
R.I.P. OpenSolaris - rpledge
http://blogs.computerworld.com/16550/rip_opensolaris
======
spudlyo
I have mixed feelings about this. I absolutely loathe the old, buggy,
incompatible Solaris userland, and for me, Solaris can't die fast enough.
OpenSolaris however seemed like a step in the right direction, keep the kernel
and all the good things that come with it (DTrace, ZFS, etc) but drop in the
GNU userland. I'd much rather Oracle kill Solaris proper and work on pushing
OpenSolaris forward.

~~~
astine
Ditto. I have to use Solaris 10 at work and it's a pain to compile anything
for it, especiallly anything that uses a GUI. ZFS is a very nifty tool and
Solaris has a lot of neat features, but it's a pain to work with. I much
prefere the Gnu toolchain.

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Keyframe
SunOS and later Solaris were my first real window into serious computing
(along with IRIX). I'm kind of sad to see inevitable happening. It was a
matter of time.

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16s
Nice article. The point he makes about Linux devs vastly outnumbering
OpenSolaris devs is true for all of the free operating systems. Look at the
CVS commits in OpenBSD. You can count on both hands the number of 'primary
commiters' Thousands versus dozens makes a huge difference as does corporate
involvement. I like all the free/open source operating systems, but I tend to
go with GNU/Linux for this very reason.

~~~
dedward
As a long-time user of Open/FreeBSD & Linux & solaris/opensolaris....

The point about # of devs is true - linux is the new _nix reference platform
(well, not new anymore I guess). It used to be SunOS/Solaris.

OpenBSD has a small number of committers and developers more because of the
attitude of it's community and head honcho - OpenBSD is fantastic at what it's
fantastic at, but the developer community is very much "If you don't like the
way we do it, F_* off" (which is perfectly fine...no moral judgement implied).

FreeBSD on the other hand doesn't get enough cred... it's solid, it's
constantly incrementally improved. It's a single distribution with a very
focused core - so while it doens't have all the fire and brimstone of linux,
those FreeBSD guys have been cranking out solid, wonderful, well engineered
and well documented code for a long, long time.

I'm often on the brink of wishing I could switch an enterprise to FreeBSD
completely - the commercial support isn't all there, but from a purist point
of view it's pretty much THE best free *nix out there, and I'm never really
sure why it doesn't get the same focus linux does - I suppose it's just the
way things went and media hype about the GPL.

~~~
sliverstorm
For starters, there is no FreeBSDBuntu, and Ubuntu has done wonders flying the
flag for Linux.

~~~
cylinder714
I haven't used it, but PC-BSD looks like the "Ubuntu" BSD.

<http://www.pcbsd.org/>

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kingnothing
... And right as I was putting some serious thought into using OpenSolaris
with ZFS for my home file server. I wonder what the future of Solaris is now,
too.

~~~
pan69
Me too. I was just about to pick this one up at the local book store.
[http://www.amazon.com/Solaris-ZFS-Essentials-Scott-
Watanabe/...](http://www.amazon.com/Solaris-ZFS-Essentials-Scott-
Watanabe/dp/0137000103/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1279414152&sr=8-1)

Anyone have an idea of whats going to happen to ZFS? (licence change?)

~~~
wmf
The future of Solaris looks the same as its past: proprietary and very
expensive (but they'll throw it in free if you buy a Sun server running
Oracle).

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tzs
OpenSolaris is GPLv3, according to the article. Those who want to save it
might take advantage of that. Try to pitch it to the FSF as the logical choice
for the GNU kernel, instead of HURD.

Linux is GPLv2, not GPLv3, and there's no sign of that changing anytime soon,
so it might be possible to interest the FSF on philosophical grounds to
consider a replacement for Linux.

~~~
mrb
The article is wrong. OpenSolaris was never released under GPLv3. It is under
CDDL. The reference the article points to is an obscure blog from 2007 which
is obviously wrong.

<http://hub.opensolaris.org/bin/view/Main/licensing>

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Maven911
Now that Oracle has dumped it for good, I really hope that there is a
resurgence of FOSS developers working on OpenSolaris to keep it alive and
relevant...

~~~
dedward
Which parts of it are really valuable to the FOSS community.

The "zones" stuff is really only valuable for the big-iron systems, which you
probably want/need support from Sun for anyway..... and if it's ZFS, the other
big killer factor, FreeBSD is probably a better place to focus efforts than
Solaris.

~~~
Maven911
I think theres benefits with having a diversified free OS environment, and I
think there are other benefits to keeping something like OpenSolaris alive
versus some of the smaller Linux distros...for instance, if OpenSolaris is
still used by the community then maybe some of the Oracle/Sun engineers will
help add features during their off-work hours spare time.

