The Future of OpenSolaris Revealed 342
ywlke writes "A few hours ago, an internal Oracle memo was leaked to the osol-discuss mailing list at opensolaris.org. It details Oracle's plans for Solaris and OpenSolaris; namely that OpenSolaris, the distribution, is dead. Solaris Express has come back from the grave, and source code will still be CDDL, but won't be released to the public until some time after it is incorporated into a binary release. What happens to the community now is anybody's guess."
The full text of the memo is available on the mailing list, as well as apparent confirmation from an Oracle employee. That said, no official announcement has yet been made.
Re:And... (Score:3, Informative)
Yes
Solaris actually is a very good OS. The lack of comunity really let it down but the code it's self and the OS is really good.
Illumos Fork (Score:5, Informative)
There are some excellent technologies in OpenSolaris, and it appears The Illumos Project [illumos.org] is going to be the place to find them.
I'm not sure this is a bad thing. Oracle's played its hand, and as opposed to Sun's years of "oh, gosh, we don't know if we want to be open or not - how about almost-open?" Oracle said, "screw you guys, we're going to make money off this thing." I frankly don't care about them not releasing an OpenSolaris binary build - Linus doesn't post binary builds - but keeping the source changes secret until after the commercial release just doesn't deal with the realities of Internet Time.
But, because of Oracle's decisiveness, the ON stack, the libc, etc. are all being done right now. I've tried once or twice to contribute to Nexenta and got stuck in the complexity of rebuilding a kernel, despite having done so in linux forever (to be fair the Nexenta guys were awesomely responsive so I didn't really have to do the build myself). This should be fixed.
It might give the OpenSolaris^W Illumos community a chance to succeed, being actually open.
Re:And... (Score:4, Informative)
That said, I don't think ZFS was going anywhere anyways. It's incompatible license meant it wasn't ever going to get going in Linux, and Linux has far too much momentum for OpenSolaris to have dethroned it as the open source world's golden boy.
Actually the ZFS storage layer was recently ported to Linux. You can use it with Lustre today, perhaps some databases. The POSIX layer is being worked on.
Due to the licensing conflict, distribution is an open problem. Probably end-users will need to install this themselves.
Re:I'm glad they're so good at math! (Score:4, Informative)
I'm a little suspicious of the apparent over-simplicity of the interpretation I'm about to lay out here, but I temper that with the understanding that this is marketing math.
"top customers" == "Oracle's enterprise customers".
40% of Oracle's enterprise customers are running Oracle (the RDBMS... remember that?) on Solaris. That means that 60% are running Oracle on some other OS. (Linux is prominent in that, I think. Can anyone find some statistics?)
Anyways, that 60% (Oracle on non-Oracle OS) is the "60% growth opportunity" the market-droid is spewing about.
Re:I'm glad they're so good at math! (Score:4, Informative)
If they have 40 customers and they grow by 60 customers, they'll have grown by 150%.
To grow by 60%, they need to grow by 0.6*40 customers. That would be the same as 0.4*60 customers; in other words, they need 40% of the 60 customers remaining, not 100% of the 60 customers remaining.
In other words, to grow by 60% they need only 40% of the market they're talking about. That's why the grandparent was critizing their math.
Re: Question about Oracle's OpenOffice? (Score:4, Informative)
I was just reading on wikipedia last night that OpenOffice.org is a "limited" version of the office suite, and that most Linux installs (like Ubuntu) actually come with Go O-O instead because it offers full *.docx functionality that OpenOffice.org does not. Is that true?
Go O-O really is a patched version of OpenOffice.org which has more features thanks to these patches. And yes, many GNU/Linux distributions give you Go O-o when you install "OpenOffice.org". The Gentoo ebuild for app-office/openoffice is, for example, the Go O-o version. OpenOffice.org is "limited" in the sense that you can get more features by applying patches who give more features, which is a result of it being very hard to get patches into this project.
Re:And... (Score:4, Informative)
"commercial operating system" - you mean proprietary. There's a lot of "commerce" in the Linux/Free Software/Open Source world, you may have noticed it.
Summary: OpenSolaris relicensed under WIPL (Score:2, Informative)
WIPL = Want It? Pay Larry
Re:And... (Score:1, Informative)
Yeah, I'm done with anything Oracle related. They're a fucking massive mess that takes forever to make any meaningful decisions, which usually end in abandonment or screwing people over anyway.
To hell with Oracle. I hope Google kicks their ass on the Java front and then I don't have to hear about them anymore.
Illumos (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.illumos.org/ [illumos.org] seems to be the closest thing to a community still left for the future of OpenSolaris.
Re:A very good kernel maybe (Score:2, Informative)
just how many good FOSS package management systems do we have?
yum
Sorry but... yum being a good package manager?
Yum is well thought in theory, but horribly slow in practice.
Ubuntu's OOo is based off go-oo (Score:4, Informative)
Recent Ubuntu's ship with an OpenOffice from go-oo - why do you think otherwise (perhaps there's a source I've overlooked)? If you dig into the Ubuntu Lucid source for OpenOffice.org [ubuntu.com] you will see it claims the upstream is go-oo and contains many patches (SVG support, write support for DOCX etc) from go-oo. A quick web search shows the Ubuntu OpenOffice maintainer says Ubuntu's OOo is based off go-oo [ubuntu.com]. This has probably been the case since at least Ubuntu 8.10 (possibly earlier).
Already in Linux and FreeBSD (Score:5, Informative)
ZFS is already available on Linux as a user-space filesystem (http://zfs-fuse.net/) - not fast but quite functional.
FreeBSD 8.1 has the best ZFS implementation outside the Solaris kernel at present - not as recent as the Solaris ZFS but it appears to work pretty well. People who want a really point and click install for evaluation or use at home should try PC-BSD 8.1, which is a repackaged version of FreeBSD with GUI installer and simpler package installation, and is still FreeBSD under the covers - see http://www.pcbsd.org/ [pcbsd.org]
However, no matter how great ZFS is, you still need full backups of your ZFS storage, because there are occasions where it refuses to open the storage (zpool) and it has no fsck, by design. I like the design and features, particularly the per-block checksums, media scrubbing and solving the RAID5 write hole (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_RAID_levels#RAID_5_disk_failure_rate), and low cost snapshots - but the 'no data loss by design' ignores the inevitable bugs that do occasionally cause data loss.
Re:And... (Score:4, Informative)
I really hope that Debian/kFreeBSD pulls through. I love ZFS. I honestly couldn't imagine going to another file system, ever, for my server needs.
I run Xen, all of my Xen disks are just zvols. I accidentally screwed one up, just rolled it back to the last version. Because of the deduplication, I only 'used' the data that had changed.
Since it's a server, I guess I'll be one of the last to turn the lights out when something finally comes along to replace it. Xen was cake to get running (compared to Linux). It runs a Debian machine and an XP machine. Seemed adequately fast.
Re:The Future of OpenSolaris Revealed (Score:3, Informative)
I thought it was a new O'Reily title and this was a book review. Doesn't that sound like a title of a book? The Animal on the cover would be some old Gypsy looking into a crystal ball.
Never mind.
lol ;) but TFA
Solaris is the #1 Enterprise Operating System. We have the leading
share of business applications on Solaris today, including both SPARC
and x64.
With everything going on at SC-Oracle these days , really sounds like they are wayyyyyy to full of themselves ok I will give them the SPARC , but #1 Enterprise ?? Depends on what.. So many of our customers that we had on Solaris have gotten so scared (over these last few months , because of the Oracle aquisition ( and I am talking paying Enterprise customers, not open) we have had to move them to AIX or linux, depending. Sad day for Solaris in general imho.
Re:Already in Linux and FreeBSD (Score:4, Informative)
You might actually try *testing* the Solaris CIFS implementation, not just believing the Sun/Oracle press releases about it. You might find it's a bit .. lacking :-). What's their roadmap timetable for an SMB2 server for example ?
Jeremy.
Re:And... (Score:4, Informative)
The reason MyISAM (not the whole MySQL) is "fast" is because there is no proper abstraction level between what executes the query and the actual file writes. This is true for simple inserts, simple selects, simple updates. This is also why when MySQL crashes, quite frequently MyISAM tables become corrupt - you can try to repair them, but hopefully you were replicating.
Besides, you use MyISAM for "speed" and you lose basic functionality like transactions, MVCC, ACID compliance (hmm, did you even have it in the first place?), row/page locks, etc. You can perform direct file writes even faster than that, I guess it counts for something, but that doesn't do you any good either.
On the other hand, what kind of "real-world" benchmarks did you do? No such "real world" I know of consists of simple inserts and selects. How about cases for:
- optimized subqueries
- using index merges
- reusing indexes in same query
- partial indexes
- indexes on expressions
- transactions with savepoints
- etc., etc.
MySQL doesn't do any of the above. Welcome to the "real world."
Re:And... (Score:3, Informative)
A commercial OS, at least by my definition, is an OS principally developed and backed by a company.
Not Redhat then? Nor Canonical? Nor SuSE?
Seriously, Open Source can be (and is!) commercial. Your post said "Open Source BSD or commercial operating system" - that implies there is a difference. Largely, there is not.
Re:And... (Score:2, Informative)
+1. BTRFS is just around the corner, ZFS is loaded with licensing and patent issues to the point that it's practically proprietary software. Forgive me for not crying over ZFS.
Re:Already in Linux and FreeBSD (Score:4, Informative)
If only I had mod points, I'd mod you +8 Insightful!
Why? Because of your last paragraph. I for one can only warn the potential users of ZFS. There are chances of you losing all your data. Don't believe me? Search all threads of the almost-defunct forums there, and you'll hit a double-digit number of users who did lose their data. Most important: the developers were and are aware of that fact, and have 'officially' (as officially as open-source-guys can be official) confirmed and conceded this fact, and likewise 'officially' discouraged the use of ZFS without RAID/backup.
I lost one volume, documented there. A Masters student of mine lost 2 volumes; at an exhibition where we wanted to use ZFS for something else.
No question, ZFS has some features that are unique and useful. Though not necessarily on a small machine, with a single drive. Hands off in such cases!
You have been warned!
Re:Already in Linux and FreeBSD (Score:3, Informative)
Yes and no. Out of context, your post is almost 'Insightful'. (Or 'Common Sense'.)
Within the context, though, ZFS promised no data corruption except at hard disk failure, due to atomic writes. Not wanting to delve into details, there was a devil in the details. If someone really was interested, I could do a write up; but in a nutshell, SUN (ie the developers) didn't deliver on this promise. There are a number of cases, confirmed cases, when a perfect hard disk loses data, actually all data, irrecoverably, with the hard drive being 100% okay. As I wrote, details on request (or you search the old forums of OpenSolaris on your own).