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OpenSolaris Governing Board Closing Shop?

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the so-it-comes-to-this dept.

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.'"

27 of 234 comments (clear)

  1. Sad by 0racle · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

    --
    "I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
    1. Re:Sad by allcar · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

    2. Re:Sad by Third+Position · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

      --
      American Third Position
      Finally, a real choice!
    3. Re:Sad by Darkness404 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

      --
      Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
    4. Re:Sad by Mark+Round · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

    5. Re:Sad by 0racle · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

      --
      "I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
    6. Re:Sad by Timex · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.

      --
      When politicians are involved, everyone loses.
    7. Re:Sad by Doc+Hopper · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.

      --

      Matthew P. Barnson
      I learn what I think when I read what I write

    8. Re:Sad by jackspenn · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.

      --
      Respect the Constitution
    9. Re:Sad by TheRaven64 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

      --
      I am TheRaven on Soylent News
    10. Re:Sad by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

      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

  2. lolwut? by wmbetts · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    --
    "Ubuntu" -- an African word, meaning "Slackware is too hard for me". - stolen from Dan C alt.os.linux.slackware
    1. Re:lolwut? by valeo.de · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

      --
      cat: /home/valeo/.sig: No such file or directory
    2. Re:lolwut? by Brett+Buck · · Score: 4, Funny

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

  3. Uhhh... by Jaysyn · · Score: 4, Funny

    Uhhh.. that will show them?

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

    --
    There is a war going on for your mind.
    1. Re:Uhhh... by bsDaemon · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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."

    2. Re:Uhhh... by ak3ldama · · Score: 4, Interesting

      ...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.

      --
      "but money is the God of Algiers & Mahomet their prophet." - Rich. O'Bryen June 8th 1786
    3. Re:Uhhh... by rattaroaz · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

    4. Re:Uhhh... by Doc+Hopper · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

      --

      Matthew P. Barnson
      I learn what I think when I read what I write

    5. Re:Uhhh... by anilg · · Score: 3, Informative

      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).

      --
      http://dilemma.gulecha.org - My philospohical short film.
  4. Old Aggie joke by BenEnglishAtHome · · Score: 3, Funny

    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.

  5. Accepting reality by ThrowAwaySociety · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  6. What about VirtualBox? by yuna49 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  7. Re:Why the silence? by Doc+Hopper · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

    --

    Matthew P. Barnson
    I learn what I think when I read what I write

  8. Re:Why the silence? by CatsupBoy · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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!

  9. A view from the inside... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  10. Re:Why the silence? by CatsupBoy · · Score: 3, Insightful
    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.