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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."
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.
This is the closed source version of Solaris, you can't redistribute it period.
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.
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.
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.
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!
Why, yes, I AM a Pagan Libertarian.
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.
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.
Circumcision is child abuse.
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.