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Mass Speculation Suggests Oracle May Kill OpenSolaris
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."
opensolaris - the regular SXCE builds are Sun's testbed for new updates, patches, fixes and technology updates...
It's noted as 5.11 for the version, codenamed Nevada.
It's very similar to the way the unix kernel builds happened at one time (to be honest I haven't looked lately to know if they still do this or not) - in that the even number release is production and the odd numbered release is development...
Unless Oracle intends to kill off Solaris altogether, I don't see them killing OpenSolaris.
Who is general failure, and why is he reading my hard drive?
The question, though, is whether a fork would be successful. Without the Sun-paid developers, would OpenSolaris keep its development momentum? My guess is that it would not.
For anyone already committed to OpenSolaris, there are some obvious things to do: (1) Celebrate the fact that it's open-source, which limits how badly you can be screwed. (2) Write a plan to start transitioning to Linux or FreeBSD or whatever. (3) Help to organize a community operating outside of Oracle that will coordinate on maintaining the OS with security patches for the rest of its lifetime.
For anyone else, now would be a good time to think about stealing features. I know a lot of people really like DTrace. Well, it's already been ported to FreeBSD, and the Linux port seems to be nearing completion.
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So, what is the chance that Oracle will spend resources on OpenSolaris? The probability is exactly 0.
Oracle -- along with Intel and Cisco -- is notorious for viewing engineers as dots on a graph and rating them on a bell curve, firing the bottom 10% annually. These companies do not waste any money or time on "underperformance" by either engineers or products. If a product does not produce any revenue, then it is abandoned.
This shark-like mentality has gained popularity in recent years among American companies.
Maybe we'll all get lucky and Oracle will just GPL the OpenSolaris code and merge some of the more useful stuff like DTrace and (dare I say it) ZFS into the Linux kernel.
OpenSolaris will not be completely dead. The community at large will pick it up and it will take on a life of its own much in the same way as BSD UNIX was when the Berkeley CSRG group disbanded. OpenSolaris is still important and used heavily throughout industry. It is not my intention to start a flame war, but Solaris is even more mature as a platform than Linux. I am a fan of all open source operating systems and software because it takes computing out of the power of the corporation and puts it in the hands of the users.
I had enough exposure to Solaris in the 90s ... I remember when a Sun install team put in the 1st e4500 16 processor high availability box at my employer ... they had powered it up and had a bunch of our company VPs standing around the cold room oogling it ... the Sun rep was giving an executive overview of its HA features, full hot swap of processor boards, power supplies, yadda yadda yadda. My (then) boss, a lowly manager in the VP crowd, walks up to the e4500 and pops a processor card out ... the whole system seg faults an UGLY death. Ahhh ... good times.
If operating systems are weapons, Solaris is a World War II German railway gun with a cracked breech block.
- Charlie Stross
"Glory is fleeting, but obscurity is forever." - Napoleon Bonaparte
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*. Someone should write a patch for those of us that want to compile it ourselves on the theory that the FSF would be insane to sue a personal user of open-source software for daring to compile it with other open source software of a different flavor.
* Porting ZFS to Linux is complicated by the fact that the GNU General Public License, which governs the Linux kernel, prohibits linking with code under certain licenses, such as CDDL, the license ZFS is released under. [Wikipedia]
If I wanted to capture business from Sun, I'd start a rumor that Oracle was going to get rid of big parts of Sun.
And, just to add insult to injury, the rumor would have them laying off the people Oracle most wants to retain!
--dave
davecb@spamcop.net
Don't forget the nice Dtrace on FreeBSD. Great stuff for servers.
I think most people underestimate how much solaris oracle uses internally...
There is marketing hype.. then reality
The value of OpenSolaris to Sun is the same as Fedora is to Red Hat Enterprise Linux; it's the cutting edge release that allows the new features to be added without compromising the stable release. It's improving as a desktop operating system, but that's not the real point of OpenSolaris. Solaris is primarily a server operating system and that's where it excels. It manages to include things today such as ZFS and Dtrace that will one-day have equivalents in Linux. These technologies are already mature on Solaris. Code from OpenSolaris is also used by the Sun OpenStorage platform and presumably will be the basis of the Sun OpenNetwork platform.
Before I'm modded down as a Linux-hating, Solaris fan-boi, I'm posting this from my home Linux workstation, sat next to my OpenSolaris server. Sometimes it's about the technology itself and not technology religion.
It would be kinda hard to kill since the code is already "open" and out in the wild. Oracle can't prevent the current code base from being forked
The notion that once you make something open source, you can't revoke that, is interesting. It's widely believed, but I've seen very little legal analysis to support that belief. What little I've seen from open source lawyers has said that it might NOT be true. I'd love to see a test case.
Some of the factors that would affect a particular case are whether or not the open source license involved is a contract or a bare license. Bare licenses ARE revokable at will by the licensor. In Rosen's book on open source licensing, that is one of the reasons he recommends against using them, in favor of making sure your license is a contract. This is interesting, because one rather prominent open source license, GPL, is not a contract, according to its authors. They are quite insistent about that.
If a particular open source license IS a contract, then whether it is revocable or not will depend on the terms of the contract. Even then, it may be possible to revoke it, if the licensor is willing to suffer a penalty for breach of contract. Contract penalties are almost always just monetary damages, not an order of specific performance. I'll leave it to others to speculate how that would work out.
Another issue is sublicensing. With some open source licenses, if you give me your software, I get my license from you. If I then give the software to a third person, they get their license from me. With other open source licenses, the third person gets their license from you, rather than getting a sublicense from me. GPLv3 is one of the latter kinds of license--it has a specific statement in the license that you cannot sublicense it.
For licenses that are not sublicensible, what happens if the original licensor simply announces that they are giving out no new licenses? People who have the software could still distribute it, free of risk of copyright suit, since they have a license to distribute. But the recipients would not have a license, so they could not redistribute. It might take a way to kill off some open code this way, because it could take a while for all the current owners of copies to stop distributing, but those would probably eventually go away.
Note that I am NOT saying that open source licenses ARE revokable. Just that no one has given a convincing reason that they are not, and that almost nothing else in contract/licensing law is irrevocable, so the notion that open source licenses are irrevocable should be treated with skepticism at this point.
Kill Sun Solaris and Oracle commits suicide. Makes no sense at all. Won't happen.
Ask the dip shit behind proprietary ssh what happens when you open source and then try to take it back. It ain't pretty.
Only in user space on Linux, and on BSD some features (integrated iSCSI support for us) that are critical to some sites are missing. We just deployed a new Solaris (paid for the basic subscription support service to get the patches) server to run an inexpensive JBOD disk array that can expand to 384TB of raw disk space using 1TB drives, and ZFS on a paid-for Solaris was the only way to make that project come together on reliability, value, and performance. It is backed by an LTO4 tape library. I treat OpenSolaris as the rough equivalent to RedHat's Fedora; for certain key pieces of infrastructure, there is no substitute for paying up and getting the right technology to get the job done right. I don't see Oracle dumping Solaris, but I wouldn't be terribly put out if Oracle stopped active development for OpenSolaris, and only kept pushing regular updates from upstream with Solaris down to OpenSolaris. Now, if Oracle stopped supporting ZFS, I'd be miffed, but we would migrate over to a LVM and ext4 and live with that.
It's SPARC that's gonna die, not Solaris. The OS is open and can/will survive *IF* its users want it to.
However, SPARC is doomed. Now that PC's can address 384 GB or more, and cost a fraction of "big iron", SPARC has little to offer that cheaper platforms can't provide. Sun are already competing with their SPARC line with intel/amd hardware. Why should Oracle support the huge R&D of those platforms, when there are 10 times as many Intel-savvy engineers to design cheaper 64-bit intel/amd systems...?
Yeah, you might say "but then Sun would just be another box-shifter, with their own OS!" Yeah, and the implication is that Sun are dead. Bye-bye, I never liked you much anyway.