
OpenSolaris is dead - mstevens
http://blogs.everycity.co.uk/alasdair/2010/08/opensolaris-is-now-officially-dead-rip/
======
pclark
Everyone seems to have missed - or be ignoring - the fundamentals of Oracle.
They aren't in this game to change the world (ala Sun), or improve the lives
of developers, they're in this to make _bucket loads of cash_ if products they
acquire will not make them money - they will ruthlessly cut it.

They aren't hackers. They aren't designers. They aren't entrepreneurs. They're
business men.

Similarly if you _dare_ compete with Oracle, you're going up against a company
similar to Microsoft 10 years ago: rich and mean. Look at someone like Google,
you think they're evil? Oracle could literally wipe them off the planet if
they were inclined. The fact people hate upon Apple or Google, or even
Microsoft when Oracle is the towering nemesis is hilarious. At least Oracle
doesn't bullshit you. Google? Do no evil? You're a public company.

Vision, for the greater good, wanting to change the world are all well and
great, but when the chips are down, you know what counts? Revenues. As Larry
Ellison once said about Sun: "Lots and lots of blogs does not replace lots and
lots of sales"

and you know what? I _admire_ them for that. I respect that they walk _that_
line. They're a public company, and god dammit, they're going to win. I would
rather spend a year working with Larry than Steve Jobs, Bill Gates or the
Google guys.

~~~
cookiecaper
The thing is, as someone stated below, Oracle is all about short-term wins. If
Oracle wins this patent suit against Google and gets lots and lots of damages
from it, that's nice, but it'll scare everyone away from Java. That's not good
for Oracle or anyone else. If they'd just cool their jets and let things like
this slide while focusing on creating great Java-based products and improving
the Java ecosystem, they'd have much better long-term prospects. Even Ellison
stated that Java is the most important product Oracle has ever acquired, and
he's going to kill it in desperation to milk every last cent of licenses that
he can get today.

If Oracle continues with this kind of ruthlessness, they may squeeze several
million out of Google et al, but Java is done for. Nobody will want to use
that platform anymore because it will be too risky legally. It'd be a huge
opening for .NET and other competitors. Java would go the way of COBOL, only
running in the darkest abysses of megacorporations that never modernize.

You can be happy that Ellison doesn't play this "good for developers" thing,
but what's good for the goose is good for the gander. By promoting software
development and Java development specifically, Oracle would be ensuring
generations of Java programmers, and lots of Java-related services and
licenses from enterprises. If someone without any programming experience
learns Java to write code for Dalvik/Android, as they may because Android is a
"cool" platform that would attract young programmers, they can and likely will
go on to big corporate environments and continue to work in Java.

~~~
avar
I think they've actually got the long term covered. Everyone in The Enterprise
(which is all Oracle cares about anyway) is already using Java. Those people
want to buy official looking software with support contracts from someone.

They're going to be doing so for decades to come, either from Oracle itself,
or someone who's paying Oracle truckloads of licensing fees to be allowed to
publish their own Java implementation.

The _only_ thing that could upset their subscription to money would be some
inconvenient little company that decides to make a clean-room Java
implementation that could target the same customers. This is what Google has
done.

If they can win this in court or force a settlement that pretty much
guarantees that anyone thinking of building that business model won't even
bother to get off the ground, and Oracle can keep printing money.

It's funny that you should mention COBOL. Java turning into the next COBOL
would be _awesome_ for Oracle. IBM still makes billions selling systems to run
COBOL[1], that's more than Sun ever made off Java.

1\. <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1567595>

~~~
beza1e1
Most companies buying mainframes, buy mainframes to run Linux and Java apps on
it. The COBOL+mainframe market is not growing (very much). (source: talking
with an IBM research director in Böblingen, Germany responsible for mainframe
development)

Mainframes promise turnkey-reliability, where the IBM support guy comes in
before you notice anything going wrong. The point is that "mainframe" is a
strong brand and IBM has the monopoly on it. There are solutions magnitudes
cheaper and just as reliable as a mainframe.

------
motters
Having never used OpenSolaris this is no hardship for me. However, it's
looking like Oracle is a company that is quite hostile to open source, so this
also raises concerns for what will happen to the likes of OpenOffice and
VirtualBox. In general it also raises questions about the wisdom of open
source developers assigning their copyrights over to a particular company, who
may subsequently choose to betray their generosity. If I'd made significant
contributions to OpenSolaris I'd probably be feeling as sick as a parrot right
now.

~~~
moondowner
Don't forget NetBeans, the Rich Client Platform. Lots of applications are
built on it (Light Analysis, Energy Consumption Management, Petroleum
Engineering App, Swedish Trading Client & Swedish Defense Research App, Open
Source Stock Trading Platform, Jewelry Customer Manager -- these are news only
from the last 3-4 months), even NASA uses it. It's crucial for Oracle to
sustain NetBeans development and not to favour their JDeveloper IDE (cause the
latter isn't a platform).

~~~
barlo
Oracle uses NetBeans internally for the development of several applications
(mostly from acquisitions), I don't believe you'll see that phased out anytime
soon.

------
tptacek
One thing you have to say for Oracle that you couldn't really automatically
say for Sun: they're not chickenshit.

~~~
mhd
No, they definitely leave out the chicken part.

~~~
houseabsolute
Because they don't want to spend/waste money maintaining certain features of a
product that are less profitable? Or …?

~~~
sprout
Because they prefer spending money on sales, marketing, and lawsuits than
maintaining / improving their products, even their most profitable ones.

~~~
houseabsolute
Surely if that is true, which I seriously doubt, this is partially on the
buyer for not choosing products based on which is the best, and therefore not
giving Oracle any incentive to spend on improving their products.

------
moondowner
OpenSolaris was dead long ago, this only opened the eyes to the people
optimistic that things will change and there will be a future OpenSolaris
release.

"We will determine a simple, cost-effective means of getting enterprise users
of prior OpenSolaris binary releases to migrate to S11 Express." -- Says
enough.

"We will continue to grow a vibrant developer and system administrator
community for Solaris." -- I really wonder how.

~~~
spudlyo
_"We will continue to grow a vibrant developer and system administrator
community for Solaris." -- I really wonder how._

They really killed the wrong Solaris. If they embraced the GNU userland (as
OpenSolaris did) they would have had a much better shot at getting more
raised-on-Linux admins and developers to embrace their OS. As it is, the
current BSD flavored Solaris tools are so crufty and incompatible it leaves
many Linux users with a distinct loathing for the OS.

~~~
wipt
Did OpenSolaris use GNU userland? Or are you confusing the official branch
with on of the forks? BSD isn't dead, and is different but not in bad ways.
Don't bad mouth something (BSD) because you don't use it.

Companies are much less likely to embrace GNU anything, GNU just doesn't fly
that way. BSD license is much more permissive, and therefore much more
attractive to companies.

~~~
azakus
OpenSolaris had a GNU userland. The BSD ancestry of the Solaris userland isn't
the problem. The problem was the senseless defaults and cryptic command
structures ("shutdown -g0 -i5 -y" instead of "shutdown")

~~~
spudlyo
Here is a barbaric and senseless default. Do a crontab -e without $EDITOR set
and you'll be dropped into ed. I realize that it's the "standard editor" but
the joke stopped being funny when I needed to edit a file with it.

------
neild
Note that this is _not_ the end of source code releases of Solaris:

 _We will continue to use the CDDL license statement in nearly all Solaris
source code files. We will not remove the CDDL from any files in Solaris to
which it already applies, and new source code files that are created will
follow the current policy regarding applying the CDDL (simply, that usr/src
files will have the CDDL, and the very small minority of files in usr/closed
might not have it). Use of other open licenses in non-ON consolidations (e.g.
GPL in the Desktop area) will also continue. As before, requests to change the
license associated with source code are case-by-case decisions._

 _We will distribute updates to approved CDDL or other open source- licensed
code following full releases of our enterprise Solaris operating system. In
this manner, new technology innovations will show up in our releases before
anywhere else. We will no longer distribute source code for the entirety of
the Solaris operating system in real-time while it is developed, on a nightly
basis._

In other words, the Solaris development process is becoming more closed, but
you'll still be able to see the source code for any given release. Or at
least, that's how I interpret the above.

I'm not in touch enough with Solaris development to know how much of a
practical impact this will have--how many non-Sun/Oracle people work on
OpenSolaris?

~~~
NonIdentifiable
It was the nightly basis that allowed a lot of other products (Nexenta) to
work well, and get updates faster. It was out of these nightly code drops that
OpenSolaris was created ...

------
martinp
Since the slogan "don't be evil" is already in use, I'm guessing Oracle is
going for "be evil" instead?

~~~
dpapathanasiou
Sometimes, I admire Oracle more than the supposed do-gooders at Google.

Oracle is a for-profit entity, they will take any legal or tactical advantage
they can get (e.g., lawsuit over Java in Android), and they make no bones
about it.

I don't like everything they do, but you know what you get with them.

Google says "don't be evil", yet they back off that principle when it's
inconvenient (e.g., caving in to Chinese censorship demands, deal with Verizon
over net neutrality, etc.).

~~~
cookiecaper
The problem with "Don't be evil" is that it's subjective. Google isn't a
hardcore idealist because people that refuse to cooperate unless all of their
demands are met never really get anywhere (see RMS). Compromise is a fact of
life for everyone. Principles shouldn't be compromised, and you have to draw
the line, but you also have to cooperate with people who have a different
perspective than yourself.

I don't see either censorship in China or the net neutrality proposal (which I
don't know much about) as bonafide "evil". You may disagree, but it's hard to
say that they are evil or done with evil intent.

Oracle, on the other hand, is pretty easy to call evil because they act out of
cruel self-interest practically exclusively. Oracle is always taking cheap
shots.

~~~
sprout
>because people that refuse to cooperate unless all of their demands are met
never really get anywhere (see RMS).

RMS would be a clear counterexample. (See Linux, GNU utils, the recent GPLv3
release of Castle Wolfenstein, and many many other victories.) It's a curious
sort of logic that says a hardline stance is ineffective because 100% of his
goals aren't meant.

Not that moderates don't also serve a purpose, but the radicals are an
absolute necessity.

~~~
cookiecaper
I agree that radicals are important and that RMS particularly is useful
because he pushes the dialogue forward and keeps new ideas on the table. It's
a good goalpost.

But nobody takes RMS's advice as practical. It's just too extreme. Most people
don't believe as RMS stated in his recent Reddit interview that the only way
to ethically use a pacemaker or other life-saving device that relies on
proprietary software would be to start developing an open-source replacement.

RMS has been somewhat successful, but I think much less than he would have
been if he hadn't poured so many resources into the silly points that should
have easily been let go, like "GNU/Linux".

~~~
sprout
I don't see how "go ahead and use the pacemaker but try and create an
alternative solution" is an unrealistic or impractical stance.

------
Kilimanjaro
Oracle will become the most hated company in the world (after mircosoft) when
they kill java (because of ineptitude), kill mysql (because they can) and kill
opensolaris (oops, they just did it)

~~~
pclark
and oracle will not care, and will continue to make billions of dollars.

(does Oracle have any fans presently?)

------
alec
I thought it was interesting that Linux was completely absent from all of the
market position talk.

~~~
nailer
I think everyone who read 'Solaris is the #1 Enterprise Operating System',
raised an eyebrow, then read 'We have more than twice the application base of
AIX and HP-UX combined' and chuckled.

~~~
rikthevik
I read that to say 'Solaris is the #1 (SysV-based) Enterprise Operating
System'

~~~
wipt
Linux IS SysV-based, though

~~~
NonIdentifiable
Eh, what? <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNIX_System_V>

No, Linux is not SysV based.

~~~
wipt
I didn't mean that it was based off of the original UNIX code base, I know my
UNIX history better than that. As nailer said, this can be taken two ways and
I meant it in the latter. Linux has elements of SysV - it has run levels and
the like, unlike BSD's.

------
dstein
<sarcasm> Hi, I'm a beginner programmer. I'm interested in learning to program
Java and MySQL on Solaris, where should I begin to learn this free and open
platform? </sarcasm>

------
chegra
hmm... The world is moving to be a more open society. It's not the place where
evil can survive. Previously, dictatorship[corp] were allow to live peacefully
because they control the media, and pretty much had control of their images.
The landscape has changed and everybody is the media. I think it's to google's
competitive advantage to be seen as good. I don't think a lot of companies
have notice the landscape has changed, so they conduct business as normal.

The game still is survival of the fittest, but for this landscape, the fittest
are good.

Without a doubt Google has the popular vote. I constantly hear people compare
SUN to Google. Sun died, when? lol

Conceive a scenario where Google died tomorrow; now compare that to when Sun
passed[it really did?]. It's not the same thing. "Google" is the most
frequently used noun on HN, with almost 3 times the frequency of "Apple"
[[http://chegra.posterous.com/word-frequencies-in-front-
page-h...](http://chegra.posterous.com/word-frequencies-in-front-page-hn-
titles)]

Sun might be good for hackers, but Google takes it to a further extent and
brought it to everybody.

Certain companies, besides their shareholders nobody cares if they live or
die; nobody is super excited about their product. Nobody is saying they want
to go work for them. The only reason why they exist is because they were best
of the first movers.

It's common practice when a company gets big in order to innovate it purchases
smaller companies. You don't innovate you die. All the big companies employ
this strategy(really, when last Apple bought somebody-NeXT?). As an
entrepreneur or a Hacker and being aware of the current situation, I think if
you were going to sell your company you will stay away from Oracle; they will
kill your culture. Also, given their business nature, they might even undercut
you; it's more to your advantage to do business with someone who is good. And
this is where I think Oracle has lost its advantage, it wouldn't be able to
innovate.

------
tszming
Honestly, it was the SUN who killed themselves, not ORACLE. ORACLE is just the
catalyst.

------
scaleordie
If at least ZFS can be salvaged from the wreck...

~~~
wazoox
No way. NetApp will rabidly chase and kill whoever dares trying building
commercial ZFS applications based upon OpenSolaris or *BSD (CDDL doesn't cover
you against patents infringements, remember?).

I know a well-known privately-held extremely-high-end storage company who just
canned its OpenSolaris/ZFS projects because they won't take the risk to be
sued by NetApp.

ZFS as open-source is cold dead. Sad, but true.

~~~
ghshephard
The only exposure that ZFS has is Patent Based. Some of the interesting ones
are expiring in the next four to five years:

[http://www.google.com/patents?as_q&num=10&btnG=Googl...](http://www.google.com/patents?as_q&num=10&btnG=Google%20Search&as_epq&as_oq&as_eq&as_pnum&as_vt&as_pinvent&as_pasgnee=%22Network%20Appliance%22&scoring=2)

They'll all expire eventually. ZFS (like) file systems will eventually be very
succesful.

~~~
wazoox
> They'll all expire eventually. ZFS (like) file systems will eventually be
> very succesful.

Yes, that's all in the "like". In 4 or 5 years, btrfs and others will mature
and ZFS will look less exceptional. That, and ZFS has a major culprit which
will become more annoying with time : it's not cluster-aware.

------
mvalle
Isn't the good part of being open-source, that you can fork it at any point?

If there is any interest in OpenSolaris, someone will fork it and continue the
development.

~~~
mvalle
the fork: <http://www.illumos.org/>

------
BenoitEssiambre
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=djZFHTa6TfA>

------
grandalf
Uh, opensolaris has been dead ever since linux 1.4.x

