

OpenSolaris: Oracle, where art thou? - bensummers
http://ptribble.blogspot.com/2010/02/opensolaris-oracle-where-art-thou.html

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bensummers
If Oracle's stated goal is to make as much money from the carcass of Sun, then
why would they be interested in OpenSolaris?

The old school Solaris admins, who represent customers who actually pay for
support contracts, aren't amazingly keen on OpenSolaris because it does away
with all the tools they know and love. While the old packaging tools are
awful, there's infrastructure around them. And there's no good replacement for
JumpStart, which is essential for large scale admin of Solaris boxes.

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illumin8
I went to an OpenSolaris users group a few months ago just to see what was new
in the OS. They had a nice dinner provided by Sun, and then proceeded to tell
me all about their new network stack, and some of the features it offers.

My impression was that they are playing an extreme game of catch up to Linux.
They were announcing features planned for release in 2010 that had been in the
Linux kernel for years now. They're really trying to catch up to the
virtualization offerings made by Xen and others in the Linux space.

Granted, they have ZFS, and one other killer feature that I wish would make it
into Linux: CacheFS - use an SSD or other fast storage device to front-end a
large slow back-end disk based device.

But Solaris and OpenSolaris are clearly operating systems that are in decline.
It's apparent that the brain-drain from Sun over the years towards open source
has left them with little innovation, which is sad. Layoffs throughout the
last decade combined with good engineers that could get jobs elsewhere has
probably left them with a staff of disgruntled, underpaid, underqualified, and
mostly overseas developers.

My big question is whether Oracle will continue with Solaris at all, or push
towards Oracle Enterprise Linux. I know they say they will support Solaris,
but to be honest, it makes more sense to just repackage Red Hat's code like
they're doing now. You get all of the benefits of the open source community
with very little software development budget.

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ryandvm
I'm more interested in seeing what happens with regard to Sun's esteemed ZFS
and the GPL'ed competing file system, BTRFS, that Oracle is working on. It
seems foolish for Oracle to continue devoting resources to two heavyweight
file systems with overlapping functionality.

I suppose I'll keep on dreaming that Oracle will update ZFS with a GPL license
and the process of inclusion in Linux would swiftly begin...

~~~
nailer
Same here, but ZFS isn't BTree structured, whereas BTRFS is both Btree and
copy-on-write (ReiserFS was Btree but not COW) - giving you better speed along
with the similar featureset.

~~~
bensummers
BTRFS: the new shiny, more potential, but definitely not suitable for use in
production.

ZFS: uses older ideas (because they didn't think COW B-tree was possible) but
is suitable for production use.

It'd be nice to have both pushed forward, so there's something for now and
something for later.

