The Future of OpenSolaris 307
jjrff writes "Phoronix has a little piece about the future (or lack thereof) of OpenSolaris. It appears based on the current support lifecycle, OpenSolaris may be going away. There is a fun thread (read: mild flameage) on a ZFS list about it."
FUD (Score:5, Informative)
Nothing about this says OpenSolaris is going away. Just support for older versions
Re:FUD (Score:5, Insightful)
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s/decision makers/sensationalists/
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If long-term usage was that important, you'd be using Solaris in the first place.
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Oracle just fired many of the best and brightest programmers at Sun, because they were the most highly paid. So, if long-term is important to you, I suggest jumping ship. As one example, they fired the accessibility guru, Willie Walker. As a result, SunOS will no longer be accessible as it use to be, causing it trouble in winning government contracts. I say good riddance... SunOS was cool, but with Oracle in charge, it's time to move on to greener pastures.
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You know, Microsoft doesn't support ancient EOL OSes like Windows NT or Windows XP, either.
XP is supported until 2014 according to my understanding. Can you clarify?
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What is the reason for abandon fashion lately? (Score:2)
When will open source folks understand that older version support, especially for server oriented things is a big deal?
There is a company who makes living with OS upgrades/sales and they still release updates for Windows XP you know. An OS from 2003 or something.
Right, they don't release directx 11 for XP but at least their consumers (and IT guys) don't feel abandoned in sense of security updates.
Same mistake is being done almost monthly in open source scene and they wonder why companies choose a $2K price
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From 2001 (oct 2001 retail release).
OpenSolaris is "dead man walking".
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At least opensolaris is technically supportable. Sounds like Oracle is laying off the best developers. So you have the source, and you can hire the developer... When closed source does the same thing, you can hire the developer, but he could only start from scratch (legally.)
Granted this is pricey support, but you likely can't get better support than that IMHO.
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Time for everybody to gwow up. (Score:2, Insightful)
I wouldn't disagree, but there are usually alternatives. I would personally never make a choice of OS on the availability of zfs (though I have no doubt the filesystem is quite nice). And stability under load can be had with any Linux or BSD with an appropriate configuration. So yes, there's nothing wrong with OpenSolaris, but then there's nothing so right with it that we can't afford to do without it.
I know the
OS going away, or just "contractual support"? (Score:2)
To be honest I didn't even know they provided "contractual support" for OpenSolaris, but surely the fact that they won't support you in using it doesn't nesessarily imply that it's being canned. Maybe it'll just be an unsupported "unstable" version that you can play with before getting "real" Solaris.
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Re:OS going away, or just "contractual support"? (Score:5, Insightful)
For many companies that's not a problem because they have competent server admin staff and the community support is often way better than what you'd get for money.
An unsupported "debian-testing-style" OpenSolaris would make a lot of sense for both Sun/Oracle and many users. If you want support and someone to blame, just pay for Solaris instead. This model is already proven to work great: Fedora vs RHEL (vs CentOS), openSUSE vs SUSE Linux Enterprise, PostgreSQL vs EnterpriseDB, and so on.
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For many companies that's not a problem because they have competent server admin staff and the community support is often way better than what you'd get for money.
That latter part is debatable. Community support often yields conflicting (and incorrect) answers in my experience.
Mind you, I've been waiting for Microsoft to fix Windows Search's ability to find matches in Unicode text files since NT 4.0 days (find and findstr work from the command line, why not the GUI?) so the level of support is probably no worse.
Re:OS going away, or just "contractual support"? (Score:4, Insightful)
there are TONS of mission critical servers out there running Debian, CentOS, FreeBSD, OpenBSD and other "there is no company you can blame and/or sue" operating systems
Absolutely false inaccurate information, at least for Debian.
As per
http://www.debian.org/consultants/ [debian.org]
"811 Debian consultants listed in 64 countries worldwide."
Now, you can hire a consultant whom might actually moonlight as a debian developer, perhaps even the maintainer of something that is critical to you. And, as a private citizen or at least small consulting company, you could sue them when/if they screw up.
On the other hand, if you think you you can sue microsoft, and win, next time exchange falls over, you are in for a BIG surprise.
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I was talking about running them unsupported as in download-ISO-and-install, I should had been more clear about that.
I'm still not seeing that. There are plenty of folks whom will gladly contract to do that.
Oddly enough, my one and only brush with consulting/contracting with Debian was doing exactly what you say can't be done. Over half a decade ago, at my day job, I downloaded a Debian ISO and installed it on a Compaq DL/360 (back when those were new). It was a very special and unusual idea for co-located hosting. I set up and supported their box, helping them use frontpage and SCP or whatever until it was working pe
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However, there are plenty of mission critical systems running debian, etc...
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Have you read the GPL? No you can't sue them for stuff under the GPL.
Oh of course you can sue them. Anyone can sue anyone else for anything, and if they have more money, they'll win.
Lets say you sign a contract to "maintain our webserver in an operational status 99% of the time with no security breaches".
If your dude fails, you either get a contractually declared SLA payoff, or if you screwed up and did not include that in the contract, you sue them for malpractice or whatever. The license doesn't matter, except that open source stuff is better and more secure so there is
Re:OS going away, or just "contractual support"? (Score:5, Insightful)
FOSS is FREE only if you don't value your time.
*gasp* I value my time but I also value flexibility and independence from vendor whims.
I have an equally naive cliche for you right here: Proprietary software is only cheaper if you are incompetent.
Re:OS going away, or just "contractual support"? (Score:5, Insightful)
And then only if your vendor is competent.
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My time is expensive so I don't use Proprietary software, I want software where the support I need is available now, and free ...or if it really is a complex product (because it needs to be) support I pay for and actually is helpful
Most Proprietary products come with support as an afterthought, if at all, or charge a fortune for it if it is any good ...
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This is funny because before there was Linux there was the GNU toolchain being installed on top of SunOS.
FOSS is what you used if you valued your time.
Linux only gained traction because Sun gave x86 no respect.
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That's not really any different from Fedora, yet businesses still use Redhat.
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"Hi boss, yeah I'd like to use OpenSolaris. .. No, we specifically can't get support for it from Sun, I mean Oracle. .. Yeah if it breaks we are totally on our own. ... Ok so I guess we're not using OpenSolaris then."
That's not really any different from Fedora, yet businesses still use Redhat.
Uh, what? Redhat is RHEL, for which support is available. Fedora is RHEL beta, and is unsupported. Solaris is supported, OpenSolaris is unsupported. So in fact, it is entirely different.
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My interpretation of part of the point of OpenSolaris - Sun were using it as a testing ground for concepts that would make it over to Solaris, e.g. ZFS. AFAIK it's not exactly Solaris beta, but it is at least somewhat analogous. Both Fedora and OpenSolaris are unsupported, RHEL and Solaris are supported. I don't think you'd
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OpenSolaris is far too big to fail. It has a large user base.
You know even FreeBSD is still supported, OpenSolaris will be, too.
Unlike Linux OpenSolaris stands for real quality and maturity.
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Indeed it makes sense to support certain software infrastructure elements by the government.
Operating systems and office productivity software are examples. Open solaris and Open Office could be developed and supported by the military.
Fork? (Score:4, Interesting)
Even if Oracle ditches Opensolaris all together, shouldn't the community keep going and shouldn't third party companies fill the hole left in the market with regards to support?
Or is this a question of reality not working out as the theory? Does that mean that, in a similar vein, Monty was right (and Eben was wrong) ranting and going to the EU about the fate of MySQL in the hands of Oracle?
(I don't know. I don't mean to imply anything. Just asking, sincerely.)
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Even if Oracle ditches Opensolaris all together, shouldn't the community keep going
I doubt that OpenSolaris has enough of a following. If businesses ditch it due to a lack of support, it's unlikely that there will be enough of a "community" left to prop it up.
Personally, while I use OpenSolaris myself, I'd be more than happy to ditch it if the BTRFS project lives up to the hype. As far as I can see, ZFS is the only reason to prefer OpenSolaris over Linux for personal use, and I know that a significant percentage of the non-business users feel the same way.
and shouldn't third party companies fill the hole left in the market with regards to support?
I believe some already do. Nex
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One cool thing that could happen due to all of this nonsense is that newer Solaris only features can be liberated and added to Linux.
Oracle has a lot less motivation to keep ZFS away from Linux than Sun did.
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Solaris is VERY common in the enterprises. Freebsd shows what a community driven Operating System may achieve.
Another "dead unix" for the collection. (Score:4, Informative)
A/UX
IRIX
Unicos
Xenix
Ultrix
OSF/1
soon: OpenSolaris
and if Larry Ellison has a bad dream: Solaris
We still use OSF/1 (Score:5, Interesting)
A bloody good version of Unix it is too. 64 bit from the start back in the early 90s when PC manufacturers and Microsoft were still wetting their trousers about moving to proper 32 bit.
The alpha CPU - what a missed opportunity. Perhaps in some ideal world in an alternate reality people woke up to what a dogs dinner x86 is and the alpha chip had as much development effort put into it. I wonder what apps would be possible on a 2010 alpha chip that is still pie in the sky for x86?
Re:We still use OSF/1 (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually most of what was very good in the alpha chip went to AMD and their Athlon64 chip. For a while they were even pin-compatible. Now Intel has the upper hand again, with no up and coming competitor on the horizon, except maybe IBM/POWER one day.
Re:We still use OSF/1 (Score:4, Interesting)
There is ARM on the low end. The new ARM chips are getting faster and faster and compete well with the Atom right now for speed and blow them away for power consumption.
I would love to see an OMAP4 or Tegra 2 ITX board with enough sims slots for a few gigs of ram and a few SATA connectors.
Would make a great little NAS, SAN, or even small database server.
Re:We still use OSF/1 (Score:4, Informative)
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I wanted to like OpenSolaris but... (Score:2)
... I tried installing the latest version (as of november) on my year old laptop (ok , not its natural enviroment but if they want to compete with linux...) and it looked nice.
However, it didn't detect:
the wifi adaptor
the ethernet adaptor
the sound ship
wifi and sound I can just about live without , but no ethernet is a show stopper. If I can't access any networks then its little use for any real work. On the same laptop even years old opensuse 10.2 which I installed as a temporary OS when I first bought it s
Re:I wanted to like OpenSolaris but... (Score:5, Informative)
However, it didn't detect ...
Of course it didn't. It's not a desktop OS, even if it does have a purdy interface. Go check the hardware compatibility list - it's pretty friggin' small.
When I put together my home file-server, I made damn sure to check the HCL before purchasing any hardware. Even after doing that, I still had an issue with the on-board LAN chipset - had to compile a different set of drivers in order to stop it from dropping the connection every 5 minutes. OpenSolaris is a great server OS, but it's just silly to expect it to be compatible with some random laptop.
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Comparable driver support with Linux, whether for laptops or for servers, is one of the things that has put Solaris on the slide over the past ten years.
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"but it's just silly to expect it to be compatible with some random laptop"
I don't think so. Server farms will go with proper supported Solaris and yes they will check the HCL first. The freebie option is for other people who want to try out solaris and who will have all sorts of random desktop and laptop configurations. If opensolaris doesn't support much hardware then who exactly is it aimed at?
Re:I wanted to like OpenSolaris but... (Score:4, Informative)
If opensolaris doesn't support much hardware then who exactly is it aimed at?
Small business users, companies like Nexenta which produce their own server hardware/software products, and tech-savvy individuals looking for a home-server solution.
It's not exactly a huge market, but it is a niche (niches?) that needs to be filled. OpenSolaris is currently the best solution for projects such as mine. The ability to build a redundant array with automatic data corruption detection and a simple yet powerful snapshot functionality is what sold me on it. Nothing else on the market can do that, and the solutions which come close would have cost a lot more.
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The kernel is fairly compatible with the BSDs and OpenBSD at least has superb 100% free support for most documented and many undocumented devices. Especially for laptops. When I looked into OpenSolaris it seemed that they were trying to follow BSD driver development.
However, let's face it. Nobody cares about Solaris enough to spend time porting drivers.
It has a horrible base system, and the alternative is using GNU tools. If it had been more consistent and attractive to Unix fans, like BSD derivatives are,
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And virtualisation is a big deal. Who cares what hardware the OS supports, so long as it can run under a hypervisor, which supports your actual hardware?
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Yeah - same problem - of about nine or ten systems that I've tried it on (up to snv_133), all of them have at least one hardware problem.
eg from my memory
NIC drivers (Broadcom, Even Intel)
W/LAN drivers (Atheros for instance)
Display driver support (not just VESA!)
HW RAID drivers (Compaq, Promise)
AHCI drivers (including NCQ and hot plug support (slated to fix in snv 135)
AMD PhenomII support (fixed now since snv 126)
and I've had issues with the install (eg installation from USB CDROM)
However, saying all this,
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There's really no good excuse for an x86 Unix to not have robust ETHERNET support.
This sort of nonsense is what kept Solaris x86 on the sidelines to begin with.
Not supporting the desktop frills is one thing, but ethernet is pretty fundemental to a Unix.
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You see exactly the same on desktops except there Windwos runs on almost any desktop, OS X only comes on its supported hardware and Linux is fail.
Linux is fail?
I have an 8 gig USB stick that boots into a fully-installed version of Ubuntu. I have used it on at least 6 completely different desktop computers, 4 laptops, and 2 netbooks. Each time I plug it into a different computer it boots and detects the new hardware without a problem. Out of all of those systems, the only exception has been an Asus EEPC on which the wireless card wasn't detected.
I'm not sure how you can consider that "fail". I've yet to see anyone do something comparable with wind
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Not the same thing. I've been dicking around with such images since BartPE first came out. It can be useful for certain things, but it's nothing like having a complete OS running from flash.
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It's not Ubuntu.
Even something like SLES will "pamper" you. It's about the level of hardware support, not how fancy the decorations are on the package manager.
Slackware won out over Solaris x86 "back in the day" over this very problem. Although then it was a bit more fundemental. Solaris x86 was SCSI only.
computer industry needs more standards... (Score:4, Insightful)
However, it didn't detect: the wifi adaptor the ethernet adaptor the sound
If there's one thing that would make the computer industry move ahead faster, it would be more standards. Why on earth can't simple mundane things like ethernet, sound, etc interfaces come with some sort of descriptors or standards which allow at least basic functionalities to be found more easily by an OS? Couldn't chipmakers, driver and OS writers try to save some work for themselves and talk? Every new OS version has to re-create, re-test, etc every driver for every device on the planet. The mere discussion of standards seems to have been killed by the whole 'de facto' notion, which is basically quitting. Even if we exclude MS, there enough active people now to have some debate over some driver and chip detection standards. VMware, linux, xbsd, the livecd scene, motherboard, device, and chipmakers, etc.
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Well, soundblaster used to be a de-factor standard for sound boards but that seems to have gone by the wayside and now there are a load of different varieties again. Same with VGA graphics - but then the 3D revolution brought along a slew of different boards that all required different drivers. Its also a mystery to me why at least a common base standard can't be thrashed out for common components but I guess it would be like herding cats with all the vested interests out there.
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Probably would also get users plugging in their devices and never installing the proper drivers. But open interface standards for basic sound, graphics, networking etc would be truly fexcellent.
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This problem was solved--correctly--years ago, and by Sun no less! You want OpenFirmware [wikipedia.org], though sadly that Intel went all NIH and is pushing EFI for x86 instead, which is similar but not nearly as good.
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It is a culture problem (Score:2)
Interestingly, all the issues you have exists on a typical Desktop/Laptop. Especially sound card and Wi-Fi. I guess the issue with OpenSolaris is the company and its culture. Sun is a company who makes gigantic servers having insane amounts of uptime and most of their products (except couple of workstations) doesn't even have the parts like sound card or wifi.
A good example is Java, for a decade, people using Java plugin had to deal with their hard disk going nuts right after running a basic applet. What di
Blatant Troll (Score:3, Funny)
Only mild flamage? You see this is why I prefer Linux!
Hardware/apps (Score:2, Insightful)
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Again, Solaris and Opensolaris are not currently desktop/laptop OS's. For a server you buy appropriate hardware.
Actually hardware support for desktops is acceptable. It's laptops that are weakest. You really have to choose your laptop carefully. But I can understand that this wouldn't be a priority for developers.
At any rate, the original posting is FUD. It's true that there is concern in some of the Opensolaris forums, because Oracle hasn't said anything about Opensolaris. But there's no particular rea
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ZFS will probably have to be reimplemented somehow to go on Linux. We'll have to wait for ext5 or 6 to get a reasonable subset of ZFS feature list.
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ZFS will probably have to be reimplemented somehow to go on Linux. We'll have to wait for ext5 or 6 to get a reasonable subset of ZFS feature list.
Sort of. There will probably never be an ext5, ext4 will be stabilised at some point. The future 'standard Linux filesystem' with ZFS features is intended to be BTRFS and it's well on the way (in the mainline Linux kernel but not ready for general use just yet).
http://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Main_Page [kernel.org]
However, the fact that Oracle is the priciple driver be
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I think that OpenSolaris will live forever, but not as a OS, its bests features (ZFS, others) will be incorporated in linux/free bsd/ others)
They won't be incorporated into Linux unless Oracle changes the license. Sun chose the license for OpenSolaris specifically to make it incompatible with Linux's license, in order to prevent Linux from gaining a further competitive advantage over Solaris, mostly in the form of ZFS. The best features might be replicated in Linux. Of course, BSD already has ZFS, because their license is compatible... Which of course has stolen some users from Linux.
Article Doesn't Quite Say it, But Not Suprised (Score:5, Interesting)
I wouldn't be surprised if Open Solaris went the journey. The whole point of it was to arrest the slide of Solaris in the face of Linux, in particular, and so that Sun could tell everyone that Solaris was open and just like Linux. Unfortunately, OpenSolaris has contributed little, if anything, to Solaris. There's no community of developers apart from those Sun sanctioned and things like Solaris's driver support is still a long way behind where Linux is. Development still hasn't been opened and there is no public repository development model. Sun, or Oracle now, is bankrolling it with none of the cost savings you would expect from such a project.
One can only hope that Oracle won't follow the same 'strategy' that Sun have followed for the past ten years, because it got Sun into trouble and it'll cost Oracle rather a lot of money if they get it wrong. However, they look as if they're doing swift about-turns on that and a statement of their future intent is clear when you go to www.sun.com - it redirects straight to www.oracle.com.
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The article doesn't quite say it, and it doesn't have the smoking gun of "We're canning OpenSolaris", but that end of life page for OpenSolaris looks pretty damn final to me and there is little room for interpretation.
The Oracle page lays out a software support policy for OpenSolaris releases and, following the policy, specifies end-of-support dates for existing releases. Oracle generally does not talk about specific release or support dates for future versions of software.
Given those facts, what on the page makes you think that there won't be another OpenSolaris version? What on the page is different from the end-of-support date pages for the Oracle RDBMS?
I detect a whiff of speculative FUD coming from both articles.
while we're here, what about linux zfs (Score:4, Interesting)
So far as I can tell, zfs is the only piece of opensolaris that's exciting enough to make anyone want to install if if they'd otherwise want to install a linux distribution. With that in mind, could someone post an authoritative update on the supposedly intractable licensing issues that prevent ZFS from being incorporated into the linux kernel? Is it still hopeless?
Re:while we're here, what about linux zfs (Score:4, Informative)
Well it's fairly simple. OpenSolaris is licenced under the CDDL [wikipedia.org], which is incompatible with the GPL, which is the license the Linux kernel is released under. Nothing "supposed" there, it's a fact.
It is, however, compatible with the BSD license, which is why FreeBSD has ZFS support now.
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It seems like a huge waste to lose a huge resilient code base like that to obscurity. Plus, Linux is definitely one of Oracle's strategic technologies.
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You've got the direction wrong. The CDDL is compatible with both those licences. I.e. you won't violate the CDDL by porting it to BSD or GPL works and distributing it. The GPL and BSD licences are not compatible with the CDDL though, in the sense that the CDDL is more restrictive than those licences. Note that FreeBSD ZFS is *not* in FreeBSD core (and never will be?) precisely because of it this, last I checked. Also, Linux could easily have the *same* level of support, if someone wished. Nothing in the CDD
Re:while we're here, what about linux zfs (Score:4, Informative)
Note that FreeBSD ZFS is *not* in FreeBSD core (and never will be?) precisely because of it this, last I checked.
It's not in the core... but it is in base. FreeBSD ships with full support for ZFS (since 7.0) and only requires zfs_enable="YES" in /etc/rc.conf.
If you are using FreeBSD in a device and don't want or cannot use ZFS, there are several settings (WITHOUT_ZFS, WITHOUT_CDDL, WITHOUT_OPENSOLARIS) and such that can be dropped into /etc/src.conf to omit these bits completely from your build.
Sources for ZFS and other bits of non-BSD licensed software (that may be redistributed) are found under src/contrib and src/sys/contrib, where they can be easily segregated from the "pure" BSD bits.
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How would this work with Linux? The reason it works with *BSD is that the BSD license doesn't exclude linking with anything. You can, quite legally, compile a bunch of random .o files that showed up on your doorstep on a CD-ROM into either kernel. However, even if they came with a license that says "Copyright 2010 Somebody Or'Other. You're allowed to do anything you want with these files and give them to anybody, but I'll never give you the source!" you couldn't legally redistribute your compiled Linux kern
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I believe this Wikipedia summary [wikipedia.org] is as good as an update as anyone has of the progress and likelihood of future progress. An alternative is FreeBSD 8 [freebsd.org] (released Nov. 2009), which includes ZFS as an officially supported feature for the first time.
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There are some other nice things about solaris/opensolaris. Linux distributions could learn a lot about integration from looking at how solaris solves some of its problems. Not that they're perfect, but compared to Linux "throw everything in a big pile" distributions it's better.
And of course there's DTrace. too.
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One of the major problems is that ZFS was designed as a huge blob of interdependent code, or in other words the complete opposite of the layered Linux VFS design. Even if they hadn't intentionally gone with an incompatible license it would still be a nightmare to port into the kernel, and that's effort that could be spent doing far more productive things (Btrfs, Tux3, Reiser4 etc.)
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ZFS was designed as a huge blob of interdependent code
Not true, any more than the claim that Linux is. ZFS has internal layers and an architecture that is as sane as any system out there.
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ZFS is available now. Running numerous places including my own home network.
btrfs still has a ton of "EXPERIMENTAL." "DON'T USE FOR ANYTHING IMPORTANT" warnings everywhere.
That right there clinched it.
Does Oracle own Sun yet? (Score:2)
With all the legal wrangling , especially in europe , I've rather lost the thread of this ongoing buyout.
Anyone actually read the article at Oracle yet? (Score:2, Informative)
Those, who are crying here "OpenSolaris gone", read the fucking article CAREFULLY (never happens on Slashdot, though):
So use letter-by-letter approach if you're unable to see word-by-word or sentence-by-sentence:"Future releases of the Solaris OS will also be based on the OpenSolaris community codebase."
That means RedHat/Fedora model. Clear now?
http://www.sun.com/software/solaris/lifecycle.xml
Wonder if someone can help me here (Score:2, Insightful)
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Um, did you even try looking [slashdot.org]?
IBM & AIX - the last man standing (Score:5, Insightful)
Nobody cares about open solaris. Nobody in their right mind would have chosen it as a platform.
I'm not surprised that IBM is the last company, AIX the last proprietary unix platform. Power the last proprietary hardware platform...
HP & Itanium? Laughable... And Linux on x86 has eaten the rest.
IBM 'get' services in the way the rest never have. They get that it's the bloody hardware which matters. This is why power is hitting 5GHz. The OS is just there to make it work. You want the fastest, lowest latency, highest throughput. You use IBM. You just want it to work and are on a budget? Linux.
The 'executives' of the rest of the companies clearly didn't know or care what their customers want, or what their business really is.
And this is why I no longer push Solaris (Score:2)
I wish Oracle would GPL ZFS (Score:3, Interesting)
And some other Solaris tech. Heck, they should GPL the whole thing and get a group of engineers to port the juiciest morsels of it to Linux. That way, Solaris going away would be much less of a loss, and Linus would be a happy man (he said, half-jokingly, he wants Solaris to die :-).
Oracle is the primary driving force behind btrfs (Score:3, Interesting)
Oracle is the primary driving force behind btrfs, which is a ZFS-like next generation FS for Linux. Now that they own ZFS, continuing development of btrfs makes far less sense.
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"Can somebody show me something good to come from the Oracle-Sun deal? Anything?"
Cutlery related anecdotes for the next 10 billion years
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Re:Bugger. (Score:5, Insightful)
Errrrrr, survival and preventing Sun from going bust, just off the top of my head?
Re:Bugger. (Score:5, Insightful)
Can somebody show me something good to come from the Oracle-Sun deal? Anything?
Errrrrr, survival and preventing Sun from going bust, just off the top of my head?
Is that really good? I just met someone who now works for Oracle; they worked for a company acquired by Sun prior to the merger. Sun fired all their best SEs because they made good salaries, while there are people all over Sun (or at least, were) making big bucks for doing nothing. UltraSPARC has its uses, but mostly it is an also-ran. Solaris' claim to fame is ZFS. Under Oracle, Solaris is doomed to either fail (as it was heading towards anyway, due to Linux's increasing dominance) or to become an Oracle RDBMS engine, which is much the same thing.
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Unfortunately, nothing. Or IBM. It's hard to tell which would be worse.
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Sun was going to get acquired. The only alternative to Oracle was probably a deal with IBM. You can speculate if IBM would have been a better owner, but IMHO they'd have had many of the same corporate priorities: making money and cutting losses on things they couldn't make money on. If Sun had focused on these things earlier, rather than doing crazy stuff like spending $1B on mySQL, they might have had a chance surviving on their own.
Re:Bugger. (Score:4, Interesting)
Well, Oracle offered about 3x the prevailing Sun stock price, so the Sun shareholders have done well. At least, well in relative terms--- some probably still lost money, but there was really not much else on the horizon that was looking likely to triple Sun's stock price. Before Oracle came along, the just-over-$3.00 stock was almost mocking its owners with its stock ticker of JAVA, an anachronism from the days that Sun management thought Java would somehow make them rich.
Coincidentally, for public companies, if you make a really good offer to stockholders (something >2x the current stock price usually qualifies), it's usually an offer the buyout target will find hard to refuse. That's the tradeoff you make when you IPO a company and put its ownership in the hands of the stockowning public.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Well this sucks... (Score:5, Interesting)
FreeBSD - ZFS is no longer in experimental status as of version 8.0. I haven't heard anyone recommend FUSE on Linux. As far as other BSDs go, I know that at least OpenBSD has no plans to include it at this stage.
http://kerneltrap.org/mailarchive/openbsd-misc/2009/1/17/4750954 [kerneltrap.org] - But that was over a year ago.
At the moment I'm learning FreeBSD over OpenSolaris because I want ZFS, FreeBSD is fully free and open source, FreeBSD looks to have a wider array of ports, which should be easy to install, even though with the LiveCD of OpenSolaris it boots up straight to X. On a production server or maybe even workstation, I think the choice would be down to FreeBSD versus Solaris, rather than OpenSolaris. Someone correct me if I'm wrong. Solaris does have a lot of nice features though, FMA (fault management architecture - lets you know when something has gone kaput and what to do about it.) And FreeBSD will lag in terms of the version of ZFS it supports. Deduplication looks to be a pretty cool feature - if you copy some data to another part of the HDD, and then you leave it a bit and your hoarding nature kicks in and you don't know whether you can delete it or not - no fear, ZFS will recognize the data as the same, only store it in one place (unless modified of course) and so there is no benefit to deleting the copy other than being a neat freak.
I'm presently wrestling with setting up FreeBSD on wireless. After that I have to get X set up. It would be nice if FreeBSD had version specific handbooks ala PostgreSQL, but they don't. So it's a combination of man pages, handbook, googling, etc to get me where I want to go. It's a bit of a contrast to Ubuntu which I set up on another box in the space of about an hour, including updates. Unmetered FOSS mirrors on ISPs kick ass!
Anyway, I suspect that the user base of FreeBSD will grow by leaps and bounds when people realize the advantages of ZFS and don't want to wait for BTRFS or whatever the results of this meeting might be: http://blogs.sun.com/bonwick/entry/casablanca [sun.com]
Re: (Score:2)
Not sure if the project is still alive or not, but might the DesktopBSD bits be useful here? FreeBSD with a pre-installed/configured X server and KDE. I tried it once, and rather liked it, but it's kernel was a full version behind the actual FreeBSD codebase (6.something when FreeBSD was at 7.2 or somesuch). There was a beta version using 7.x that I never got around to trying, and this was all several years ago, but at the time it was a pretty nice setup, and according to their site you could simply install
Re: (Score:2)
FUSE involves overhead. You don't want to use it when you're trying to achieve maximum performance.
Re: (Score:2)
ZFS itself isn't exactly a performance screamer, although it offers some of the best volume management and redundancy options in the business. A few features (such as the ability to grow a raidz pool) are still waiting on the sidelines, although they are for the most part very competitive with what you'd get from an enterprise-grade RAID controller.
Of course, if you want high performance and redundancy, you'll still need to resort to one of those expensive RAID controllers, and something like iSCSI, which
Re: (Score:2)
Latest FreeBSD supports ZFS on root. Which is nothing short of awesome.
I haven't tried yet, but I want to pull one of the hard drives and see if it still boots (it should).
I have 2x2TB as / and 5x1.5TB in RAIDZ2 for my multimedia archive. Irreplaceable family photos are on both (and offsite backed up.)
It's taken me a while to get used to the "BSD way" over the "Linux Way" and still frequent google with "Freebesd how to X"
Re: (Score:2)