Open Community vs. Open Code 141
snydeq writes "Recent silence regarding the future of OpenSolaris under Oracle's hand has InfoWorld blogger Savio Rodrigues questioning the relative importance of open code. 'Source code availability is a central factor in establishing trust in the open source community, as knowledge that the source is available can often allay fears about the future of a particular open source project or product. And yet, this trust can often be overstated,' Rodrigues writes. Members of the OpenSolaris community have been agitating for Oracle to clarify its plans for OpenSolaris in the wake of its acquisition of Sun, with some suggesting a fork as a way of severing ties. But, as Rodrigues points out, 'The community around an open source project or product can certainly be vibrant without having the resources to support a fork. In fact, this is true for many open source communities, which count numerous members, very few of whom would be qualified to develop the open source project further should a fork occur. Worse, even fewer would be interested in doing so.'"
Re:GPL means never worrying about lifespan (Score:3, Informative)
All non-trivial software nowadays is built with an enormous reliance on some set of shared libraries. As time marches on, those libraries will diverge from the ones the software originally compiled against. Eventually, some API will drift enough that code stops working, and that's where the most difficult to avoid bit rot comes from.
Yes, you can keep code going without rot forever if you can completely freeze the build/deployment environment. But that's rarely practical. Eventually you will need a newer OS, which is going to ship with a new set of libraries, because the old one won't run on newer hardware for example. And that's where having the source and being able to rebuild the code yourself is potentially valuable, if you have the right skills to be able to fix this class of problem.
Re:Forked to death (Score:4, Informative)
First link: author is vague and incorrect; OpenSolaris supports most common onboard SATA controllers. I have personally run it on nVidia MCP55 and above, Intel ICH7 and above, AMD SB600 and above, and OpenSolaris usually support all these very common chipsets/onboard SATA controllers.
Second link: the author is using unsupported dev builds of OpenSolaris.
Third link: the post is 2 years old and evidence suggests unreliable hardware.
Fourth link: the author complains about FreeBSD, not OpenSolaris.
Fifth link: the author concluded corruption was caused by unreliable hardware.
Search for "$NAME_OF_TECHNOLOGY unreliable" and google will always return thousands of results.
Personally I have a rather pleasant experience with ZFS. I have been using it for 3+ years at work and at home on 5-6 machines with about 50 drives total. It has been rock solid so far. And it has saved my life a couple times when drives died.
Re:And after all these years (Score:3, Informative)
Torvalds has switched to GNOME.