OpenSolaris Governing Board Closing Shop? 234
echolinux writes "Frustrated by Oracle's refusal to interact with the OpenSolaris community or speak with the OpenSolaris Governing Board, the OGB has issued an ultimatum to Oracle: designate a liaison to the OGB by August 16th or the board will 'take action at the August 23 meeting to trigger the clause in the OGB charter that will return control of the community to Oracle.'"
Sad (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Sad (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Sad (Score:5, Interesting)
They’ve completely alienated and scared off the community around OpenSolaris, killed any lines of communication by clamping down on employee blogs and ignored open letters from highly influential and important community members begging for *any* kind of information. They’ve forbidden Sun/Oracle employees from heading up the Solaris user groups and booted the meetings out of their buildings; turned Solaris 10 into a 30-day trial, and pushed back the 2010.x release of OpenSolaris with no word as to it’s planned release date, or even if it is being continued as a product.
Oracle are doing a superb job of killing Solaris - at least, as we knew it to be.
Oracle just really doesn't care about Solaris as a general purpose OS (there's no money in it), and it makes sense although I personally find it tragic. It's probably why they're also killing all their OEM deals. I strongly suspect Oracle's overall aim is to have Solaris relegated to the role of running as the bottom layer in an Oracle "database machine" or Java appserver bundle.
It excels in these tasks, and it would obviously fit into Oracle's stated goal of being a one stop shop, where if you want to run Oracle, they'll sell you the bundle - hardware, storage, OS and software. If they no longer want it to be a dominant general purpose datacenter OS, then their approach makes sense. They don't need a "community" around the product, they don't need open source developers porting applications to it, and they certainly don't need the overhead of running and managing a community portal anymore.
I think the way they are going about it reprehensible, and it's a tragic end for such a historic and innovative OS but you can see why. Larry is all about the $$$, and Sun's approach just wasn't bringing in the big bucks.
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when the market goes down, the companies goes vertical.
heck, it may well be that oracle wont sell a stack, but rather lease it; with some kind of yearly support contract.
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You could see it in the language that was used, 60's business rhetoric regurgitated for today's business masses that might still buy it. Now, I am looking for contracts that are migrating away from Solaris. Going to try and catch this wave early.
- Dan.
Re:Sad (Score:5, Interesting)
I guess that Sun were just too nice a company to prosper
Well that and they were way over priced ...
...
Well that and the Open Source Community caught up with them
Well that and they didn't have a long-term solution/strategy to ensure new entries into the tech field could gain experience/skills on their products so they would be comfortable recommending them. Sun relied on the old guard to recommend Sun, while newer entries onto the computer field were more comfortable recommending solutions they had experience with.
As a result apache replaced Sun's web server as the standard.
Red Hat (and others) took away Solaris server market share.
New startups began by running Oracle and other databases on Linux (or even Windows) servers in the initial low funding development stages and then when it came time to go into production, some of them didn't bother with moving to Sun hardware and Solaris, and instead remained with what worked and building it out to be "good-enough" for less money and less headaches.
I was in college from 1995-1999. The guys who loved going to the lab became Solaris die-hards, because that was what the school at that time ran (it is now LINUX, LINUX and more LINUX). But I preferred working in my apartment, so when I had took C, LISP, and JAVA classes that were focused on the fundamentals of code, things like recursion or objects, my teachers didn't demand I used the Solaris workstation, just that I solved the problem and got a strong foundation. So I installed Red hat on a backup PC and worked by using the same languages, with the same libraries, with the same text editors only on LINUX as the labs used on Solaris. At the time, I was the minority, but with each new class the LINUX users increased and those willing to invest in learning Solaris decreased, not to mention a larger and larger percentage of Solaris guys knew both.
When I went to work for a startup in California, they couldn't afford the quotes for Sun, so I purchased three DELL servers and installed Linux on them to accomplish the same task. Now nobody asks for Solaris admins, they ask for Linux admins.
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Yeah. It really makes me worry about Java's future. Is there any other comparable cross-platform language that runs in a managed environment?
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nice? pumping millions into sco during their lawsuit against Linux?
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Solaris could very easily fall behind in terms of support for modern hardware and principles.
Solaris is a small advantage over Linux and competitors, but they seem more interested in Linux.
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Oddly enough, I went the other way around about 6 months ago because I wanted a better implementation of ZFS and iSCSI. Freebsd's implementation is far behind OSOL, and iscsi is not even close to being functional in 8. iscsi works in 7, but zfs does not.
It's unfortunate, but I see OSOL dieing a slow horrible death at the hands of Oracle.
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zfs works in 7.X, just 7.0 -> 7.2 it wasn't considered production ready.
zfs + iscsi integration doesn't work in 8 and didn't work in 7 either because iscsi target support doesn't exist in the base system like OpenSolaris. Running iscsi targets is possible and stable with some implementations from the ports tree however(I assume you tried /usr/ports/net/iscsi-target since you are so down on FreeBSD iscsi target support, use /usr/ports/net/istgt). You don't get the ease of use as in Opensolaris, but a sp
Re:Sad (Score:5, Insightful)
This is not exactly a surprise. Oracle has a deep and abiding interest in Oracle's bottom line. How does Open Solaris contribute to that? It doesn't, hence Oracle losing interest fast.
As painful as it may be to acknowledge, this is actually a rational approach. Look no further than the fact that Oracle ended up eating Sun, not the other way around. I like Free Stuff as much as the next guy, but that doesn't change the fact that if you're in business to make money, you'd damn well better focus on things that make you money.
Re:Sad (Score:5, Insightful)
Support a community well and it will pay you back. Alienate a community and you are suddenly competing against better entrenched products.
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Not if they don't want or need a community around their product. I posted about this above, but I suspect Oracle are of the opinion that there's no money to be made selling Solaris as a general purpose OS. They probably just want it as the bottom layer in a hardware & software bundle, tuned to running Oracle or Java workloads.
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"They probably just want it as the bottom layer in a hardware & software bundle, tuned to running Oracle or Java workloads."
I think that is the point exactly. I think Oracle inherited all this OSS stuff from Sun and they're still scratching their heads trying to figure out how it will fit into their bottom line. I know Oracle is not new to OSS, I think InnoDB was open, but the Sun acquisition dramatically expanded their OSS offerings and I think their still playing catchup with understanding exactly how all this technology fits with their profit plans.
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> Not if they don't want or need a community around their product.
The thing about that is that while you may not NEED a community around a product for making the next quarterly estimates, long term, I highly doubt that Solaris would have any edge over other OSs that do have a community around them.
> I suspect Oracle are of the opinion that there's no money to be made selling Solaris as a general purpose OS
Which is another reason why no money will be spent on Solaris to maintain any edge over other OSs
Re:Sad (Score:4, Interesting)
Support a community well and it will pay you back. Alienate a community and you are suddenly competing against better entrenched products.
If you'll pardon the dated reference, this isn't the first time something like this has happened. One case that comes to mind is Apple's ending the life of the Apple II line. Sure, it would have been a virtual nightmare to keep backward compatibility as they moved forward with the series, but because of the way they went about it, many of their big fans jumped ship to the PC-compatible camp, rather than shifting to the Mac. Apple could have had a larger following with their Mac line, had they tried to make the change a little more gently, but they didn't, and they are only recently beginning to recover from it.
If Oracle is careful, they won't make any waves in doing what they think is the best action to take, but somehow I get the feeling that they're past caring what anyone else thinks.
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Support a community well and it will pay you back.
Yeah, that worked out great for Sun, didn't it?
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Although I agree, kinda. We are wrong.
The market cap of Red Hat is 6.06B
The market cap of Oracle is 119.57B
Oracle doesn't need "a community" in any way. Communities are great if the bottom line isn't the priority. RHAT makes the bottom like "a" priority but they are certainly not making it "the" priority. They can't because they are an Open Source company and without the community they are hosed. Oracle needs a community like Bill Gates needs a loan.
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Also look at the Itanium processor line, it was too expensive so hobbyists couldn't afford them, and too new so they couldn't buy old ones...
Availability of a platform to the masses increases user experience of it, and users like to run what they're familiar with and have used before.
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The primary reason the Itanium died was because it preformed poorly for all but niche tasks. Intel's dream of super compilers that can take over instruction scheduling was wishful thinking.
The final nail in the Itanium coffin was AMD forcing Intel to come out with 64 bit Xeons that ended up outperforming the Itanium.
Re:Sad (Score:5, Insightful)
Oracle got rid of the free to download and use Solaris 10 as well. Sun moved that way to entice developers to develop and test on their platform. Oracle, instead of continuing that to keep developers, moved Solaris back to a pay only. Why would anyone pay to develop or test on Solaris when the competitors are free and just as good? Who is going to buy Solaris when the only thing tested on it is Oracle Database? Oracle is shooting itself in the foot.
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Who is going to buy Solaris when the only thing tested on it is Oracle Database?
People looking for a stable, tested OS to run Oracle on?
Re:Sad (Score:4, Insightful)
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Oracle probably only cares that Oracle software runs on it. Everything else is superfluous.
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Oracle could leverage Open Solaris as the ideal Oracle platform.
They could push for high end web solutions to use Oracle+Solaris+Java.
So yes it could be a really good solution for them. Also if they can get enough people using OpenSolaris they will have a well trained pool of sysadmins. OpenSolaris could compete with RHEL and Sun/Oracle can sell support like Red Hat.
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They could but it would compete with their Linux offering thus adding no value vs development and maintenance costs.
Re:Sad (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, Oracle DOES leverage OpenSolaris as an Oracle platform. The 7410 storage platform exclusively runs OpenSolaris under the hood. Bog-standard Solaris wasn't up to the job. We've bought a number of these storage platforms and are testing them out right now; other than annoying production delays due to unavailability of really-honking-big SSDs, they are extremely cool and high-performance storage solutions.
Also the newer T5240 boxes run way better on OpenSolaris than on stock Solaris 10. No ifs, ands, or buts. Better hardware support and faster I/O. You have to be running the 10/09 release of Solaris 10 to even support these boxes at all, and OpenSolaris supported them before they were even released.
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Right you are. I stand corrected. My main experience with the 7000-series storage devices comes from some training classes, followed by hands-on recently as we've received a few of the devices with many, many more back-ordered due to the global solid-state disk shortage.
Thanks for the clarification.
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OpenSolaris provides insight into the directions Solaris is going. I've used my experience with OpenSolaris at home to discuss possible future directions at work once the features work into mainstream Solaris. OpenSolaris is to Solaris what Fedora is to RedHat Enterprise Linux. Giving your customers a chance to preview what's up and coming gives them an opportunity to suggest a direction before it's in the mainstream release. Sure, a lot of deadbeats benefit from making the OS freely available, but gett
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Oracle seems determined to destroy everything they acquired from Sun. We had 2 OpenSolaris machines since Zones and ZFS are just hot shit and several SunFire servers. We're moving the OpenSolaris installs to FreeBSD and are probably going to be looking at HP or IBM machines in the future.
And just how much money did Oracle make from your two OpenSolaris machines? If you bought them pre-merger, they made nada. Zip.
Oracle doesn't care about you unless you're willing to spend a lot of money. That's not bad, that's just their business model. They're trying to become the Mercedes-Benz of IT. They're going mostly to the high end of the enterprise. They expect to be well paid for both hardware and software. And I suspect Sun will start making more money on the high end if they do it right. I hear
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Correction: Oracle wants you to spend a lot of money, but they care about you as a potential paying customer. For instance, you can pick up a two-user license of Oracle Database for free and run a large production web site on it if you want. Think about your typical MySQL deployment: One user for the web site, and maybe a second user for the administrative user (usually "root"). Oracle gives this away for free for unlimited use.
T
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Correction: Oracle wants you to spend a lot of money, but they care about you as a potential paying customer. For instance, you can pick up a two-user license of Oracle Database for free and run a large production web site on it if you want.
Uh, you can? I thought Oracle Express Edition was free (1 cpu max, 1GB RAM max, 4GB DB size max), but anything past that cost money. And if you hook it up to the Internet, you're paying per-processor, not-per-user.
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Climbing up the ladder may work, but don't be surprised by how high and fast Intel, AMD and their partners can climb
DEC and SGI also went for the high end of IT.
HP's HP/UX is good as dead, and they've done a good job killing off Tandem and VMS.
So far IBM is still holding out with their POWER stuff.
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Oracle doesn't care about you unless you're willing to spend a lot of money. That's not bad, that's just their business model.
No, that is bad; in the long term it will ensure their own demise. Actually, never mind, that is good. It is just a shame that they are wasting all of Sun's innovation in the process.
This is one of the great problems with investment in America; senseless greed ensures that the bulk of the money is concentrated in short-term high-return investments, which produce little overall value outside of these investments. The companies are set on a course for self-destruction, and the investors jump ship when appr
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We're moving the OpenSolaris installs to FreeBSD
That, is a mistake. I strongly recommend you do some reading about the base requirements for ZFS on FreeBSD as well as its many shortcomings (at least compared to the OpenSolaris implementation).
Just a couple of the shortcomings I've hit against in the past couple months:
* stability issues. Even with the supposed "stable" 8 RELEASE and the 'required' ZFS tuning and hardware, I've had ZFS lock the system. It would appear the only significant difference between the 7.3 and 8 ZFS implementations is that in 8,
Re:Sad (Score:4, Informative)
Wow. You must be kidding. See below:
We're moving the OpenSolaris installs to FreeBSD
That, is a mistake. I strongly recommend you do some reading about the base requirements for ZFS on FreeBSD as well as its many shortcomings (at least compared to the OpenSolaris implementation).
Just a couple of the shortcomings I've hit against in the past couple months:
* stability issues. Even with the supposed "stable" 8 RELEASE and the 'required' ZFS tuning and hardware, I've had ZFS lock the system. It would appear the only significant difference between the 7.3 and 8 ZFS implementations is that in 8, they've removed the "EXPERIMENTAL!" warning on the opensolaris driver.
The limitations of running ZFS on 32-bit systems is well-documented. Try an amd64 box instead with the same amount of RAM you would get in a Sun box, like, oh, 8 GB or so. ZFS is *ported* to FreeBSD. It isn't magically shrunk down to require less resources.
* boot mechanisms. There is no 'official' way to boot off a ZFS zpool, and all the ways that exist to get around that shortcoming are poor compromises,
won't work from one release to another, or require use of unstable code (USB boot device, grub2, etc.)
Untrue. Our production SAN boxes are all GPT/ZFS-boot. Nothing compromising about it, it's rock-solid and quick. You have to follow some easy directions (the install program won't do it for you, and you must restore the boot code with gpart if you overwrite it). Google "FreeBSD Root on ZFS" for the instructions.
* ZFS requires a *minimum* of 4GB of RAM for supposed stable operation. It will use that memory, even on an infrequently accessed file server. You will have stability issues with less, even with the recommended FreeBSD ZFS tweaking.
Yes, which is less than an equivalent Sun box would require, isn't it?
* Compared to Linux or OpenSolaris, FreeBSD stability - largely related to device drivers - is pathetic and amateur.
You ignore historical Netcraft surveys which show BSD boxes run longer than Linux on average. Our own FreeBSD servers have a 99.99% uptime. We stick with name-brand devices which may explain our lack of driver issues. I would put driver quality in FreeBSD up against Linux any day, since I run both in our data center. Linux requires more care and feeding than FreeBSD. This has been my experience for over 15 years.
* A general "unprofessional asshole" attitude on the mailing lists. "I've discovered a bug, here it is" seems to result in things like "we're not going to fix that, we'll replace the system in the next release" or similar - if any response is made at all (admittedly, the only list I'm currently following is freebsd-usb).
There aren't as many folks working on the BSDs - no Fortune 500 companies employing armies of kernel developers like Linux. Sorry you got that impression. We're just overworked, not assholes. It sounds like someone was focused on a new system rewrite and didn't have the bandwidth to address a minor bugfix. Major bugs are addressed as a matter of course.
* ALong those lines, the inclusion of incomplete/dysfunctional systems (presumably) simply on the basis of superior design.
There's an old generalization which is fairly true: "BSD is developed by those coming from a Unix software background. Linux is developed by those coming from a PC software background." Superior design is part of the Way of Unix. It pays off handsomely later on. I wouldn't expect youngsters to understand.
Zones, however, would probably be pretty well implemented via jails. Those are cool. But ZFS is, IMO, not a good choice for picking FreeBSD. FreeBSD does a subset of things very well (networking, documentation, infrastructure design and naming), but ZFS is, unfortunately, not one of them (yet).
I'm very concerned th
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I'm using mostly SuperMicro boards (Intel everything, "recommended" FreeBSD hardware), but I have some other generic stuff in the shop.
The one FreeBSD ZFS machien I've got that has more than 4GB (it has 8), as well as the low-utility ones, are the only systems I've not had stability issues with. FreeBSD 7.2, 7.3, and 8.
Where is it that you see that you can use ZFS root only "for a long time now"? Are you one of those people who thinks "stable" is stable enough, even though it's strongly recommended against
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Apparently you haven't read this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/zfs
Hell, even XFS is closer despite its lacking features, if only because it's stable and available. btrfs fits neither of those.
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Comment removed (Score:3, Funny)
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Yeah, except CDDL doesn't allow forking.
I guess that's why the CDDL is better than the GPL?
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Yes, it does. The problem is that there's no supporting user community to maintain a fork; almost all of OpenSolaris's updates come from Oracle/Sun.
lolwut? (Score:5, Insightful)
So they're trying to force Oracle to give them a liaison by threatening to cut their own throats? Great move I'm sure Oracle will get exactly what they want.
Re:lolwut? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:lolwut? (Score:5, Funny)
It's the Judean People's Front crack Suicide Team to the rescue!
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It's the People's Front of Judea. Bloody splinter group.
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Isn't a project fork still possible, though? "Here's your turd, we're starting our own project!" and so forth. Granted, they'd be stuck with the license, but at least things like Nexenta could continue - yes?
Uhhh... (Score:5, Funny)
Uhhh.. that will show them?
"If you don't give in to our demands...we'll give up & stop existing?"
Re:Uhhh... (Score:5, Insightful)
No, it seems more like "If you don't appoint 1 person to sit at a table, we'll dump responsibility for the whole thing on your lap... where you still won't have anyone pay attention to it, so we may as well all just cut to the chase and declare OpenSolaris dead."
Re:Uhhh... (Score:4, Interesting)
...so we may as well all just cut to the chase and declare OpenSolaris dead.
This is absolutely what is happening. [cuddletech.com] From that post I linked to:
I once advocated this kind of self-implosion tactic back in the Sun days. The reason was to re-organize the OpenSolaris leadership to be more engaged and industry focused. That was a good idea back in the days when I had faith that Sun would "do the right thing". However, those times have past. Oracle has made it clear that it either controls things or it doesn't... there is no give and take. I don't think we can demolish the structure and believe that Oracle will re-organize in such a way as to give the community more power. It was a long shot with Sun anyway.
However, the most important tidbit he reveals lower in his post:
We're in no worse a position right now than we were during the Sun days. They didn't communicate, we had no visibility or impact on the OpenSolaris distribution, etc. Don't fall into the lie that things are now "worse" than they were... they aren't. Its status quo. The difference is that the OGB is no longer composed of Sun insiders who can get a sense of control from hallway conversations and are now as blind and weak as those of us in the community always have been.
My apologies to Ben Rockwood for raping his blog post of content, but this is /. and no one reads anything linked to apparently.
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If these guys are smart, they should just bang the gavel, stop trying to talk to Oracle, officially fork OpenSolaris. I'm sure Oracle will probably go bat shit lawyer crazy and start yelling it's their property, but since they've given it so little interest... who knows.
Re:Uhhh... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Legally, you can fork Opensolaris given the CDDL
Also important to note is that given that the CDDL is not compatible with the GPL, you can't merge in the good things about OpenSolaris into Linux (not sure about it's compatibility with the BSD license).
With that it mind, you literally would have to maintain it always as a completely separate project, compounding the lack of manpower.
All in all, I think it's best to just give up on it. It doesn't have the steam the Linux has. I say we just use this as a good example of just WHY you should be careful abou
Re:Uhhh... (Score:4, Informative)
Though a fork (in the sense of OpenBSD/FreeBSD) is not possible, a fork in the sense of Linus's tree, and Alan Cox's tree is possible. The Nexenta project itself already maintains such a tree (nexenta-gate) for the Nexenta and derivative distributions.
In short, though Oracle develops a major part of the kernel, it's open source nature still allows for multiple paths the community can take. The healthy Nexenta community is a testament to that.
We do have some plans for OpenSolaris in the near future. If you're attending DebConf in the first week of August, look me up (and my talk).
Re:Uhhh... (Score:5, Insightful)
Nope. Oracle had a major goal when they bought Sun: create a vertically-integrated platform where they control everything from the hardware through the OS, applications, and support contracts. IBM has that sort of leverage with DB2 + Web Services on AIX, along with a killer international sales and support force with its fingers everywhere in the Fortune 500. IBM is really Oracle's main competition and has been for several years because they could offer whole-life-cycle, end-to-end support at a fraction of the cost of Oracle's offerings. The acquisition of Sun allowed Oracle to compete where it was getting hammered.
Accepting reality (Score:5, Insightful)
Uhhh.. that will show them?
"If you don't give in to our demands...we'll give up & stop existing?"
It's not like they can really threaten Oracle into submission. Sometimes, you just have to roll over and ask, "Honey, are you really in this for the long run, or are you just screwing me?" If you don't like the answer, you just pack up and leave. No need to go all psycho.
What were we talking about again? Oh yeah. If the organization disbands, Solaris loses some of its credibility as an open platform with a healthy, involved community. Not a death blow, but better than prolonging a charade.
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"If you don't give in to our demands...we'll give up & stop existing?"
Now where have I heard this before? Oh, right. [wikipedia.org]
Very sad to witness this (Score:2)
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Solaris isn't dead. Oracle said as much. It's OpenSolaris that has become roadkill via the Oracle purchase of Sun.
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Solaris isn't dead.
It's just pining for the fjords.
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With no OpenSolaris, Linux will continue to kill Solaris in every market.
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Solaris is and never will be the Solaris we old hackers got to know and love.
Oh, I don't know. I had to use Solaris a couple of years ago and I felt like I was back in 1992 all over again...
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I felt like I was back in 1992 all over again...
Ah, 1992. George H. W. Bush vomits into the lap of Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa on TV. Riots in Los Angeles. Hurricane Andrew. Windows 3.1 is released.
Good times.
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You must not get near Unix or Linux much then, because they ALL look like that at the command line, even the latest versions not coded in the '90s. Still, good for you for putting down the mouse for two minutes and getting into some REAL computing. As a very long time Solaris Admin (22 years +, kids) I am not surprised at how Oracle completely ignores the open source community in favor of more $$. Look how they are fumbling SPARC, Java, MySQL, and now Open Solaris. In case you're not aware, which is wha
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The road to the perfect OS sure has a lot of big roadkills:
- DEC OSF / Digital Unix / Tru64 - gave us 64-bit and support for more than one CPU type.
- Unicos - gave us NUMA and threading that actually worked.
- IRIX - gave us xfs, OpenGL, mixed 32/64-bit environments and tonnes of new GUI features now found in all OSes.
- NeXT - gave us heartburn, upset stomach, indigestion and envy of those who could actually BUY a system.
and now OpenSolaris goes too, and will undoubtedly drag Solaris with it in the long run.
Why the silence? (Score:2)
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Are they willing to pay for it though? Oracle removed the ability to download and use Solaris 10 for free. This isn't 10 or 15 years ago, Linux and *BSD are more then capable of doing most of the loads you would throw at Solaris an RHEL has the cooperate support and a sane company backing it.
Oracle seems to be looking at Solaris the same as they look at their Database product. Oracle Enterprise Database, even for all its irritatio
Re:Why the silence? (Score:5, Informative)
Thanks for playing. Please try again.
1. Register at sunsolve.sun.com.
2. Click "Downloads & Trials", and select "Top Downloads".
3. Under "Servers & Storage Systems" select "Solaris".
4. Download the option most suited to your needs. For certain releases, you may be asked some survey questions first. If you're not certain you want Solaris full-time on your workstation, I'd suggest going with the VirtualBox image.
The assertion that Oracle no longer allows you to download and use Solaris 10 for free is completely FALSE. I hate seeing this canard repeatedly trotted out as if it were true. There were a couple of days during the support transition and shutdown of legacy Sun data centers when Solaris downloads were affected, but that's been fixed for quite a while now.
Re:Why the silence? (Score:4, Insightful)
If you think downloading a base image constitutes as using for free, then I'm afraid you are mistaken. It takes security patches and bug fixes to keep an OS in production quality working order.
Maybe you just re-install every 6 months when the new media set is released? right!
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What buttons do I have to click to get my free patches? Oh that's right, they don't supply patches for free anymore.
When did they ever? Yes, Oracle is selling Solaris support. So what? If you need Solaris, then you should be willing to pay for it. If not, Oracle supports Linux as well. The Oracle bashing has gotten to be a bit much. Sun would have been dead one way or another; they're lucky someone with cash decided to trawl through all of it and decide some of it was worth keeping. It's unfortunate to see an open community die like this, but if it can't survive without Oracle, then there probably weren't many people the
Re:Why the silence? (Score:4, Insightful)
This is not bashing, its the truth. Competitors such as IBM and HP currently provide patch information, downloads, and knowledge base articles for free, Oracle does not. And now they bled that mentality into Solaris.
It's unfortunate to see an open community die like this, but if it can't survive without Oracle, then there probably weren't many people there to begin with.
There were plenty of ppl involved and interested, but its based on a proprietary platform, of course it can't survive without the parent company's support. The larger point is that they are, seemingly, purposefully killing it.
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Wrong again. You get LOTS of free patches with a free install of Solaris. RedHat set the pace for this: if you install RHEL, you have to use up2date which requires a registered system with the RedHat Network (RHN). If you don't want to register and pay for RHN, you wait for the next release and do your upgrade from that. Sun implemented a similar system -- in planning, testing, and prelimi
Re: (Score:2)
http://www.ypass.net/blog/2010/04/solaris-licensing-changes-the-real-story [ypass.net]
Linux and *BSD still have nothing to compete with zfs and dtrace. Their competition to crossbow (new networking stack) sucks. And even with SELinux, can't touch the fine grained access controls built into Solaris. But I suppose if you've never used it, it seems like it doesn't do much different.
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The two cultures couldn't be more different, especially where support is concerned. It's a good litmus test. Sun would stand behind its products. If something wasn't right, all you had to do was say so and someone who knew what he was talking about would go and fix it. I don't mean that the process was perfect, but there was some agility to it. Oracle seems to stand in front of its products. If so
Old Aggie joke (Score:4, Funny)
An Aggie* comes home to find his wife in bed with another man. He pulls out a pistol and points it at his own head. His wife screams "No, don't do it!" The Aggie replies "Just wait; you're next."
* - Footnote for people not from Texas - Students at Texas Agricultural and Mechanical (A&M) University are called Aggies and are the subject of endless jokes insulting their intelligence.
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Why did the three Aggies go to the Xmas party dressed as firemen?
Because the three wise men came from afar.
(read it out loud, it makes more sense).
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*-Footnote: I don't really hate you.
What about VirtualBox? (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't really care about OpenSolaris, but I have been a happy user of VirtualBox since before it was acquired by Sun. Sun developed some nice, but proprietary, tweaks to VirtualBox in areas like graphics drivers. I do see development continuing as I get prompted to upgrade fairly regularly, but I've been nervous that VirtualBox will also eventually be treated as roadkill by Oracle. Obviously there will always be a free implementation since the "open-source edition" is GPL-licensed.
I can understand Oracle's lack of interest in OpenSolaris since they've supported Linux for a long time now. (Hell, they even compete directly against RedHat with their Oracle Enterprise Linux [wikipedia.org] distribution.) I do wonder, though, whether they'll stay committed to VirtualBox down the road.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I hate to engage in speculation, but Oracle now has two virtualization solutions:
1. Server-side "OVS" or "OVMS": Oracle Virtual Server. This is a Xen-based implementation used widely within Oracle under the framework of their Grid and Elastic Grid products. It's portable, scalable, and is a huge revenue-generator in areas like Oracle Education.
2. VirtualBox, which is more of a client-side, "run it on the desktop" app.
They bot
It's not just Solaris (Score:2)
Most proprietary IT companies have started to - if not openly embrace - at least accept and try to work with F/OSS (both in communities and with sponsored products).
Some have been quicker than others; some have taken it more seriously than others. Some have quite obviously put up with F/OSS under protest rather than actively encouraging it.
Oracle, I would say, at least before they acquired Sun, has definitely been in the "not taking entirely seriously" camp. A traditional proprietary vendor, who consider
Ah Oracle (Score:2, Interesting)
Sad for OpenSolaris (Score:2)
Especially now that we have a need for Sun's Solaris, they close up shop and sell to Oracle. Sun was far ahead of their game implementing virtualization and extreme storage limits in a time when there was no need for it. Now the industry is finally ready to get started using these technologies and they decide to sell it. Sun's systems were finally starting to get used, systems like the Thumper have been in great demand. Too bad they wasted money on overpriced 1U servers ($10k for an Opteron system?) and pro
Today Solaris, tomorrow MySQL? (Score:2, Insightful)
The future of MySQL is iffy, too. All Oracle has to do is put the second team on maintaining it, and it will die. A database program has to be very reliable to be usable at all.
We've already seen this with "MySQL Workbench". Since Oracle took over, all the MySQL GUI tools were wrapped into a central "MySQL Workbench" program. Which crashes frequently. (If you can install it at all. [mysql.com]) If Oracle can bring MySQL down to the level of MySQL Workbench, nobody will be able to use it.
MySQL needs to be fully
It's not sad, it's normal (Score:2)
Want to kill an open ource project? Buy the "supporting" company (if any, like MySQL AB) or buy^H^H^Hhire the top 5 or 10 developers.
Is the control of the project already in your hands? Simply forget about it.
Then sue all forks.
It's (sadly) normal.
A view from the inside... (Score:5, Interesting)
I was a Sun employee, I'm now an Oracle employee. I've posted in the past about internal, but non-secret Sun stuff using my registered nickname because I didn't think it mattered all that much. These days, however, the corporate secrecy is verging on paranoia, and so I don't dare use my regular nickname.
Anyhow, I'll keep this short. First of all, Oracle does not say anything to anyone outside of Oracle about future plans. Period. It's repeated over and over in the brainwashing (er, onboarding) presentations. The rationale for this is that if customers think they know what new products are in the pipeline and when they'll come out, they'll plan their purchases accordingly. There's also the potential loss of competitive advantage.
Second, Oracle doesn't give a rat's ass about building communities and generating interest with Open Source. They'll re-brand Red Hat because they know people want Linux servers, but they don't care about trying to make Open Solaris a gateway to "real" Solaris. They'll make Solaris the premier platform for high-end Oracle DBs, and they'll use it for storage solutions which take on NetApp. Beyond that, they don't care about whether or not Solaris "wins" against Linux. They don't need it to. The goal is to leverage Solaris (on Sparc for Oracle DB, x86 for storage) into closed solutions which have huge profit margins. If it's not going to create large margins, it won't live long at Oracle.
Profit is king here. Anything else is overhead, and overhead eats into Larry's yacht fund.
Yes, I'm looking elsewhere. The best and brightest have been leaving in droves. I am neither, but I'm still pretty good; just somewhat less mobile. Working on that.
Re: (Score:2)
/me wonders how long before someone on opensolaris-discuss posts this in a thread, leading to another flamewar and a new round of speculations on the nature of OpenSolaris ;)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I was at the LUG 2010 (Lustre Users group) and there was a very similar sense of disquiet where Lustre is concerned. The corporate line seemed to be: You'll be able to download Lustre for free but if you want any kind of support you'll have to install Lustre on a box from one of our preferred vendors running our Linux variant.
Granted it's not clear exactly what 'any kind of support' means. As it stands now the mailing list is very active and it doesn't really matter what your support status is. If that s
How funny (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Look it is obvious, Oracle is putting a nail in anything having to do with Solaris. Get over it, move on and start migrating.
No, Oracle is putting a nail in OpenSolaris. They're quite interested in developing commercial Solaris. They just want to be paid for it. You don't make money by not making money. You'd have thought everyone would get that now after the Internet bubble 10 years ago.
Re: (Score:2)
Depends. Big shops like commercial products with commercial support. They'll pay for it too. HOWEVER, the people to run that stuff? If you expect them all to pick up the skills on the job then they're going to be a rare breed, and rare talent = EXPENSIVE talent. If you have some version of your software available for free though, without support, then you let the tinkerers learn it in their spare time.
I'm convinced that's why things like IBM's i Series OS (OS/400) isn't picking up many more users. It
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Solaris brought out opensolaris to try to deal with the fact that linux was killing them. This will move ensure Solaris ends up as dead as HP/UX.
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MS is completely 100% irrelevant to me I could care less what they do.
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"Where are my GNAA homies?"
RTFA, they are evidently running Oracle.