Solaris No Longer Free As In Beer

rubycodez writes "Oracle, having acquired Sun Microsystems, including its Unix, will no longer give away free Solaris licenses. Oracle also states that some features of its Oracle Solaris will not appear in OpenSolaris, which means OpenSolaris may start to die."

Comments

That's fine

[Darkk]

We still have choices of free OS to choose from.

They don't scare me.

Re:That's fine

[Anonymous Coward]

Time for the mighty FreeBSD!!!!!

Re:That's fine

[Tinctorius]

But I thought it was confirmed that it's dying, I read that here all the time...

Re:That's fine

[Teancum]

Of course this is precisely the reason for licenses like the GPL that explicitly prohibit this kind of bait and switch tactic for "open source" software development. Trusting and relying upon the goodwill of a for-profit company that can have management changes or get taken over by a different company as is this case will always happen.

Score one more for Richard Stallman being proven correct.

Re:That's fine

[Korin43]

I was under the impression that licensing couldn't be changed retroactively, so couldn't someone still take Open Solaris's current version and make their own OS with it? I'm guessing it's just not worth the effort though since its fairly similar to the other Unix-like systems.

Re:That's fine

[Anonymous Coward]

Some "open licences" don't allow you to make changes and redistribute them (i.e. fork the code base) but instead require you to submit all changes to the copyright owner which has final say over what gets accepted. So if the owner decides to take their ball home and start charging for a new version, you're stuck with the last open version and unable to exchange any changes you make with like-minded folks. In the long run that freezes any improvements and will kill most projects unless such a project is a mature limited implementation of a straightforward and unchanging standard.

Re:That's fine

[Anonymous Coward]

They don't scare me.

How about the Grue?

Re:That's fine

[udippel]

Yes. Correct on almost all accounts. It might even be worthwhile, but SUN managed to create an artificial community only. According to my 2 Sen, this also broke its neck: In and out. Free Java, no, don't, free Solaris, yes, no, new license. And the 'community' could decide what they wanted, as SUN employees they had to follow Ponytail's zig-zag course.
No, it is not 'fairly similar' to the other Unix-like systems, though. Actually, it is the furthest away from those systems.

Re:That's fine

[sourcerror]

That's true for BSD licensed works as well.

Re:That's fine

[CharlyFoxtrot]

Of course this is precisely the reason for licenses like the GPL that explicitly prohibit this kind of bait and switch tactic for "open source" software development. Trusting and relying upon the goodwill of a for-profit company that can have management changes or get taken over by a different company as is this case will always happen.

Score one more for Richard Stallman being proven correct.

Nothing is being "switched" all the OpenSolaris stuff is still there, Oracle just won't be adding new features it develops to it. All the code that was there is still open even without the magical GPL and can be developed further. From TFA :

"The good news is that those of us who have worked so hard to bring this project to life still wholeheartedly believe in it. A core group of the Wonderland team intends to keep the project going. We will be pursuing both for-profit and not-for-profit options that will allow us to become a self-sustaining organization. "

Re:That's fine

[Anonymous Coward]

While the existing codebase is licensed irrevocably under the Open Solaris license, Oracle doesn't need to release any changes under that license and doesn't need to accept any community additions.

Any changes/upgrades to the various subsystems of Solaris such as ZFS need not be released under the open license.

Re:That's fine

[amorsen]

I was under the impression that licensing couldn't be changed retroactively

Don't be too confident about that. Many, perhaps even most, licenses include termination clauses.

Free Software/Open Source licenses generally have no or very limited termination clauses, but proprietary licenses are not so generous.

Re:That's fine

[SQLGuru]

*THIS* is the year of Linux on the desktop. Wait, no, this one....errr, this one?

Ah, screw it, Linux on the desktop is still years away. And it will be until all of the fractured versions converge into only one or two. A combined Gnome and KDE exists. And it's as simple (dumb?) as Windows. Until then, it will pretty much be a geek's toy.

I'm a savvy computer user and I can't tell you which is the "best" combination of Linux. Maybe someone should put together a decision matrix that says "If you want XXX, then you need KDE. If you want YYY, then you need RedHat. If you want ZZZ, then you need...." Present a bunch of sliders about how important all of the major features are and it tallies them up to recommend a Linux environment that will work best for them.....and maybe even link to a specific build that meets the needs.

Re:That's fine

[adosch]

Funny, I don't see a *single* mention of the following items related to TFA anywhere in your off-topic post: Solaris, OpenSolaris, Free, Oracle, Money ...what point are you trying to prove?

Re:That's fine

[Chris Mattern]

Many, perhaps even most, licenses include termination clauses.

Well, yeah, but they deal with the *licensee* terminating the license, and/or outline limited cases where the licenser may terminate. Very few licenses allow the licenser to terminate the license without cause.

Re:That's fine

[siloko]

Maybe that his SQL Gurudom is platform specific ;)

Re:That's fine

[dpastern]

Yup. Oracle won't make friends with this. It'll probably be the death knell of Solaris imho.

Dave

Re:That's fine

[Paul Jakma]

How is this insightful?

However short-sighted it would be for Oracle to strangle OpenSolaris development, the OpenSolaris code that's out there is forever licensed under the CDDL - which is a cleaned up version of the Mozilla Public Licence don't forget.

Re:That's fine

[that this is not und]

Larry Ellison has never been about 'making friends.' He makes acquaintance with co-conspirators.

Oracle makes Microsoft look like a troop of Eagle Scouts by comparison.

Re:That's fine

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm a savvy computer user and I can't tell you which is the "best" combination of Linux. Maybe someone should put together a decision matrix that says "If you want XXX, then you need KDE. If you want YYY, then you need RedHat.

Well the first thing you've got to do is figure out how to teach people the difference between a windows manager like KDE and a distro like Red Hat.

Re:That's fine

[that this is not und]

I know somebody like that. They claimed to be a 'top tier software developer.' They were shocked when I mentioned I was still using Windows 2000 on some of my machines. They didn't seem to have ever heard of MySQL....

Re:That's fine

[Anonymous Coward]

There's no such thing as a troop of Eagle Scouts.

That's like a platoon of sergeants.

Re:That's fine

[Anonymous Coward]

From TFA :

"The good news is that those of us who have worked so hard to bring this project to life still wholeheartedly believe in it. A core group of the Wonderland team intends to keep the project going. We will be pursuing both for-profit and not-for-profit options that will allow us to become a self-sustaining organization. "

The irony of your quote is that Project Wonderland "is a 100% Java open source toolkit for creating collaborative 3D virtual worlds" that has nothing to do with Solaris or OpenSolaris.

The blog "article" is a mishmash of FUD with no links to any primary sources.

Re:That's fine

[TheRaven64]

Oh, shut up. What is it with GPL fanatics always feeling the need to claim the GPL will save the world?

The GPL would have absolutely no impact on this. Oracle owns the Solaris copyrights. It would make absolutely no difference if Sun had chosen the GPL instead of the CDDL for OpenSolaris. They would still have the right to release future versions as proprietary software and not release their changes (although no one else would have, which would have killed things like NexentaStor). The exact same can happen with MySQL now; Oracle could simply decide not to release any future improvements under the GPL and keep shipping the proprietary version. You'd have exactly the same choice; either use the proprietary version, use something else, or fork.

With OpenSolaris, there are already a couple of active forks, so the code remains open, it just doesn't necessarily get enhancements from Oracle. The FSF owns the copyright on all GNU software; they unilaterally relicensed most of it as [L]GPLv3 when the new license came out, meaning that you couldn't link it with any GPLv2-only code (e.g. Poppler, which is currently the only decent PDF rendering library for *NIX). Is this safer according to your FSF-approved definition of freedom?

Re:That's fine

[rbanffy]

I still like ZFS

Re:That's fine

[diegocg]

The license don't matter in this case. Even if Opensolaris was 100% GPL, Oracle still would release Solaris with propietary addons. They can do that because they own the copyright (if you want to get a patch into the opensolaris repositories, you need to give first your copyrights with Sun/Oracle). The license doesn't matter to them. Sun/Oracle can release propietary versions of Solaris, but nobody else can - that's the sad truth behind Sun's "open source".

Re:That's fine

[rubycodez]

why would it be short-sighted? not making Oracle one dime, just costing money. And, if no longer given the artificial resource-injected community, in a few years when it becomes obsolete crap that won't run on newer hardware, may as well be dead.

Re:That's fine

[Anonymous Coward]

How much development on OpenSolaris was being done by Sun, and how much was from "the community" (excluding Sun)? Every one I ever interacted with on that project was a Sun employee. The most vocal supporters were either Sun employees or non-contributors.

From what I can tell there is no OpenSolaris development without direct support from Oracle. It will just stagnate and die.

Re:That's fine

[dfghjk]

So you are saying that code owners should be forced to release all future code as open source because they have released some as open source in the past? That may be Stallman's wet dream but the GPL does not and cannot do that. Property remains property; GPL fanatics love to preach that when it suits them. It cuts both ways.

It would seem that the goodwill of a for-profit company remains goodwill even if their future contributions aren't so good. There is no "bait and switch".

Re:That's fine

[Ltap]

The issue isn't OpenSolaris no longer being FOSS, the issue is that Oracle is more likely to make it atrophy (cut off the important updates until it's so out-of-date compared to Solaris, Linux, BSD, et. al. that any sane person would switch away). Their strategy is probably to kill OpenSolaris and try to force people to pay for Solaris as a cheap way of trying to squeeze some short-term money out of the situation.

Re:That's fine

[icebraining]

Yes, except that KDE is not a window manager. KDE is a Desktop Environment (DE), which includes KWin, which is a window manager.

Re:That's fine

[cbiltcliffe]

With the GPL, individual contributors would still own their own patches, features, etc. Oracle couldn't just take all that contributed code and close it up, as it doesn't belong to them.

Unless, of course, the patch contributors signed something to state that all copyrights were turned over to MySQL/Sun/Oracle, in which case those contributors are boneheads. The point of the GPL is that you give away your code, and get a bunch of code back in return. When you sign your rights to your own code away like that, you're just giving away your code, with nothing coming back to you.

That's a big part of the reason why the Linux kernel is unlikely to ever be released under GPL 3. Every contributor of every piece of code that didn't come from Linus himself would have to agree to the licence change.

So yes, the GPL can certainly prevent a commercial entity from taking their ball and going home.

Re:That's fine

[Paul Jakma]

Sun made it very hard for external people to jump in and contribute, yes. Even within Sun there can be an obstacle course of processes to overcome to commit anything bigger than bug fixes.

Re:That's fine

[Lunix Nutcase]

With the GPL, individual contributors would still own their own patches, features, etc.

Only if they don't sign a copyright attribution agreement as what happens with FSF software and things like MySQL.

Oracle couldn't just take all that contributed code and close it up, as it doesn't belong to them.

And Oracle isn't closing up any of the current OpenSolaris code. They wouldn't have any legal right to do so.

Re:That's fine

[SQLGuru]

If you can follow threads, my response was in a chain that was talking about FreeBSD and a response that they thought it was dead. Sure, offtopic of the article, but not the current line of commenting.

And as for my point, it's that I wish that all the Linux distros in all of their many flavors would come to a point where they merge into one so that I can actually switch to Linux. There are so many distros and so many desktop environments and so many package managers and and and..... Sure, choice is nice and all, but I've yet to see a really good post that tells me (in one place) why I would choose one distro over another or why I should pick Gnome or KDE or whatever. I'm not afraid of Unix/Linux -- I've used several versions. But if a user picks the wrong version of Linux, they'll have a horrible experience with it and probably never come back. Until every (most?) users who tries it has an experience that matches their needs, Linux will always be a small component of the desktop world. And if that never happens, I (and most users) could care less if OpenSolaris or FreeBSD or whatever other flavor has their license jerked around by the likes of Oracle or whoever runs the flavor you perfer.

Re:That's fine

[tinker_taylor]

Maybe this is not such a bad thing afterall. The Linux kernel seemed to do well without any corporate tinkering. Why can't OpenSolaris simply carry on into whichever direction things take it, independent of Oracle.

Projects like Crossbow, NPIV etc are integral parts of OpenSolaris, stuff that is missing from stock Solaris afaik, so what is to prevent the community from building on this solid base and reaching new heights?

Re:That's fine

[Anonymous Coward]

But because Solaris is closed source I can't fix things/improve it now that oracle has pulled out the rug (yes, I know about OpenSolaris). OTOH let's say Red Hat did something like this, you'd still have the source RPMs and the ability to fix things/improve things going forwards.

Re:That's fine

[jgrahn]

No, it is not 'fairly similar' to the other Unix-like systems, though. Actually, it is the furthest away from those systems.

Citation needed. Linux was (it seems to me) modeled on Solaris; the BSDs are ... well, the BSDs, and AIX is famous for being weird. What other Unixes are alive today -- HP-UX? HP have hundreds of servers in our labs, and they all run Linux.

Re:That's fine

[Amouth]

they don't care about the individual using Solaris - they care about the enterprise.. they now have it so you have to have a licence per machine and have to have at least the basic support contract on that machine to receive updates.

what they just did was give an ultimatum to the small and medium biz that where using Solaris and avoiding a service contract.. theses people are now forced to either pick up some type of support contract (a way for Oracle to get it's foot in the door) or to overhaul their systems and move away before the first major bug is released where they can't get the update.

it is a biz move my Oracle but it isn't to squeeze some OS licence fee out of people.. hell i bet they will throw that in if you just say hey i have a box and want support. what they want is a reoccurring revenue stream - and that is what support contracts are.

the small setup install base.. doesn't hurt them or help them much on the money side for it to be free, it's the larger installs they are going after.

Re:That's fine

[BitterOak]

Nothing is being "switched" all the OpenSolaris stuff is still there, Oracle just won't be adding new features it develops to it. All the code that was there is still open even without the magical GPL and can be developed further. From TFA :

Quite true, and even more to the point, precisely the same thing could happen even if OpenSolaris were GPL. As the copyright holder, Oracle could still fork OpenSolaris and relicense it however they want. GPL doesn't take any rights away from the copyright holder to license their own further developments as they see fit.

Re:That's fine

[spitzak]

The original poster is mistaken just as you noticed, but I would not be so quick to think he is a "GPL fanatic". In fact I suspect he is somebody who has swallowed the anti-GPL FUD that it is a "virus" that somehow is attached to the code and makes it permanently released somehow.

The poster may even have ulterior motives to try to promote this misconception.

Also, lots of projects that release GPL code want copyrights assigned to them for submitted patches. The FSF itself does this.

Re:That's fine

[rubycodez]

false, a troop is led by a Scoutmaster, and can have many eagle scouts.

Re:That's fine

[rubycodez]

heh, found out name changed in some english speaking countries for political correctness' sake ("scouter", "scout leader")

Re:That's fine

[dpastern]

So, you're saying that Oracle is like Apple?

Dave

Re:That's fine

[gschuell]

And Sun's stuff is still better than the shit Ellison has put out over the years. The only thing I can fault Sun on is that maybe they should have put Java in the public domain.

Re:That's fine

[Teancum]

No where does it say in the GPL or other similar licensing models that you are forced to release future code under an open source license. But what it does provide is the "right" to fork the code, the ability to tweak existing software to get it to continue working the way that you need it to work.

What the GPL forces people to do is to "give back" to the community if you use a community resource. You can't have it both ways, as if you are applying a patch or appropriating some licensed software, all the GPL forces you to do is to maintain that same license for tweaks to that software. If you don't want to let others have those tweaks, the answer is simple: Don't distribute the software with your tweaks.

It sounds like you need to actually read the license for a change and see what it says and doesn't say. Where Richard Stallman gets angry is if you use HIS software, or software owned by the FSF, and then claim that software as your own. Microsoft does the same thing BTW, as does Oracle and most other larger organizations.

Re:That's fine

[Teancum]

The problem with the Linux kernel is that Linus Torvalds didn't like the "or later" clause in GPL v 2. He started to accept patches to the kernel with this slightly modified version of the GPL.

BTW, his fears did prove to be somewhat legitimate, as can be seen with Wikipedia, the Wikimedia Foundation, and their abuse of the GFDL. They used the "or later version" clause of that particular licensing document to move the entire text database to CC-by-SA through strong arming the FSF to allowing an escape clause as a legitimate "or later version" in the license. Yeah, "the community" voted on approving the change but it was a biased and stacked vote when that happened anyway, or at least it felt forced to me.

The concern still exists there for the Linux kernel, and it is interesting how even a minor tweak of this nature in a license can significantly impact the legal implications for a project. I put the impact of that decision by Linus Torvalds to be on par with the advertising clause of the original BSD license.

Re:That's fine

[bsdaemonaut]

Actually Solaris is quite similar, Linux is not. Seeing how Solaris is fully POSIX compliant and directly derived from SVR4 I'm not even sure where your coming up with this. Last I head, Linux was not POSIX compliant.

I have a feeling your idea of other "unix-like" systems encompasses little more than Linux. If you took Linux and Solaris and then compared them against AIX, IRIX, HP-UX, *BSD, and other POSIX-compliant or mostly POSIX compliant unix-like OS's I can assure you that Solaris fits in just fine. You can tell just how unlike Linux is as early as the boot sequence. To my knowledge, no Linux distro uses SVR4 style startup scripts.

Re:That's fine

[bsdaemonaut]

As to your first point, you fail to explain how this would change the situation in any way. It wouldn't. The CDDL does not provide provisions against forking.

Your second point is moot. The whole deal with "giving back" is when a group of people take a project, that isn't theirs, and turn it into a product that they are going to sell/reuse. This is not what is happening here. Solaris is the property of Oracle, there is no one for them to give back to but themselves. All but dropping support for OpenSolaris can hardly be considered a grab and run, and in the long run Solaris really didn't benefit much at all from OpenSolaris in actual code contributions. I have never heard of a submitter earning sole ownership of relatively small contributions in a large project, GPL or not, but perhaps I'm wrong there.

Hell, I'd even argue that the GPL often gets in the way of companies when they do attempt to give back. Look at ZFS and dtrace for two prime examples.

Re:That's fine

[Mr. Slippery]

And as for my point, it's that I wish that all the Linux distros in all of their many flavors would come to a point where they merge into one so that I can actually switch to Linux. There are so many distros and so many desktop environments and so many package managers and and and..... but I've yet to see a really good post that tells me (in one place) why I would choose one distro over another or why I should pick Gnome or KDE or whatever.

Yeah! And I wish all those different car manufacturers with all their many flavors would come to a point where they merge into one so that I can actually switch to cars over my horse and buggy. There are so many makes and so many models and so many options...but I've yet to see a really good post that tells me (in one place) why I would choose one make other another or why I should pick a wagon or a coupe or whatever.

Re:That's fine

[VulpesFoxnik]

No, linux is not Posix Certified. It is Posix Compliant.

Re:That's fine

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe they changed it nowadays, but a default Solaris install isn't even POSIX-compatible, not even the shell is.
You have to change the path and then most stuff is POSIX-compliant, though it might be a older POSIX version than what you're used to from e.g. Linux.

Re:That's fine

[SQLGuru]

Oh, but they do. Car & Driver will give you the performance character and their reliability and what options are available (and what cost). All sorts of information that you can use to make a decision based on your needs. If you want a car that goes from 0 to 60 quickly, that info is there. If you want a car that doesn't break down much, that info is there. etc. For Linux, if you ask which is the best desktop environment for me (and by me, I mean ME), you still never get a solid answer.

Re:That's fine

[bsdaemonaut]

All sources I have ever seen disagree, most of which can be found with a Google search, where exactly are you claims coming from? Granted I do believe it is mostly POSIX compliant these days, but it's not fully compliant last I heard.

Even if I were wrong about POSIX compliancy it would hardly change my argument, Solaris has more in common with most, if not all, UNIX and UNIX-like systems then Linux. Even were it not for the obvious pedigree -- it's easily apparent to anyone with access to those OS's.

Re:That's fine

[DragonWriter]

Of course this is precisely the reason for licenses like the GPL that explicitly prohibit this kind of bait and switch tactic for "open source" software development.

Had OpenSolaris been GPL rather than Sun's own open license (CDDL, I think, but that doesn't really matter), it would have had no effect on their ability to:
(1) also sell a closed-licensed version, which also had free-as-in-beer licenses,
(2) stop giving new free-as-in-beer licenses for the closed version,
(3) stop including new features made for the closed version in the open version,
(4) stop, ultimately, releasing new versions of the open version at all.

Re:That's fine

[DragonWriter]

I was under the impression that licensing couldn't be changed retroactively

Licensing can't generally be changed "retroactively", but gratuitous licenses (that is, ones that aren't contracts supported by mutual consideration -- which includes most open source licenses in most circumstances) can be revoked at will by the party granting the license in the first place.

Under the doctrine of promissory estoppel, such a revoked license may nevertheless be granted a kind of residual effect by a court, to the extent necessary to avoid manifest injustice resulting from a licensee's reasonable reliance on the license where that reliance occurred before the revocation.

I feel sorry

[SigNuZX728]

For the person that this affects.

Re:I feel sorry

[masshuu]

i might feel stupid, but what runs on Solaris that won't run on any other posix based OS.
When i look around at software, eveything with a Solaris build/source also usually has a windows/linux/bsd/etc build/source

Re:I feel sorry

[jimicus]

There's probably a few commercial applications knocking around that still haven't been ported to Linux - but they'll almost certainly be the sort of application where if you were to run it on anything other than a fully-supported, paid-up platform (which OpenSolaris never was), you'd need mental help.

Re:I feel sorry

[mzs]

mdb, the solaris modular debugger, that's what I will miss the most, it's not a product (comes with solaris) but there just is no open source equivalent. People that tell you otherwise have never run into a problem that was too much for truss or dtrace but one where gdb simply did not work or got in the way.

Re:I feel sorry

[Venik]

Clearly, very few people here have any enterprise-level Solaris experience. In terms of stability and performance I compare Linux to Solaris like you compare Windows to Linux. Well, this may be too harsh but this is mostly addresses to the fat dorks on Slashdot screaming "death to Solaris". The biggest file server guys like that had to support is the one sitting under their desk with all the porn on it.

When I transitioned from Solaris and AIX to supporting RH and SuSE several years ago, I experienced somewhat of a shock: servers hanging on shutdown, lousy NFS performance, Samba slowing down to a crawl under moderately heavy load and a crapload of other issues I never thought a unixoid OS can suffer from. All these problems coupled with consumer-grade hardware and what you get is one big, never-ending downtime. Something is always down or barely limping along.

There were times when all our servers were running Solaris, AIX or HP-UX. I could come to work, drink my coffee, read the news, space out for a couple hours, then break for lunch, work a couple hours on some project and go home. As more and more real servers are being replaced by cheap HPs and Dells running the blasted RHEL or, worse yet, SLES, all this free time I used to have is a distant memory.

Re:I feel sorry

[rodgerd]

YMMV. We have more problems with our Sun hardware than we ever do with our HP Lintel boxes. Hell, we had an M5K dead within a week of delivery due to a single point of failure with a fan stopping and frying a backplane. And let us not speak of the 4xx series machines, whose memory controllers appear to be made from components eMachines rejected as too crappy.

Re:I feel sorry

[religious freak]

I work for a major company and we're a Solaris shop, we run close to one hundred large Solaris boxes production and test. Hmm, I wonder how we're going to deal with it... oh well, guess that's why I'm not an admin :)

Re:I feel sorry

[Celarnor]

That would be RIT's Computer Science system administrator. All our non-Windows, non-mac labs run Solaris, on Solaris workstations.

And we learn database concepts on Oracle.

Is this awesome? (y/n)

Re:I feel sorry

[Anonymous Coward]

What pisses me off the most after having worked as a "little" admin = no root access on our universities main fileserver and then starting to administer a small groups Linux server: documentation. it is ok if not everything is perfect, but at least i dont want to spend half an hour to figure out what exactly is in *this* Linux machine as compared to *that* Linux Machine, which differ in the kernel or samba version. How do i set up NFS with Kerberos? some obscure howto, requiring to turn on experimental features. And that 5 Years after Solaris had it? BTW did i say the howto is not specific to your distribution? Congratulations!

If youd give me the choice for a fileserver (small to large), it would still be Solaris. If you have a decent HW, then the software will ease your life. Unless you have 100s of machines, it will be cheaper just to buy the Solaris license.

Re:I feel sorry

[Anonymous Coward]

There's 2 of us.

Re:I feel sorry

[master_p]

Yes, but perhaps the new situation of yours is better in terms of job security ;-).

Re:I feel sorry

[Znork]

very few people here have any enterprise-level Solaris experience

Actually, anyone with serious enterprise level Solaris experience would remember getting stung by everything from faulty cache memory design on the E450 resulting in time between reboots measured in days to ZFS causing solid crashes quite often when it was new.

Rose coloured tint on the rear view mirror aside, things weren't always that good.

Personally I've found Linux machines to be at least as stable, but there are about ten times as many of them which will of course increase incidence of problems. And there's new untested hardware and platform changes more often than there used to be with Sun (for better or worse), so if you want to prioritize stability you'll have to take more care while shopping.

Re:I feel sorry

[santax]

Do not underestimate my porncluster, you insensitive clod!

Re:I feel sorry

[Anonymous Coward]

When I transitioned from Solaris and AIX to supporting RH and SuSE several years ago, I experienced somewhat of a shock: servers hanging on shutdown, lousy NFS performance, Samba slowing down to a crawl under moderately heavy load and a crapload of other issues I never thought a unixoid OS can suffer from.

I definitely don't have any enterprise-level Solaris experience. In fact, my only experience with Solaris is that every 6 months or so I try it out again, just for fun. The experiment usually ends when I try to update it. I have never successfully updated Solaris. It always breaks so that it becomes unbootable the first time I do it. Now, I will grant you that if I knew my way around it, I could probably fix or avoid this, but...are you really supposed to have Enterprise-Level experience to fucking successfully patch your box?

I'm going to vote for Linux on the stability front, just because of that.

Re:I feel sorry

[loufoque]

All these problems coupled with consumer-grade hardware

You realize the problems are likely *due* to that consumer-grade hardware and not the OS right?
Don't blame the OS for the hardware...

Re:I feel sorry

[vegiVamp]

I have two words for you: Patch Management.

Re:I feel sorry

[garaged]

no offense intended, you obviously didn't were at sysadmining before 2000, yeah, all servers were aix, hpux or solaris, but they we not that stable, much more than windows of course, but not a paradise, and it was dead simple to hack them, not to mentio a couple of magnitude orders more expensive.

I do linux sysadmin and I have A LOT of free time, and the best hardware running my servers is dell, good enough, better than than and I would have no job.

Re:I feel sorry

[Arancaytar]

The entire Solaris user-base was quoted saying "Wow, this sucks."

Re:I feel sorry

[Guido von Guido]

I definitely don't have any enterprise-level Solaris experience. In fact, my only experience with Solaris is that every 6 months or so I try it out again, just for fun. The experiment usually ends when I try to update it. I have never successfully updated Solaris. It always breaks so that it becomes unbootable the first time I do it. Now, I will grant you that if I knew my way around it, I could probably fix or avoid this, but...are you really supposed to have Enterprise-Level experience to fucking successfully patch your box?

I'm going to vote for Linux on the stability front, just because of that.

While patch management on Solaris is probably about the worst of the *NIX I've worked with (compared to AIX, Red Hat, SUSE, Debian or Ubuntu and ignoring anything where you usually have to recompile from source like OpenBSD or Gentoo), you have got to be kidding me.I've never had any problems with patching, even on x86 Solaris, and I've been using Solaris since before they started the crazy version numbering.

Re:I feel sorry

[IrquiM]

That's why we're stuck on slackware for the "farms" I'm running.

Re:I feel sorry

[dpastern]

I'd say you're right to a large extent - Solaris on dedicated boxes, set up correctly, runs forever. Very secure. Very stable. Very scalable. Look at a large site like EBay - it runs off Solaris and is incredibly stable.

The downsides to that are usually dedicated Sun hardware to get the utmost out of the operating system, supreme knowledge of how to install/setup and tweak Solaris to the nth degree to get it to be the best that it can be. Cost. Any decent organisation will have a support licence with the vendor for those things that their in house techs can't solve. That costs money.

Still, I think that this decision by Oracle will kill Solaris. There was some uptake over the past few years due to Sun's changing attitude toward the desktop user, and more reasonable support contracts (cost wise) - it was actually cheaper to get support on Solaris than RH or Suse products. I'm glad I've alrady got a copy of Solaris 10 for x86. I've never liked Oracle as a company to be honest, as good as their dbase product might be, them, along with Apple, I'd love to see go bust. They are a nasty trash p.o.s company.

Dave

Re:I feel sorry

[jargon82]

That's amazing :) I wish you luck and strong pain meds. Also, RIT? Come to fosscon!

Re:I feel sorry

[DarkOx]

I think you are correct. If you perception that Linux is less stable than the commerical Unix systems in your organization than at least one and possibly all three things are true:

1. There are a lot more Linux boxen on (realatively speaking) smaller iron, hosting a single app. This is common behavior in the Windows world because Windows licenses were cheap, Linux license are cheaper than that. This lets you localize your problems which is nice but you have more platforms and therfore more platform problems, where platform means hardware plus base OS image.

2. You are running these things on much cheaper, lower quality hardware than your commercial Unix vendor would have sold you. Addionally that particular configuration has not been tested with the software stack. Maybe there are well tested drivers for everything in the boxes but something does not play nice together. This is one of the value adds the older traditional model of buy the whole shootin match from one vendor did offer. That RS6000 was KNOW to work with AIX.

3. You are running bleeding edge Linux, and your problems would go away if you switched to debian stable.

Re:I feel sorry

[datapharmer]

Clearly you have something wrong with your setup. We run Fedora on Dell Poweredge file, network, and mail servers and have had very few problems. Some of these servers have multi-year uptimes and the others have been rebooted only for security or performance related upgrades. I mean sure, Samba is a little slow now on a few of the machines, but that is because it serves about 4 times as many people as it was originally designed for and it still isn't slowing "to a crawl".

If you are having problems with HP/Dell you really must be using low end hardware that was never designed to be a server or you have something really poorly configured. Typically I see the poor performance when companies get cheap and don't use high speed/high reliability hard drives or don't have raid setup properly, but that can't be blamed on the OS and as far as hardware goes - you get what you pay for.

Re:I feel sorry

[VolciMaster]

I have two words for you: Patch Management.

Are you saying that Solaris has or has not "Patch Management"?

The only platform I've worked-with that comes close to doing actual "patches", and allows them to be unrolled at will*, and has a steady schedule, and can be relied-upon is Microsoft Windows.

Sure - go ahead and jest that it's because they need more patching.

Linux distributions release entire new packages - not patches.

AIX patches come out whenever IBM feels the need, and may or may not be announced well.

Solaris patches are released willy-nilly with poor announcements, the patch clusters don't always include everything that has been released since the last one, and.. oh yeah: it'll try to install patches that aren't needed, then complain they're not installed. And the number of times I've have to run cluster installs more than once because dependency-mapping was incorrect? Not pleasant.

* except for service packs - but those are effectively new revisions to the underlying OS

Re:I feel sorry

[VolciMaster]

Personally, I've noticed a down-take in Solaris adoption, and more Linux and Windows deployments taking their place over the last 3-5 years.

Re:I feel sorry

[VolciMaster]

I work for a major company and we're a Solaris shop, we run close to one hundred large Solaris boxes production and test. Hmm, I wonder how we're going to deal with it... oh well, guess that's why I'm not an admin :)

100 Solaris boxes is not a "major" installation... a couple thousand, sure - I'd agree with you there. I've done both contract work, and consulting engagements at locations in the thousands category. [Almost] All of their Sun admins were moving towards Linux or Windows, too.

Re:I feel sorry

[the_womble]

Right, so that why my former employer has not only been seeing their product increasingly deployed on Linux (it used to be Solaris only).

They were recently bought by the London Stock Exchange to bring development of the new, more stable, system in house. Stock Exchanges are pretty insistent on reliability.

The only thing that might slightly take the shine of Linux n this story is that the London Stock Exchange were running Windows, so the direct comparison is not with Linux, however, having being burned, they still went with Linux.

Re:I feel sorry

[drfireman]

zfs

Re:I feel sorry

[Robert Bowles]

You're both right.

Generally, Sun hardware made before 2000 seemed almost "unbreakable". Since then, likely due to wildly fluctuating financial conditions, reliability has been all over the map. My (pre2k) E4000, E4500 and E450 systems never dropped. When they had any hardware problems, they'd announce it in syslog preemptively (ie. "DIMM J3201 correctable errors blah replace module").

I ordered about a dozen E420R's around 2001. E420 and E220 servers made 1999 and later had problems specifically with their stupid "memory riser boards". Each board had two torque screws that needed to be tightened precisely. If they were even slightly under-tightened (as many were from the factory), vibration would eventually shake the connectors slightly loose, causing intermittent system freezes.

A hard-freeze with nothing in the logs was almost unheard of, but that's why we have serial console logging, right? Getting nothing off the serial console post fail, now that was novel. Back then, Sun field engineers were a great bunch, but they were as in the dark on the issue as we were, performing the same checks, making sure everything was clean and properly seated. The same systems would fail a week later.

Eventually, I noticed that the memory board screws on a failed system that I had tightened had actually gotten looser. This led to a simple solution: over-tighten them. Granted, this isn't really an acceptable solution on systems sold for $30k+, and it was inexcusable that Sun didn't vigorously inform its customers (or employees for that matter).

rogerd, Are you talking about E420 rackmount systems that you have now? If so, then I'd say the exception proves the rule, as you're talking about 10 year old systems, over double the 5 year MTBF advertised (lie) for PC hardware. Try bunging the screws next time one goes haywire. I've never played with an M5k, personally. If that's true, (bad) SPOF fan, (worse) faulty temp sensors that (horrible) failed to save the hardware, that's, well, kinda sad.

Re:I feel sorry

[vegiVamp]

> Are you saying that Solaris has or has not "Patch Management"?

Given that I responded to someone going on about how great Solaris is, I meant that it's quite the pain in the ass.

I agree that Microsoft uses the closest thing to actual patches, that is, differentials from the original binary. On the other hand, and as you point out, any service pack is of the order of gigabytes, these days. Why is are those "a new revision to the underlying OS" when the regular patches also include updates for that ? Why not do service packs with binary diffs, too ?

Linux indeed mostly does full packages. There's no technical hurdle in supplying diffs, so I assume there's some convenience in doing so. One thing that comes to mind, is not having to follow every step of the upgrade path as you have to with MS patches - you just install the latest package if you skipped a few versions.
Also, keep in mind that with Linux (and, indeed, most *nix) package management (nobody claims *patch* management there) is not only to the OS (kernel and basic utilities), but also a whole host of third-party applications ranging from Apache to Zope, whereas MS' gigabyte SPs are *only* for Windows and some -not even all- of their own software.

AIX, I'm not familiar with, so I can't comment.

Solaris patches are theoretically pretty manageable, especially with zones and ZFS snapshots. In reality, it literally takes hours to upgrade a large system. No fun, indeed.

Re:I feel sorry

[Anonymous Coward]

My experience is the opposite. Linux was more stable than Solaris starting in the late 1990's and never looked back.

Re:I feel sorry

[nycguy]

faulty cache memory design on the E450 resulting in time between reboots measured in days

That's a bad memory I'd rather forget. What's worse is that you paid top dollar for that crappy hardware, and it was far slower than Intel-based Linux systems. You'd also get sold on some HA failover snakeoil which would work great in some stunt test but not necessarily when you actually had a real hardware failure. The only thing that Solaris got right early on, in my opinion, was the threading model, which scaled well in comparison to any other OS at that time. Otherwise, my only thoughts about Solaris and Sun hardware are "slow, expensive and prone to catastrophic failure."

Re:I feel sorry

[LWATCDR]

"This led to a simple solution: over-tighten them."
I would suggest locktite :) no really it should work a treat but kind of scary to use on a 30k machine.

Re:I feel sorry

[LWATCDR]

Well what where you doing running consumer grade hardware on your severs? HP and Dell enterpise stuff is actually pretty good.

I have heard that NFS on Linux isn't or wasn't as good as on Solaris or even BSD way back when but I have no real experience with NFS .

Sounds like a lot of issues you are having may be hardware based.

Re:I feel sorry

[Anonymous Coward]

Sun eventually fixed this, but I always enjoyed it when the patch cluster would patch sendmail and then happily re-enable it for me on servers that I had explicitly shut it down on because I didn't need a sendmail daemon running on them.

Good times, good times.

Re:I feel sorry

[Anonymous Coward]

Clearly, very few people here have any enterprise-level Solaris experience.

Far more than you might think. And most of the engineers I work with that have Linux and Solaris experience will choose Linux over Solaris when given a chance.

Re:I feel sorry

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, anyone with serious enterprise level Solaris experience would remember getting stung by everything from faulty cache memory design on the E450 resulting in time between reboots measured in days to ZFS causing solid crashes quite often when it was new.

Oh, you can bitch about the cache design from the get-go, but if IBM would have unfucked their chips it wouldn't have been a problem.

In addition, if you think the E450 was awhile back, then you're pretty much wet behind the ears.

Personally I've found Linux machines to be at least as stable, but there are about ten times as many of them which will of course increase incidence of problems.

At least as stable? You're either lying or incompetent. I've been working with UNIX professionally for 25 years and there's no way you can compare Linux to enterprise class iron running Solaris (or even *gag* AIX) with a straight face.

If you want to rag on a commercial UNIX go smack IRIX around.

Re:I feel sorry

[spedrosa]

Yes, Linux distributions will release new packages.

*Because* Windows has no packages, it can't do the same.

So you are seriously arguing that those huge downloads from Microsoft are actually binary diffs? They are not.

Re:I feel sorry

[Jon_E]

The real thing missing that Solaris engineers took pretty seriously at a time (IMHO) is kernel panics and kernel debugging. Shapiro and Cantrill's work on mdb (and later DTrace) was huge at helping developers prove or identify key behavioural (and philosophical) aspects of the kernel and develop fixes pretty quickly. It also helped to identify key parts of the kernel that could be stripped out to prevent the amount of bloat that's quickly creeping into linux

just a thought

Re:I feel sorry

[Anonymous Coward]

In a word: ZFS. Also, there's dtrace. I see no significant tools other than ZFS, but ZFS is significant.

Re:I feel sorry

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, and how about nfs corruption because it didn't do checksums when using udp, or the backspace key printing '^H' on a fresh out-of-the-box machine. At least it wasn't as slow as hpux, but it wasn't fast either.

Re:I feel sorry

[jtorkbob]

"consumer-grade hardware"

Speak for yourself. Some of us use enterprise-level hardware for our Linux machines.

Re:I feel sorry

[Cyberax]

"Linux distributions release entire new packages - not patches."

Uhm. Have you ever looked inside Windows patches? They are in essence what Debian Stable updates are. I.e. new versions of affected software.

They are definitely NOT patches in original sense (i.e. a diff between two versions).

Re:I feel sorry

[einhverfr]

When I transitioned from Solaris and AIX to supporting RH and SuSE several years ago, I experienced somewhat of a shock: servers hanging on shutdown, lousy NFS performance, Samba slowing down to a crawl under moderately heavy load and a crapload of other issues I never thought a unixoid OS can suffer from. All these problems coupled with consumer-grade hardware and what you get is one big, never-ending downtime. Something is always down or barely limping along.[emphasis added]

I dunno how many years this was ago but in the time I have been using Linux (since 1999), scalability and performance on the server-side have improved greatly, in large part due to IBM's interest in trying to bring Linux up to the level of AIX in these areas..... Comparing Linux to Solaris in 1999 would have been like comparing Windows ME to Linux at the same time. However things have improved a great deal. In particular the schedular wars have left us with a far better OS than we ha before.

I have generally found Linux to be the most admin-friendly OS out there. This is reason to use it where it works well. More recently Linux has gotten a lot of effort in resolving those very problems you mention.

Re:I feel sorry

[Venik]

Actually, this brings me to the other point of comparison between commercial Unix and commercial Linux: quality of support. What happened when I ran into an OS problem with Solaris? I would run the explorer script, send output to Sun support and they would send me a patch to install or some other fix. Opening support cases with Novell or RH is pointless. First thing they tell you is to install the current service pack of the OS. They have no idea what the problem is or if one of the patches contained in the service pack would fix the problem. But they are perfectly willing to let you take the risk. Don't get me wrong, Sun's quality support is a thing of the past and Oracle is not to blame for this. These days when you call Solaris support it seems you get the same Novell morons on the line as when you call for SLES support. Sometimes I wish I could just reach out throught the phone line is beat that curry chicken they had for lunch out of them. On the other hand I feel sorry for them because Linux' debugging facilities quite frankly suck, despite the impressive number of logs it keeps. Kernel panics and non-trivial hardware problems are all a great mystery to Linux syslogd.

Re:I feel sorry

[Enleth]

Use the PTFE plumbing tape to secure screw threads. $0.10 for a few meters, works flawlessly even against very strong vibration.

Re:I feel sorry

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem with Windows was always: the hardware. With the release ofthe beast Intel Nehalem EX yesterday, Windows (2008R2) has very little things to envy from the diferent flavours of UNIX.

Re:I feel sorry

[Drinking Bleach]

On the other hand, and as you point out, any service pack is of the order of gigabytes, these days.

As odd as it feels to defend the argument, I feel like I should point out that Windows Vista's SP2 was 700MB, which is still about 300MB off from even a single gigabyte.

Re:I feel sorry

[h4rr4r]

As a former RIT student I suggest you stop trying to force emacs on kids. For god's sake VI is already installed on those boxes.

Oh and TRY needs to die, that POS is worthless.

Re:I feel sorry

[Anonymous Coward]

"Very Secure". No.

Sun has been fixing serious security problems right up till the end. I would provide links if I thought it important.

Re:I feel sorry

[Anonymous Coward]

You can run your explorer output through the most excellent Patch Check Advanced script for patch revision analysis. It's not quite as good as what you would get from an EIS disk, but pretty close.

Re:I feel sorry

[ishobo]

You know nothing about the types of servers. They could be entry or enterprise.

Re:I feel sorry

[Anonymous Coward]

Solaris patching is horrible. For me, it's always worked, and I think there was only maybe one time where a patch broke something. This said though, it's SOOOOOOO fucking slow! I remember a while back patching an old sparcstation 5. Took over 8 hours to apply the Solaris 8 patch cluster. I did a 5220 a few weeks back that only had a single non-global zone on it, and it took over 2 hours. That's ridiculous.

Linux, AIX, and even HP-UX don't have this issue.

Re:I feel sorry

[carton]

seriously Venik get over yourself. Solaris now does all those things and worse. It also has serious random performance regressions on certain hardware. It's generally much pickier and flakier than Linux, and the installer's shit as well. and Linux has become a lot better.

the interesting stuff in Solaris is all the new stuff. crossbow 10Gb+L4 preclass, zones, zfs, infiniband. sun might've leveraged the shit out of this, even with a fragile brittle platform. they can sell magical hardware that evades all the performance regressions. They can sell blade servers with top-of-rack switches that make IB cheap. They can take bites out of Hitachi/EMC/Netapp's market with storage based on IB and ZFS. Their kernel is better for modern AMD systems with dozens of cores. fragile and brittle is more okay for modern shops with 1000 servers instead of 2 servers. it's more about having a whole package that works together. That's what gave me hope for them and interest in them.

but this marketing necktie damage is probably too much.

Re:I feel sorry

[sr180]

Opening support cases with Novell or RH is pointless.

Ive had reasonable support from Red Hat. ES4 was tripping and panic'ing on Sun blade hardware. It took them about three weeks and lots of debugging, but they sorted it and released a new kernel - which solved our problem.

Similar hardware is tripping on Windows 2008. Neither Microsoft or Sun seem to care much about it.

Re:I feel sorry

[Anonymous Coward]

NFS on linux is a huge PITA. Especially given that if the NFS server goes down while you have it mounted, all IO operations that try and look at it (dd, ls, etc) will hang, and in some cases block, such that even a kill -9 won't terminate them. Best part is, even if you try and shut down/reboot it'll hang on the NFS unmount and not allow your system to reboot until the nfs server came back up.

I use it a lot for convenience, but as with a number of quirks on linux, it's definitely not 'industrial grade' software.

Re:I feel sorry

[laffer1]

I can only speak to FreeBSD and MidnightBSD. There are problems with the NFS implementation in these systems. Loss of network connectivity can make your kernel panic if you try to access the mount point, memory leaks (recent discussion on freebsd mailings lists), etc. The FreeBSD community has been working on it, but it's not in line with Solaris or Linux AFAIK. I've read that OpenBSD interoperates better with other systems on the NFS front, but I don't know first hand.

Re:I feel sorry

[laffer1]

From my perspective, there is one critical flaw with Linux. i recently tried to deploy a cheap server at work. We were on a tight budget and had to go with the onboard raid control on an asus motherboard (core i5). We tried three different linux distros and none of them could handle the fake raid properly in the installer. It was possible with some work to get it to work, but it wasn't worth the trouble. I had it up on FreeBSD in 5 minutes after going through suse, debian and ubuntu (granted the last two are the same except ubuntu is missing raid scripts debian has)

I realize that fake raid is not a enterprise grade thing but it's quite useful in newer desktops with SSDs using low capacity or with cheap servers trying to do mirroring.

Sometimes the 20 different ways to do something on hundreds of distros is a blessing, but other times it just means nothing works.

Re:I feel sorry

[dpastern]

It traditionally has been more secure than any Linux distribution. Of course, openBSD in particular is probably the most secure operating system available, but Theo is a wee bit pedantic imho.

Dave

Re:I feel sorry

[sciurus0]

'mount -t nfs -o intr' and 'umount -l' should solve your problems.

Re:I feel sorry

[cthulhu11]

Sun's x64 servers are extremely reliable for us, more reliable than their SPARC gear was, even. They're also easier to manage than other x64 servers that I've seen, eg. by virtue of having a real serial console that works out of the box.

Re:I feel sorry

[LWATCDR]

Which makes one wonder just how many people us NFS anymore.
I know that even when I am using a Linux workstation I use Samba for networking and not NFS.

Re:I feel sorry

[Mr. Slippery]

700 MB is quite properly "on the order of gigabytes", as the GP post has it. On a logarithmic scale, it is closer to 1 GB than to 1 MB, or even 100 MB: log (1,000,000,000) = 9
log (700,000,000) = 8.85
log (100,000,000) = 8
log (1,000,000) = 6

Re:I feel sorry

[ckaminski]

Don't worry. BSD has ZFS and is progressing quite nicely.

The only reason I'm running Solaris today is because ZFS is well supported in nv129, and is still "experimental" in FreeNAS.

As soon as FreeNAS gets a refresh, I'm migrating.

Re:I feel sorry

[drfireman]

Thanks for posting that, I didn't even realize ZFS was in BSD. On a scale from "rock solid for critical production use" to "for data you don't care about anyway," how stable is it in the latest FreeBSD release? Not that OpenSolaris has been without glitches, but I'm always nervous when contemplating big changes to our storage.

Re:I feel sorry

[Anonymous Coward]

My personal experience: That's because it's RH and SuSE. Use Debian and suddenly you'll have far less issues.
Obviously I'm missing something since there are too many RH users out there that they can't just all be stupid, but if I only went with my personal experience (only small companies) you'd think that the best explanation :-)

Re:I feel sorry

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually I managed to make a update just recently! So obviously it can work sometimes. But yes, most of the time updating OpenSolaris just results in an unbootable system (and no, the previous "snapshot" or what you can select at booting tends to not work either anymore).

Re:I feel sorry

[ckaminski]

Off-topic, but I love how a certain unknown Windows patch undid all my registry tweaks so now the damn balloon/tool-tips for Dummies keep popping up every time something happens on my desktop. Love it! :-)

Re:I feel sorry

[ckaminski]

This has always been the case with NFS. Even SGI IRIX, AIX and SunOS and Solaris way back in the day (1994).

Linux is just obeying the standard set by others.

As usual.

Re:I feel sorry

[ckaminski]

From what I hear, the latest FreeBSD (7.x) rates it as production-quality, but the version in the currently available FreeNAS is merely experimental. Though I hear lots of anecdotal evidence that it runs well there as well.

Re:I feel sorry

[rodgerd]

No, SunFire V440s and V490s, which have been an exercise in terrible since they were new - long histories of kernel panics on memory errors that only go away after motherboard+CPU swaps.

Oh no!

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh no!

They certainly like to send people away.

[sethstorm]

For trying to get people to want to use the OS, Sun and Oracle sure like to piss people off.

Oracle just seems to make it more pronounced.

Re:They certainly like to send people away.

[Third Position]

Well, if Sun's strategy was making them any money, Oracle wouldn't own them now.

This isn't really a surprise. Somehow, I have the feeling Oracle will just unload the server business on someone else within a few years. I expect they'll milk it to the max while they can, and just dump it at a bargain basement price when it's no longer profitable.

Re:They certainly like to send people away.

[tsotha]

This is true. Sun never did figure out how to monetize their most popular product - the java language. Maybe Oracle is going to have another go at "database appliances". They've only tried and failed about five times now.

Re:They certainly like to send people away.

[coogan]

We have been given instructions to decommission all our Sun hardware (all midrange stuff) at earliest convenience. Luckily we saw the writing on the wall when the whole Oracle thing started and as a result have already migrated most applications to X86 and completely decommissioned others. Additionally we have made a strategic decision to remove all Glassfish app servers from our portfolio and proved to management that many of the Oracle databases we were running could quite easily be migrated to PostgreSQL and in cases where migration was not possible due to dependencies, consolidated aggressively. I am thrilled that management has seen the light since I will have no part in adding to Uncle Larry's quest for financial world domination.

Re:They certainly like to send people away.

[Anonymous Coward]

SUN never managed to even make a dent in the majority of the market. Maybe it was different in the US, but here, if you were an organization with less than 50 000 employees, forget about SUN. They just weren't interested. Well, guess what. Most organizations/businesses have less than 50 000 employees, so SUN just lost the biggest part of the market by just wrinkling it's nose at those "poor" people.

Re:They certainly like to send people away.

[Anonymous Coward]

Oracle doesn't breath without making money
wait until tey start charging for Java

Re:They certainly like to send people away.

[VolciMaster]

at the moment, Oracle is focusing on large data-warehousing applications using the Sun hardware and OS until OEL is more-widely deployed. When Oracle brought out OEL, they effectively proclaimed that Solaris was no longer the OS of choice - if it were, why bother with their own Linux distribution?

Re:They certainly like to send people away.

[Anonymous Coward]

Sun's strategy wasn't based around the operating system.

Re:They certainly like to send people away.

[dekemoose]

Yep, run don't walk away from anything Oracle owned you can. They have bending people over a barrel down to a science. Two jobs ago I was at a company that Oracle acquired, watching the change from a customer focused orginazation to a big cash vacuum designed to suck as many dollars from customers as possible was disheartening. I took a contract gig at a large local company supporting the software that Oracle acquired at my old company and got to watch the big O come in and try to shake them down for huge increases in their support contracts. The web team were running Aqualogic for an app server and going through the same contortions after the BEA acquisition. The fewer Oracle products you can have under your roof the better off your organization will be.

Re:They certainly like to send people away.

[Anonymous Coward]

at the moment, Oracle is focusing on large data-warehousing applications using the Sun hardware and OS until OEL is more-widely deployed. When Oracle brought out OEL, they effectively proclaimed that Solaris was no longer the OS of choice - if it were, why bother with their own Linux distribution?

Curious...

So who do you think Oracle bought out when they began their Linux support? I thought that OEL was just a re-branded version of RHEL? I thought it was a measure taken to compete with the RHEL support program?

When IBM began collaborating with Red Hat and Novell do you think that this was akin to IBM stating that AIX, i5/OS, and z/OS are headed to the scrap heap?

"I'm jes sayin..."

So fork it.

[doishmere]

There's nothing stopping anyone from forking the existing distribution and maintaining it separately from Oracle; if Oracle does release any code back into the public, it can be incorporated too. FTA, "The good news is that those of us who have worked so hard to bring this project to life still wholeheartedly believe in it. A core group of the Wonderland team intends to keep the project going."

Re:So fork it.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's bizarre how the article carelessly switches from talking about Solaris (well, OpenSolaris FUD) to four or five paragraphs about "Project Wonderland", implying that Wonderland has something to do with OpenSolaris. I had to do a web search to remind myself what in the world this project was:

Project Wonderland is a 100% Java open source toolkit for creating collaborative 3D virtual worlds. Within those worlds, users can communicate with high-fidelity, immersive audio, share live desktop applications and documents and conduct real business. Project Wonderland is completely extensible; developers and graphic artists can extend its functionality to create entirely new worlds and add new features to existing worlds.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Wonderland

Re:So fork it.

[rodgerd]

If you read more closely, you'll see OpenSolaris is poisoned by dependencies on key closed components (including libc) that Sun never released, only providing binary builds for. That fork's a non-trivial task.

Re:So fork it.

[Brandon Hume]

And if you read http://hub.opensolaris.org/bin/view/Main/no_source , which is the ACTUAL list of non-source-available components, you'll only see "libc_i18n" listed. Not libc.

Re:So fork it.

[jonwil]

Care to provide a link to some details of those components essential to running OpenSolaris but which are not open source?

Libc for example, I see code here for it
http://src.opensolaris.org/source/xref/onnv/onnv-gate/usr/src/lib/libc/
Or is that not complete code for libc?

Re:So fork it.

[rbanffy]

Wasn't Wonderland a second-life like thing? OpenSolaris was called, AFAIK, Project Indiana.

Re:So fork it.

[Jon_E]

I see Cantrill just updated this page yesterday .. it's still surprising to me that so many drivers that vendors open sourced for linux and worked with Sun to help develop or port are still closed .. I guess some of this just echoes from an earlier time before linux had some of the commercial vendor support and there was still a large amount of vendor FUD (and corporate FUD) around open sourcing some of your key underlying IP. After 12 years in the Sun bubble you really begin to see that innovation really comes from freedom and just a few talented developers (not armies) .. here's to hoping that Oracle doesn't stifle that freedom in the interest of improving Larry's boats.

Re:So fork it.

[rodgerd]

That's based on David Boyes' endorsement of an anon comment in an interview here. Given David's spearheaded the System Z port, I assume he knows what he's on about.

dup

[lems1]

another dup. but this is /. after all...

How different does it have to be?

[DeadPixels]

An honest question from someone who has never been involved in OSS development: how 'different' does a Linux distribution have to be in order to count as a separate branch? Is someone allowed, for example, to take the current release of Solaris, remove anything Oracle may own the rights to (does that include code? just graphics?) and redistribute it?
Where is the line drawn, legally, in the OSS community?

Re:How different does it have to be?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is the closed source version of Solaris, you can't redistribute it period.

Re:How different does it have to be?

[DeadPixels]

Oh, sorry, I didn't realize "Oracle Solaris" and "OpenSolaris" were referring to two separate products. Mod parent informative. :)

Re:How different does it have to be?

[Anonymous Coward]

It has to have at least a single different pixel in the logo and a new group of sunless basement cases who endlessly drone on about how free is better, but can never answer the question as to why nobody wants it.

Re:How different does it have to be?

[symbolset]

For GPL works you take a distro, file off the serial numbers somebody else was using (usually this is just trademark logos and such), stamp your name on it, and it's DeadPixelOS. Of course, DeadPixelOS isn't going to get much of a following unless you're continuously developing some value-add as well as keeping up with the patch management of 1000+ packages. It's some work. For your first clone distro I'd start with a low-maintenance one like Pentoo.

The line is drawn in the license. For OpenSolaris, that would be here. If the license says you can do what you want with the code, then you can. If it says you can't, then you can't. And if it doesn't say, then it's all about how good your lawyer is and how much you want it.

Re:How different does it have to be?

[Anonymous Coward]

...legally.
Ha! There goes your period. Feeling so smart and pedantic now? Nyah nyah.

Re:How different does it have to be?

[Anonymous Coward]

Solaris -> OpenSolaris -> Solaris Express Community Edition is very approximately equivalent to:
Red Hat Enterprise -> Fedora Core -> Rawhide

Re:How different does it have to be?

[Anonymous Coward]

In addition to the answers you've already received, which are more informative, we're not talking about Linux.

Re:How different does it have to be?

[iggymanz]

not quite, because you *can* get the source for RedHat Enterprise and its patches and compile your own distro (leaving out redhat logos and some other bits) and distribute it all you want (e.g. CentOS)

You can't do that with Sun Solaris at all. OpenSolaris you can, but OpenSolaris isn't quite Solaris, some things in Solaris has licensing restrictions from third parties that prevented Sun from doing that. Some things are written a little differently.

OpenSolaris is a wonderful OS, (and Solaris a wonderful closed source OS)not saying its bad, and at various times Sun let people have the source code to Solaris back in the day, for informational purposes only and not for distribution to third parties.

Re:How different does it have to be?

[bhtooefr]

VERY approximately. AFAICT, SXCE was more like Solaris 10, but with bleeding-edge OpenSolaris /dev code.

May?

[symbolset]

Will. Oracle is not in the business of giving stuff away for free.

Have you heard? They license their database software not by the servers it runs on, nor by the processor, but by the core. How absurd is that? Does it cost them more to produce a database that works on more than 4 cores, or to support it? Believe it or not, they also charge extra for installed memory, as if that had anything to do with their production or support costs. Failover? Now you're into serious money. And don't you dare run it on stuff that's not on the secret list, or your support contract is invalid.

If Cisco's motto is "that feature is enabled through the purchase of an optional license", Oracle's is more so.

I guess Oracle doesn't get that we have options, and the pace of hardware technology will quickly erase any software advantage they think they have.

Re:May?

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess Oracle doesn't get that we have options, and the pace of hardware technology will quickly erase any software advantage they think they have.

People have been saying this for a long time, but we are still around (and quite healthy as well). Because the fact is, we understand the market better than geeks. To make money, you don't need to persuade geeks that our stuff is better (even when this is the case, especially now after all the acquisitions -- between stuff like Weblogic, Essbase, dbxml, ocfs, virtualbox, zfs and dtrace I'm sure we can find something you'll like); you only need to persuade managers that our "solution" (including support etc) will cover their ass should anything go wrong.

(anon because I work there)

Re:May?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because of this, I'm seeing Oracle installations be replaced by Microsoft SQL server installs. Technically it sucks, but there are a lot of things the Microsoft rep can tell the PHB to sway them to phase out the Oracle/Solaris stack:

1: Decent license deals with Windows/Exchange/SQL Server/etc. Catch 'em all and save.
2: MS experience is a lot easier to come by than Solaris admins. Same with an Oracle DBA versus a MS SQL DBA. Supply and demand.
3: Almost all hardware is tested with Windows Server. Not that much is tested with Solaris x86 except Sun's.
4: Easy control of servers -- stick them all on AD.

Oracle won't see the results of this footshooting now, but as Oracle installations hit the bitbucket when companies upgrade, they will start to feel the hurt.

Re:May?

[Fractal Dice]

Perhaps their advantage is not technical, but in the skill of social engineering in large organizations (governments and corporations) to create cycles of dependency where it becomes too risky to the careers of senior or middle management to attempt a switch to an alternative product?

Re:May?

[Anonymous Coward]

Does it cost them more to produce a database that works on more than 4 cores?

Well, judging by Mysql's lack of scaling beyond this limit. I'd say they have a decent argument on this one.

Re:May?

[Rakishi]

It's not absurd at all, perfectly valid economics. That you're incapable of understanding the economics involved is your failure not Oracles.

Essentially different people are willing and able to pay different amounts for the same product. As a result if you could charge people individual amounts you could not only meet the needs of more consumers (ie: sell more software) but also make more money in the process. That is, if you couldn't price differentiate than you'd need to (ie: while maximizing profit) charge everyone an amount that certain customers just couldn't afford. If you could somehow charge just those customers less than everyone would be better of. Since you don't know what this amount is you have to use a proxy. Oracle uses features, the number of cores and ram as their proxy.

Re:May?

[symbolset]

People who can be swayed by one persuasive salesman await the next to find their door.

Re:May?

[symbolset]

Heh. It's my lack of understanding. I just don't "get it". Yeah, that's my problem. If only I understood the ROI proposition properly presented then I would grasp the essential nature of Oracle's value-add.

Bite me. It's tables and joins, SQL and IOPs. Oracle has no magic bits.

Re:May?

[Builder]

You need to persuade ME that you can support your products. Every chance I get, I replace Oracle products with non-Oracle products because I'm pretty much sick and tired of having to rely on some random guy at Veritas who has happened to see the same RAC problem as I am having when your tech monkeys force me to raise a ticket with my storage vendor because theyr'e too clueless to work out the problem.

About the only things I'm likely to keep (for now) are coherence and Java, just because there's nothing else out there that competes with it. But for most of my other needs, other products exist. MSSQL, JBoss, etc.

We don't get the support we pay for, not even on a level 1 outage, so I'll be damned if I ever spend another cent with Oracle that I don't have to.

Re:May?

[lena_10326]

Nothing is hard set with Oracle. If your company is big enough, Oracle can be bargained down quite a bit. My last employer wound up with an unlimited license deal, but I presume it cost millions for multi-year support contracts.

Re:May?

[clarkkent09]

Here is an idea. Wouldn't it be nice if the companies looked at Oracle's product and only bought it if it happens to give them a good value for money compared to the competitors products? That way, if the price is too high, nobody will buy it and Oracle will either have to lower the prices or go out of business. Oh wait, that's how it works already.

Re:May?

[Anonymous Coward]

To rephrase, take one product and sell it to each customer for as much as they can afford, using the number of cores and amount of RAM in their server(s) to judge.

Re:May?

[swilver]

If you treat any of those products the way you bungle your main Oracle product, then I'm sure they'll soon be as despised as your 1970's Database that needs constant supervision and doesn't even know the difference between NULL and a known empty value.

Eventually I think having the programmers, architects and designers against you is gonna cost you -- I sure as hell will not use your Database product as more than a glorified storage system (and a picky one at that), I will not touch JHeadStart or Oracle Developer with a 10ft pole, and I will actively try and replace anything Oracle with a free solution. It will no doubt please you that Oracle has been above Microsoft on my "evil" list for quite a few years now.

Re:May?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's how a number of economists might try to convince you it works, but really, it doesn't. A convincing salesman isn't the same as value for money.

Re:May?

[hairyfeet]

Uhhhh...you DO realize you just described exactly why there are multiple versions of Windows, which most geeks here at Slashdot have a royal shitfit about, right? While I don't have a problem with different SKUs charging per core and per RAM amount is getting a little anal about it. Hell even MSFT as far as I know doesn't charge per core but per socket.

As for Solaris my guess is old Larry is gonna be cracking the whip on the developers to make it THE platform for Oracle DB, which means he can pretty much charge whatever he wants as those addicted to Oracle DB will buy whatever platform Oracle tells them to. So I wouldn't be surprised if old Larry is doing this so the next version of Oracle/Solaris will be a tightly integrated unit that will kick ass on SPARC and give him a top to bottom solution he can make big piles 'o cash from, followed by him killing unbreakable Linux which he can't control like he can Solaris. Remember old Larry didn't get all that money by being a dumbass, I'm sure he has a plan to make some serious cash out of it one way or another.

Re:May?

[Tim C]

They license their database software not by the servers it runs on, nor by the processor, but by the core... Believe it or not, they also charge extra for installed memory

I've not spoken to Oracle sales, but this page disagrees with your assertion. The only pricing options I see are per named user, and per processor. Nothing about cores or installed RAM. Furthermore while I'm not a DBA my company works with Oracle's DB a lot, and this is the first I've heard of such an insane pricing scheme. Do you have anything to back your claims up? (I'm more than happy to be proved wrong)

Re:May?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not necessarily disputing what you're saying, but Oracle will cut any crazy license deal to get you in. I worked close to a project that were licensing Oracle based on the number of INSERT statements executed. Per core / per memory isn't that unbelievable and it's possible that the GPP is extrapolating on a 'special' deal he's seen to be the norm.

Re:May?

[Rakishi]

Uhhhh...you DO realize you just described exactly why there are multiple versions of Windows, which most geeks here at Slashdot have a royal shitfit about, right? While I don't have a problem with different SKUs charging per core and per RAM amount is getting a little anal about it. Hell even MSFT as far as I know doesn't charge per core but per socket.

And if you asked any of those geeks why microsoft had different reasons, how many do you think could answer? Of course, if some congressman dares to not know the exact details of some technological issue they all suddenly rise in outrage at his ignorance and stupidity.

I dislike ignorance. Claiming the practice is absurd shows an utter lack of understanding of the issue which was my only point. I'm pretty sure most people even on slashdot would very much dislike having pay more for basic windows since they'd never use enterprise features (which is what'd happen if there was but one version). As a note, just because I happen to agree with someone's overall views doesn't mean I won't call them an utter moron if they start spouting stupidities.

Re:May?

[Anonymous Coward]

Oracle has been above Microsoft on my "evil" list for quite a few years now.

And you're not coming to his birthday party either.

Re:May?

[Kerrigann]

How much is it?

I dunno, how much you got?

Re:May?

[jimmyharris]

He's right and he's wrong at the same time.

Oracle calculates its licensing cost based on cores but then discounts that number depending on its calculation of the 'power' of the processor architecture. In the case of x86/x86_64, the discount is 50% meaning that two cores counts as one processor for licensing purposes. This of course means that a license for a quad-core CPU will cost you just as much as two dual-core CPUs.

As for charging you according to the amount of RAM in a server, that's just rubbish. We've just upgraded to 256GB per server in our main RAC and the licensing cost is no different than when we first rolled it out with 32GB in each node.

Re:May?

[Anonymous Coward]

It depends on Oracle licensing - with the Oracle Standard Editions they're licensed per processor socket, not per core. And thats if you go with processor licensing - you also have the option of Named User licensing, which licenses per user. The Standard Editions are not too expensive either, but yes, as soon as you want more enterprise-like stuff such as failover then you are into serious money.

Re:May?

[Builder]

You really think that's how it works right now? Awwww cute!

For a lot of deployments, Oracle databases are deployed because a vendor of a product you want requires oracle. These vendors are often niche providers so you can't just choose someone else who doesn't have an oracle dependency. So you buy oracle.

Here's a fun game for you ... Phone Oracle and ask for a price to run Oracle 11i on 2 servers, one with 8 cores (2 x 4 way CPUs) and the other with 16 cores. Also, ask if there is a price difference if Hyperthreading is enabled. Tell me how long it takes to get that quote. And how many different people you have to speak to.

About halfway through the above little game, you'll realise I left out a load of key information that you need to get it. How many people will be accessing these databases? Will they be accessing as named users, or through a web portal? Oh, and don't forget about maintenance.

Oracle is a joke that stays around for now because they provide some things that no-one else does. No-one I work with (other than Oracle DBAs) seems to like using them, and we're always on the lookout for something else.

Any chance we get, we use something else.... Sybase ASE, MSSQL under Polyserve, PostgreSQL where it fits.

Re:May?

[drinkypoo]

People have been saying this for a long time, but we are still around (and quite healthy as well). Because the fact is, we understand the market better than geeks.

Healthy? Sun laid off practically everyone with a clue at practically every company they bought to cut costs, and now Sun is a barely-amalgamated collection of disparate enterprises. And Sun employees are still waiting for the other shoe to drop. I've met some and they don't seem happy. Sun is anything but healthy, and adding that on to Oracle was not a smart move.

you only need to persuade managers that our "solution" (including support etc) will cover their ass should anything go wrong.

Oh, if only I could believe that. I might believe it of IBM, which appears to have a future.

Sun and Oracle are alike in that they are both alive due to momentum. But without a reason to continue to exist, that momentum will be lost. And ZFS is a pretty thin hope to hang your future on.

Re:May?

[Anonymous Coward]

I can confirm they charge extra per core.

Re:May?

[epine]

Since you don't know what this amount is you have to use a proxy. Oracle uses features, the number of cores and ram as their proxy.

This is a valid recitation of economic orthodoxy which unfortunately leaves off right at the moment where thinking begins. Ships are lost on this basis.

The problem is that the choice of proxy has downstream consequence which can destroy a lot of value, or in the worst case, almost the entire value of the sales proposition.

In the case of licensing by core, it introduces a huge non-linear term in right-sizing infrastructure. I can't stand this stuff myself, but some of my closest friends have made an excellent living showing up to solve the Oracle license fee non-linear optimization problem, which contains large elements of uncertainty and non-determinism because the outcome depends on unknown future events.

Anyone with the least insight into systems theory knows that non-linearities are like a sexual disease. They have a noted tendency to give on giving. Properly understood, the effort involved in damping out these non-linearities can easily exceed the value proposition of adopting Oracle solutions in the first place.

Fortunately for Oracle, there's a huge real world shortfall in the quantity "properly understood". Microsoft, among others, makes a mint from truncated TCO studies. The assumption underlying every TCO study I've ever seen is that the higher order non-linearities can be safely neglected. If that were true, why is anyone relying on a vendor-funded TCO? In the case where the higher order terms can be safely neglected, it's usually easy enough for the customer to work their own TCO on the back of napkin, and get an immediate answer everyone immediately believes.

The cases where this breaks down are the sales propositions absolutely freighted with non-linearities, to the point where no one trusts their own numbers, surprise, surprise.

The first rats off a sinking ship are the best swimmers. The first wave of people to abandon Oracle are those outfits with a larger than average insight into "properly understood".

From [http://www.riskglossary.com/link/barings_debacle.htm Barings Debacle]

In November 1993, BSL was merged into BB&Co. in anticipation of a subsequent initiative to form a Barings Investment Bank (BIB). The merger was not easy because the two firms had markedly different cultures. It was a distraction right in the middle of Leeson's tenure at BSL.
...
Barings was just starting to form a risk management function. Risk controllers were appointed in London, Tokyo and Hong Kong during 1994, but not in Singapore.
...
As part of the 1993 reorganization, Barings had adopted a "matrix" approach to management of its offices. ... Employees complained that lines of reporting were not always clear. ... Another issue was that Leeson was an accomplished liar.

Every aspect of this is situation normal at most medium or large companies. You best executive attention is devoted to various political fires. Many organizations are just too busy with other pressing demands to step back and engage in the kind of clear thinking it takes to put out the Oracle fire. So what if the Oracle pricing model induces non-linearities? We're planning to auction block that division anyway.

However, in the companies where choosing the right database and the right database architecture is the dominant fire, non-linearities associated with proxy pricing models can escalate into a serious business concern. Some of those people will go talk to Oracle and try to cut a special deal. Many of them won't. An attrition sets in.

Look what happened to Microsoft when Google became the hot job opportunity. That sucking sound is your technical clout packing family photos into their briefcases.

A major coming of age event in commoditization of a technology is crossing the threshold where the price proxy shifts from being a

Re:May?

[Nerdfest]

Frequently, the developers, admins, and DBAs that you're pissing off become the next managers.

Re:May?

[drinkypoo]

Hell even MSFT as far as I know doesn't charge per core but per socket.

Nah, Microsoft sells stuff that works per-core. You can't use HT with uniprocessor NT, for example.

Re:May?

[vegiVamp]

Nice. Now tell us about the *internal* metalink, which contains fixes for problems that never make it to the public metalink, and allow you to sell weeks of consultancy for tickets that take half a day to fix.

It's true, unfortunately, you *do* understand the market all too well.

Re:May?

[IrquiM]

Persuading managers is not something Oracle is good at. And now we're stuck with M#")"#)/G SAP because of this screw-up!

Re:May?

[Anonymous Coward]

Except that Oracle lost out in a bid for full Operational Database support for the 3rd largest ISP in the US.

(anon because I work at the company that won).

Re:May?

[Anonymous Coward]

It is actually more complicated than this; read the fine print for definition of "processor".

Re:May?

[rhsanborn]

Perhaps their licensing model is too granular, but the idea of charging per core is not unfounded. It does, indeed, change their development costs. Oracle has created a nice product that scales very well. Making that software utilize all the resources available to it does cost money. Making it a performance monster does cost money. It sounds more like they are baiting lower volume customers into a cheap toke to get their app out there. The first hit is free, but it's going to be a nightmare to move off them when your applications grow and you need to start paying for a larger system to support it.

Re:May?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure it is much more profitable to bribe persuade managers than to show technical superiority.

Re:May?

[Anonymous Coward]

Right... because the only reason that Bellsouth used your products for their CRM is because one of the directors at BS lost a golf game. Now everyone there is stuck with a slow ass POS DB and java front end that barely works. Way to go!!

Re:May?

[nomadic]

Oracle calculates its licensing cost based on cores but then discounts that number depending on its calculation of the 'power' of the processor architecture.

Hmmm, that's a change, back when I worked in IT (admittedly 10+ years ago) Oracle "calculated" its price by visiting your office and figuring how much money you had.

Re:May?

[colinrichardday]

Do I really want to deal with a company that wants to screw me out of consumer surplus that badly?

Re:May?

[_Sprocket_]

...you only need to persuade managers that our "solution" (including support etc) will cover their ass should anything go wrong.

Oddly enough, my first reaction on reading the article tittle was "forget Solaris - try getting SUPPORT out of Sun / Oracle even when you have a contract."

Re:May?

[Anonymous Coward]

The part about Oracle having the top-to-bottom solution was the whole idea of him getting his credit card out in the first place. And it was public knowledge. Sun have the software, hardware and a history with Oracle. And now Oracle can charge for even more bizarre set up's for eg CMT's threads on a core on a CPU on a plug-in board in a blade in a blade-rack in a server-rack in a pod in a datacentre. All while downing a cup of java in his Solaris spaceship interconnected with his Magnum fabric. Top to bottom Oracle.

Re:May?

[Anonymous Coward]

We don't get the support we pay for, not even on a level 1 outage, so I'll be damned if I ever spend another cent with Oracle that I don't have to.

Ditto. I work for a large US bank. We are migrating off of Weblogic and (shudder) beehive. Oracle support sucks, even if you are a mega-customer. We'll probably keep using the DB for a long time (and even getting rid of the other products will take a while) but we all hate Oracle.

Re:May?

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, if only I could believe that. I might believe it of IBM, which appears to have a future.

Ah, you must not be working at IBM....

Re:May?

[dekemoose]

you only need to lie to managers that our "solution" (including support etc) will cover their ass should anything go wrong.

FTFY.

I worked support at a company that Oracle acquired and we went from having the best support money could buy to having the most expensive answering service money could buy. Oracle works very hard to make sure that their support process is consistent, repeatable and efficient at handling the volume of issues submitted. You'll notice I didn't say anything about being good at handling issues, that is not a concern for them. Most of the folks who were any good at all found jobs elsewhere and were replaced by offshore staf with little to no knowledge of the product whose primary purpose was to shuffle requests around while they drowned the few remaining decent support staff with inane questions. This is my understanding at least based on talking with folks who are still there, I was one of the first rats who fled that sinking ship.

No matter how bad Sun's support may have been in recent years* you can rest assured that it will be worse under Oracle's ownership.

All the being said, AC is right, Oracle sells to management not to the geeks. There's still a general perception amongst the management types that "you can't be fired for buying Oracle".

*I've never used Sun's support, no idea if it's been decent or not.

Re:May?

[dekemoose]

Nobody internally uses Metalink (at least not the folks who have figured out how to navigate the system), it's crap and they know it. When I was there most folks in support used a mish-mash of independently developed tools to perform support tasks. Metalink was used to communicate with customers only, and was typically the only way used to communicate with customers.

Re:May?

[Anonymous Coward]

And that'll work for you, as long as you don't need anything HA, with multimaster synchronous replication (provided you even have a clue what that is).

And if you ever do, you'll quickly find out, the hard way:

either you pay ultra-mega-$$$ for TERADATA (which is shared-nothing architecture), or you pay slightly less for Oracle RDBMS.

Because there isn't anything out there on the market that is *AVAILABLE* for you to buy or otherwise.

If you think you're so smart, good luck going off on a tangent and trying to patch PostgreSQL with the synchronous multimaster replication patches -- effectively engineering your own PostgreSQL DB build.
Oh, wait, someone did that one before too. But guess what? You'll have to pay! And I'd be interested to hear if it performs as well as Oracle RAC, and how good the support is.

In other words: YOU DON'T HAVE A CHOICE. You're just unbelievably NAIVE. Are you from Slashdot or something?

Re:May?

[iggymanz]

and how do the vendors of those "only runs on Oracle" products get their business. You think by technical excellence? best tool for the job??? hah!! Your CTO or VP of finance gets the dog and pony show, fancy dinner, maybe even some hookers expensed as something else if the sales wank gets the subtle signals. It's who schmoozes the best, that's how contracts are awarded and vendors selected at the enterprise and big government account level. I'm an engineer at a VAR for big iron, that's how our salesmen operate.

Re:May?

[iggymanz]

The Oracle licensing processor-core-factor table has different factors depending on processor GHz for some architectures.

Maybe his company upgraded some Express Edition (1GB limitation) to Standard Edition (unlimited memory but 2 CPU limit)?

Re:May?

[david_thornley]

Back around 2000 I worked at a company that made the best product in the world in a particular niche. We had database independence, but with the stuff we were doing it became more expensive to maintain it, and all our customers ran Oracle anyway, so....

Re:May?

[Draek]

To make money, you don't need to persuade geeks that our stuff is better (even when this is the case, especially now after all the acquisitions -- between stuff like Weblogic, Essbase, dbxml, ocfs, virtualbox, zfs and dtrace I'm sure we can find something you'll like); you only need to persuade managers that our "solution" (including support etc) will cover their ass should anything go wrong.

Exactly Sun's philosophy. The fact that you bought them illustrates how effective that strategy was.

Re:May?

[Finite9]

say what you will about Oracles licensing. Yeah it cuts out small businesses due to overly steep pricing, but it's simply best of breed in the DB market for non-web services/social net. sites (where it's more likely that mysql or equiv. will be more appropriate). When you have the best DB going, you can sort of dictate your prices. Only thing that will change this is if another DB can match them on features and performance. I dont mean DB2/MSSQL: they want a slice of the pie as well and are not going to go rock bottom to try to steal business from Oracle. It will take an OSS project to try to meet them on technical merit, and that is very very unlikely to ever happen, but I wish it would, for the sake of competition.

Re:May?

[Finite9]

besides, you've gotta love-to-hate Larry. He's such a cut-throat bastard, but it's obviosly working!

Re:May?

[Finite9]

Sorry, which DB other than Oracle has a serious competitor to RAC or Real Application Testing? Yeah, support standards have dropped since the good old days of Metalink, now the standard of knowledge seems to have dropped overall with regards to 1st line metalink, but log as SR and it can get quite deep. Your example of the Oracle/Veritas problem is at present just rumour/heresay, because you don't provide info if it really was Veritas, or Oracle or if it even got resolved. Maybe you were doing something stupid and the support people couldn't figure it out becuase you failed to tell them? Yeah, sounds like flame-bait, but you just threw out a half baked example that gives a bad impression without providing a real example that was Oracles fault.

Re:May?

[Builder]

Sorry - I tend not to go into complete descriptions of all of my support issues on Slashdot for some reason.

The problem was absolutely a known Oracle RAC issue - The bloke I was speaking to at Veritas had seen it with another customer that Oracle had fobbed off on him before and was able to point to the metalink article that described the issue and the solution.

This shows several things...
1. I gave enough information for someone (just not the Oracle 3rd line 'expert') to identify the problem and find me the solution.
2. I was not the first person that had been in this position
3. Veritas staff are used to having to find Oracle solutions because Oracle try to get out of supporting their products by blaming someone else.

Sure - there is no RAC alternative. But that's less and less important to me these days with distributed caches. The only downside for me right now is that Oracle bought Tangosol, but at least I've got an SLA and won't have to pay anything more to Oracle for at least 3 more years.

Oracle's short term memory

[Korgan]

The whole reason Sun opened up Solaris in the first place was to try and get it a wider audience and more of a community around it. Linux was encroaching on Solaris as much as it was on any other Unix, if not faster.

Oracle will probably find that the only way they can sell Solaris is to bundle it as a database appliance OS or something stupid like that. Include the cost of Solaris with the cost of whatever software runs on top of it.

Solaris wasn't the healthiest until the OpenSolaris project gave it a significantly greater audience that allowed anyone to use it and get familiar with it. OpenSolaris sold Sun hardware and the proprietary Solaris. It is what kept Solaris from dead ending and stagnating.

Oracle will either realise this soon, or wait till its too late. This is essentially the first nail in the Solaris coffin after Sun managed to get it off life support.

Fare thee well, old friend.

Re:Oracle's short term memory

[Anonymous Coward]

Oracle will either realise this soon, or wait till its too late. This is essentially the first nail in the Solaris coffin after Sun managed to get it off life support.

What makes you think that Solaris's death by neglect is not part of Oracle's plan? Milk those who are locked-in to Solaris for as long as possible and for as much money as possible, while putting the least possible resources into it. Classic corporate-raider tactic for medium term (3-5 yr) returns. Strip the assets for as much as you can squeeze them for, then sell the trademark name of the carcass off to the highest bidder.

Re:Oracle's short term memory

[Anonymous Coward]

(see also death rattle of: SGI, Caldera, ...)

Re:Oracle's short term memory

[MacGyver2210]

"Include the cost of Solaris with the cost of whatever software runs on top of it." I think a big point of this article is that Oracle won't be 'including' anything for free. They're some money grubbers. I really liked Sun Microsystems. I thought they were very non-evil and supportive of the software community as a whole. They came up with some great tech, and they did well with Java. Oracle has always been an evil corporation to me. Every time I've encountered anyone from their company it was a hassle. On the phone, on-site, email, always a hassle. Ordering, service, updates, maintenance, always a bunch of hoops. They sure don't strike me as the people who will keep Sun's product lines in the public favor, and I sure won't deal with them - even for a Sun product.

Re:Oracle's short term memory

[blind biker]

Solaris is still open - through OpenSolaris.

FUD much?

Re:Oracle's short term memory

[master_p]

What's the point of free Unixoid OSes having separate codebases? Is Solaris so much better than Linux that Sun couldn't merge it with Linux? this is what happens when people refuse to co-operate due to pride or corporate blindness.

Re:Oracle's short term memory

[drinkypoo]

Is Solaris so much better than Linux that Sun couldn't merge it with Linux?

What is Solaris? Solaris is SunOS plus a GUI. What is SunOS? SunOS is SVR5 with customizations. What is SVR5? It's a kernel, a libc, and a set of applications and other associated libraries. So here is the point; the applications (the userspace) are more or less the same on both operating systems already; most Linux commands behave like their SysV ancestors more than the BSD ones today. So really, any Sun-required advances could be easily merged into the GNU userspace tools. But the kernel? Merging the best features of the Solaris kernel into the Linux kernel is non-trivial. dtrace, zones, and ZFS are basically the appeal. dtrace would require changes all over the kernel. zones' functionality is provided by a combination of KVM and colinux, depending on your particular goal. That leaves ZFS, which Sun took special measures to keep out of Linux. Oracle can safely be assumed to have the same idea about its value as Sun. So when the only thing that really needs merging (linux is getting better profiling and debugging tools over time, and dtrace will be outclassed by it eventually anyway) is the one part that the corporate master doesn't want to merge...

Sun was never that interested in Free operating systems. OpenSolaris was simply a way to try to attract users away from Linux, which was destroying Sun. Back in 1996 I was replacing SparcStation workstations, low end ones like SS1+, SS2, SS5, and IPX, with intel-motherboard PCs with onboard Mach64 video (drivers were crap even then, sigh) and maybe 64MB RAM. They were just as capable of being an X terminal and far MORE capable at running the various local applications you would expect than anything even vaguely cost-competitive with Sun. You could get two systems with 19" monitors for the cost of one performance-competitive system from Sun, without a display or keyboard. The same is true today. Unless you need a megalithic server for a RDBMS, there is no reason whatsoever to use big iron when a cluster will do, and IBM does that better than Sun no matter how you measure. And of course, rather than trying to merge it, IBM is just letting AIX die in favor of Linux.

Short answer: Denial is not a river in Egypt.

Re:Oracle's short term memory

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, it's sort of open - there are quite a few binary-only dependencies that are going to be problematic, and OpenSolaris still lags behind Solaris in a number of ways. For instance, sparse zones are totally unavailable in OS because of the god-awful package manager they use.

People are welcome to try to keep OpenSolaris current, but it's not going to be easy *at all*, and as an OpenSolaris user, I have to say that, in my case anyway, it's just not going to be worth the effort. For all intents and purposes, Oracle's action has put a stake in OS's heart.

Re:Oracle's short term memory

[ducomputergeek]

At one time, Solaris was Oracles preferred OS for their DB. They started to shift away from Sun when they rebranded RHEL. They figured, "ooh, we can give it away on our own hardware and make more money instead of having to invite a sun sales guy on the conference call.". Now that Oracle owns Solaris and a hardware business, I think we'll see the death of Oracle Linux and seem them move back to Solaris being their preferred OS again.

I'm not ashamed to say that Sun was my preferred Enterprise Unix. Over all I've had extremely good luck with their stuff. It was expensive, but most days you could come into work and not have to worry about it.

I was enthused about OpenSolaris and tried it out, but frankly when FreeBSD ported over DTrace and ZFS, it became my Free OS of choice. We're running FreeBSD and had plans to jump to Sun when the time came. But while I liked Solaris & Sun, I can't stand Oracle. They have a good OLTP database, probably the best, but given the choice between dealing with Oracle and IBM, I'll take IBM. DB/400 (or whatever the series is called today) may not be as flashy a Database platform, but it's been fast enough, rock solid, and reliable anytime I've used it.

Re:Oracle's short term memory

[nxtw]

SunOS is SVR5 with customizations. What is SVR5? It's a kernel, a libc, and a set of applications and other associated libraries.

Solaris was based on SVR4, but that was almost two decades ago. Like modern BSD-derived systems, quite a bit has been rewritten since.

dtrace would require changes all over the kernel

Linux has systemtap. But dtrace has been incorporated to other operating systems already (such as Darwin)

zones' functionality is provided by a combination of KVM and colinux, depending on your particular goal.

The functionality provided by Zones is more like that provided by the OpenVZ patch to Linux or FreeBSD jails. KVM and coLinux run entire Linux kernels as guests, incurring significant overhead (over Zones, OpenVZ, or jails).

Re:Oracle's short term memory

[iggymanz]

absolutely false, there are differences in the code - parts of Solaris can *not* be open sourced ever because they are third party licensed. Other bits you only get the binary for, not the source code.

Re:Oracle's short term memory

[BitZtream]

That leaves ZFS, which Sun took special measures to keep out of Linux.

Really ... Sun took special measures ... to keep it out of Linux ... but to let it into every other OS everywhere ...

No, the retarded bullshit built into GPL prevent Linux from doing a lot of things. The only thing that prevents ZFS from being mainlined into Linux itself is Linux.

Way to try and shift blame but no one believes that fanboy crap.

Re:Oracle's short term memory

[Grog Boggoth]

What is Solaris? Solaris is SunOS plus a GUI.

No it is not, my confused, penguin-worshipping young friend. Solaris == SunOS.

That leaves ZFS, which Sun took special measures to keep out of Linux.

Not true, once again. Sun was investigating a Linux port.

Back in 1996 I was replacing SparcStation workstations, low end ones like SS1+, SS2, SS5, and IPX, with intel-motherboard PCs with onboard Mach64 video

My condolences.

Re:Oracle's short term memory

[sciurus0]

Which came first, GPL or CDDL? Sun knew what they were doing when they choose the license for the opensolaris kernel.

Re:Oracle's short term memory

[drinkypoo]

What is Solaris? Solaris is SunOS plus a GUI.

No it is not, my confused, penguin-worshipping young friend. Solaris == SunOS.

You fail. About 4.1.3 or perhaps 4.1.3_u1 Sun christened SunOS4+OpenWindows as Solaris 1.x. SunOS5 had already started shipping, of course, as Solaris 2.x. As any fool can easily ascertain, Solaris 1.x contains SunOS4, while Solaris 2.x contains SunOS5.

That leaves ZFS, which Sun took special measures to keep out of Linux.

Not true, once again. Sun was investigating a Linux port.

I was investigating running away to Madagascar to join the midget circus this morning, but I decided not to.

Back in 1996 I was replacing SparcStation workstations, low end ones like SS1+, SS2, SS5, and IPX, with intel-motherboard PCs with onboard Mach64 video

My condolences.

PCI > SBUS. Mach64, sad as it is, is superior to CG6, let alone CG3. SCSI is overkill for workstations, IDE is just fine (Sun was just barely starting to kick out IDE-bus SPARCs, but they all had UltraSPARC processors, and as such they had enormous price tags.) Small footprint was irrelevant in this context, Mini-AT was acceptable. And IIRC they had Pentium MMX chips, which would beat the hell out of any SPARC processor that could be installed into the systems. It's been a long time since Sun has had a good reason to exist, and that time was before 32 bit PCs with PCI buses.

That Article's Title Should Be...

[lloy0076]

"Oracle kills OpenSolaris" - what next? MySQL?
DSL

Re:That Article's Title Should Be...

[CaptainZapp]

what next? MySQL?

Yes!

next question, please...

Re:That Article's Title Should Be...

[Issarlk]

Oh god ; yes please!!

Re:That Article's Title Should Be...

[Anonymous Coward]

isn't that the reason they purchased Sun?

Re:That Article's Title Should Be...

[Anonymous Coward]

My bet is on Netbeans, now that they removed UML and SOA support.

Re:That Article's Title Should Be...

[wisty]

MySQL? They might have something more insidious in mind.

Re:That Article's Title Should Be...

[JohnConnor]

Oracle did not kill OpenSolaris, Sun did. OpenSolaris will die because Sun did not make it truly open source. Had all the code of OpenSolaris been open, Oracle could not shut it down, it could happily fork and continue living.

Re:That Article's Title Should Be...

[lloy0076]

That is a fair comment; there were or are moves to try and remove the non-open parts of OpenSolaris more open.

So that we're not throwing brick bats at Sun, though, I suspect Sun might have wanted to open all of OpenSolaris but got stuck with a codebase where some of the licensing for it simply didn't allow them.

That, of course, is exactly the whole point of many open source advocates' message - if you use ANY source that has a restrictive license you can lock yourself in and end up not being able to open your source as much as you'd like to.

There are arguments about the CDDL versus the other open source or free licenses but that, I don't think, matters here. My point is that even if Sun wanted to make ALL of OpenSolaris free (eg. GPLv3 free) they couldn't have due to prior legal obligations.

Re:That Article's Title Should Be...

[sheph]

LOL :) mySQL does suck mightily for a number of reasons. Realtime backups, obscure deviations from the SQL standard, query times on large tables, etc. However, it's better than some other databases for small jobs, and it interfaces with PHP quite nicely. I'd hate to see it go away entirely. On the Open Solaris front I'm not that worried about it. If it goes away it's one less choice, but it's not like there are too many critical applications that exclusively use Solaris. Now if Oracle started requiring Solaris to run their databases I might get concerned. I seriously doubt they are going to do that. In any event, as previously mentioned, there is nothing preventing either one from being forked.

Re:That Article's Title Should Be...

[Anonymous Coward]

Idiots. MySQL is garbage. Did you check their bugtracker? They've got CRITICAL data corruption bugs... open since 2003!

If you must drool like total and complete morons, then at least drool over a decent FOSS database: PostgreSQL.

Don't be such morons: PostgreSQL isn't anything harder to get up and running than that no-good MySQL garbage.

Re:That Article's Title Should Be...

[Anonymous Coward]

Hell they already have... I went to their little kick off here is Atlanta. It was so sad. Half the room was happy and excited (the Orcale side). Half the room was REALLY! pissed off ( the Sun side). After the lunch break I noticed about half of the people left and didn't return. I left right after.

During the morning slides I noticed that MySQL was never mentioned nor was the word MySQL found on any of the presentation slides I saw. They also said in so many nice words that any applications built by Sun are headed to the trash heap except Glassfish. Good bye Identity Management, Java Messaging and so many great applications.

It really does piss me off that all the training and set up of Sun systems I have done on our network that we have been bought and sold to a company that it the past we refused to even talk to much less run their shit on our network.

I just called and asked "How much for a Licenses?" and I was told no one knows to write and email to and address that department doesn't have a phone. No shit!

Re:That Article's Title Should Be...

[CaptainZapp]

(i reproduce the reply of the anon coward, since it definitely adds to the discussion) :

Hell they already have... I went to their little kick off here is Atlanta. It was so sad. Half the room was happy and excited (the Orcale side). Half the room was REALLY! pissed off ( the Sun side). After the lunch break I noticed about half of the people left and didn't return. I left right after.

During the morning slides I noticed that MySQL was never mentioned nor was the word MySQL found on any of the presentation slides I saw. They also said in so many nice words that any applications built by Sun are headed to the trash heap except Glassfish. Good bye Identity Management, Java Messaging and so many great applications.

It really does piss me off that all the training and set up of Sun systems I have done on our network that we have been bought and sold to a company that it the past we refused to even talk to much less run their shit on our network.

I just called and asked "How much for a Licenses?" and I was told no one knows to write and email to and address that department doesn't have a phone. No shit!

Re:That Article's Title Should Be...

[Issarlk]

> and it interfaces with PHP quite nicely Yes, so we can get rid of PHP at the same time. Bonus.

Huh?

[symbolset]

Talk about fleeing the cat to find the tiger. Wee todd you might be making this post, and id lacks something.

Re:Huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

As long as Microsoft is flanked by cheaper alternatives and more expensive alternatives, they'll maintain their position of having a decent, perhaps even good product at a decent price.

I would start to worry when Oracle begins to retreat from the DB sector, and I don't think I'll ever need to worry about MySQL or PostgreSQL disappearing.

Re:Huh?

[jedidiah]

The only problem with this rationale is that Microsoft doesn't have a terribly price competitive product when stacked up against even Oracle.

Sure, they have a "reputation" for being cheap but that's mostly nonsense. Oracle's reputation for being "expensive" is also somewhat overblown.

Except for not being well tested on 60 cpu machines, Microsoft's offering is not that different.

LOLz - Oracle can't afford to give away free stuff

[Anonymous Coward]

the thing people should realize is that Oracle must try very hard to make a profit out of Sun, and the only way to do that quickly, albeit very annoyingly, is to CHARGE FOR STUFF.

I love that Sun gives away so much, but if they can't seem to turn a reasonable enough profit from doing support, sales, agreements etc... then they must adapt. Oracle is smart enough to realize that CHARGING for SERVICES accross the board will give them either the excuse to wind things down at Sun because they are not making enough profit, or they might actually turn a profit eventually.

Oracle cannot lose in the short or the long run by getting Sun to charge for more stuff than it ever has.

i wouldn't be surprised to see more of this kind of behaviour from Oracle.

then again, a positive spin off might be that since Java is a pretty good idea, Oracle might be able to invest enough money in it so that it actually continues to grow nicely in terms of ability and applications.

i just sure as heck hope that Oracle will not start charging developer fees for people to develop in Java etc...

My point is that Sun WILL weigh Oracle down, if Oracle doesn't controlably wind Sun down, or if Oracle does not make a profit from CHARGING FOR MORE SERVICES Sun always liked to give away for free.

Sun is probably going to start disappearing over the next 1-6 years if Oracle can't make a decent profit from it.

start to die?

[timmarhy]

that thing has been dead for years. Which is a huge pity because solaris and sun's hardware was some sweet gear.

Re:start to die?

[paganizer]

I picked up a bunch of solaris hardware during the dot-bomb for scrap metal prices; none of it was top-end even then, but gods I love their stuff. I loved their software ca solaris 7, but as linux got better...well, I would still take Solaris 10 over most Linux distro's. And I grabbed the free distro of Solaris 10 as soon as I heard about it.
IIRC, in storage I have a SPARCstation 5, a ZX, a ELC, 2 or 3 Sun Ultra 5's, a Ultra Enterprise 3000 (which, BTW, rocks) and some other stuff that I have to think must have been one-offs, like a Solaris laptop and a really very pretty workstation that does not seem to exist; it's Dark orange and blue.

I used to have most up and running, in my little mini-datacenter, but I moved to some place without decent internet and had to move my servers to hosting services (which, by the way, after having everything in my basement from 1994 to 2003, was a convoluted mess from hell to get sorted out).
I might be helping to start up an ISP soon, which means I get my datacenter back up...yay!

Re:start to die?

[Inda]

Solaris was the first "proper" OS I used. The rest of the company was using Win3.1 but I felt honoured to use Solaris on a Spark box in the CAD department. It was light years ahead of anything I'd seen before.

The tide

[symbolset]

It comes in. It goes out.

Fuck the market

[Anonymous Coward]

fuck capitalism.
completely unrelated to this, but just wanted to say it.

Re:Fuck the market

[Anonymous Coward]

Not really. Capitalism is just the dominant system and it aggressively opposes alternatives by force - that is the standard you use to say that other systems don't work.

Re:Fuck the market

[Anonymous Coward]

I think parent was just expressing frustration at how "the market" is so often put above "people" by decision-makers (both in enterprises as in govs).

Capitalism does _not_ "work as advertised" because it assumes the existence of a free market of non-colluding rational agents where access to information is symmetric.

protip: the world is not binary; there IS a possibility of a middle ground, you know, despite all the "ZOMG SOCIALISM" rants you hear these days?

Re:Fuck the market

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah yeah, another well-informed argument from the local high schooler.

Re:Fuck the market

[Ramze]

Capitalism works, in theory, by survival of the fittest and is subject directly to consumers' support providing for their self-interests. It is the perfect solution for creating the fittest organizations to provide the goods and services people want at a price they want. It is fueled by people's selfish needs to grow and prosper by working hard as well as their selfish needs for goods, services, and the perception of wealth. It's really the only system that allows for a certain level of greed. Socialism is perfect in a perfect world with a benevolent, wise dictator where everyone agrees that we should all do equal work for equal pay and equal outcome... and the dictator tells us all what we should make, how much, and of what kind, shape, color, etc. etc.

The standards I use to say other systems do not work is that there hasn't been one yet that worked. The USSR tried and failed. Do you know that there was once a glass company that told its workers they would be paid by the hour, so they worked long hours and produced almost nothing? Then they were told they would be paid by the square inch produced, so they produced thin sheets of glass that would easily snap. Then they were told they'd be paid by the weight of the glass, so they added lead and other heavy metals to the glass and made it too thick to fit into standard window sizes. Eventually, they had to state every specification for the product and how much to be produced. It would've been so much easier if the company's income were based on the demand. Command Production and Quotas implemented by the USSR had detrimental consequences USSR

All systems have flaws -- they just take time to surface. Even capitalism requires government interference to provide laws to prevent monopolies, price-fixing, fraud, etc... but I have yet to hear of a system that works better to allow the masses to prosper.

Re:Fuck the market

[Anonymous Coward]

why do we have to wait for robber barons to come back before people remember then? capitalism works great as long as the government butts it's head in to bust up anti-competitive behavior. the current generation of IT mergers is about as bad as the last generation of finance mergers.

Re:Fuck the market

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you in fact know any good example of a working capitalism?

All countries I know of that was said to have capitalism was in fact socialisms when you took a closer look at them.

Pure capitalism is ugly as hell and does not really work at all. The reason for this is that those who get the wrong end of the stick has no other choice then to turn to crime. (At least it is the easiest way out.)
But then again, there is no known pure capitalisms that I know of, never has been.

Re:Fuck the market

[Anonymous Coward]

but I have yet to hear of a system that works better to allow the masses to prosper.

Hi. I live in a country which has a free-trade agreement with America. We have fewer tariffs on incoming products than America, we don't subsidise our agricultural industries unlike America (although we are accused of it, as well as anticompetitive control of the world agricultural market, whichis a joke given our size and GDP). We use a capitalist system. We currently have a right wing government made up of businessmen, and politicians that are influenced by businessmen. You know what they're doing? They're setting the country up so they prosper, by moving all the taxes they pay onto the poorest section of society so that the tax revenue doesn't fall, but they get to keep more money.

You said that you haven't heard of a system that works better, well, all ideology aside, how about this: capitalism is NO better than any other system, because those with money have undue influence on the population and authority figures.

Re:Fuck the market

[Anonymous Coward]

> lol and your alternative is? socialism? fascism?

free market in a free society. Which under current capitalists are just temporary tactics meant to destroy existing powers and settle in. They sold me them as propaganda now i want them as ideals.

Socialism and fascism? London gave money to communists and nazis- after a WW the new gen of capitalists come from russia and china. Are you sure these are options against capitalists? Note i say ists not ism. Capitalism is an idea. Ideas don't kill people, people do.

Re:Fuck the market

[BassMan449]

You are comparing capitalism to your corrupt government. Just because your government is using a capitalist system to get rich doesn't mean it's the system's fault. The heads of the USSR got rich off the communist system too.

Re:Fuck the market

[Anonymous Coward]

Capitalism does _not_ "work as advertised" because it assumes the existence of a free market of non-colluding rational agents where access to information is symmetric.

Actually the only problem with that is that people can gain success by cooperating ... which doesn't seem like a problem. And the only alternative is to give a specific group everything (de-facto dictatorship or oligarchy, depending on size of the group). The problem with robber barons is the same as the problem with your view : they attempted (and succeeded) in having the government interfere on their behalf.

You assume that somehow it is the job of capitalism to create a perfect communist society : you assume in capitalism everyone will get the same wage and that that is the only fair answer. But the truth is that everyone is different. Everyone not only does not get paid the same, they do not necessarily get paid enough to survive even. And some get paid disproportionally. All true. That is because they produce (through whatever means) superior results.

In a capitalist system you get paid according to the results of your labor ("in the limit", meaning this is only 100% certain after the passage of infinite time. In practice, however, it happens quite fast). Qualifications, knowledge, connections, ... all are useful in achieving that goal, but do not ensure success. Which is as it should be. The output of the whole thing is then re-used as input.

The result is that a capitalist system will (again "in the limit") build a world that works and works sustainably (yes you heard that correctly), a world that stays within it's means and does what humans want it to do. All other systems, including communism, theocracy (including idiocracy where the state ideology was "not a religion", as there have been atheist theocracies), dictatorships, military occupations of various kinds ... are both deeply unfair and deeply flawed. All such states are, at best, considered failures.

If it is possible to have ANY kind of economic system in a specific location, capitalism will work. All other systems have loads of very specific demands, the most common being a centralized authority to control people.

Re:Fuck the market

[arose]

So why don't you complain at Ramze, that his criticism of the USSR lays with the corrupt, authoritarian government?

Re:Fuck the market

[Skuld-Chan]

Some of the best living standards in the world are in socialist countries - most of Europe in fact ;).

The reason why the USSR failed was as you said the command economy, but also the amount of greed and corruption at the top.

The reason why our economy will fail eventually is because its what I call socialized capitalism - or in other words capitalism without risk. The second something bad happens the government will bail out people who by definition should have lost everything. For the simple reason that the rich get richer (even when things are bad) because they simply make people below them suffer. I think capitalism would work great if we actually had it.

Don't believe me? Bankers got bonuses this year - even though they lost money last year (and indeed many banks failed!). Washington Mutuals (which also failed) Alan Fishman who was CEO of the company for three weeks retired with 19 million - guess who paid for that? Consumers - that's who.

Re:Fuck the market

[arose]

Actually the only problem with that is that people can gain success by cooperating

Just to clarify. You don't think that irrational market behavior and asymmetric information are serious problems for a market?

Re:Fuck the market

[Ghoul123]

http://goo.gl/nJvN - identifying the negative symptoms of a capitalistic/monetary society.

Followed by: http://vimeo.com/7857584
and http://vimeo.com/7938805
for possible future developments of a better system than the current one.

The way I see it. There isn't much incentive to change from the current system. Just like
there are better keyboard layouts than Qwerty out there.. however just because another layout is 10% better
than the current one isn't good enough.
So far capitalism hasn't failed on a grand/massive scale for changes to occur... alas.

Re:Fuck the market

[gangien]

Umm well there's the US (we've done pretty damn well, though we're going to fall because we've strayed to far from our roots). there's certainl sucesses in socialized countries, but they're not because of the socialism. Look at hong kong, look at tiawan.

Pure capitalism is ugly as hell and does not really work at all. The reason for this is that those who get the wrong end of the stick has no other choice then to turn to crime. (At least it is the easiest way out.)

umm no. pure capitalism, as i know it, means you cannot force others to do something. so it means anything you are a part of is your choice. that means when you buy milk from the store, you're better off and the store is better off. Let's take a look at some heavily regulated industries vs little government involvement. health care: costs have risen, quality, in some aspects has gone up, in others it has gone down. But in places where government has had little influence, lasik, prices have gone down, quality has gone up. government is heavily involved in insurance now.

But hell, just look at everything you have, you spend so much less on stuff you want, as a percentage of your income, than your grandparents did. it's not because some magical government involvement made things better. it's because the government kept out, and people were free to do what they wanted, for the most part.

I'd love to hear your cases of socialism working out so well. we're about to go through a major economic crisis that's gonna affect everyone, it's largely because of government intervention. (looking at you, mr. federal reserve).

Re:Fuck the market

[gangien]

yeah, mods are so fair. parent gets neutral mod, i get -1 troll. hahaha. biased much?

Well then

[Sycraft-fu]

To quote Johnny Ringo form Tombstone "Well... Bye."

Seriously, if Oracle thinks they've got a money maker with Solaris, they are in for some sore disappointment. We use Solaris quite a bit at work, since we have a long UNIX legacy and still run SPARC systems. The thing is a bitch. All kinds of reasons not to like it. We only use it on our SPARC systems, and then only because that is pretty much what you have to use. Our x86 stuff is all Windows or Linux.

So I don't see what they think they are going to gain here. If they think they'll start making big in roads to the x86 market, good luck. They had enough trouble when it was free, charging isn't going to do them any favors. If they are charging on SPARC hardware, well that seems kinda dumb. SPARC is expensive as hell and generally only purchased these days by companies that either need high end systems (mainframes and the like) or by those with legacy SPARC apps they don't want to port.

I just can't see how they figure this will work. If they want to push their hardware, the software needs to be free since the hardware is already expensive and they are fighting an uphill battle against x86, which I might note is gaining more high end capabilities each generation. If they want to instead because a software firm, fine, but first Solaris has got to get a whole hell of a lot better. It can't compete with Windows as it doesn't have the app base, nor good desktop support so it has to compete with Linux. Well if you are going up against a free OS, you've got to find something (probably more than one thing) you do better than they do. With Solaris, I don't see it at least on normal x86 servers.

Re:Well then

[Anpheus]

Technologies. Solaris and OpenSolaris are full of things that geeks, Windows and *nix, would love to see in their OS of choice but Sun invented first. ZFS, Dtrace, and dozens of other features languished in Solaris covered by patents or from a just plain lack of ability and motivation to recreate those features in other OSes.

Even now the comparable features in other OSes are just now starting to approach a release candidate quality, and Sun has already started building new technologies and completely unique solutions based on stuff only Solaris has. Look at Oracle/Sun's new hybrid storage SAN for example. It uses a bunch of spinning disks (which everyone knows are so passé now) in a huge ZFS pool combined with 100-200GB of very fast SSD storage as an active logging and cache system. The result is that even very nearly random writes, when done to a small enough area on disk, can be done almost linearly once fully cached by the SSDs. You thought your RAID card was clever being able to cache 256MB-1GB. These things cache ten or a hundred times as much.

Really clever stuff which is hard to duplicate on other platforms. You certainly can't get a supported solution for something like that from anyone but Sun/Oracle.

Re:Well then

[Slashcrap]

Solaris and OpenSolaris are full of things that geeks, Windows and *nix, would love to see in their OS of choice but Sun invented first. ZFS, Dtrace, and dozens of other features

Can you name just five more of these things? Two real examples followed by some handwaving about dozens of others doesn't really convince, especially when everyone knows those are the only two interesting things about Solaris.

Re:Well then

[Spit]

As a long time Sun admin, I find a lot of Sun's whiz-bang stuff to be of questionable trustworthiness, especially the storage solutions. As for Solaris, the only thing of real value in the past decade has been the excellent zone VM system, other than that I don't go too far past how I used to configure Solaris 2.6.

Re:Well then

[Anonymous Coward]

I second this, I have no choice for my E250's, it's too old for open solaris and non of the linux distros support it activly.

Re:Well then

[petree]

Can you name just five more of these things? Two real examples followed by some handwaving about dozens of others doesn't really convince, especially when everyone knows those are the only two interesting things about Solaris.

Here's five:

• Crossbow
• Kernel Mode CIFS Server
• Zones
• Logical Domains
• COMSTAR: iSCSI & Fibre Channel

...plus five more reasons why ZFS counts as more than one 'feature'. Just cause it's easy to do with ZFS, doesn't each of these aren't killer features on their own.

• Snapshots & Time Slider
• Boot Environments
• Checksums for Data Integrity ('zpool scrub' lets me sleep at night)
• Deduplication
• Hybrid Storage Pools (Hard Disks and Flash are more useful together)

ZFS+DTrace are great, but certainly not the only features Solaris10/OpenSolaris/SolarisNext have going for it.

Re:Well then

[unchiujar]

Larry, is that you ?

Re:Well then

[Anonymous Coward]

Ummm, 1993 rang, they want their NetApp back.

But I guess that's what the noise is all about. :)

Re:Well then

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd be careful with COMSTAR, because it tends to become The Word of Blake very fast and then they'll try to kill you.

Re:Well then

[geschild]

"You certainly can't get a supported solution for something like that from anyone but Sun/Oracle."

I believe the likes of http://www.nexenta.org/ and http://www.getgreenbytes.com/ would like to differ.

Re:Well then

[bleh-of-the-huns]

This is the reason I switched from FBSD to OSOL.. what you said above.. in my 16 Disk Supermicro chassis.. I am disappointed in Oracle.. I While freebsd has support for ZFS, its a number of revisions behind, and can be unstable.

iscsi works well in FBSD 7.x, but not in 8.x at all, zfs works reasonably stable in 8.x, but barely functional in 7.x... makes it a pain in the ass and I am now using nfs for my VM server instead of iscsi...

Re:Well then

[Anonymous Coward]

And with Boot Environments comes
Live Upgrade
Live Patching
Test Configs

Re:Well then

[Anonymous Coward]

FreeBSD has ZFS, DTrace, and Jails (similar to Zones). It may have more of the features you mentioned, but my only direct experience is using it as a desktop OS for a while and as a home server.

Re:Well then

[Anpheus]

What a joke, those aren't SANs, they're storage servers. Single point of failure, and all that. I want to see a SAN. And Nexenta is just an OS for a storage server.

While SUN does not have a true "SAN" with hybrid storage it does support clustering the storage servers in an active-active config.

Re:Well then

[Anonymous Coward]

I take it you never used this "hybrid storage SAN" from SUN/Oracle you are advertising here, right?

IF you did, you would know how badly it sucks ATM.

And "very fast SSD storage"? Give me a break!

posting anonymously for obvious reasons.

Re:Well then

[Anpheus]

What are the obvious reasons?

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

Garbage. It will go the way of the dusty shelf. Who needs it anyway. Just like the AS400. It will take a while to die, Oracle just has not figured it out yet.

next up

[Anonymous Coward]

MySQL...watch

No surprise - Larry Ellison, remember?

[ibsteve2u]

In war you don't give away anything. Just most people don't know that Larry Ellison is at war; his weapon, technology; his battleground, the reachable universe; his goal, ruthless conquest and absolute domination.

Re:No surprise - Larry Ellison, remember?

[BiggerIsBetter]

In war you don't give away anything. Just most people don't know that Larry Ellison is at war; his weapon, technology; his battleground, the reachable universe; his goal, ruthless conquest and absolute domination.

Maybe he just needs a new boat?

Re:No surprise - Larry Ellison, remember?

[MichaelSmith]

In war you don't give away anything. Just most people don't know that Larry Ellison is at war; his weapon, technology; his battleground, the reachable universe; his goal, ruthless conquest and absolute domination.

Maybe he just needs a new boat?

I bet there is a little sticker on that boat which says Ass, grass or cash, nobody rides for free.

The future...

[Redon]

...of MySQL.

End of New Solaris Customers

[CranberryKing]

If I were the head of any IT/company/initiative trying to decide on a platform for a new system.. Nobody in their right mind would now invest in a Solaris system anymore than they would start developing PowerBuilder or SQLWindows applications.

It's been a fun ride Solaris.

Re:End of New Solaris Customers

[Anonymous Coward]

Oracle has a client base in the hundreds of thousands.

A good percentage of those:
- buy the hardware that oracle tells them to
- runs the software that oracle tells them to

Do you think Oracle is now going to recommend a Dell or HP or IBM server ? Or a Sun one?

If you're buying Oracle, are you going to care about a $10k server or $7k server when the database is so much more expensive?
If the Oracle Solaris RTU is priced the same as Solaris was (~$1000 in 1990s), is that going to make any impact on a quote that lists their database, servers, etc?

What hasn't been said is if the open storage products will now cost more because they need to be sold with an Oracle Solaris RTU - or maybe that'll just be factored into the existing price.

The typical slashdot community member IS NOT the typical target for Oracle products. Well, maybe about as much as a Rolls Royce or Bugatti Veyron. So whilst the comments here are amusing to read, I'm not convinced their accurate.

There's a fair chance that the pairing of sales will increase the presence of Solaris in the marketplace. Maybe not in front-end web servers, but it isn't clear if that's Larry's target.

And yes, it all now comes down to what Larry wants to do, not anyone else. Don't like this move? Write a letter to Larry Ellison (your email will just end up in his spam folder and never get read.)

Re:End of New Solaris Customers

[roman_mir]

Really? Solaris was forever a closed source OS until it became Open, but look at other proprietary OS software. Windows is doing well in corporate environments, of-course it is mostly desktop systems, but they are a closed source OS that is not being really replaced by anything much.

Solaris, if bundled with Oracle DB, will sell just as well as Oracle DB all by itself, would it not?

Re:End of New Solaris Customers

[drinkypoo]

Solaris, if bundled with Oracle DB, will sell just as well as Oracle DB all by itself, would it not?

That is an excellent argument not to sell Solaris. It doesn't help explain what Oracle is thinking, though. In fact, it only serves to confuse the situation.

Re:End of New Solaris Customers

[sproketboy]

PowerBuilder? LOL.

Re:End of New Solaris Customers

[Anonymous Coward]

Windows is doing well in corporate environments, of-course it is mostly desktop systems

Do you spend much time in real large corporate environments? Where I work, one of the world's largest banks, Windows servers outnumber all Unix/Linux servers combined. I've not seen this to be significantly different at any of the other large environments I've been in over the last decade or so.

Old News

[Anonymous Coward]

Wait... I thought it was already dead?

not worth the extra effort any more

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm afraid it's time to say goodbye to Solaris. I was putting extra effort trying to get Open Solaris working with my 3G USB modem, but now the struggle to get something to work on Open Solaris just doesn't seem worthwhile any more.

With the cloud of uncertainty surrounding Solaris and Open Solaris it has become time to say good bye to Solaris and Open Solaris. Rest in peace. Nothing is and will never be like it was before. Solaris is and was an advanced operating system, but it's time to let go.

Bye, bye.

They scare me.

[Anonymous Coward]

We still have choices of free OS to choose from.

We still have choices of free OS...a choice for a free OS...to choose a choice....free choices...from choices of free...AT H0

Re:They scare me.

[feldicus]

Indeed, can we be choosy about the choice chosen?

feldicus

And Java?...

[Anonymous Coward]

from TFA : "OpenSolaris wasn't even mentioned.If you look carefully, it's on a slide, but that's about it." So was Java...

I'm glad I moved to Python...

Re:And Java?...

[etymxris]

Unlike Solaris, Java is open. It's GPL'd. If that's not good enough, you can get JDKs from other vendors like IBM. Oracle might try to close Java development. However, it could then be forked by open source developers. An outdated FAQ seems to show some binary only pieces remaining in the JDK downloads, but I'm not sure how critical they are. And they may have been replaced by now anyway. Hopefully they are less problematic than "Open" Solaris's closed bits.

Re:And Java?...

[hotfireball]

Java is open. Stop FUD and bullshit. And stay with your Python, masturbating with GIL.

You can still download it so....?

[BestNicksRTaken]

You can still download the DVD ISO's of Solaris 10u8, so it still works, so is it just patch cluster access (as reported last week) that's no longer free (hasn't been for years has it?) or are they saying that the next version of Solaris (11 I guess, based on OpenSolaris) will have some type of 90 day timeout upon which we get WGA-esque warning popups?

Not really sure I understand this move, with hoards of people moving to x86_64 from SPARC, the obvious move would be to use that x86_64 hardware to run Linux instead.

Solaris?

[calmofthestorm]

What's that?

Re:Solaris?

[Stormwatch]

Solaris? What's that?

It's a science fiction novel by Polish author Stanislaw Lem, famously adapted to film in 1972 by Soviet director Andrei Tarkovsky. Its main theme is the impossibility of communication between humans and a completely non-humanoid alien life form.

Re:Solaris?

[frinkacheese]

The OS that just took 5 hours to install on a new box and then needed to grab a LOAD of patches to fix stuff, but it seems that patches are no longer available so I'll be selling a few V480s on Ebay in the next week or so and buying some more DELLs.

Though it was quite handy to be able to break into my old SS10 with the 'telnet -l "-fbin"' exploit when I forgot the passwords..

Sheesh.

Re:Solaris?

[Anonymous Coward]

Did anyone notice the parent's and the GP's usernames? Where would we all be if "stormwatch" wasn't watching out for "calmofthestorm"'s annoying calmness about Solaris?

Re:Solaris?

[Anonymous Coward]

That explains why the $4 "Solaris" DVD I bought @ Fry's wouldn't boot in my SunBlade 1000.

Re:Solaris?

[Stormwatch]

The SunBlade 1000 is a very picky machine. Get the Criterion Collection release next time.

MySQL

[achten]

OK. When do we see a similar statement on MySQL?

Re:MySQL

[seeks2know]

You know that we will be seeing an announcement soon assuring us the Oracle full embraces and supports Open Source and that its commitment to the MySQL is eternal.

Which is why they are focusing their support on the core features.

As a result some of the high-end features deployed by a only small contingent of MySQL users will no longer be supported.

Re:LOLz - Oracle can't afford to give away free st

[Darfeld]

Sun is probably going to start disappearing over the next 1-6 years if Oracle can't make a decent profit from it.

Correction : Sun will desappear over the next 1-6 years, becauce it's Oracle business plan.

What?

[Youngbull]

what kind of business move is this? OpenSolaris doesn't really have a lot of users! They might get a couple of bucks from someone acquiring a non gratis license. But is really a good Idea to squeeze out what's left of it, and ruin the brand name?

ZFS

[Anonymous Coward]

I literally just finished an unexpectedly painful migration of my home ZFS file server from a Linux/FUSE solution to OpenSolaris. I was hoping for greater stability and better support.

FUCK.

I've tried really hard to be a ZFS fan, I really have. This pisses me off even more than Apple's ZFS bullshit behavior. Fuck it. I give up. Goodbye, ZFS.

Re:ZFS

[udippel]

Why AC? I second you with your effort (trying fscking hard to fall in love with ZFS). I was hoping for a ground-breaking filesystem for the rest of my lifetime. After some bad crashes and loss of data (well documented in the Internets), we had to declare it a full-blown failure.

Re:ZFS

[SIGBUS]

The "OpenSolaris is dying" talk is FUD, plain and simple. Besides, if you really feel like you have to give up on OpenSolaris, ZFS has made it into FreeBSD as well.

Exactly same business model as RedHat

[blind biker]

And clearly, it didn't hurt RedHat. You can't blame Oracle for the attempt, it does make some sense.

To note: RHEL :: Oracle Solaris - OpenSolaris :: Fedora

Re:Exactly same business model as RedHat

[SIGBUS]

The one thing that is missing is an equivalent to CentOS. On the other hand, boot environments make it a lot more pleasant to keep up with OpenSolaris' bleeding edge than to do so with Fedora. If the latest update proves unsatisfactory, I can switch back to the previous boot environment.

Sad

[vikingpower]

Having been an enthusiastic user of Solaris-on-Intel from the very beginnings on, this is sad news to me and many of my colleagues. Now get off my lawn, darn corporate capitalists and patent-wielding punks !

Solaris/Open Solaris/SPARC are dead...

[Anonymous Coward]

They are the walking dead... Solaris needed less restrictions and more support to stay alive. Not more restrictions.

Solaris was a standard in our company but two years ago we made the switch. IBM, Linux, virtualization: there are too many easy, cost effective ways to wean off of Solaris. In two years we went from a fairly predictable expenditure of over $60 million annually to Sun down to less than $1 million. ....and that is never coming back. Vendors that only supported Solaris are now offering Linux and AIX support.

Bye bye. We had fun.

Awesome, I'm all for it.

[shaitand]

I support oracle entirely in this. I just think they should re-license Open Solaris under the GPLv3 so the code that was previously opened can be used somewhere useful instead of being locked in an ever more stagnant academic experiment for bored geeks.

Re:Awesome, I'm all for it.

[swordgeek]

Good luck there, fanboy.

1) Sun could NOT use the GPL3 (or 2 for that matter) for OpenSolaris, because it violated existing license agreements. CDDL worked with them. Just because Oracle bought them doesn't make all of those previous issues irrelevant.

2) Why the hell would they? What could it possibly benefit Oracle to go to significant effort in relicensing a product they don't care much about, especially using the most anti-corporate license commonly available?

The GPL3 isn't necessary for a product to be useful. Hell, open source isn't necessary either - but you DO have the source with OpenSolaris, so I highly recommend getting over your tiny little license wars, and joining the real world.

Eheh

[SmallFurryCreature]

Lovely anecdote. It may very well be true. No way to verify.

Of course my personal experience is that for the price of Solaris, AIX and HP-UX I can afford top-class hardware and more important top-class admin and have no problems at all with ordinary linux, not even RHEL but plain Ubuntu.

So, what does this prove? That you are a lousy admin who can't make linux work when others can, or that anecdotes are meaningless personal experiences?

Your choice.

I personally think that proper unixes have their place, if you can afford them, but many can't. But maybe I got good news for your boss. If he fires you, he can use the savings to buy Solaris and have it then run unattended with no problems. Because if your anecdote is true, then you were not needed. The few hours you put in could have been outsourced. Right?

Re:Eheh

[jedidiah]

This kind of drivel is especially ironic considering the history of Solaris x86 and Oracle.

Re:Eheh

[Anonymous Coward]

So, what does this prove? That you are a lousy admin who can't make linux work when others can, or that anecdotes are meaningless personal experiences?

What it means is that he changed hardware and software at the same time, noticed that some things got worse, and blamed it all on the software change. Basically he's an idiot.

Re:Eheh

[RubberDuckie]

Yet more anecdotal evidence: we had a proprietary database system running on a old Solaris 2.6 system circa 1998. I was able to move the binaries to a Solaris 10 system and they ran without any modifications at all. Try taking a binary that ran on a Linux system from that era and run it on a modern variant. You'd have to play games with libc to even think about getting it to run.

So we only have a few data points here; perhaps if a few other post their experience you might be open to looking at another point of view?

Oracle is the pebble in my shoe - ever so annoying

[Der PC]

A decade ago I abandoned Oracle for PostgreSQL mostly because of their inherently stupid pricing policy and horrible scare-tactics. It seems that Oracle is going to keep crapping all over my thang. Only have I recently decided to give OpenSolaris a fighting chance in our company, patiently waiting for 2010.03, when Oracle takes a dump on all my ideas once again.

Gotta love it. They are getting there. As my "Nemesis".

OpenSolaris

[Bugamn]

According to the article, Open Solaris won't be closed, but it won't receive updates to keep with Oracles Solaris.

Does that means that there will still be a free Solaris option for those who don't want to pay Oracle?

Damn!

[Anonymous Coward]

Now I have to go back in time at least 5 years, to when I still cared about that product.

Solaris, the new Irix.

i hate to say this

[hellraizer]

but i told you so .... :D

Where does it mention ANYTHING about OpenSolaris?

[Anonymous Coward]

Errr where is OpenSolaris mentioned anywhere in the actual link provided. It's not mentioned. We're speculating people!

Unbreakable solaris

[JohnConnor]

It's not surprising at all that Oracle would shut down a free competing product to its unbreakable Linux. In fact it would be crazy for them to allow internal competition between two OSes to happen. What I am really disappointed about is the fact that *open*solaris was not really open and that now it will die. That's what sucks about the various half-assed open-source licenses and practices of former Sun. Had openSolaris been a complete open-source prject, not dependent on binary blobs, the closing of solaris itself would not be such a problem.

Oracle Solaris

[mix77]

Sounds like a bad horror movie!

Talk about high aspirations

[Anonymous Coward]

Holy crap, after 12 years you're still an admin and you feel proud about this?

Re:Talk about high aspirations

[OeLeWaPpErKe]

Holy crap, after 12 years you're still an admin and you feel proud about this?

Are you still trying to make a valid point ? Because everyone here understands exactly why you would leave an admin job, or any other skilled position for that matter.

Re:Talk about high aspirations

[that this is not und]

A 12-year sysadmin sounds a lot like a long-term member of the Janitor's union to me.

Re:Talk about high aspirations

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, Einstein, anybody in computers is a janitor; just the pay levels change. Machines are getting both faster and smarter, needing fewer people to do a given amount of work. Add to this the tendency of most companies to treat the majority of their IT staff like shit, AND the hateful, unmentioned but expected 24-7 support so the PHB can get his email and you'll realize that ANY time in IT is time wasted. Even one year in IT is a career backwater. I'm doing everything I can to get out, even in this economy.

Re:Talk about high aspirations

[Spazztastic]

Holy crap, after 12 years you're still an admin and you feel proud about this?

Not everybody wants to be a manager.

Re:Talk about high aspirations

[Anonymous Coward]

A 12-year sysadmin sounds a lot like a long-term member of the Janitor's union to me

This sysadmin, 8 years at current job, makes a few dollars shy of $93K. Great benefits, excellent pension, 4 weeks holidays...

You were saying?

Re:Talk about high aspirations

[cayenne8]

"A 12-year sysadmin sounds a lot like a long-term member of the Janitor's union to me."

Call it what you wish, but it IS an easy way to crank out 6 figure salaries. If doing that for most of the 12 years, that's not too bad...especially in today's economy!!

Re:Talk about high aspirations

[bsdaemonaut]

I missed something, why would you not be proud of being a sys-admin?

I hope the sell it for real

[Anonymous Coward]

I hope Oracle at least makes it technically possible to actually purchase a Solaris license.

Last time around I tried it, it was so darn difficult for a private person. I don't want to set up a business just to be able to purchase an OS for my own use. Hence, it is just so much easier to use the free alternatives.

I just need the OS and access to patches. I don't need SLA's or any of that stuff. Just the basics.

Whatever they call it, a Solaris subscription ... maybe this could be different elsewhere in the world. But around here, I failed to give them my money.

The book

[Carra]

For a minute there I thought I wasted seven euros on Lems book or Tarkovsky's movie. Luckily it's only a free Solaris license.

Re:Look at the proposed date of the release

[dragmar]

DOH!. Wrong tab. If I could I would mod myself down

Not really absurd.

[Anonymous Coward]

When I delved into the murky depths of Oracle licensing I had a similar reaction to their model. But upon reflection it actually makes sense. Charging per CPU, or per core, allows them to differentiate their customers so that each pays for what they need. The small business who only needs a small server setup will pay considerably less than a multi-national which needs to run a RDMS across whole server farms. There's a term for this tactic, but I can't think of it right now.

And the point about pricing the software based on how much it cost to produce is irrelevant. No company sells a product to recover the costs they incurred in making it, they intend to make a profit.

No, this is impossible

[WindBourne]

I gripped that I did not trust solaris because it was given away once already. I said that Sun could do this same stunt AGAIN.

I was put down by MANY of the solaris supporters saying that it was IMPOSSIBLE for it to be brought back in.

More importantly, some of my friends that work in the brromfield operation ASSURED me that it would not happen again.

So, this is really not happening. And yes, MS will not use their patents to go after OSS if we develop mono all because some ppl said so.

Solaris has been dead for weeks anyway

[Aged Cynic]

They killed it when they decided you could no longer download patches without a support contract.

It's theirs to do with as they please, certainly... but not having immediate access to the support contract number shouldn't force a choice between taking a server off line or running it unprotected against newly discovered vulnerabilities.

Gracious, even Microsoft doesn't require that.

Besides, the nostalgia is gone -- CDE is deprecated, bash is installed by default, by the time you look at what they're doing with it, the look and feel is nearly Linux anyway (not that that's all that bad, but hey...).

It did have the edge under heavy stress, usually. Given the standard current approach of massively redundant clusters, even that isn't terribly relevant given proper engineering.

The bottom line is, even Windows can now serve in what used to be the exclusive domain of genuine AT&T-derived code. We may decry the loss of flavor, or even the loss of elegance... but by and large things are working better.

While I find the discussion interesting, from an implementation perspective... it just doesn't matter that much any more. This makes me wonder what Ellison & co. were thinking, but I frequently wonder that.

Re:

[natehoy]

I program on "the system formerly known as an AS/400, but has changed names so many times I don't even know what it's called any more" you insensitive clod!

Re:LOLz - Oracle can't afford to give away free st

[guruevi]

Sun died, not because it gave away stuff but because it overpriced stuff and made some really bad decisions. A Thumper costs about 50-100k and all it is, is an AMD Opteron-based machine with some SATA controllers that fits lots of disks. I can get the same hardware for 10-20k elsewhere. Same goes for their 1U servers - I believe it's 10k for an entry-level model. They have some really nice CPU's though (Niagara now) but they never marketed it right, never priced it right and management killed some really nice projects.

The same with ZFS. They never marketed it as a company but the developers did market it to other developers and the open source community which made it very popular. ZFS is simply awesome and if upper management would've seen what this project does, they could've easily been taking over NetApp (where their buyers don't seem to mind spending 20k/TB) and other high-end proprietary storage vendors while staying safe from a hostile takeover.

I am building a dual-parity, redundant 30TB storage array with 320GB read cache and 64GB write cache (POSIX-correct) for under 30k with ZFS. Sun could have easily charge 300k for something like this and most customers would be grateful not to pay NetApp or EMC for it.

AAAAAAAAmen!!! Fucking and sadly true.

[viraltus]

that proves that to be a manager you only need convincing directors that the multimillion budget is necessary for the company when it is only necessary as a confort blanket, many companies see technical competence as a threat and Armani suits as "this guy must know what he's talking about".

Please mod down parent

[Anonymous Coward]

The misleading parent shouldn't be at (Score:5, Informative) while the correction is only at (Score:3, Informative).

Sad solution

[Anonymous Coward]

opensolaris# /usr/sbin/shutdown -i 5 -g 0 -y
Shutdown started. Tue Mar 30 15:14:00 EDT 2010
Broadcast Message from Oracle (MotherShip) on opensolaris Tue Mar 30 15:14:00
The system will be shut down NOW
                                        .

Nexenta?

[Anonymous Coward]

Guess the Nexenta project either stops getting core updates, or they start charging?

If you use Solaris as a corporation

[Anonymous Coward]

Do what I did, speak with your wallet, tell them in no uncertain terms that if they continue to do away with free licenses (for personal/educational/testing use) then they are stabbing themselves in the foot, in that you will have to look elsewhere for a product you can do that with. The marketing person tried to say "Well OpenSolaris is there." Towhich I replied "OpenSolaris isn't Solaris, no matter how you slice it.". There are things you want to test, try, work out that you cannot do on OpenSolaris just because of the fact that it is different than Solaris.

Re:LOLz - Oracle can't afford to give away free st

[rbanffy]

"CHARGE FOR STUFF."

Sun didn't give away servers. Sun is a hardware company.

An appallingly poorly managed hardware company, with conflicting product lines (x86 servers _and_ SPARC-based ones), stupid projects (Looking Glass?!), but with some top-notch software (OpenSolaris, Glassfish and Java).

Oracle could just straighten up the product line and Sun would, probably, make more money than they spend. If they tweaked the Solaris licensing and support contracts a little, I bet they could grab a lot business out of IBM, HP and Dell's hands.

After all, it's easier to support Oracle software on Oracle (I can't believe I am saying it) hardware.

Now. if you excuse me, I'll wash my hands.

They are digging their own grave

[mediis]

Given my current Oracle "Support" ticket (for their database) will go a weeks without them touching it, looking at it, or working it, I see no reason why I should buy Oracle hardware. We buy Dells for Windows servers. We might as well buy Dell for Linux servers. Closing out Solaris, is just another reason-- in a long line of reasons --to switch.

Enjoy the sunset

[xactuary]

Stick a fork in it and enjoy the sunset.

Really?

[jotaeleemeese]

I have an E450 now that has not been rebooted in, lemme check, several months.

As for ZFS causing crashes when it was new, you were using ZFS in a test system, right? RIGHT?

Once we were confident ZFS was ready for deployment (and I would be damned to take a new technology without through assessment) it has worked perfectly fine.

It is funny that companies that have built a successful business around cheap hardware do so by the implicit assumption that the hardware is not reliable: Google for example knows that machine will break and then provision for the whole replacement of a machine as the smallest unit that is serviceable, you would not need to do that with highly reliable hardware (Sun does this kind of stuff at the CPU core level, that is how confident they always were about the reliability of their hardware).

You are also forgetting escalation: Sun hardware scales transparently from 1 to hundreds of processors and cores. With Linux you simply can't do that.

Re:Really?

[udippel]

If you really, really, want to read about why it is a mess, just read the ZFS mailing list (dunno if it is still up at Oracle, but there are plenty of other places where the archives can be found), and you'll read not only our gripes. We could be 'just dumb' (R). Others ran into similar trouble, and (Open)Solaris even confirmed some of those.

If you really are not a troll, let me add this info for you: SUN employees confirmed that ZFS has a tendency to die, and lose data (!!) running off a 'cheap' power supply, that - so confirmed by the same employees - make other file systems work properly. Another 'hot tip' was, to never, ever, run ZFS without RAID if you don't want to *lose* data. Not to talk about 'cheap' controllers.
If enough money is in the offing, I will gladly undig all those posts. Otherwise you're on your own. No need to believe me, do as you like. Have fun with ZFS!

Re:Really?

[Anonymous Coward]

Where do you people get this shit? Take a look at the top supercomputer clusters out there. Thousands of CPUs running... get this.. Linux.

All of this smacks of some sort of OS snobbery, just like you see with "audiophiles" who insist the overpriced crap they use is so much better than the inexpensive crap you use.

I've admined hundreds of Solaris, AIX, and Linux systems for near a decade. I love Linux. I like Solaris, and I loathe AIX nearly as much as Windows.

I gotta ask...

[PalmKiller]

Did anyone actually use free solaris for anything critical? I mean except those that like to put their trust in a company that was flirting with bankruptcy?

Re:I gotta ask...

[FrozenFOXX]

I cannot say where I work but yes, we use a lot of Solaris. Quite a few people who attend the various USENIX conferences use Solaris. Especially 10 works like a champ, and the Zones/ZFS/FSS/DTrace bundle alone is pretty nice.

But yeah, we use Solaris on 75+ boxes doing a lot of work with my country's law enforcement agencies. A lot of it's critical stuff and in our heterogeneous environment (we use Linux, Windows, and Solaris, each in a different capacity) of several hundred systems the 75+ Solaris boxes are the *only* ones without issue. That either means I'm a god-like admin (especially considering some of the setups I've had to build and maintain...they are NOT easy) or Solaris is a durable, solid OS worthy of enterprise-level use.

And I personally think I'm far from a god-like admin.

Re:I gotta ask...

[swordgeek]

Most major oil companies and several major ISPs live and breathe Solaris (mostly on SPARC, but that's changing).

Probably the most prevalent OS in large data centres out there.

Bullshit article as well as 99% of BS comments

[hotfireball]

OMG, folks... Some idiot troll made braindead posting and all the slashdot started buzz. FUCKING LEARN TO READ IN ENGLISH.

http://www.sun.com/software/solaris/popup.jsp?info=17

The registration process to receive an Entitlement Document is part of the Solaris download process, with the Entitlement Document being returned to you via e-mail. For this reason, YOU MUST PROVIDE A WORKING E-MAIL ADDRESS AS PART OF YOUR SUN DOWNLOAD CENTER ACCOUNT. If you fail to do so, you will not receive an Entitlement Document and will only have the right to evaluate Solaris for 90 days

Oracle only asks for valid email address. Once valid email passed and Entitlement accepted, 90 day restriction does not apply.

Re:Bullshit article as well as 99% of BS comments

[PhilipPeake]

I think you are the one that needs lessons in English language comprehension.
You took one small part, completely out of context, and placed your own interpretation on it.

Here it is WITH context:

In order to use the Solaris operating system for perpetual commercial use, each system running Solaris must be expressly licensed to do so. An Entitlement Document comprises such license and is delivered to you either with a new Sun system or from Sun Services as part of your service agreement. Customers who did not receive an Entitlement Document with their new Sun system or through their service agreement must register each system running Solaris with Sun. Before you install Solaris on additional systems, you must first register those systems to receive an additional Entitlement Document.

The registration process to receive an Entitlement Document is part of the Solaris download process, with the Entitlement Document being returned to you via e-mail. For this reason, YOU MUST PROVIDE A WORKING E-MAIL ADDRESS AS PART OF YOUR SUN DOWNLOAD CENTER ACCOUNT. If you fail to do so, you will not receive an Entitlement Document and will only have the right to evaluate Solaris for 90 days.

What it says is that you need an entitlement document to be able to use Solaris perpetually (that means forever).
This entitlement is ONLY delivered with a new machine, or with a support contract. So you have to either buy a machine or a support contract to get this entitlement.

If you didn't get one with your machine, then we move on to the paragraph you quoted.
You have to register either your new machine, or your support contract, and in return will get your entitlement.
If you use a non-working email address, the registration will not complete, and you will only be able to use the software under the terms of the evaluation agreement - for 90 days.

Re:Bullshit article as well as 99% of BS comments

[BitZtream]

You realize that you just agreed with everything he said ... right?

Perhaps you should check your comprehension skills.

Really?

[jotaeleemeese]

How curious. Other companies are using it as the back end of fully automated enterprise wide backup solutions (and where I work all new machines have been using it for the root file system for some months now).

So if the lost of data is well documented, why didn't you provide a plethora of links?

That is stupid.

[jotaeleemeese]

Oracle has made clear that Solaris has an important place in their integrated vertical offerings (why should they use anything else? the capabilities of Solaris+ZFS+dtrace are way above anything else in offer in the industry, Sun put several storage servers that show the potential of the integrated offering, Oracle I am sure is not oblivious to that, the day they had their talk about cloud computing in London they made a point of showing Sun hardware and of giving a slot to a Sun guy).

Another particular entry

[ak3ldama]

Ben Rockwood also blogged about this. The open source nature of Open Solaris shall henceforth be called to action...

The end of the month is here and OpenSolaris 2010.03 is no where in site and those I've asked on the inside are unable to say.
This might be a good time to catch up on non-Sun/Oracle distros such as Nexenta, Schillix, and Belenix.

Dumb move, Oracle.

[Anonymous Coward]

I use OpenSolaris all the time to hunt down bugs that effect our software.

I have answered customers why their crypto-card does not work, cause I had access to OpenSolaris.
(It was a combo between how Solaris worked and how the Sun JVM worked, that one I also got source for, so far).

When they close it down, I can no longer help customers in this way.

Our product has nothing to do with Oracle or Solaris or even Sun JVM (can run on other JVM, but it do depend on Java).

I hope Oracle understands what happens when they remove this option to help customers.

The problem becomes that we can not help our customers run our software, that the customer is running on: Oracle Hardware, Oracle Operating System and Oracle database.

Maybe we could tell our customers to switch to Dell, and other Database, cheaper, faster and much nicer OS anyway.

GlassFish

[Slashdot Parent]

For the person that this affects.

I'd say the folks who should really take note are GlassFish users.

It was always a gamble whether or not Oracle was going to let GlassFish compete with Weblogic. I think the Solaris announcement makes it pretty clear that the writing is on the wall for GlassFish.

Anecdote

[Slashdot Parent]

We could swap anecdotes all day long.

My current client switched fairly recently to RHEL from Solaris, and we haven't had any hiccups at the OS level. Performance is much better under RHEL on the same hardware.

Their EMC storage solution, on the other hand, is a source of constant headaches for the admins.

Obviously I have no idea what was causing your issues, but I doubt it was RH. You do allude to using consumer-grade hardware, so it's possible that maybe you should have increased your hardware budget a smidge.

Why would they try to make money

[ClosedSource]

off a formally free product made by a broke company?

article based on old info

[chillywillycd]

a) Yankelovich's quote about dropping support for Project Wonderland was on 1/31.
b) the wonderland project immediately became a community supported project called Open Wonderland
c) it's misleading for the author to talk about Project Wonderland like it's part of Solaris. it's a java project developing an extensible 3D virtual environment.
d) the comment from Peter Tribble was made 2/14, approx 2 weeks after Oracle's acquisition of Sun.
e) on 2/26 after the OpenSolaris annual meeting Tribble gives a number of quotes about Oracle commiting themselves to support the project
sad spreading of out of date misinformation

No longer free as in beer...

[roc97007]

...about to become dead as in dead.

Agreed

[einhverfr]

For those who think the GPL matters in this case, how will it be different when Oracle discontinues development efforts on MySQL?

Re:Agreed

[Teancum]

For those who think the GPL matters in this case, how will it be different when Oracle discontinues development efforts on MySQL?

You might be surprised. At least MySQL can be forked and the code based tweaked by people who aren't Oracle employees. I can't say the same thing about Windows 2000 or some other very definitely proprietary software packages and in fact the GPL may just be the one thing saving that software from complete extinction.

Re:Agreed

[einhverfr]

MySQL has been forked, but you also have to fork the storage engines, and a lot of the proprietary apps would suddenly go away. Maybe web hosts would be less likely to support it.

I don't think MySQL would be fundamentally different than OpenSolaris in this way....

This is just about price increases

[Anonymous Coward]

Posting anonymously because I'm an employee, but in the short-term, this is simply a way of extracting more money from existing customers who will be forced to pay the "Oracle tax". Oracle raised prices in 2008 and 2009, but this year we were told "you have to increase revenues, but can't just keep raising the product prices". The solution? Sell more of existing product or sell new products. The trouble is, any new products (either developed or acquired) need some time to get traction. What better way to boost revenue than to find critical Oracle-owned components that we aren't charging for and beginning to charge? Sure, customers have a choice technically, but in reality any company heavily invested in Solaris will find it too costly to switch in the short term.

I for instance don't care much about Solaris ...

[boorack]

... as I care about JDK. Seeing how Larry axes one thing after another, I suppose they'll do the same with JDK somewhere down the road. And for me JDK is the most valuable thing of all their (Sun's) good stuff.

Incase you hadn't actually noticed ...

[BitZtream]

OpenSolaris was dead years ago, its a pile of buggy crap.

I used to love Solaris ... about 8-10 years ago, then I was out of the admin world for a while, decided to play with OpenSolaris and realized that the only hardware you'd want to run it on is Sun hardware ... which is going to have a license for the proper version and not the OSS crap.

I really wish people would realize that OSS is not the end all be all solution to everything.

Annecdotes can support any hypothesis

[drew_eckhardt]

>Clearly, very few people here have any enterprise-level Solaris experience. In terms of stability and performance I compare Linux to Solaris like you compare Windows to Linux.

I used Solaris in a cellular base station billing interface appliance.

Moderate thread use crashed it out to the ROM monitor (we gained usable stability and a 100X performance improvement by switching to an event driven scheme) and sequential performance through the file system was half that of Linux (it was good enough for our use).

You can pick anecdotal stories to support any hypothesis regarding operating system stability you want.

no free Solaris beer == no iPlanet for me

[carton]

OpenSolaris is better than the non-IPS-based Solaris/SXCE builds IMHO so I'm not heartbroken to be forced off the Solaris 10 platform in general, HOWEVER other big fragile brittle Sun programs require Solaris 10 to work well, and won't work well or at all on a moving target like OpenSolaris. The one I know of is iPlanet, their MS Lookout killer email/calendar/... app. It's quite good, and it's also free-as-in-beer. I think there are other big, valuable non-Solaris userspace projects going on inside Sun, too.

Until this change, the s10brand looked like a good way to run these on OpenSolaris hardware inside a ``zone'' which is like a FreeBSD jail, which would be a ``branded zone'' meaning it can be solaris10 inside even though the outer kernel is newer OpenSolaris, so the brittle apps would be isolated from churn of the bare-metal OpenSolaris kernel. The branded zone is a way of really enforcing the kernel/userland boundary so the two can be upgraded independently, but in a rigorous and realistic way: for example packaging&patching, grub, zfs tools, ifconfig all get upgraded along with OpenSolaris without touching the Solaris10 inside the zone hosting iPlanet. It's a smart architecture, and I'd already changed from SXCE to OpenSolaris, gotten familiar with IPS 'pkg', installed s10brand and Solaris 10 in a zone, and started reading iPlanet install documents.

there is actually a LX brand for running Linux instead of solaris10, but it does not work well: it's Linux 2.4 / CentOS 3.8 only, and is not complete enough to run Apache. In contrast s10brand already works very well (no surprise there!), and it was this fact that originally swayed me to iPlanet rather than Zimbra, because Zimbra doesn't come packaged/supported to run smoothly on Solaris. Sun's work on s10brand had convinced me to use iPlanet rather than Zimbra, so eventually I might have paid for iPlanet support. (iPlanet is quite hard to maintain.) Good on them! Design a smart overall platform, and slowly, people will come. I was happy for both of us.

Because of this change I will probably either use Zimbra, or else use iPlanet on CentOS instead of Solaris, since both have committed licenses.

I'm interested in paying Sun for support, but I'm not interested in letting them rope me in with a bunch of monstrous interlinked packages I cannot separate from one another, then re-jigger the deal on one of the packages so I have to pay up or else redo months of work. I'm disappointed by how untransparent the change was: apparently it happened months ago, and took media and blogosphere (Ben Rockwood) sleuthing to uncover it. That's nothing new for Sun, though.

It's funny how free-as-in-beer seems good enough at first, but after about a decade, no matter how mercenary and narrowly-interested you THINK you are, you end up needing free-as-in-freedom.

And it doesn't matter if they recant, either, because now that they've changed their minds once, everyone knows they can change it again. From now on Solaris10 can talk-to-the-hand.

Solaris 10 is not CDDL

[carton]

OpenSolaris is a combination of redistributable binary blobs and CDDL open source parts, and is redundantly hosted on genunix.org so that if opensolaris.org disappeared tomorrow we could continue. In addition, I can legally copy my OpenSolaris LiveCD, and mirror (parts of? or all of?) the package depot.

Solaris 10 is nothing like that. You can download it legally only from Sun. so, if you had a commercial RTU before they changed their click-thru, AIUI anyway, you can still keep using it commercially for $0. However you can't get any more copies under those terms.

In the end, I think the binary blobs, CDDL's intentional incompatibility with GPLv2 and v3, the semi-dependence of OpenSolaris on the Sun Studio compiler, and their failure to win over a significant outside-Sun developer community will kill OpenSolaris if Oracle doesn't keep funding free development of the core OS.

The problem with the CDDL is mostly that it isn't the GPL, nor GPL-like enough: it doesn't have the same marketing power, and it isn't compatible with the GPL. And the other problem with OpenSolaris is that huge chunks of it are still binary.

You are semi-right that factors other than license will determine OpenSolaris's future, but for Solaris 10 license is absolutely the issue. There are two pieces to the announcement:

  * Solaris 10 no longer $0

  * OpenSolaris might be defunded.

The first is certain, and the second is very speculative AFAICT. The first is license-related, and the second is more complicated.

Those countries just have high welfare spending

[judeancodersfront]

unlike the USSR they allow capitalism. It's just a socialized form of capitalism where they take a large cut of the fruits from the most productive.
The rich getting richer is not a sign that capitalism doesn't exist. It's just a sign that the rich are getting richer.
Capitalism is a system of trade. There's no prerequisite involving distribution of wealth.

Re:Those countries just have high welfare spending

[Skuld-Chan]

What if the rich get richer when their companies and ventures are going down in flames as in my examples?

OpenSolaris?

[hallux.sinister]

I'm sorry, um... what is this OpenSolaris thing of which you speak? Oh... one of the ex-Unixes that for some mysterious reason is still breathing despite the plethora of alternatives which aren't liable to be yanked away from unsuspecting users and sysadmins. In retrospect, that whole AT&T versus everyone suit was probably the best thing that could have happened, painful as it was, to the Unix using community.

Bye Bye Sun

[Anonymous Coward]

It's very simple. BYE BYE Oracle/Sun. Heading back to HP or Linux on commodity hardware. It was only a matter of time before Oracle made the move to put an end to Sun.

Do you like Alice in Chains Sprocket?

[Anonymous Coward]

You ought to go to a doctor and ask him to "Check My Brain" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Check_My_Brain . However, that'd be assuming you actually have a brain (as we're fairly certain here at slashdot that you actually do not).

Many enter. Few survive.

[CyberdogOSX]

In any market, many players enter, but few survive. In the OSS OS market, Linux has risen to the top. BSD has assumed the smaller feisty competitve roll. Like MS & Apple. Now the others are being gradually taken apart and rendered irrelevant. They will disappear, like BeOS. Linux has killed big Unix. And good riddance. Anything worth keeping will be merged into Linux & OSX. There will be a few true believers that will keep the losers alive, limping along for years(Amiga), but nothing will ever really come of it. I do believe that true innovation can only come from small companies though. So I'd look for the next big thing in OSS OSes to come from BSD. As for commercial OSes, Apple of course.

This sucks

[thetoadwarrior]

I've not been impressed with some of Oracle's moves. I'd actually have been happy if they fucked with MySQL. I'd like to see Postgres over take MySQL and oracle could have helped but instead they seem keen to shit on everything else. It will be interesting to see what they do with Java.

I know it is true.

[SmallFurryCreature]

I have got experience not with Solaris, but with AIX, and it does indeed just keep running and running. And I also know that plenty of small companies just can't afford those servers. End of story.

In the real world many people make their living on 1000 dollar servers. They are not as reliable as the proper hardware but the 9000+ dollar they save is worth the risk that they are the one who experiences the difference between 99.999 and 99.

And your example is an execellent but useless point. I never felt the need to do that. So what use is Solaris to me?

Don't kill a fly with a nuke when you are on a budget.