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

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.

[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:How different does it have to be?

[Anonymous Coward]

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

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: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: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: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.