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Mass Speculation Suggests Oracle May Kill OpenSolaris

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the corporations-excel-at-killing-thiving-communities dept.

CWmike writes to point out that Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols is one of many people questioning where Oracle may land once the acquisition of Sun is complete. One concern that I have heard many people express is that there may be a good chance of OpenSolaris getting the axe for not fitting in with the overall corporate vision. "People outside of IT seldom think of Oracle as a Linux company, but it is. Not only does Oracle encourage its customers to use its own house-brand clone of RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux), Oracle Unbreakable Linux, Oracle has long used Linux internally both on its servers and on some of its desktops. So, what does a Linux company like Oracle wants to do with its newly purchased Sun's open-source operating system, OpenSolaris? The answer appears to be: 'Nothing.' Sun, Oracle and third-party sources are telling me that OpenSolaris developers are afraid that they'll be either moved over to working on Linux or let go once the Sun/Oracle merger is completed."

4 of 205 comments (clear)

  1. One word: Dtrace by seifried · · Score: 3, Informative

    One thing Linux is lacking (and will possibly never have due to politics) is Dtrace, which is sad because a) Dtrace kicks ass, b) it's mature and works well and c) system tap is... well.. one day when a vendor ships it I guess we'll find out how well it works. This is one spot OpenSolaris and Solaris (and Mac OS X which now has Dtrace) really shine, you can extract useful telemetry and performance data from the system easily.

  2. Re:Look at the bright side -- ZFS for Linux! by The-Pheon · · Score: 4, Informative

    I've long been immensely frustrated that you can't get kernel-space ZFS (sorry FUSE) compiled into a Linux kernel because of inane licensing issues*....

    Well it is a good thing FreeBSD does not have a restrictive license like that. FreeBSD 8.0 will have ZFS with zpool 13, and here is how to use it.

    http://wiki.freebsd.org/ZFSQuickStartGuide

    Cheers!

  3. Re:Look at the bright side -- ZFS for Linux! by diegocgteleline.es · · Score: 3, Informative

    The problem with that is that ZFS is not just a filesystem, it's a complete "IO stack". It's everything that does from the VFS to the device drivers. Sun didn't improve their old stack, they wrote a new brand system and they left the old system there.

    Such thing would not be tollerated on the Linux main tree, it would be considered a very ugly design mistake. For them, the IO stack would need to work for ZFS and for FAT, and they would never buy the logic of "ZFS is special and needs special treatment to be better than the rest". If ZFS was released, Linus & co wouldn't accept it until ZFS is modified to fit the Linux IO stack, and/or they modify the Linux I/O layer to fit what ZFS needs.

  4. fuck you by mungtor · · Score: 3, Informative

    you're probably right. As much as I wanted to find fault and prove you wrong, I can't and now I'm just bitter.