OpenSolaris Governing Board Closing Shop?

echolinux writes "Frustrated by Oracle's refusal to interact with the OpenSolaris community or speak with the OpenSolaris Governing Board, the OGB has issued an ultimatum to Oracle: designate a liaison to the OGB by August 16th or the board will 'take action at the August 23 meeting to trigger the clause in the OGB charter that will return control of the community to Oracle.'"

Comments

Sad

[0racle]

Oracle seems determined to destroy everything they acquired from Sun. We had 2 OpenSolaris machines since Zones and ZFS are just hot shit and several SunFire servers. We're moving the OpenSolaris installs to FreeBSD and are probably going to be looking at HP or IBM machines in the future.

Re:Sad

[allcar]

It is sad. I find it really depressing to find the Oracle logos all over the Sun site and Java downloads. I guess that Sun were just too nice a company to prosper in the cut throat world of modern IT.

Re:Sad

[Third Position]

This is not exactly a surprise. Oracle has a deep and abiding interest in Oracle's bottom line. How does Open Solaris contribute to that? It doesn't, hence Oracle losing interest fast.

As painful as it may be to acknowledge, this is actually a rational approach. Look no further than the fact that Oracle ended up eating Sun, not the other way around. I like Free Stuff as much as the next guy, but that doesn't change the fact that if you're in business to make money, you'd damn well better focus on things that make you money.

Re:Sad

[Darkness404]

Well developed open projects however allow for greater mindshare leading to more people using their commercial offerings. Look at Red Hat, because RHL was well used on people's personal desktops, it made sense for them to push a company towards Red Hat's commercial products. Same thing with Ubuntu, because many people who use Linux are comfortable with Ubuntu, when a small business looks to consider Linux, Ubuntu is their first choice. Solaris has a lot of features that could be very handy for businesses, but without experience, most tech people are going to recommend BSD or Linux because it is what they have worked with.

Support a community well and it will pay you back. Alienate a community and you are suddenly competing against better entrenched products.

Re:Sad

[Mark Round]

They’ve completely alienated and scared off the community around OpenSolaris, killed any lines of communication by clamping down on employee blogs and ignored open letters from highly influential and important community members begging for *any* kind of information. They’ve forbidden Sun/Oracle employees from heading up the Solaris user groups and booted the meetings out of their buildings; turned Solaris 10 into a 30-day trial, and pushed back the 2010.x release of OpenSolaris with no word as to it’s planned release date, or even if it is being continued as a product.

Oracle are doing a superb job of killing Solaris - at least, as we knew it to be.

Oracle just really doesn't care about Solaris as a general purpose OS (there's no money in it), and it makes sense although I personally find it tragic. It's probably why they're also killing all their OEM deals. I strongly suspect Oracle's overall aim is to have Solaris relegated to the role of running as the bottom layer in an Oracle "database machine" or Java appserver bundle.

It excels in these tasks, and it would obviously fit into Oracle's stated goal of being a one stop shop, where if you want to run Oracle, they'll sell you the bundle - hardware, storage, OS and software. If they no longer want it to be a dominant general purpose datacenter OS, then their approach makes sense. They don't need a "community" around the product, they don't need open source developers porting applications to it, and they certainly don't need the overhead of running and managing a community portal anymore.

I think the way they are going about it reprehensible, and it's a tragic end for such a historic and innovative OS but you can see why. Larry is all about the $$$, and Sun's approach just wasn't bringing in the big bucks.

Re:Sad

[0racle]

OpenSolaris as the basis to Solaris 11, or simply dropping Solaris 10 and going with OpenSolaris as the primary OS would have brought a more modern environment and significantly improved package management and patching while still maintaining the expected stability from Solaris. Oracle seems to prefer to keep Solaris archaic. They just killed their best beta platform.

Oracle got rid of the free to download and use Solaris 10 as well. Sun moved that way to entice developers to develop and test on their platform. Oracle, instead of continuing that to keep developers, moved Solaris back to a pay only. Why would anyone pay to develop or test on Solaris when the competitors are free and just as good? Who is going to buy Solaris when the only thing tested on it is Oracle Database? Oracle is shooting itself in the foot.

Re:Sad

[hitmark]

when the market goes down, the companies goes vertical.

heck, it may well be that oracle wont sell a stack, but rather lease it; with some kind of yearly support contract.

Re:Sad

[Timex]

Support a community well and it will pay you back. Alienate a community and you are suddenly competing against better entrenched products.

If you'll pardon the dated reference, this isn't the first time something like this has happened. One case that comes to mind is Apple's ending the life of the Apple II line. Sure, it would have been a virtual nightmare to keep backward compatibility as they moved forward with the series, but because of the way they went about it, many of their big fans jumped ship to the PC-compatible camp, rather than shifting to the Mac. Apple could have had a larger following with their Mac line, had they tried to make the change a little more gently, but they didn't, and they are only recently beginning to recover from it.

If Oracle is careful, they won't make any waves in doing what they think is the best action to take, but somehow I get the feeling that they're past caring what anyone else thinks.

Re:Sad

[Doc Hopper]

Oracle could leverage Open Solaris as the ideal Oracle platform.
They could push for high end web solutions to use Oracle+Solaris+Java.

Actually, Oracle DOES leverage OpenSolaris as an Oracle platform. The 7410 storage platform exclusively runs OpenSolaris under the hood. Bog-standard Solaris wasn't up to the job. We've bought a number of these storage platforms and are testing them out right now; other than annoying production delays due to unavailability of really-honking-big SSDs, they are extremely cool and high-performance storage solutions.

Also the newer T5240 boxes run way better on OpenSolaris than on stock Solaris 10. No ifs, ands, or buts. Better hardware support and faster I/O. You have to be running the 10/09 release of Solaris 10 to even support these boxes at all, and OpenSolaris supported them before they were even released.

Re:Sad

[Hylandr]

When I was on the Oracle / Solaris website recently I noticed the environment was very old guard. Hailing to a day when Unix knowledge was a rare and expensive commodity.

You could see it in the language that was used, 60's business rhetoric regurgitated for today's business masses that might still buy it. Now, I am looking for contracts that are migrating away from Solaris. Going to try and catch this wave early.

- Dan.

Re:Sad

[Doc Hopper]

Oracle doesn't care about you unless you're willing to spend a lot of money.

Correction: Oracle wants you to spend a lot of money, but they care about you as a potential paying customer. For instance, you can pick up a two-user license of Oracle Database for free and run a large production web site on it if you want. Think about your typical MySQL deployment: One user for the web site, and maybe a second user for the administrative user (usually "root"). Oracle gives this away for free for unlimited use.

The goal is to eventually rope you into a larger deployment with more capabilities so you become a paying customer. Always has been.

But I can assure you the sales guys "care" to get your money even if you're only spending a little bit of it. And Oracle spends a ton of money on trial programs, free software (Oracle Enterprise Linux, for instance), and other promotions to eventually drive revenue.

Re:Sad

[qwijibo]

OpenSolaris provides insight into the directions Solaris is going. I've used my experience with OpenSolaris at home to discuss possible future directions at work once the features work into mainstream Solaris. OpenSolaris is to Solaris what Fedora is to RedHat Enterprise Linux. Giving your customers a chance to preview what's up and coming gives them an opportunity to suggest a direction before it's in the mainstream release. Sure, a lot of deadbeats benefit from making the OS freely available, but getting contributions from the unpaid community and giving your customers reasons to promote your products should be a good enough benefit to justify the business case to keep it going.

I work for a hosting group in a large financial services company. We have over a thousand Linux and Solaris systems we support, with more being added all the time. We have numerous internal groups that need large Oracle databases on Solaris and we're happy to provide that. The people who write standards for the company are telling us to move away from Solaris and either move to Oracle on Linux, or for large databases, go to DB2 on AIX. When we're being told to drop Solaris, we really need something compelling to argue in favor of keeping it around. That is going to be much harder with Oracle's tight lipped approach to letting customers know what's coming up.

At home, I run OpenSolaris using ZFS for all of my storage. I run Ubuntu under VirtualBox to get all of the benefits of ZFS on the hardware with the more user friendly features of Ubuntu as a desktop. This is working out great for my whole family. Unfortunately, it looks like I'm going to have to look for another OS for the bottom of the stack since Oracle appears to be dropping it entirely.

OpenSolaris may not be a direct money maker for Oracle, but it has a very real contribution to their bottom line. With an enterprise database, you can get away with being secretive about everything. With an operating system that is much more widely used, that approach is not wise. Unfortunately, Oracle probably won't realize that until they've permanently lost several large customers.

Re:Sad

[jackspenn]

I guess that Sun were just too nice a company to prosper

Well that and they were way over priced ...

Well that and the Open Source Community caught up with them ...

Well that and they didn't have a long-term solution/strategy to ensure new entries into the tech field could gain experience/skills on their products so they would be comfortable recommending them. Sun relied on the old guard to recommend Sun, while newer entries onto the computer field were more comfortable recommending solutions they had experience with.

As a result apache replaced Sun's web server as the standard.

Red Hat (and others) took away Solaris server market share.

New startups began by running Oracle and other databases on Linux (or even Windows) servers in the initial low funding development stages and then when it came time to go into production, some of them didn't bother with moving to Sun hardware and Solaris, and instead remained with what worked and building it out to be "good-enough" for less money and less headaches.

I was in college from 1995-1999. The guys who loved going to the lab became Solaris die-hards, because that was what the school at that time ran (it is now LINUX, LINUX and more LINUX). But I preferred working in my apartment, so when I had took C, LISP, and JAVA classes that were focused on the fundamentals of code, things like recursion or objects, my teachers didn't demand I used the Solaris workstation, just that I solved the problem and got a strong foundation. So I installed Red hat on a backup PC and worked by using the same languages, with the same libraries, with the same text editors only on LINUX as the labs used on Solaris. At the time, I was the minority, but with each new class the LINUX users increased and those willing to invest in learning Solaris decreased, not to mention a larger and larger percentage of Solaris guys knew both.

When I went to work for a startup in California, they couldn't afford the quotes for Sun, so I purchased three DELL servers and installed Linux on them to accomplish the same task. Now nobody asks for Solaris admins, they ask for Linux admins.

Re:Sad

[TheLink]

> They're trying to become the Mercedes-Benz of IT. They're going mostly to the high end of the enterprise.

Climbing up the ladder may work, but don't be surprised by how high and fast Intel, AMD and their partners can climb ;).

DEC and SGI also went for the high end of IT.

HP's HP/UX is good as dead, and they've done a good job killing off Tandem and VMS.

So far IBM is still holding out with their POWER stuff.

Re:Sad

[CAIMLAS]

We're moving the OpenSolaris installs to FreeBSD

That, is a mistake. I strongly recommend you do some reading about the base requirements for ZFS on FreeBSD as well as its many shortcomings (at least compared to the OpenSolaris implementation).

Just a couple of the shortcomings I've hit against in the past couple months:

* stability issues. Even with the supposed "stable" 8 RELEASE and the 'required' ZFS tuning and hardware, I've had ZFS lock the system. It would appear the only significant difference between the 7.3 and 8 ZFS implementations is that in 8, they've removed the "EXPERIMENTAL!" warning on the opensolaris driver.
* boot mechanisms. There is no 'official' way to boot off a ZFS zpool, and all the ways that exist to get around that shortcoming are poor compromises, won't work from one release to another, or require use of unstable code (USB boot device, grub2, etc.)
* ZFS requires a *minimum* of 4GB of RAM for supposed stable operation. It will use that memory, even on an infrequently accessed file server. You will have stability issues with less, even with the recommended FreeBSD ZFS tweaking.
* Compared to Linux or OpenSolaris, FreeBSD stability - largely related to device drivers - is pathetic and amateur.
* A general "unprofessional asshole" attitude on the mailing lists. "I've discovered a bug, here it is" seems to result in things like "we're not going to fix that, we'll replace the system in the next release" or similar - if any response is made at all (admittedly, the only list I'm currently following is freebsd-usb).
* ALong those lines, the inclusion of incomplete/dysfunctional systems (presumably) simply on the basis of superior design.

Zones, however, would probably be pretty well implemented via jails. Those are cool. But ZFS is, IMO, not a good choice for picking FreeBSD. FreeBSD does a subset of things very well (networking, documentation, infrastructure design and naming), but ZFS is, unfortunately, not one of them (yet).

I'm very concerned that Oracle is going to kill ZFS off. It is one of the coolest, most useful things to come to storage in a long, long time. Hopefully the Linux folks can pull their pants up quickly and come out with something feature comparable.

Re:Sad

[pak9rabid]

Who is going to buy Solaris when the only thing tested on it is Oracle Database?

People looking for a stable, tested OS to run Oracle on?

Re:Sad

[Anonymous Coward]

Support a community well and it will pay you back.

Yeah, that worked out great for Sun, didn't it?

Re:Sad

[TheRaven64]

For some value of 'tested'. When the only people filing bug reports are Oracle paying customers, you get something a lot less tested than when anyone can download and try it.

Re:Sad

[jgagnon]

Oracle probably only cares that Oracle software runs on it. Everything else is superfluous.

Re:Sad

[KonoWatakushi]

Oracle doesn't care about you unless you're willing to spend a lot of money. That's not bad, that's just their business model.

No, that is bad; in the long term it will ensure their own demise. Actually, never mind, that is good. It is just a shame that they are wasting all of Sun's innovation in the process.

This is one of the great problems with investment in America; senseless greed ensures that the bulk of the money is concentrated in short-term high-return investments, which produce little overall value outside of these investments. The companies are set on a course for self-destruction, and the investors jump ship when appropriate.

Re:Sad

[poet]

Although I agree, kinda. We are wrong.

The market cap of Red Hat is 6.06B
The market cap of Oracle is 119.57B

Oracle doesn't need "a community" in any way. Communities are great if the bottom line isn't the priority. RHAT makes the bottom like "a" priority but they are certainly not making it "the" priority. They can't because they are an Open Source company and without the community they are hosed. Oracle needs a community like Bill Gates needs a loan.

Re:Sad

[rubycodez]

nice? pumping millions into sco during their lawsuit against Linux?

Re:Sad

[Bert64]

Also look at the Itanium processor line, it was too expensive so hobbyists couldn't afford them, and too new so they couldn't buy old ones...
Availability of a platform to the masses increases user experience of it, and users like to run what they're familiar with and have used before.

Re:Sad

[Doc Hopper]

It's not that it wasn't up to the job, it's that the features weren't/aren't backported to Solaris (10) yet.

Right you are. I stand corrected. My main experience with the 7000-series storage devices comes from some training classes, followed by hands-on recently as we've received a few of the devices with many, many more back-ordered due to the global solid-state disk shortage.

Thanks for the clarification.

Root file systems on ZFS were originally OpenSolaris-only, but are now possible in recent updates of Solaris 10.

Yep. Happy day! I'm running Solaris that way right now (though typing this from my Ubuntu Linux box).

Re:Sad

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow. You must be kidding. See below:

We're moving the OpenSolaris installs to FreeBSD

That, is a mistake. I strongly recommend you do some reading about the base requirements for ZFS on FreeBSD as well as its many shortcomings (at least compared to the OpenSolaris implementation).

Just a couple of the shortcomings I've hit against in the past couple months:

* stability issues. Even with the supposed "stable" 8 RELEASE and the 'required' ZFS tuning and hardware, I've had ZFS lock the system. It would appear the only significant difference between the 7.3 and 8 ZFS implementations is that in 8, they've removed the "EXPERIMENTAL!" warning on the opensolaris driver.

The limitations of running ZFS on 32-bit systems is well-documented. Try an amd64 box instead with the same amount of RAM you would get in a Sun box, like, oh, 8 GB or so. ZFS is *ported* to FreeBSD. It isn't magically shrunk down to require less resources.

* boot mechanisms. There is no 'official' way to boot off a ZFS zpool, and all the ways that exist to get around that shortcoming are poor compromises,
won't work from one release to another, or require use of unstable code (USB boot device, grub2, etc.)

Untrue. Our production SAN boxes are all GPT/ZFS-boot. Nothing compromising about it, it's rock-solid and quick. You have to follow some easy directions (the install program won't do it for you, and you must restore the boot code with gpart if you overwrite it). Google "FreeBSD Root on ZFS" for the instructions.

* ZFS requires a *minimum* of 4GB of RAM for supposed stable operation. It will use that memory, even on an infrequently accessed file server. You will have stability issues with less, even with the recommended FreeBSD ZFS tweaking.

Yes, which is less than an equivalent Sun box would require, isn't it?

* Compared to Linux or OpenSolaris, FreeBSD stability - largely related to device drivers - is pathetic and amateur.

You ignore historical Netcraft surveys which show BSD boxes run longer than Linux on average. Our own FreeBSD servers have a 99.99% uptime. We stick with name-brand devices which may explain our lack of driver issues. I would put driver quality in FreeBSD up against Linux any day, since I run both in our data center. Linux requires more care and feeding than FreeBSD. This has been my experience for over 15 years.

* A general "unprofessional asshole" attitude on the mailing lists. "I've discovered a bug, here it is" seems to result in things like "we're not going to fix that, we'll replace the system in the next release" or similar - if any response is made at all (admittedly, the only list I'm currently following is freebsd-usb).

There aren't as many folks working on the BSDs - no Fortune 500 companies employing armies of kernel developers like Linux. Sorry you got that impression. We're just overworked, not assholes. It sounds like someone was focused on a new system rewrite and didn't have the bandwidth to address a minor bugfix. Major bugs are addressed as a matter of course.

* ALong those lines, the inclusion of incomplete/dysfunctional systems (presumably) simply on the basis of superior design.

There's an old generalization which is fairly true: "BSD is developed by those coming from a Unix software background. Linux is developed by those coming from a PC software background." Superior design is part of the Way of Unix. It pays off handsomely later on. I wouldn't expect youngsters to understand.

Zones, however, would probably be pretty well implemented via jails. Those are cool. But ZFS is, IMO, not a good choice for picking FreeBSD. FreeBSD does a subset of things very well (networking, documentation, infrastructure design and naming), but ZFS is, unfortunately, not one of them (yet).

I'm very concerned th

Re:Sad

[Cramer]

The more recent sun machines... are "PCs" -- AMD and Intel (Xeon) based. The one's actually made by Sun -- the earlier ones weren't, btw -- are nice hardware. But they aren't exactly cheap. And in the Oracle world, you need a support contract just to see a picture of one. 4 year old BIOS updates -- that had always been free -- now require a contract. Documentation of any kind now requires you login -- even for free crap.

Re:Sad

[afabbro]

Oracle doesn't care about you unless you're willing to spend a lot of money.

Correction: Oracle wants you to spend a lot of money, but they care about you as a potential paying customer. For instance, you can pick up a two-user license of Oracle Database for free and run a large production web site on it if you want.

Uh, you can? I thought Oracle Express Edition was free (1 cpu max, 1GB RAM max, 4GB DB size max), but anything past that cost money. And if you hook it up to the Internet, you're paying per-processor, not-per-user.

Re:Sad

[Hooya]

> Not if they don't want or need a community around their product.

The thing about that is that while you may not NEED a community around a product for making the next quarterly estimates, long term, I highly doubt that Solaris would have any edge over other OSs that do have a community around them.

> I suspect Oracle are of the opinion that there's no money to be made selling Solaris as a general purpose OS

Which is another reason why no money will be spent on Solaris to maintain any edge over other OSs.

So, Solaris will die a death brought on by both edges of the sword. No money AND no community.

Re:Sad

[CAIMLAS]

I'm using mostly SuperMicro boards (Intel everything, "recommended" FreeBSD hardware), but I have some other generic stuff in the shop.

The one FreeBSD ZFS machien I've got that has more than 4GB (it has 8), as well as the low-utility ones, are the only systems I've not had stability issues with. FreeBSD 7.2, 7.3, and 8.

Where is it that you see that you can use ZFS root only "for a long time now"? Are you one of those people who thinks "stable" is stable enough, even though it's strongly recommended against using it in production?

I'm fairly new (6 months) to FreeBSD, having been a linux administrator since '98, using many different filesystems. This includes XFS and Reiser 3 and 4 when independent kernel patching was still required. It isn't since those days that I've seen the stability issues I've seen with ZFS on FreeBSD.

Your idea of "supported" is apparently drastically different than mine, because I've yet to see information presenting these things as facts; are they only on the mailing lists? The ZFS documentation I've seen has been sparse, poorly written, or (essentially) provided by Sun (Oracle), with little FreeBSD specifics aside from "this should work, try it".

The way I'm currently doing ZFS is to use a USB key for initial boot. This was working well until 8.0 came out and broke the USB stack, making booting from USB... "unreliable", at best. (Having the keys randomly fall off the chain until they were physically unplugged was also fun).

Re:Sad

[CAIMLAS]

Apparently you haven't read this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/zfs

Hell, even XFS is closer despite its lacking features, if only because it's stable and available. btrfs fits neither of those.

Re:Sad

[gmack]

The primary reason the Itanium died was because it preformed poorly for all but niche tasks. Intel's dream of super compilers that can take over instruction scheduling was wishful thinking.

The final nail in the Itanium coffin was AMD forcing Intel to come out with 64 bit Xeons that ended up outperforming the Itanium.

and alone one dark night

[nimbius]

on the internet, i felt my coffee mug rumble and the tubes begin to quake...i felt a fork looming in the distance.

lolwut?

[wmbetts]

So they're trying to force Oracle to give them a liaison by threatening to cut their own throats? Great move I'm sure Oracle will get exactly what they want.

Re:lolwut?

[valeo.de]

It looks like they don't have any real power anyway, so they're basically telling Oracle they will no longer work to Oracle's benefit for free.

Re:lolwut?

[Brett Buck]

It's the Judean People's Front crack Suicide Team to the rescue!

Re:lolwut?

[TrailerTrash]

It's the People's Front of Judea. Bloody splinter group.

Uhhh...

[Jaysyn]

Uhhh.. that will show them?

"If you don't give in to our demands...we'll give up & stop existing?"

Re:Uhhh...

[bsDaemon]

No, it seems more like "If you don't appoint 1 person to sit at a table, we'll dump responsibility for the whole thing on your lap... where you still won't have anyone pay attention to it, so we may as well all just cut to the chase and declare OpenSolaris dead."

Re:Uhhh...

[ak3ldama]

...so we may as well all just cut to the chase and declare OpenSolaris dead.

This is absolutely what is happening. From that post I linked to:

I once advocated this kind of self-implosion tactic back in the Sun days. The reason was to re-organize the OpenSolaris leadership to be more engaged and industry focused. That was a good idea back in the days when I had faith that Sun would "do the right thing". However, those times have past. Oracle has made it clear that it either controls things or it doesn't... there is no give and take. I don't think we can demolish the structure and believe that Oracle will re-organize in such a way as to give the community more power. It was a long shot with Sun anyway.

However, the most important tidbit he reveals lower in his post:

We're in no worse a position right now than we were during the Sun days. They didn't communicate, we had no visibility or impact on the OpenSolaris distribution, etc. Don't fall into the lie that things are now "worse" than they were... they aren't. Its status quo. The difference is that the OGB is no longer composed of Sun insiders who can get a sense of control from hallway conversations and are now as blind and weak as those of us in the community always have been.

My apologies to Ben Rockwood for raping his blog post of content, but this is /. and no one reads anything linked to apparently.

Re:Uhhh...

[rattaroaz]

If you follow the discussions, the community around Opensolaris is not enough to maintain a fork. 99.9% of the OS is developed and maintained by Oracle now. It's not like the Linux kernel where numerous people/companies contribute. Legally, you can fork Opensolaris given the CDDL. But maintaining a fork is just not realistic. If it was as popular as Linux, then okay, but that is the problem.

Re:Uhhh...

[Doc Hopper]

Oracle had one plan when they bought Sun. Kill it and pump a few extra rounds into it, just to make sure.

Nope. Oracle had a major goal when they bought Sun: create a vertically-integrated platform where they control everything from the hardware through the OS, applications, and support contracts. IBM has that sort of leverage with DB2 + Web Services on AIX, along with a killer international sales and support force with its fingers everywhere in the Fortune 500. IBM is really Oracle's main competition and has been for several years because they could offer whole-life-cycle, end-to-end support at a fraction of the cost of Oracle's offerings. The acquisition of Sun allowed Oracle to compete where it was getting hammered.

Re:Uhhh...

[anilg]

Though a fork (in the sense of OpenBSD/FreeBSD) is not possible, a fork in the sense of Linus's tree, and Alan Cox's tree is possible. The Nexenta project itself already maintains such a tree (nexenta-gate) for the Nexenta and derivative distributions.

In short, though Oracle develops a major part of the kernel, it's open source nature still allows for multiple paths the community can take. The healthy Nexenta community is a testament to that.

We do have some plans for OpenSolaris in the near future. If you're attending DebConf in the first week of August, look me up (and my talk).

Old Aggie joke

[BenEnglishAtHome]

An Aggie* comes home to find his wife in bed with another man. He pulls out a pistol and points it at his own head. His wife screams "No, don't do it!" The Aggie replies "Just wait; you're next."

* - Footnote for people not from Texas - Students at Texas Agricultural and Mechanical (A&M) University are called Aggies and are the subject of endless jokes insulting their intelligence.

Accepting reality

[ThrowAwaySociety]

Uhhh.. that will show them?

"If you don't give in to our demands...we'll give up & stop existing?"

It's not like they can really threaten Oracle into submission. Sometimes, you just have to roll over and ask, "Honey, are you really in this for the long run, or are you just screwing me?" If you don't like the answer, you just pack up and leave. No need to go all psycho.

What were we talking about again? Oh yeah. If the organization disbands, Solaris loses some of its credibility as an open platform with a healthy, involved community. Not a death blow, but better than prolonging a charade.

What about VirtualBox?

[yuna49]

I don't really care about OpenSolaris, but I have been a happy user of VirtualBox since before it was acquired by Sun. Sun developed some nice, but proprietary, tweaks to VirtualBox in areas like graphics drivers. I do see development continuing as I get prompted to upgrade fairly regularly, but I've been nervous that VirtualBox will also eventually be treated as roadkill by Oracle. Obviously there will always be a free implementation since the "open-source edition" is GPL-licensed.

I can understand Oracle's lack of interest in OpenSolaris since they've supported Linux for a long time now. (Hell, they even compete directly against RedHat with their Oracle Enterprise Linux distribution.) I do wonder, though, whether they'll stay committed to VirtualBox down the road.

Re:What about VirtualBox?

[Doc Hopper]

I do wonder, though, whether they'll stay committed to VirtualBox down the road

I hate to engage in speculation, but Oracle now has two virtualization solutions:

1. Server-side "OVS" or "OVMS": Oracle Virtual Server. This is a Xen-based implementation used widely within Oracle under the framework of their Grid and Elastic Grid products. It's portable, scalable, and is a huge revenue-generator in areas like Oracle Education.

2. VirtualBox, which is more of a client-side, "run it on the desktop" app.

They both have their niches, so I don't see either going away any time soon. OVS is a beast to manage on more than a handful of servers, and paravirtualization (required for good virtualization of Windows) is just now getting rolling onto the "good" side of the usability & performance hump. While Vbox has worked great in that environment.

Speculation: I think we may see some sort of interoperability merge in the future between Vbox & OVS. I am fairly certain there is no development along those lines right now -- Oracle's really busy working on integrating all the web-services & database stuff acquired from Sun, PeopleSoft, and other acquisitions -- but I bet it's on a roadmap somewhere.

Re:Why the silence?

[0racle]

I'm sure they'd find plenty of customer still willing to use Solaris proper

Are they willing to pay for it though? Oracle removed the ability to download and use Solaris 10 for free. This isn't 10 or 15 years ago, Linux and *BSD are more then capable of doing most of the loads you would throw at Solaris an RHEL has the cooperate support and a sane company backing it.

Oracle seems to be looking at Solaris the same as they look at their Database product. Oracle Enterprise Database, even for all its irritations and faults does get the job done very well and does shine against it's competitors, Solaris doesn't have that same position any more. There are many just as good products out there.

Ah Oracle

[sir lox elroy]

You have already showed what kind of a BOFH you can be. I was attempting this week to find drivers for some of our Ultra 20s, I can't even download drivers without a stinkin Maint Agreement. This is why I went with MySQL years ago, and not Oracle, hmmm time to change to PostGRES and dump all the Sun equipment.

Re:Why the silence?

[Doc Hopper]

Oracle removed the ability to download and use Solaris 10 for free.

Thanks for playing. Please try again.

1. Register at sunsolve.sun.com.
2. Click "Downloads & Trials", and select "Top Downloads".
3. Under "Servers & Storage Systems" select "Solaris".
4. Download the option most suited to your needs. For certain releases, you may be asked some survey questions first. If you're not certain you want Solaris full-time on your workstation, I'd suggest going with the VirtualBox image.

The assertion that Oracle no longer allows you to download and use Solaris 10 for free is completely FALSE. I hate seeing this canard repeatedly trotted out as if it were true. There were a couple of days during the support transition and shutdown of legacy Sun data centers when Solaris downloads were affected, but that's been fixed for quite a while now.

Re:It is obvious

[DesScorp]

Look it is obvious, Oracle is putting a nail in anything having to do with Solaris. Get over it, move on and start migrating.

No, Oracle is putting a nail in OpenSolaris. They're quite interested in developing commercial Solaris. They just want to be paid for it. You don't make money by not making money. You'd have thought everyone would get that now after the Internet bubble 10 years ago.

Re:Very sad to witness this

[arth1]

The road to the perfect OS sure has a lot of big roadkills:

- DEC OSF / Digital Unix / Tru64 - gave us 64-bit and support for more than one CPU type.
- Unicos - gave us NUMA and threading that actually worked.
- IRIX - gave us xfs, OpenGL, mixed 32/64-bit environments and tonnes of new GUI features now found in all OSes.
- NeXT - gave us heartburn, upset stomach, indigestion and envy of those who could actually BUY a system.

and now OpenSolaris goes too, and will undoubtedly drag Solaris with it in the long run.
With HP-UX on life support, HURD being just a wet dream, and BSD evolving as quickly as granite, there's not a lot to choose from anymore, at least not for servers.

Re:Why the silence?

[CatsupBoy]

What buttons do I have to click to get my free patches? Oh that's right, they don't supply patches for free anymore.

If you think downloading a base image constitutes as using for free, then I'm afraid you are mistaken. It takes security patches and bug fixes to keep an OS in production quality working order.

Maybe you just re-install every 6 months when the new media set is released? right!

A view from the inside...

[Anonymous Coward]

I was a Sun employee, I'm now an Oracle employee. I've posted in the past about internal, but non-secret Sun stuff using my registered nickname because I didn't think it mattered all that much. These days, however, the corporate secrecy is verging on paranoia, and so I don't dare use my regular nickname.

Anyhow, I'll keep this short. First of all, Oracle does not say anything to anyone outside of Oracle about future plans. Period. It's repeated over and over in the brainwashing (er, onboarding) presentations. The rationale for this is that if customers think they know what new products are in the pipeline and when they'll come out, they'll plan their purchases accordingly. There's also the potential loss of competitive advantage.

Second, Oracle doesn't give a rat's ass about building communities and generating interest with Open Source. They'll re-brand Red Hat because they know people want Linux servers, but they don't care about trying to make Open Solaris a gateway to "real" Solaris. They'll make Solaris the premier platform for high-end Oracle DBs, and they'll use it for storage solutions which take on NetApp. Beyond that, they don't care about whether or not Solaris "wins" against Linux. They don't need it to. The goal is to leverage Solaris (on Sparc for Oracle DB, x86 for storage) into closed solutions which have huge profit margins. If it's not going to create large margins, it won't live long at Oracle.

Profit is king here. Anything else is overhead, and overhead eats into Larry's yacht fund.

Yes, I'm looking elsewhere. The best and brightest have been leaving in droves. I am neither, but I'm still pretty good; just somewhat less mobile. Working on that.

Re:A view from the inside...

[Anonymous Coward]

The best and brightest have been leaving in droves.

Does that include Solaris Kernel Engineering folks? If so that is a very interesting situation. My reading was that the kernel folks never wanted to Open Source Solaris - at least not GPL it and so may be they are happy with the axe falling on OpenSolaris and they might just be staying. But it is hard to believe hard core Sun talent adjusting with the realities at Oracle. (Sun was Engineering dominated - as you pointed out, Oracle is all about $$$.)

If the kernel folks are leaving it's huge loss for Oracle if they intend to keep Solaris alive and kicking - it could be Linux's gain if those people made the next logical career choice. Any rate worth keeping an eye on.

Re:A view from the inside...

[belthize]

I was at the LUG 2010 (Lustre Users group) and there was a very similar sense of disquiet where Lustre is concerned. The corporate line seemed to be: You'll be able to download Lustre for free but if you want any kind of support you'll have to install Lustre on a box from one of our preferred vendors running our Linux variant.

Granted it's not clear exactly what 'any kind of support' means. As it stands now the mailing list is very active and it doesn't really matter what your support status is. If that stays the same then wonderful. If the Lustre devs at Oracle are instructed to stop interacting with all but paying customers it's a real problem.

Re:Why the silence?

[CatsupBoy]

Yes, you could download patches for free from sunsolve for many years before Oracle.

This is not bashing, its the truth. Competitors such as IBM and HP currently provide patch information, downloads, and knowledge base articles for free, Oracle does not. And now they bled that mentality into Solaris.

It's unfortunate to see an open community die like this, but if it can't survive without Oracle, then there probably weren't many people there to begin with.

There were plenty of ppl involved and interested, but its based on a proprietary platform, of course it can't survive without the parent company's support. The larger point is that they are, seemingly, purposefully killing it.

Re:Why the silence?

[Doc Hopper]

What buttons do I have to click to get my free patches? Oh that's right, they don't supply patches for free anymore.

Wrong again. You get LOTS of free patches with a free install of Solaris. RedHat set the pace for this: if you install RHEL, you have to use up2date which requires a registered system with the RedHat Network (RHN). If you don't want to register and pay for RHN, you wait for the next release and do your upgrade from that. Sun implemented a similar system -- in planning, testing, and preliminary deployment LONG before the acquisition -- requiring registration and a support contract number before allowing entitlement to certain patches in a more timely fashion than the traditional six-month release cycle.

Maybe you just re-install every 6 months when the new media set is released? right!

Actually, you can upgrade off the install CD from the media sets, too, without reinstalling. Always have been able to, and it's a simple, easy way to keep up-to-date, though it requires some downtime to install. Downside: no zero-day exploit fixes. Upside: free patch sets every six months. As long as I've been working with Solaris -- since 1999, and up through right now while I'm downloading the latest kernel exploit & StarOffice 8 security patch on my Solaris box -- the zero-day security exploits are listed in the patch entitlement for ALL Solaris systems, not just those with a support contract.

Upgrade old release (7, 8, 9): http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/doc/817-3799/6mjcan1v6?l=en&a=view
Upgrade newer release (10): http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/doc/817-0544/6mgbagb1c?l=en&a=view (x86 on this page; the SPARC install instructions are also in the documentation)ma

To get your security patches, go to Launch-> Applications -> Utilities -> Update Manager. Go through the registration wizard. Choose "Continue without providing a Service Plan Number". Accept the software license agreement. Finish the registration; if you want to use this as a base image for mass-deployment, click the "enable auto registration" option.

Next select all updates, and install them.

I understand you're concerned with not having the latest-and-greatest usability and functionality updates to your OS on a faster-than-6-month schedule. If it's of sufficient concern to you, register for a cheap Solaris support contract through SDN and be done with it. But for the rest of the world that wants to continue using Solaris for free, CRITICAL SECURITY PATCHES ARE AVAILABLE TO ANYONE WITH A SUN ONLINE ACCOUNT.

Free security updates online as soon as you get around to installing them. Free every-six-month usability and functionality updates. What exactly is the problem with this patch schedule? That those who choose to pay nothing for a great operating system don't get usability and functionality updates on the same schedule as paying customers?

OpenSolaris exists to fill that niche: customers who need bleeding-edge features on a very timely schedule and don't want to spend a lot of money. You can even patch production Solaris boxes from OpenSolaris patches if you wish, though I understand some assembly is required. Never done that myself. Never felt the need.

Overall, I think the Oracle acquisition of Sun has been a good thing for both companies. Sun gets to keep the lights on and payroll flowing, Oracle gets a bunch of hardware & software products in its portfolio.

Re:Great!

[Anonymous Coward]

Another Sun/Oracle internal person here....

Yea, but will they listen and accept the seasoned incoming ex-Sun folks? I have a great libthreads mutex bug, I can get two or more threads in a protected block of code pretty consistently, and have sprinkled assert()'s all over to assure it's the library and not our code. Nope... Linux maintainer doesn't care. I'm not in the "inner circle" and can't make much trouble for him.

If the Linux people want the ex-Sun devs, they need to embrace them as peers, not vanquished competitors.