
OpenSolaris governing board threatens dissolution - mattyb
http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/OpenSolaris-governing-board-threatens-dissolution-1037134.html
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melling
(Open)Solaris died a few years ago. It has got some great features like Zones
and ZFS, and it's still very stable. However, they lost the hearts and minds
of almost everyone. I used OpenSolaris for a few months as my desktop. They
don't have the package support of Linux, or the large community. Gotta
remember to get GNU Make before Sun's Make in PATH, Gnu sed before Sun's, or
was the other way around, Perl CPAN modules not compiling... What a waste of
time.

As Scott McNealy said: you've gotta get all your wood behind one arrow. That
arrow is now Linux.

~~~
illumin8
I went to an OpenSolaris users group last year. They were talking about new
network features like being able to assign sub-interfaces to different zones.
Stuff that VMware ESX had available for years. I was thoroughly unimpressed.
The concept of Zones or FreeBSD jails has some appealing aspects; not needing
to load multiple kernels in memory, for example, but by this time, Hypervisors
such as VMware that deduplicate memory blocks pretty much negate any advantage
Zones/Jails once had.

ZFS definitely has some potential though. I hope it will be released under a
more liberal license that will allow a direct Linux kernel module as opposed
to fuse support.

~~~
patrickgzill
What kind of ratios are you actually seeing with VMware's deduplicate memory
features? I have not seen much on anything I am running, though I admit I
don't have them overcommitted very much on RAM (total RAM allocated to all VMs
is about the same as physical RAM in the system).

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illumin8
This really depends on what you are running. If you're running an eclectic mix
of Windows, Linux, all running different applications and software, you might
not get much benefit. Most of our VMs are all running Windows Server 2003
(ugh!) and the exact same terrible web application so we get pretty good
savings; about 50%.

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ax0n
I've been following this for a while. OpenSolaris, VirtualBox and MySQL are
all things I was worried about surviving in the wake of Oracle's takeover. I
use all three quite a bit.

~~~
pavel_lishin
I was not aware VirtualBox was controlled by Oracle. I just switched to it
because it was a free alternative to Parallels. Suddenly, I care about this
issue!

~~~
ax0n
I switched from Parallels when Parallels started sucking AND THEN wanted more
money for me to upgrade to 3.x. VirtualBox, back then, was anemic but
functional. Now, it's really going places with features that still trail
behind the commercial brands you know and love, but when you consider it's
free, it's hard to complain too much.

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adbge
I installed FreeBSD a couple weeks back just so I could play around with ports
and ZFS. Getting ZFS to work with the bootloader is kind of a pain (should be
fixed in FreeBSD-9, I'm hoping) but otherwise I was blown away by just how
intuitive ZFS is to use and how ridiculously powerful. ZFS was introduced in
2005(!) and I'm _still_ amazed by how far ahead of the pack it is. It's really
a damn shame that we can't get ZFS into the Linux kernel because of licensing.

~~~
there
if you feel like playing around with filesystems, try dragonflybsd
(<http://www.dragonflybsd.org/>). it has some neat things like its unique
hammer filesystem and virtual kernels.

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bensummers
Here's a view from a prominent member of the (rather small) OpenSolaris
community: <http://www.cuddletech.com/blog/pivot/entry.php?id=1134>

He's not exactly impressed.

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nailer
Remember the OGC is headed by Schilly. Who's quite famous for actively
campaigning to stop people patching his OSS cdrecord to use regular device
files, and has a reputation of being very outspoken against anyone who
disagrees with him.

~~~
rbanffy
If the OGC head is a problem, this, certainly, solves it.

Oracle can easily make a new OGC the following day and name whoever they are
comfortable with (or whoever they think will help OpenSolaris get developed in
the right direction.

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thesnark
Out of curiosity, does anyone here use OpenSolaris for anything?

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BlueZeniX
I do, our webservers run it. ZFS with automatic snapshots has saved my ass
quite a few times already. Sending incremental snapshots (for backups) to
offsite location (another OpenSolaris machine) is also easy and efficient.

But, if linux had ZFS i'd probably use that instead.

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cperciva
FreeBSD has ZFS too. We've been seeing a lot of people migrating from
OpenSolaris over the past few months due to Oracle.

~~~
nailer
I wonder if the OpenSolaris people would consider a merge? Ie, work on zones,
any useful Solaris management tools, etc...

~~~
cperciva
FreeBSD already has jails, so there's no point bringing in Solaris zones; but
we're generally quick to bring in features from OpenSolaris. DTrace, for
example, is available for the FreeBSD kernel now, and work is underway to make
it available for FreeBSD userland too.

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pinkode
Maybe its for the best. I'm not a big fan of autotools, but proliferation of
semi-compatible UNIXes was the reason behind this mess. I'd be absolutely
happy with just Linux/BSD/Macs to worry about.

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roundrubik
I'd love to have a lively discussion here about OpenSolaris, could not upvote
this enough (actually I don't think my upvote counts at all, is that because I
don't have karma yet?)

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Goladus
Yes, otherwise people would be able to create dummy accounts and vote
themselves up for nothing.

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rbanffy
Some things I have been observing can be explained by that. I believe this
gotcha is being actively circumvented.

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schwonder
Why do they need a blessing from Oracle though? "If you don't like it - fork
it" doesn't apply here? Licensing issues?

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rmc
I'm not sure, but I'm guessing that 'Solaris' is a trademarked term, owned by
Sun (now Oracle). If you fork it, you can't call it 'Solaris' anymore. You'd
have a hard time selling/promoting this new unix os that no-one has heard of.

~~~
bensummers
You're right, it would have to be a different name.

However, if there were a sufficient community around it, this would not be a
problem. But because it's so driven by Sun, and they never really managed to
build an active community, there is no one who would naturally start using the
forked OS.

~~~
rbanffy
The community around it is not sufficient. The license prevents borrowing code
from Linux. It can, however, borrow BSD code.

But not even that would be enough to keep it alive and evolving.

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zts
I'm sure I'll get knocked for this (again), but if you want to pick nits, it's
the GPL that prevents the commingling, not the CDDL.

Why not just say that the licenses are incompatible?

That's the simple truth, and that's not a slight on either of them.

The real problem here is that there doesn't appear to be an OpenSolaris
development community outside of Sun^WOracle. It's much like Mozilla in its
early days, though with an even smaller chance of success. Mozilla's
competitive landscape was devoid of credible open-source alternatives - that's
not the case for OpenSolaris.

~~~
rbanffy
Fair enough. Linux also can't borrow code from OpenSolaris. I would love to
have ZFS on Linux.

Anyway, it was Sun who raised the possibility of licensing OpenSolaris under
GPLv3 (that would still prevent Sun from borrowing lots of Linux code and
Linux from borrowing any Sun code, but it would, at least, be a start) not the
Linux folks who considered re-licensing Linux under a CDDL-friendly license,
hence the "unidirectional" slant of my post.

As for the community and Sun^WOracle's contributions, Oracle has made it clear
that they would follow an open-core model for the OS.

That's really sad, IMHO, but predictable. Ellison is nicer than Gates and way
cooler, but it doesn't make him a particularly nice guy who wants to share.

BTW, I think the copyright fragmentation you see in Linux is one of its
strengths. When you contribute a patch to OpenSolaris, do you retain its
copyright or you transfer it to whoever controls OpenSolaris?

~~~
zts
That's fair - Sun at least had the option of relicensing (given that the
required contributors to sign an IP agreement).

FWIW, it saddens me to watch Solaris stumbling towards its grave. Remaining
available only on hardware sold by Oracle renders it worthless to me.

I can't make that shift now, which means that I need to build my own credible
alternatives to using Solaris. And when I am in a position where I could
afford Solaris on Oracle hardware, I won't be so inclined - because I'll have
my homebrew alternatives, and a bitter taste in my mouth.

So it goes.

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bitwize
That's a threat?!

Larry Ellison: "Uh, sure, we'll get right back to you on that."

[Larry alt-tabs back to his word processor with a draft of his Solaris
Developer Trial licensing plan: foree for 30 days followed by a $9000-per-seat
licensing fee]

~~~
rbanffy
Larry may not be the nicest guy around, but he's no idiot. He just spent a ton
of money on Sun and something like this would put that much more momentum
behind commodities he cannot control (like Linux)

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bitwize
Indeed, Ellison is no idiot, and that's precisely what he's been doing:
putting Sun's formerly free properties behind strict paywalls in order to get
the company cash-flow-positive again after Sun bled money giving away the
geese that laid the golden eggs.

~~~
rbanffy
They only laid golden eggs because they were relevant. If his clients decide
to migrate away from Solaris, they may also decide to migrate away from
Oracle. Being legacy-only is not good for long-term revenue.

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RyanMcGreal
The Imperial Senate will no longer be of any concern to us.

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c00p3r
It is now as dead as say Digital Unix or OpenVMS.

