device drivers. A single process tree. Potentially a single storage system. It's extremely lightweight compared to virtual machines.

          Thinking of Zones as "virtual machines" is simply wrong. They are more like process groups, or process sets, and in fact on Solaris they are implemented in part by using resource groups. There is virtualisation but it's not at the machine layer; that's why they're not virtual machines.

          To illustrate the significant differences, on the same hardware that Xen can run 10 VMs, Solaris can run 100s of zones. Xen can lose 10% or more CPU to overheads, Solaris Zones loses less than 1%. Xen can lose as much as 90% of I/O performance, Solaris Zones loses less than 1%. Xen places restrictions on the resources available to each VM, Solaris Zones can gain access to the full resources of the hardware. Xen requires each VM to be patched and maintained separately, Solaris Zones are patched and maintained through the "host" OS.

          These benefits are only possible because Solaris Zones are not VMs.

        • by CAIMLAS ( 41445 )

          As others have said, you're clearly confused.

          Zones ~= BSD jails or Linux jail environment, but better in many ways (security/compartmentalization, independence, implementation, configuration, adaptability). Security can be much more tightly defined as to what the zone can or can not do (more like a host level ACL) as can be in Linux.

          Containers ~= virtual machines. It's a zone with the ability to do true VM type stuff. Except better, in that it's able to run pretty much anything (try vbox under a container,

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by Junta ( 36770 )

        lxc exists in linux as a Zones alternative.
        I don't know first hand, but some would say systemtap is on the level of DTrace.
        btrfs may eventually provide zfs parity (but not today, even if considered stable the featureset lags in some ways).

        • a dtrace script will work when run against a solaris10 server regardless of patch levels. Systemtap has some similarity, but the scripts that work on one are not reliably portable between patch revisions or systems.

        • by nathanh ( 1214 )

          LXC will one day be a zones alternative. Right now it's a pre-1.0 alpha with severely reduced functionality. I consider it basically unusable in its current form.

          Same deal for BTRFS. One day it will be a ZFS alternative. Right now it's only for BTRFS developers.

          • by Cyberax ( 705495 )

            ???

            LXC now has network/PID/FS virtualization, and is even supported by SELinux. There's also support for live migration of containers.

            Its userspace tools are indeed immature, but kernel-level features are OK.

      • Re: (Score:1, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Don't forget Crossbow.

      • When I started trying out OpenSolaris early this year, ZFS actually saved me from losing files to a hard drive that was silently corrupting data. Needless to say, my file server now runs OpenSolaris, even though the rest of my network is a mix of Linux and Windows.

        Yes, FreeBSD has ZFS now, but it lags behind the OpenSolaris version - and I don't have the time for the compile-the-world approach for updates that the FreeBSD world prefers.

        • FreeBSD 8.1 [freebsd.org] is now only a year behind OpenSolaris in terms of its ZFS support; it's compatible with pools created with OpenSolaris 2009.06. If you assume that freely available innovation from Oracle's side is going to stagnate, it shouldn't take long until they've caught up with the latest of the open-source ZFS releases. At that point it will be FreeBSD vs. paid Oracle Solaris as the presumed only way to get advancements. Since I don't actually care about the non-free crap that Oracle peddles, I expect

      • but none of those are required to do mission critical business computing, which is why Solaris and OpenSolaris have lost (too little too late in both cases) and GNU/Linux has won. Go ahead and flog your dead horse, but the Solari are toast.

        • but none of those are required to do mission critical business computing, which is why Solaris and OpenSolaris have lost (too little too late in both cases) and GNU/Linux has won. Go ahead and flog your dead horse, but the Solari are toast.

          Secular, proprietary systems built from or borrowing from BSD projects have "won". Linux has "won" in its reality distortion bubble where the inhabitants are convinced if something free isn't available to them they don't need it.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by bsDaemon ( 87307 )

        no, but FreeBSD jails are basically the same thing as Solaris Zones, and FreeBSD supports ZFS and DTrace, too. Plus, the added benefit of also not being Linux.

        • I'm glad my Linux doesn't have the FreeBSD feature of seizing up under heavy IPC under SMP load because the locking model is too complex

          • by bsDaemon ( 87307 )

            Yeah, I can see where I'd be mad about that, too, if I'd ever encountered it using FreeBSD since 2.2.8 in both a hobbyist and professional environment. Luckily, it's never been an issue.

            • it started in 5.2 with the move to fine-grained smp, but bugs still being weeded out - like the UFS with QUOTA locking order fix that just was put out for 8.1

      • by Cyberax ( 705495 )

        Zones = OpenVZ / Linux Containers (and they have some features that Solaris lacks)
        DTrace = SystemTap (fairly mature)
        ZFS = btrfs (not very mature yet)

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by CAIMLAS ( 41445 )

        Feature parity? THat's being generous. Linux has nothing that compares with those features (or containers) in and of itself. (And this coming from someone who loves linux and has used it for almost 15 years.) Particularly, (Open)Solaris ZFS is light years ahead of any other filesystem - and yes, I'm excluding the other ZFS implementations from being awesome, because they really aren't yet.

        OpenSolaris has also done some work integrating VirtualBox into Containers; it supposedly works very well.

        If nothing els

      • Zones, ZFS, and DTrace don't have equivalents in Linux with feature parity.

        The ZFS storage layer for linux is done, you can use it now. The ZFS POSIX layer isn't done, the project needs help.

      • by mrdogi ( 82975 )

        Zones, ZFS, and DTrace don't have equivalents in Linux with feature parity.

        I am the Unix admin at work (mainly Solaris 10, with some REALLY old linux we haven't gotten around to migrating, FC1 and RH 7.2 for those morbidly curious), and I agree, I love those 3 features in Solaris 10. I just wish I had time to really dig in to the dtrace stuff.

        One thing I don't recall anyone mentioning as specific to Solaris is services. Basically they are the init scripts with dependencies and self-restarting built in. I

    • by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 03, 2010 @02:39PM (#33128876)

      Yes. Zones, ZFS, SMF, dtrace, RBAC, and zero effort porting to Solaris on x86 or sparc. Linux has at best half-assed simulacrums for these features. The first three features alone are enough to justify OpenSolaris over Linux in many situations.

      That said, Oracle's ham fisted approach to Solaris is effectively going to kill it. Lack of movement on OpenSolaris and new draconian licensing for Solaris means I'm going to be pushing for Linux to replace Solaris at my sites. I can deal with the reduced features if it means fewer licensing headaches.

      • I can deal with the reduced features if it means fewer licensing headaches.

        Not to mention the fact that most of those features will likely have equivalents with GPL-compatible licensing within a year or two.

        Whenever someone asks if Linux supports some cool feature that this niche project does, rather than "No.", a more appropriate answer will typically be "Not yet.".

        • Not to mention the fact that most of those features will likely have equivalents with GPL-compatible licensing within a year or two.

          I've been hearing that since DTrace was announced. Before then, I was hearing it when Solaris 8 was new and Linux servers had to be rebooted to see new disk, or a reboot caused them to renumber the disks they had. It takes years to get these features implemented, tested, stable and bug-free. Pretending Linux will magically have something that's taken years for a major OS company to get right is delusional.

      • That's only the start of the list. There's also:
        Dynamic (hardware) reconfiguration, projects, resource management and resource pools, processor sets and binding, investigative tools and fault management.

        I like Linux. It has some definite advantages over Solaris. But Solaris is the best server OS I've used, and after 15 years of being a Unix admin I've used most of them - certainly everything currently Unix or Linux and supported today. It's going to be a real shame when Oracle kills it.
    • Re: (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      You mean other than API/ABI stability, less bugs and cleaner code base?

    • by Gerald ( 9696 )

      "lsof -o" and SIGINFO come to mind.

    • Re: (Score:1, Informative)

      by jschmitz ( 607083 )
      OpenSolaris has DTrace, ZFS, Zones........While Linux' hardware support is wider than that of OpenSolaris, the latter does benefit from having a static driver interface. Where in Linux hardware support might actually break as time goes by, 10 year old Solaris drivers will still work today. There's also a Device Detection Tool which will tell you if your hardware is compatible with OpenSolaris. However the number of applications to choose form is quite limited compared to what Linux distributions generally
    • Supporting platforms beyond the commercial viability of them(e.g. sun4m machines and early sun4u machines)?

      Oh, wait. That's OpenBSD and Linux.

    • ZFS if you want to run a storage server. You can probably get ZFS running in Linux using FUSE, but it won't be so good, or you could port it as a kernel module, but it won't be legal.

    • From the post it is not completely clear, but I guess this sporked OpenSolaris will still include the possibility of zones. Now I know Linux has similar features, but Containers/Zones have been a hit in the Solaris world from day one. And are widely used, including production environments where it does the segmentation / isolation of Oracle databases.

      (I'm former Sun guy, been there, done that.)

  • Missing sources? (Score:3, Informative)

    by Antony T Curtis ( 89990 ) on Tuesday August 03, 2010 @02:29PM (#33128678) Homepage Journal

    Didn't the OpenSolaris effort have problems because they were always waiting on Sun to compile certain libc binaries for them?

    Is this resolved in Illumos or is there still a binary blob issue?

    • Re:Missing sources? (Score:5, Informative)

      by gstoddart ( 321705 ) on Tuesday August 03, 2010 @02:35PM (#33128802) Homepage

      Didn't the OpenSolaris effort have problems because they were always waiting on Sun to compile certain libc binaries for them?

      Is this resolved in Illumos or is there still a binary blob issue?

      Apparently, it isn't. From TFA ...

      The biggest problem is that an important minority of the code distributed with OpenSolaris is closed source, something that has annoyed the OpenSolaris community for five years. Sun didn't allocate resources to fix this and neither has Oracle.

      D'Amore says that a significant percentage of the libc C library (libc_i18n to be precise) is closed, as is the NFS lock manager, portions of the kernel's cryptographic framework and functions, and a bunch of important drives.

      So, no, the closed stuff still needs to be written and they don't have it.

      • the NFS lock manager

        Linux has needed a proper NFS lock manager for many years. If Linux could duplicate its functionality, it would put a LOT of Solaris NFS servers out to pasture.

        • by afabbro ( 33948 )

          the NFS lock manager

          Linux has needed a proper NFS lock manager for many years. If Linux could duplicate its functionality, it would put a LOT of Solaris NFS servers out to pasture.

          Who in 2010 is still using a Solaris box as a NFS server? Netapp (and a thousand cheaper NAS clones) of it have put Solaris out of the "NFS server" market.

      • Re:Missing sources? (Score:5, Informative)

        by anilg ( 961244 ) on Tuesday August 03, 2010 @05:06PM (#33131126)

        (I'm in the project leadership team of Illumos)

        We've opened the closed bits of libc - specifically the i18n portion of it.

        What's still closed (and soon to be opened) is some additional drivers (mpt, etc) that are almost prepared to be released. All of the closed bits would be open in a short timeframe (weeks).

        What you've quoted Garrett saying is in reference to OpenSolaris's code. That is followed by the announcement that we've opened it.

        ~Anil

        • (I'm in the project leadership team of Illumos)

          Well, then obviously I will defer to someone who actually knows about this. I only had TFA to go by. :-P

          Cheers

    • by guruevi ( 827432 )

      That was slowly getting resolved with the latest development bits of OpenSolaris. However since the Oracle takeover there haven't been any updates (whereas before the schedule was weekly or bi-weekly 'unstable' releases).

  • by SlashdotOgre ( 739181 ) on Tuesday August 03, 2010 @02:34PM (#33128780) Journal

    While I applaud this effort, I have to wonder if enough folks with the requisite skills to do kernel/driver development will be motivated to assist. It was an excellent product with some cool features (ZFS, Zones, Dtrace, Crossbow, etc.), but it was very clear that the vast majority of the development came from paid Sun engineers. The OpenSolaris community was never anywhere near the size of the Linux community, and even with Linux a significant portion comes from corporations (see "The Myth of the Isolated Kernel Hacker" from last year: http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/08/20/1342223 [slashdot.org]). I really do hope OpenSolaris continues (or Oracle changes the license to be GPL compatible), but at this point I wouldn't be basing any new projects on the platform.

  • by ToasterMonkey ( 467067 ) on Tuesday August 03, 2010 @02:38PM (#33128844) Homepage

    Development on OpenSolaris has all but stopped

    Except it hasn't?

    I mean biweekly, binary development builds haven't been released since 134 in March, but development clearly marches on.
    http://hub.opensolaris.org/bin/view/Main/ [opensolaris.org]
    http://opensolaris.org/jive/thread.jspa?threadID=125446&tstart=0 [opensolaris.org]
    http://cr.opensolaris.org/ [opensolaris.org]
    http://hub.opensolaris.org/bin/view/Main/RecentChanges [opensolaris.org]
    Think for yourselves..

    Community (outside Oracle) development may have been frozen, and it might be worthwhile to have a liberal, free spirited fork to try new things, but if Oracle wanted OpenSolaris dead, there's a very fast an efficient way of doing that, and they have not. Don't call something dead unless you're pretty darned sure it aint going to wake up the next morning.

    • I'm not sure it's going to be dead as much as they're going to pick the good fruit and let the rest rot on the vine.

      They just want to be able to pick the good parts out over time.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by anilg ( 961244 )

      The referenced OpenSolaris is not the code, but the distribution OpenSolaris (formerly project Indiana).

  • I'd rather call it a foon. It sounds cooler.
    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Phibz ( 254992 )

      I always thought a foon was more fork than spoon, and a spork more spoon than fork.

    • Foon sounds like it is sitting outside a bar in the parking lot with a bloody nose.

  • by JSBiff ( 87824 ) on Tuesday August 03, 2010 @02:41PM (#33128912) Journal

    So, we have Debian GNU/Hurd, Debian GNU/Linux, Debian GNU/NetBSD, and Debian GNU/kFreeBSD. Does this mean we'll have Debian GNU/Illumos next?

  • R.I.P. Solaris (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 03, 2010 @02:44PM (#33128954)

    I am a user of Solaris (formerly known as SunOS) for 20 years now. Most of the time, i have worked for a Sun partner. But now i have said my goodbyes to the company that once was Sun. While i still think that Solaris has the best kernel in respect of networking and multicore usage, i just cannot afford to let my attachment cloud business decisions. I should have cut my ties the moment Oracle anounced the takeover.

    While it is well known that being a partner and being treated like a partner are quite different things, Oracle has taken this to new unexpected heights. That someone intentionally breaks the business model of partners (while not profiting oneself from that decision) is still something that puzzles me. I know what they intend, but they are really, really busy making enemies. If it were just me, but i have dozens of once loyal customers profanely swearing now, if the name Oracle/Sun is mentioned. I have seen IT managers, who controll several dozen million $ IT budget, vowing to never purchase a system from them again.

    Solaris is dead, no fork or spork will change that. Even if they manage the code side, the well upon they sit is well poisoned. May Solaris rest in peace.

    CU, Martin

    P.S. Hate to post anonymously, but i don't dare other.

    P.P.S. ... and it hurts like hell to write it.

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Solaris is dead, no fork or spork will change that. Even if they manage the code side, the well upon they sit is well poisoned. May Solaris rest in peace.

      Same opinion here. 15 years as a Solaris admin. Solaris is an admirable OS, but Oracle has already started destroying it with their licensing. I've been a Linux admin for 15 years too and I'd rather have fewer features if it means simpler licensing. It's going to hurt to lose ZFS and Zones in particular. But what really scares me is the half assed ve

      • Use FreeBSD. Jails may not be quite to the functionality of Zones, but it's better than what Linux has got...and ZFS v.15 (and v. 25 IIRC in 9.0 when it goes -CURRENT) is better than no ZFS at all.

      • Re: (Score:1, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Believe me, despite some of the postings here, I'm sure there are a lot of Linux admins (and just *nix in general) that are standing with hat-in-hand, covering their heart, head bowed in remembrance... It's like loosing a cousin you meet with for twice a year. You didn't know them as well as you wanted to, but you know damn well it's not going to be the same once they're gone for good...and watching them die slowly is just fucking painful.

        Now, a parting message for Oracle:

        You have just fucked the pooch ro

  • When I read the title and started reading the article for a minute I thought someone had taken a spork and built an OpenSolaris system into it. Now I'm sad and disappointed. :(

  • OT, but I wonder what would have happened if IBM bought Sun instead of Oracle.
  • by theNAM666 ( 179776 ) on Tuesday August 03, 2010 @04:09PM (#33130288)

    That's the million-dollar question tonight, here in Solaris-land tonight, ladies and gentlemen.

    Coming up next-- Yet-Another-Patent-disputed, filed by... tune in at 10 O'Clock to find out who!

Real programmers don't comment their code. It was hard to write, it should be hard to understand.

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