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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."
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.
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.
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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.