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."

Comments

Already Open

[Major Blud]

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.

Re:Already Open

[gomek-ramek]

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.

Re:Already Open

[MadFarmAnimalz]

Or you could just move to FreeBSD.

I would, but it keeps dying. Don't believe me? Ask Netcraft.

Re:Already Open

[diegocgteleline.es]

Without the Sun-paid developers, would OpenSolaris keep its development momentum?

Another similar question is: Even with the Sun-paid developers, can OpenSolaris keep its development momentum? I very much doubt it, in fact if you look at the trends, you could say that solaris lost that momentum years ago. The only thing that keeps the interest in opensolaris today is ZFS (which is great, but it doesn't make the traditional filesystems irrelevant - LVM and traditional raid suck, but it works and it can do almost everything that ZFS does, even if its a bit slower and crappier), and it's impossible to release big innovative features like ZFS every few years, things like zfs only happen one time every n-decades.

My take: Ellison is not going to follow the anti-Linux competitive attitude that the old Sun had. Its clear that Linux is here to stay, and Oracle couldn't win a fight against Linux, because pretty much everyone except Microsoft and Apple back it. I can't guess what they will do with opensolaris, but it's clear that they aren't going to start a war against Linux, because that would mean starting a war against the huge and increasing share of their Oracle Linux customers.

Re:Already Open

[harlows_monkeys]

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.

Re:Already Open

[tyen]

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.

Complete rubbish

[saleenS281]

Oracle aligned with the Linux project because they could have a say in the direction the OS went, and put back code to the project that they wanted/needed for the wares they were selling to be successful.

Now that they own an entire OS stack, they have no need. If nothing else, I expect unbreakable Linux to fade away rather quickly once the acquisition is complete, as well as Oracle shifting the focus of all future DB enhancements to have a Solaris focus with Linux as a secondary, as was the case historically.

Re:Complete rubbish

[drummerboybac]

Solaris needs to exist to support the Sun SPARC64 and UltraSPARC T2+ processors, the latter of which is a multithreading whiz. It is used extensively where I work, and I hope they keep making it, as 128 simultaneous hardware threads in a 1U can be some powerful stuff when programmed for appropriately.

Re:Complete rubbish

[davecb]

There's a good proof of concept Linux that's run on a T2000, but how many years, how many staff and how many debates on LKML would it take to get from a POC to something you could bet your company on?

Honorable bird in hand beats however many in the South Atlantic (;-))

--dave

Makes absolutely no sense

[javacowboy]

Why would Oracle kill Solaris? Their first public pronouncement on the Sun takeover specifically mentioned Solaris next to Java as the reasons they want to acquire Sun. Killing Solaris would be almost as much of an about face as killing Java.

Solaris represents one of Oracle's differentiators. It has features that Linux can't due to licensing concerns, namely ZFS and DTrace. It gives them the opportunity to add value to their offerings, as opposed to being simply a reseller, which is what they'd be if they'd favour Linux.

What's more, Oracle's database is well-known to run better on Solaris than on any other operating system. Killing Solaris would remove that competitive advantage.

The only reason Oracle supported Linux so strong is that they didn't have an OS of their own. When they acquire Sun, they will.

Linux is the biggest fish in the "open" space.

[reporter]

Unless Oracle explicitly spends resources to develop OpenSolaris, it will fade away and die in the "open" space as Linux is the biggest fish there. The typical geek who builds a freeware application builds it for Linux first since Linux is the dominant freeware operating system.

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.

One of my favorite quotes...

[UID30]

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

Re:One of my favorite quotes...

[hoggoth]

I had a similar experience when I was at N.E.C. We were showing off one of our fully redundant servers to some execs from a Wall St. firm (I won't name them, but they are still in business, but with a merger). While my manager was talking about how fail-safe the server is one of the execs walked around behind the rack and just jammed his pen through the fan in the back to see what would happen.
Luckily back-up fans spun up and everything was fine, but there were a lot of sweaty foreheads in the room...

Re:Look at the bright side -- ZFS for Linux!

[The-Pheon]

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!

This just in...

[Temujin_12]

This just in: "Mass Speculation" also suggests:
1) The world will end in 2012
2) Man never landed on the moon
3) Vaccines cause autism
4) Technology = magic
5) Science is infallible
6) Religion is infallible
7) Windows is better than Mac
8) Mac is better than Windows
9) Mac is better than *nix
10) *nix is better than Mac
11) Windows is better than *nix
12) *nix is better than Windows

I really need to meet this "Mass Speculation" guy. He seems to be all over the board on things.

Solaris internal to Oracle

[panic]

I think most people underestimate how much solaris oracle uses internally...

There is marketing hype.. then reality

OpenSolaris == Fedora

[jregel]

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.

Let's ask the customers...

[Catalina588]

About five years ago, Sun seriously considered killing Solaris on X86. What Sun customers said was "Do that and your SunFire servers will be out on the street as quickly as we can get them unplugged". These customers included the major NY city investment and merchant banks, and Sun was in no position to destroy relationships with key customers. Fast forward. Those same large financial institutions are still running Solaris, including Solaris on Sun-supplied X86. But the reason this rumor makes no sense is that Sun and Oracle grew on Wall Street together as less expensive alternatives to Big Iron IBM mainframes.

Kill Sun Solaris and Oracle commits suicide. Makes no sense at all. Won't happen.