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: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. "