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

That's fine

[Darkk]

We still have choices of free OS to choose from.

They don't scare me.

Re:That's fine

[Teancum]

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.

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:That's fine

[TheRaven64]

Oh, shut up. What is it with GPL fanatics always feeling the need to claim the GPL will save the world?

The GPL would have absolutely no impact on this. Oracle owns the Solaris copyrights. It would make absolutely no difference if Sun had chosen the GPL instead of the CDDL for OpenSolaris. They would still have the right to release future versions as proprietary software and not release their changes (although no one else would have, which would have killed things like NexentaStor). The exact same can happen with MySQL now; Oracle could simply decide not to release any future improvements under the GPL and keep shipping the proprietary version. You'd have exactly the same choice; either use the proprietary version, use something else, or fork.

With OpenSolaris, there are already a couple of active forks, so the code remains open, it just doesn't necessarily get enhancements from Oracle. The FSF owns the copyright on all GNU software; they unilaterally relicensed most of it as [L]GPLv3 when the new license came out, meaning that you couldn't link it with any GPLv2-only code (e.g. Poppler, which is currently the only decent PDF rendering library for *NIX). Is this safer according to your FSF-approved definition of freedom?

Re:That's fine

[diegocg]

The license don't matter in this case. Even if Opensolaris was 100% GPL, Oracle still would release Solaris with propietary addons. They can do that because they own the copyright (if you want to get a patch into the opensolaris repositories, you need to give first your copyrights with Sun/Oracle). The license doesn't matter to them. Sun/Oracle can release propietary versions of Solaris, but nobody else can - that's the sad truth behind Sun's "open source".

I feel sorry

[SigNuZX728]

For the person that this affects.

Re:I feel sorry

[rodgerd]

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.

Re:I feel sorry

[Znork]

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.

Re:I feel sorry

[VolciMaster]

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

They certainly like to send people away.

[sethstorm]

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.

Re:They certainly like to send people away.

[Third Position]

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.

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."

May?

[symbolset]

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.

Re:May?

[Anonymous Coward]

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)

Re:May?

[Rakishi]

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.

Re:May?

[symbolset]

People who can be swayed by one persuasive salesman await the next to find their door.

Re:May?

[Builder]

You need to persuade ME that you can support your products. Every chance I get, I replace Oracle products with non-Oracle products because I'm pretty much sick and tired of having to rely on some random guy at Veritas who has happened to see the same RAC problem as I am having when your tech monkeys force me to raise a ticket with my storage vendor because theyr'e too clueless to work out the problem.

About the only things I'm likely to keep (for now) are coherence and Java, just because there's nothing else out there that competes with it. But for most of my other needs, other products exist. MSSQL, JBoss, etc.

We don't get the support we pay for, not even on a level 1 outage, so I'll be damned if I ever spend another cent with Oracle that I don't have to.

Re:May?

[swilver]

If you treat any of those products the way you bungle your main Oracle product, then I'm sure they'll soon be as despised as your 1970's Database that needs constant supervision and doesn't even know the difference between NULL and a known empty value.

Eventually I think having the programmers, architects and designers against you is gonna cost you -- I sure as hell will not use your Database product as more than a glorified storage system (and a picky one at that), I will not touch JHeadStart or Oracle Developer with a 10ft pole, and I will actively try and replace anything Oracle with a free solution. It will no doubt please you that Oracle has been above Microsoft on my "evil" list for quite a few years now.

Re:May?

[hairyfeet]

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.

Re:May?

[drinkypoo]

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.

Re:How different does it have to be?

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Oracle's short term memory

[Korgan]

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.

Re:That Article's Title Should Be...

[CaptainZapp]

what next? MySQL?

Yes!

next question, please...

End of New Solaris Customers

[CranberryKing]

If I were the head of any IT/company/initiative trying to decide on a platform for a new system.. Nobody in their right mind would now invest in a Solaris system anymore than they would start developing PowerBuilder or SQLWindows applications.

It's been a fun ride Solaris.

Re:Well then

[Anpheus]

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.

Re:Solaris?

[Stormwatch]

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.

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.