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.
So much for that (Score:3, Interesting)
So much for that ultimatum:
http://developers.slashdot.org/story/10/07/14/1448209/OpenSolaris-Governing-Board-Closing-Shop [slashdot.org]
Re:And... (Score:2, Interesting)
A non-FUSE implementation of ZFS that isn't on BSD?
Re:And... (Score:5, Interesting)
ZFS seemed pretty interesting. Btrfs might catch up eventually, but for now it's a loss.
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.
In short the good features of OpenSolaris aren't going to have to be reimplemented, but since we were going to have to do that anyways then it's less disheartening.
Question about Oracle's OpenOffice? (Score:4, Interesting)
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?
If so I've been recommending the wrong office suite to friends, coworkers.
Re:And... (Score:5, Interesting)
correct. zfs was the only thing I cared about (for home use) on solaris.
its 'ok' on freebsd but not all that fast (in my experience, compared to linux md-raid, which I do realize is not at all the same exact thing).
but solaris was THE de-facto reference implementation of zfs.
kind of sorry to lose that. the rest: meh, no great loss to non-enterprise computing. and enterprise computing will still be buying solaris when they need this level of features and support (mostly the support side).
Re:And... (Score:4, Interesting)
It'll be interesting to see what happens with InnoDB and MySQL in the coming months/years.
IMHO? MySQL is in for a long, slow, drawn out slide into obscurity. Oracle isn't going to do much with it at the risk of making a free competitor to their flagship product even better.
It has been forked already, and I'm sure more will sprout up. MAYBE one of those will take off, but my guess is that without the brand recognition of MySQL to go behind them, PostgreSQL will slurp up a lot of those users.
That said, for better or for worse (worse IMHO, but that's just my opinion) "no-SQL" databases like CouchDB and MongoDB seem to be gaining a lot of traction. They won't likely take over completely as there are some things that just work better in a traditional relational database, but my guess is that a lot of smaller projects that once would have used MySQL will be looking at those instead.
Sounds good to me (Score:4, Interesting)
OpenSolaris distributions were a joke. They would have been fine back in the 90s when it was acceptable for a free UNIX to feel unpolished, incomplete and buggy because even the commercial ones were that way.
Now with other free (as in cost) clones feeling polished and professional, and OSX being user friendly and pretty, theres absolutely no execuse for a company to allow someething like OpenSolaris to exist.
All OpenSolaris ever did was make me feel like Solaris was going backwards rather than forwards, I'm pretty sure I never had an install that 'worked' properly, there was ALWAYS something wrong. Same hardware runs Linux and FreeBSD fine, so its not the hardwares fault. My fault ... maybe, but considering I used to admin solaris boxes a few years back its not like I was completely clueless.
If Solaris Express feels like it used to feel in relation to everything it had around it, then it'll be a great improvement.
The only reasons I would use Solaris at this point are:
I want to use high end Sun hardware, meh, probably unlikely at this point.
I want a UNIX that doesn't feel like it was thrown together by a bunch of people on the Internet, a coherent experience.
I would run Solaris for the same reason I run Mac OSX, I want a professional feeling polished OS. I want to get things done, not play UNIX admin to accomplish what should be trivial tasks. The only time I should see a commandline is when I need to do something completely out of the ordinary.
Sadly, it seems that Linux's popularity killed Solaris, not because one was better or worse than the other, but because Solaris tried to act like it was Linux and just failed completely because Linux's real advantage is the surprising number of people that treat it like a god, they are a useful resource as we all know. No one will probably ever feel that way about Solaris so its just never going to get the support Linux gets from people without it having SOMETHING Linux doesn't have.
Oh great. (Score:1, Interesting)
First OpenSolaris.
I hope they dont do anything like this with java.....oh wait [cnet.com]
I abandoned Solaris for Y2K. (Score:3, Interesting)
I'd had high hopes for Sun's stuff back in '85. But even before being eaten by Oracle they always seemed to be roadblocking any attempt to work with the guts of their system, even for internal use only. Meanwhile, Linux made good on the GNU promise and the freeing of BSD provided an additional open alternative OS (at least three of 'em if you count the project splits as distinct).
I abandoned Solaris on the last of my own machines for Y2K, rather than shell out for upgrades. (Only Linux machines at home at the moment - except for one firewalled-off Windows machine for my wife to run student-Autocad and certain true Windows applications for classwork.)
Some Open Solaris fans tried to claim things were more open than I perceived them to be. But this development underscores the correctness of my choice.
Re:Question about Oracle's OpenOffice? (Score:2, Interesting)
That's really interesting. Apparently OpenOffice.org + a useful patchset has been the norm for some distributions of Linux for some time, and there are builds for other platforms (Windows included) as well.
http://go-oo.org/discover/ [go-oo.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go-oo [wikipedia.org]
"About OpenOffice.org" confirms an ooo-build in Lucid Lynx. I'll switch over in Windows later today I guess. Maybe Go-OO should advertise better?
Re:And... (Score:3, Interesting)
IMHO? MySQL is in for a long, slow, drawn out slide into obscurity. Oracle isn't going to do much with it at the risk of making a free competitor to their flagship product even better.
It has been forked already, and I'm sure more will sprout up. MAYBE one of those will take off, but my guess is that without the brand recognition of MySQL to go behind them, PostgreSQL will slurp up a lot of those users.
I really do hope that MySQL is successfully forked. Postgre is ok, but it is too different from MySQL and that scares a lot of companies who may adopt it.
I am glad to see that Postgre now pays a bit more attention to replication as this is they key feature I will need in order to adopt it. I am very glad my predecessor where I work insisted on us using PDO as database abstraction layer as this will make my migration away from MySQL slightly easier.
Re:And... (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't think "too different from MySQL" is necessarily a minus. There's very little worthwhile about MySQL, all it had was good marketing and a earlier move to being cross-platform (which is very very important, but as a difference it's gone).
Derby (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:And... (Score:3, Interesting)
Btrfs might catch up eventually, but for now it's a loss.
It's working quite nice here in my desktop. I miss the extra RAID modes (which have been available as patches for ages but for some reason haven't been merged), the ability to reconfigure chunks on fly, the possibility of setting different compression/size limits to each volume, the rewrite-corrupted-blocks feature and the fix for the hard link limit with backrefs enabled, but since I don't need them for everyday usage I can live without them.
Re:And... (Score:4, Interesting)
its 'ok' on freebsd but not all that fast
That's an understatement. Some of the performance metrics on FreeBSD 8.1 ZFS are so poor that they're not even comparable to OSol. A 10th the performance, maybe?
Nevermind the FreeBSD implementation is shoddy, at best in terms of stability and hardware utilization in other areas: high CPU, high memory use, a couple versions behind 'official' ZFS, inexplicable instability (particularly when the filesystem is nearing capacity, but I had my test fbsd zfs system reboot itself - twice - during bonnie++ tests), and a handful of other matters.
And no, don't tell me "it'll be fixed in the next version via higher pool version support". Fix what you did before implementing something new.
Each new major version of FreeBSD since 6 seems to have taken a couple steps back where there shouldn't have been change until it worked (USB, I'm looking at you). FreeBSD is awesome for network devices and code projects, but it's kinda a wretched nightmare as a general purpose or storage OS.
ZFS in OpenSolaris is a huge loss. I just hope it's continued onward - albeit a little bit behind "official" solaris - in Nexenta and the other derivative projects. Is that even possible, legally speaking?
Re:I abandoned Solaris for Y2K. (Score:3, Interesting)
They were never open. Sun came up with OpenSolaris because they were losing out big time to Linux suppliers and it was a feeble attempt to make Solaris look 'open source' when they were selling it without Sun giving up any control at all.
Frankly, I applaud Oracle for finally being open with everybody rather than continuing Sun's sham. Now it and SPARC can be Ellison's play-things that he can use to go up against IBM, Power and AIX, which is now a different story.
Re:And... (Score:1, Interesting)
Don't have to hear about them anymore? Look into where Oracle came from. There is a metric shit-ton of power behind that company which is why they don't need to blitz people like us with moronic add campaigns to prosper.
I wouldn't be surprised if their entire plan for the popular Sun properties is to hit people with them so the public will develop an aversion to even thinking about Oracle.
Those guys are going to be the last ones that need to change to survive, so all they need to do is be progressive a couple times a decade and they stay ahead of the curve.
Re:And... (Score:1, Interesting)
dtrace is also da bomb.
Re:And... (Score:4, Interesting)
Oracle controls the fate of the best open source advanced file systems.
If they control the fate, you can't really call them open can you?
Re:And... (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm running ZFS with Solaris 10 on a SAN, and while I really like ZFS, I'm anxiously awaiting btrfs and will migrate to Linux the moment btrfs hits stable in RHEL 6. ZFS is good, but that doesn't mean that other file systems like btrfs don't have the potential to be better and cheaper.
Re:Already in Linux and FreeBSD (Score:3, Interesting)
ZFS-FUSE is a pretty amazing effort, but it tends to be buggy and big on memory consumption, from what I've read. It's also at the wrong layer.
I have high hopes for ZFS in FreeBSD 9. Due to their compatibility requirements, they can't get zpools > v16 in FreeBSD 8 (and it sounds like it'll only be 15 at this point). If 9 has zpool v23, there will be much rockage.
Tightly integrated CIFS, NFS, and iSCSI would also be welcome.
For a straight NAS box, OpenSolaris is just where it's at ... for now.
Re:And... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:And... (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes, there are times when a "no-sql" solution is better than SQL, and the vector is pretty much that point where you realize that storing files in databases makes sense like hauling bales of hay in sports cars does.
It's more than that: it's also for every case where the lookup logic is NOT handled by the database. Consider when queries are fielded by a separate service, such as a dedicated search engine (e.g. Solr/Lucene [apache.org]), leaving the database is relegated to just primary key lookup for full records/documents. At that time the benefits and tradeoffs offered by the various NoSQL solutions suddenly become a LOT more interesting, because that's what these tools specialize in.
Re:And... (Score:5, Interesting)
Btrfs is a product of Oracle. Oracle now owns ZFS outright and controls the fate of Btrfs in terms of developer resources. One guess as to whether Oracle will remain motivated to complete Btrfs.
If Oracle for whatever reason decides to stop investing in BTRFS, the likely outcome AFAICS is not that BTRFS dies, but rather that Chris Mason and his team jump shop to Red Hat, Novell, Google, IBM or some other Linux contributor with an interest in seeing BTRFS succeed. That's one of the advantages of a collaborative project like Linux which isn't subject to the whims of any single corporation in complete control.
To the extent that there might be a threat against BTRFS, depends on how the ZFS-WAFL lawsuit plays out. I wouldn't be particularly surprised if Oracle settles with Netapp, covering only official Solaris releases, leaving other ZFS versions (Illumos, Nexenta, FreeBSD, etc.) out in the cold, and perhaps BTRFS as well, depending on to which extent the WAFL patents apply to BTRFS.
Re:And... (Score:1, Interesting)
Well, in every real-world benchmark I've done when evaluating which DMBS to chose MySQL was faster - that's gotta count for something.
Game Changing Moves by Oracle. (Score:3, Interesting)
Seeing Open Solaris killed off was fairly obvious. However combine the fact that they sued Google over Java issues raises interesting thoughts.
These moves and inevitably others are already having consequences. Java as a platform for consumer products is now no longer a given. The assent of Android as the" platform of choice of hardware and software vendors puts Nokia, RIM / HP back in the picture. When just days ago they were an after thought in developers eyes.
I've seen it before. People put business distant between them selves and anything with a lawsuit potential. So is the law suit over Java going to cause a massive migration away from Java?
What is Solaris's future. I think it's rather short less than 10 years left. Price per grunt the upstart Linux is kicking it's butt despite all the very nice features of Sparc and Solaris
Is this the first sign of another shift in IT futures?
Re:And... (Score:1, Interesting)
Replication isn't as good with PostgreSQL. And that matters.
Re:And... (Score:2, Interesting)
Nope. RedHat, Canonical, and SuSE all basically bundle open source software together. Sure, they have developers on staff, but they produce a single or maybe very low double digit percentage of the work that goes into the product. They create packaging tools, installers, custom skins, custom admin tools, etc., and they contribute patches for other things back upstream, but the fundamental core of the OS was created by others, and is largely maintained by others.
Compare that with a true commercial OS developer like Sun/Oracle, Apple, IBM, etc. and the difference is blindingly obvious. Those companies have developers that create most of the code that goes into their products. Sure, the commercial vendors use Open Source as add-ons in some cases (e.g. Apple bundling Apache), but those companies are almost solely responsible for the bulk of the core code in Solaris, Mac OS X, and AIX, respectively. It's not at all the same development model, and the difference has nothing to do with whether the end result is shipped as open source or as proprietary code. The key difference is whether most of their code is developed in-house, and thus on how much of their own IP they have in the code.
To give a more graphical illustration, the Linux vendors are content to stand on the shoulders of giants. The commercial UNIX vendors prefer to kill the giants, grind up their bones to make mortar, and use that to build a stone and giant-mortar dais to stand on outside their stone and giant-mortar castle. The Linux vendors usually stand to lose little if a particular GPLed work proved to be toxic. The commercial UNIX vendors stand to lose a great deal more.
Sure, there is. OpenSolaris isn't BSD-based. It's AT&T UNIX based. AIX, same. Heck, even Mac OS X basically conforms to AT&T at this point. There basically aren't any commercial BSDs (except maybe in the embedded space) because you can't call yourself UNIX if you conform to the BSD conventions, and all the commercial UNIX vendors want to be able to call themselves UNIX.
There are open source BSD OSes, there are commercial OSes, and there are Linux-based OSes. These are three fundamentally different camps in terms of development methodology that sometimes overlap and sometimes have common interests. Never fool yourself into believing that any two of the camps are the same.
Re:Should I be worried? (Score:3, Interesting)
No. VB complements the Xen/OracleVM offer. I know for a fact that it's extensively used inside Oracle itself. They'll just add features to facilitate integration between VB and OVM (i.e. develop on VB, deploy on OVM).
Re:This was so predicable... (Score:2, Interesting)
You have perceived something that most miss here: how fucked IBM and a large number of very big companies could be if Oracle really lets loose their patent torpedo salvo. Pretty much all of IBM's big bucks packages are either built on Java, or have significant Java components. Perhaps IBM has the money to pay off Oracle, but maybe not. Forget IBM, though, and look at the small companies doing work with Java who may lose their shirts over this fiasco. Unlike IBM, they don't have an entire building full of attack lawyers to call upon.
Oracle has fired a shot across the bow of Java. It remains to be seen how it will play out, but I am not hopeful.
Re:And... (Score:3, Interesting)
The only example where the GPL would concern you, if you are going to embed MariaDB in your software. In that case your software would have to be GPLed, too. But MariaDB is not really a database which you want to embed in your software. You rather going to use something like JDBC or ODBC, in which case the GPL doesn't concern you.
The only commercial thing you want from MariaDB is a service contract and here is the GPL a big advantage, because now you can go to any company that offers a service for it.
So in which case the GPL concern you? In which case would you want to embed something like MariaDB in your software and not using JDBC or ODBC?