Slashdot Mirror
The Future of OpenSolaris
jjrff writes "Phoronix has a little piece about the future (or lack thereof) of OpenSolaris. It appears based on the current support lifecycle, OpenSolaris may be going away. There is a fun thread (read: mild flameage) on a ZFS list about it."
to some decision makers, that is the same thing...
As you probably are aware of, there are TONS of mission critical servers out there running Debian, CentOS, FreeBSD, OpenBSD and other "there is no company you can blame and/or sue" operating systems, just as well as they run PostgreSQL or MySQL without support contracts for their mission critical databases.
For many companies that's not a problem because they have competent server admin staff and the community support is often way better than what you'd get for money.
An unsupported "debian-testing-style" OpenSolaris would make a lot of sense for both Sun/Oracle and many users. If you want support and someone to blame, just pay for Solaris instead. This model is already proven to work great: Fedora vs RHEL (vs CentOS), openSUSE vs SUSE Linux Enterprise, PostgreSQL vs EnterpriseDB, and so on.
My other account has a 3-digit UID.
Errrrrr, survival and preventing Sun from going bust, just off the top of my head?
Can somebody show me something good to come from the Oracle-Sun deal? Anything?
Errrrrr, survival and preventing Sun from going bust, just off the top of my head?
Is that really good? I just met someone who now works for Oracle; they worked for a company acquired by Sun prior to the merger. Sun fired all their best SEs because they made good salaries, while there are people all over Sun (or at least, were) making big bucks for doing nothing. UltraSPARC has its uses, but mostly it is an also-ran. Solaris' claim to fame is ZFS. Under Oracle, Solaris is doomed to either fail (as it was heading towards anyway, due to Linux's increasing dominance) or to become an Oracle RDBMS engine, which is much the same thing.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
FOSS is FREE only if you don't value your time.
*gasp* I value my time but I also value flexibility and independence from vendor whims.
I have an equally naive cliche for you right here: Proprietary software is only cheaper if you are incompetent.
My other account has a 3-digit UID.
And then only if your vendor is competent.
Nobody cares about open solaris. Nobody in their right mind would have chosen it as a platform.
I'm not surprised that IBM is the last company, AIX the last proprietary unix platform. Power the last proprietary hardware platform...
HP & Itanium? Laughable... And Linux on x86 has eaten the rest.
IBM 'get' services in the way the rest never have. They get that it's the bloody hardware which matters. This is why power is hitting 5GHz. The OS is just there to make it work. You want the fastest, lowest latency, highest throughput. You use IBM. You just want it to work and are on a budget? Linux.
The 'executives' of the rest of the companies clearly didn't know or care what their customers want, or what their business really is.
Deleted