

Illumos's response to Oracle killing OpenSolaris - mapleoin
http://gdamore.blogspot.com/2010/08/hand-may-be-forced.html

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js2
“I once said I never intended for Illumos to compete with Solaris. That was
true, but if Oracle forces the issue, then even despite their vast economic
resources, I say, "Bring it!"”

Insane.

~~~
nochiel
Ambitious but perhaps slightly naive?

If Oracle have decided that they want to build the best Solaris engineering
team then it's only a matter of time before they actually do.

The best engineers gravitate towards the hardest problems, the biggest
paycheques and other brilliant hackers. Oracle easily provides the first and
will quickly provide the last two.

In fact, it won't surprise me to see people who've recently left going back to
Oracle within a year or two. Either that, or people better than they are will
fill the empty slots.

Worse still, anyone working on OpenSolaris is simply doing R&D for Oracle.

~~~
bcantrill
You are missing an important motivator of great engineers: we seek out hard,
commercially-relevant problems of course, but these problems must also be
societally relevant and responsible. While our actions may often reflect it
only implicitly, many of us take this professional responsibility to society
very seriously; we need to be engaged in enterprises that both understand and
encourage this. Conversely, when an organization loses engineers over issues
of principle, getting them back is essentially impossible.

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makmanalp
Oooh, this is going to improve Oracle's already brilliant public image.

~~~
gaius
Oracle is used to a world where it sells products to people who don't care
either way about things like this. Your head of HR decides they want to use
Oracle HR; by the time IT even hears about it it's a done deal. Same with
Oracle Financials or any other parts of their Applications suite.

It remains to be seen however what the former customers of Sun decide.
Certainly anyone running Sybase on Solaris will be urgently planning their
next move...

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po
This is good to see, as it can be quite disheartening when something you
worked on is effectively killed. That being said, this talk needs to be backed
up with code quickly. People will be evaluating their options and they will
wait only so long. There needs to be a credible effort.

~~~
X-Istence
Not only that, but all of us who have, or were planning to run OpenSolaris
based machines in datacenters are now having to once again re-consider and
look for alternatives.

If this new project can take the space that OpenSolaris was once in it would
be absolutely fantastic.

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JoachimSchipper
I'd _really_ like this to succeed, but Oracle and NetApp´s legal wrangling is
a serious problem (if Oracle is willing to assert patents against Google, why
not against OpenSolaris? And NetApp is already fighting over ZFS...)

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signa11
what happens to zfs and dtrace ? i know dtrace does exist on osx in some shape
and form, but if zfs was lost, it would be kind of sad ;(

~~~
bcantrill
DTrace is in fine shape -- Oracle has monopoly over neither DTrace talent nor
implementation. (And the significant patent portfolio around DTrace is
licensed to anyone who abides by the CDDL -- and the name itself is not
trademarked.)

ZFS is more complicated; most ZFS implementation expertise exists within
Oracle's walls (for now), but the system is also much more done than it was
even a year ago, and the system as it stands is suitable for much (if not
most) enterprise use. So even at worst, ZFS will not be "lost" -- it will
either be frozen in time or forked, depending on the fate of the ZFS team
itself...

