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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."
We still have choices of free OS to choose from.
They don't scare me.
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.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
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)
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.
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.
American Third Position
Finally, a real choice!
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.
what next? MySQL?
Yes!
next question, please...
ich bin der musikant
mit taschenrechner in der hand
kraftwerk
People who can be swayed by one persuasive salesman await the next to find their door.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
It's been a fun ride Solaris.
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.
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.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
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.
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.
How much is it?
I dunno, how much you got?
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.
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.
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.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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. ... Employees complained that lines of reporting were not always clear. ... Another issue was that Leeson was an accomplished liar.
...
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.
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
Frequently, the developers, admins, and DBAs that you're pissing off become the next managers.
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
Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter. --Martin Luther King Jr.
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
antipaucity
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?
antipaucity
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.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.