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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 the person that this affects.
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.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
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."
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?
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.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
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.
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.
that thing has been dead for years. Which is a huge pity because solaris and sun's hardware was some sweet gear.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
what next? MySQL?
Yes!
next question, please...
ich bin der musikant
mit taschenrechner in der hand
kraftwerk
Oh god ; yes please!!
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.
What's that?
93rd rule of Slashdot: No matter how obvious my sarcasm is, my comment will be taken seriously by someone.
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.
(\__/) This is Lapinator
(='.'=) copy it in your sig
(")_(") so it can take over the world
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.
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?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
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?
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
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:
ZFS+DTrace are great, but certainly not the only features Solaris10/OpenSolaris/SolarisNext have going for it.
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.
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.
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.
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?
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
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).
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
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.
"Just a fox, a whisper."
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?