The Future of OpenSolaris Revealed

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The Future of OpenSolaris Revealed

Posted by Soulskill on Friday August 13, 2010 @07:14AM from the long-live-illumos dept.

ywlke writes "A few hours ago, an internal Oracle memo was leaked to the osol-discuss mailing list at opensolaris.org. It details Oracle's plans for Solaris and OpenSolaris; namely that OpenSolaris, the distribution, is dead. Solaris Express has come back from the grave, and source code will still be CDDL, but won't be released to the public until some time after it is incorporated into a binary release. What happens to the community now is anybody's guess." The full text of the memo is available on the mailing list, as well as apparent confirmation from an Oracle employee. That said, no official announcement has yet been made.

342 comments

The Future of OpenSolaris Revealed by AnonymousClown · 2010-08-13 07:16 · Score: 4, Funny

I thought it was a new O'Reily title and this was a book review. Doesn't that sound like a title of a book? The Animal on the cover would be some old Gypsy looking into a crystal ball.
Never mind.

--
RIP America
July 4, 1776 - September 11, 2001
1. Re:The Future of OpenSolaris Revealed by falzer · 2010-08-13 07:18 · Score: 1
  
  Only animal woodcuts from the 1800s, pal.
  I got nothin'.
2. Re:The Future of OpenSolaris Revealed by Anonymous Coward · 2010-08-13 07:31 · Score: 0
  
  how about ye olde penis bird?
3. Re:The Future of OpenSolaris Revealed by nametaken · 2010-08-13 07:53 · Score: 2, Insightful
  
  O'Reily uses the image of a gypsy looking into a crystal ball on the cover of an Oracle book? TACKY!
4. Re:The Future of OpenSolaris Revealed by Anonymous Coward · 2010-08-13 08:43 · Score: 0
  
  I'm not sure if this memo is accurate or not, but it certainly has the right names attached to it. It might be worth noting, though, that the "confirmation from an Oracle employee" named Elaine Ashton seems kind of fishy to me, since there is no Elaine Ashton in the Oracle employee database. Could be a fake to try and pump up the perceived legitimacy of the memo.
5. Re:The Future of OpenSolaris Revealed by Darinbob · 2010-08-13 09:22 · Score: 3, Funny
  
  Gypsy Moth
6. Re:The Future of OpenSolaris Revealed by think_nix · 2010-08-13 09:25 · Score: 2, Informative
  
  I thought it was a new O'Reily title and this was a book review. Doesn't that sound like a title of a book? The Animal on the cover would be some old Gypsy looking into a crystal ball.
  Never mind.
  lol ;) but TFA
  
  Solaris is the #1 Enterprise Operating System. We have the leading
  share of business applications on Solaris today, including both SPARC
  and x64.
  With everything going on at SC-Oracle these days , really sounds like they are wayyyyyy to full of themselves ok I will give them the SPARC , but #1 Enterprise ?? Depends on what.. So many of our customers that we had on Solaris have gotten so scared (over these last few months , because of the Oracle aquisition ( and I am talking paying Enterprise customers, not open) we have had to move them to AIX or linux, depending. Sad day for Solaris in general imho.
7. Re:The Future of OpenSolaris Revealed by Chaos+Incarnate · 2010-08-13 13:18 · Score: 1
  
  Googling her name and Oracle reveals a bunch of listserv postings with her name and oracle.com and (on older ones) sun.com e-mail addresses. If it's a fake, they chose a viable person to imitate.
  
  --
  Benford's Corollary to Clarke's Law: "Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced."
8. Re:The Future of OpenSolaris Revealed by Anonymous Coward · 2010-08-13 14:14 · Score: 0
  
  Maybe she just quit too.
  Seems like all the sane Ex-Sun/Oracle employees are jumping ship upon realization they're FUBAR. Nevermind possibly redundant.
9. Re:The Future of OpenSolaris Revealed by FlyByWire63 · 2010-08-13 14:28 · Score: 1
  
  Or, they could use a picture of the group "April Wine" ... singers of "Sign of the Gypsy Queen" I'll admit it was a stretch!
10. Re:The Future of OpenSolaris Revealed by luk3Z · 2010-08-13 19:29 · Score: 1
  
  Indeed it looks like book title...
  
  --
  Recipes for USA bankrupt - http://tinypaste.com/0d66f dd = dollar deluge (printed in the infinity)
11. Re:The Future of OpenSolaris Revealed by Hognoxious · 2010-08-13 20:48 · Score: 1
  
  The Animal on the cover would be some old Gypsy looking into a crystal ball.
  Well there's already one with a dodo , so how about a passenger pigeon or a quagga?
  
  --
  Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
12. Re:The Future of OpenSolaris Revealed by Anonymous Coward · 2010-08-13 23:24 · Score: 0
  
  Is she hawt?
So much for that by gatzby3jr · 2010-08-13 07:17 · Score: 3, Interesting

So much for that ultimatum:
http://developers.slashdot.org/story/10/07/14/1448209/OpenSolaris-Governing-Board-Closing-Shop
1. Re:So much for that by rubycodez · 2010-08-13 07:19 · Score: 4, Funny
  
  see, the Onion could write an article: "OpenSolaris Governance Board Ultimatum Swiftly Moves Oracle To Action!"
And... by SilverHatHacker · 2010-08-13 07:17 · Score: 0, Troll

...was anything of value lost?

--
Funny may not give karma, but +5 Informative never made anyone snort coffee out their nose.
1. Re:And... by Anonymous Coward · 2010-08-13 07:23 · Score: 2, Interesting
  
  A non-FUSE implementation of ZFS that isn't on BSD?
2. Re:And... by Anonymous Coward · 2010-08-13 07:24 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  There certainly wasn't a "community" for it. The vast majority were Sun employees doing their job. Linux trounced Solaris because everyone could play, Sun took way too long to realize this. No one is surprised Oracle is doing this, they make money from being an expensive closed shop. It'll be interesting to see what happens with InnoDB and MySQL in the coming months/years. Oracle are suing Google over JAVA, making people in that environment rather nervous too.
3. Re:And... by MBGMorden · 2010-08-13 07:25 · Score: 4, Interesting
  
  ZFS seemed pretty interesting. Btrfs might catch up eventually, but for now it's a loss.
  That said, I don't think ZFS was going anywhere anyways. It's incompatible license meant it wasn't ever going to get going in Linux, and Linux has far too much momentum for OpenSolaris to have dethroned it as the open source world's golden boy.
  In short the good features of OpenSolaris aren't going to have to be reimplemented, but since we were going to have to do that anyways then it's less disheartening.
  
  --
  "People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
4. Re:And... by TheGratefulNet · 2010-08-13 07:27 · Score: 4, Interesting
  
  correct. zfs was the only thing I cared about (for home use) on solaris.
  its 'ok' on freebsd but not all that fast (in my experience, compared to linux md-raid, which I do realize is not at all the same exact thing).
  but solaris was THE de-facto reference implementation of zfs.
  kind of sorry to lose that. the rest: meh, no great loss to non-enterprise computing. and enterprise computing will still be buying solaris when they need this level of features and support (mostly the support side).
  
  --
  
  --
  "It is now safe to switch off your computer."
5. Re:And... by LWATCDR · 2010-08-13 07:27 · Score: 2, Informative
  
  Yes
  Solaris actually is a very good OS. The lack of comunity really let it down but the code it's self and the OS is really good.
  
  --
  See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
6. Re:And... by MBGMorden · 2010-08-13 07:30 · Score: 3, Interesting
  
  It'll be interesting to see what happens with InnoDB and MySQL in the coming months/years.
  IMHO? MySQL is in for a long, slow, drawn out slide into obscurity. Oracle isn't going to do much with it at the risk of making a free competitor to their flagship product even better.
  It has been forked already, and I'm sure more will sprout up. MAYBE one of those will take off, but my guess is that without the brand recognition of MySQL to go behind them, PostgreSQL will slurp up a lot of those users.
  That said, for better or for worse (worse IMHO, but that's just my opinion) "no-SQL" databases like CouchDB and MongoDB seem to be gaining a lot of traction. They won't likely take over completely as there are some things that just work better in a traditional relational database, but my guess is that a lot of smaller projects that once would have used MySQL will be looking at those instead.
  
  --
  "People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
7. Re:And... by kthreadd · 2010-08-13 07:31 · Score: 1
  
  I don't think that much has been lost at all. The situation could have been worse. Thanks to the Illumos project we will hopefully have a living OpenSolars project once again, however without any help from Oracle. I would day that we are still in a very early stage and it's hard to make any conclusions at this point. It will interesting to see what happens within the next year before, it will probably take at least that much time before we can say anything with good confidence.
8. Re:And... by Renegade88 · 2010-08-13 07:32 · Score: 1
  
  yes.
  
  And asking that question basically pegs you as a jerk.
9. Re:And... by dirtyhippie · 2010-08-13 07:32 · Score: 1
  
  ...was anything of value lost?
  I'm not sure which angle you are trolling from, but I'll bite.
  If you were referring to OpenSolaris, then yes, something of value was clearly lost.
  But if you're referring to Oracle taking part in OpenSolaris, then you have a point. However, even though few really expected Oracle to do anything useful or significant with OS, think of all the expertise and potential person hours from former sun employees that is very unlikely to come back to opensolaris work. Even tho Oracle hadn't been contributing of late, it was remotely possible that they were holding their source for some other reason or would again some day. The fact that they never will is a major kick in the seat for the OpenSolaris ecosystem and, to a lesser extent, for the free software community as a whole.
10. Re:And... by bill_mcgonigle · 2010-08-13 07:34 · Score: 3, Informative
  
  That said, I don't think ZFS was going anywhere anyways. It's incompatible license meant it wasn't ever going to get going in Linux, and Linux has far too much momentum for OpenSolaris to have dethroned it as the open source world's golden boy.
  Actually the ZFS storage layer was recently ported to Linux. You can use it with Lustre today, perhaps some databases. The POSIX layer is being worked on.
  Due to the licensing conflict, distribution is an open problem. Probably end-users will need to install this themselves.
  
  --
  My God, it's Full of Source!
  OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
11. Re:And... by SilverHatHacker · 2010-08-13 07:42 · Score: 1
  
  To be honesty, I was just looking for a quick summary of why OpenSolaris was still relevant, not trolling. I personally never used it, so I'm not sure of its strengths and weaknesses. Course, the "anything of value" phrase carries some pretty negative connotations, so I'm not surprised I came off as a troll.
  
  --
  Funny may not give karma, but +5 Informative never made anyone snort coffee out their nose.
12. Re:And... by dgatwood · 2010-08-13 07:42 · Score: 2, Insightful
  
  That said, I don't think ZFS was going anywhere anyways. It's incompatible license meant it wasn't ever going to get going in Linux, and Linux has far too much momentum for OpenSolaris to have dethroned it as the open source world's golden boy.
  And in the same vein, Btrfs isn't going anywhere, either. Its incompatible license means that it won't ever appear in any Open Source BSD or commercial operating system. Until we get a comparable filesystem under a BSD-style license, no new filesystem is can truly take off. That's the only license that everyone can accept without reservation.
  
  --
  Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
13. Re:And... by rubycodez · 2010-08-13 07:42 · Score: 1, Insightful
  
  It's very good, on an UltraSparc. On an x86, it's a mixed bag depending on your hardware. On anything else, forget it.
14. Re:And... by Zocalo · 2010-08-13 07:43 · Score: 1
  
  ZFS seemed pretty interesting. Btrfs might catch up eventually, but for now it's a loss.
  Maybe, maybe not. Given their proprietary nature, that Oracle was not going to put a huge amount of resources behind OpenSolaris was pretty much a given as soon as they bought Sun, I think. What we'll probably see next is an exodus of some of the Solaris people from Oracle to other *NIX organisations and elsewhere, which could turn out to be a very good thing depending on who walks. Since "other *NIX shops" includes Linux and the *BSDs, we might see a lot more activity going into work on the ports of the cooler parts of Solaris into Linux and BSD distros.
  
  --
  UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
15. Re:And... by evilviper · 2010-08-13 07:48 · Score: 2, Funny
  
  It's incompatible license meant it wasn't ever going to get going in Linux, and Linux has far too much momentum for OpenSolaris to have dethroned it as the open source world's golden boy.
  FreeBSD, OTOH, is plenty competitive with Linux, and has good ZFS support.
  Not to mention that, while ZFS may not become a universal file system, it could well dominate in NAS appliances, and other proprietary closed-box products running OpenSolaris.
  
  --
  Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
16. Re:And... by sprag · 2010-08-13 07:48 · Score: 1
  
  Opensolaris survived only because of Sun's benevolence. Once the source drops stop, that's the end of Illumos project: its either stuck permanently at whatever the last drop was (especially in light of the binary-only internationalization stuff) or becomes incompatible and then its no longer solaris.
  Stick a fork in it.
17. Re:And... by dotwaffle · 2010-08-13 07:52 · Score: 3, Informative
  
  "commercial operating system" - you mean proprietary. There's a lot of "commerce" in the Linux/Free Software/Open Source world, you may have noticed it.
18. Re:And... by Ash+Vince · 2010-08-13 07:54 · Score: 2, Interesting
  
  IMHO? MySQL is in for a long, slow, drawn out slide into obscurity. Oracle isn't going to do much with it at the risk of making a free competitor to their flagship product even better.
  It has been forked already, and I'm sure more will sprout up. MAYBE one of those will take off, but my guess is that without the brand recognition of MySQL to go behind them, PostgreSQL will slurp up a lot of those users.
  I really do hope that MySQL is successfully forked. Postgre is ok, but it is too different from MySQL and that scares a lot of companies who may adopt it.
  I am glad to see that Postgre now pays a bit more attention to replication as this is they key feature I will need in order to adopt it. I am very glad my predecessor where I work insisted on us using PDO as database abstraction layer as this will make my migration away from MySQL slightly easier.
  
  --
  I dont read /. to RTFA, I read /. to offend people in ignorance.
19. Re:And... by mcrbids · 2010-08-13 07:56 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  Augh! Posts like this make my BRAIN HURT!!
  MySQL is in for a long, slow, drawn out slide into obscurity.
  I agree, but not for the reasons you state. Brand recognition? Seriously? You think 30 seconds with a google search isn't going to turn up the forks?
  It has been forked already, and I'm sure more will sprout up.
  Except that *all* these forks have a consistent problem: there is no commercial license available. The owners of MySQL could dual-license their works, and people are free to fork the MySQL GPL edition, but they can't then turn around and offer commercial licenses to those who need them. The GPL is a bit "too free" (or too restrictive, depending on your definition of free) to be palatable.
  In a strange sort of way, if Oracle doesn't develop MySQL enough, more projects will start with PostgreSQL and will never even consider Oracle. The fact that MySQL sucks as bad as it does works for Oracle, and if they actually kill it, they risk losing revenue!
  That said, for better or for worse (worse IMHO, but that's just my opinion) "no-SQL" databases like CouchDB and MongoDB seem to be gaining a lot of traction.
  No-SQL is not a database, it's a file store. Calling them a database is an insult to databasses the world over. Yes, there are times when a "no-sql" solution is better than SQL, and the vector is pretty much that point where you realize that storing files in databases makes sense like hauling bales of hay in sports cars does.
  
  --
  I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
20. Re:And... by TopSpin · 2010-08-13 07:56 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  Btrfs might catch up eventually
  Btrfs is a product of Oracle. Oracle now owns ZFS outright and controls the fate of Btrfs in terms of developer resources. One guess as to whether Oracle will remain motivated to complete Btrfs.
  Oracle controls the fate of the best open source advanced file systems.
  
  --
  Lurking at the bottom of the gravity well, getting old
21. Re:And... by Anonymous Coward · 2010-08-13 07:56 · Score: 0
  
  was under the impression that Btrfs was a oracle supported project also, if they are the main contributor to it this days, I dont know. But given they now have Solaris under their roof, and they are pushing it to their customers, them developing another filesystem for linux that might or might not, bring the advances of zfs to linux, patches from their end might come to an end, if there is too much conflict of interesst.
22. Re:And... by Etherized · 2010-08-13 07:59 · Score: 2, Insightful
  
  Of course, Oracle controls btrfs as well, and its future doesn't exactly look so great at this point, either
  Why exactly does Oracle need btrfs now, anyway? ZFS is more mature, and the CDDL is more restrictive than the GPL, so it seems like that would be Oracle's product of choice. I guess Oracle can still sue btrfs users for patent infringement, even though the code itself is under the GPL, but why bother at all? Making Linux a more attractive competitor to their own Solaris doesn't seem like it makes much sense.
23. Re:And... by Anonymous Coward · 2010-08-13 08:04 · Score: 1, Informative
  
  Yeah, I'm done with anything Oracle related. They're a fucking massive mess that takes forever to make any meaningful decisions, which usually end in abandonment or screwing people over anyway.
  To hell with Oracle. I hope Google kicks their ass on the Java front and then I don't have to hear about them anymore.
24. Re:And... by LWATCDR · 2010-08-13 08:04 · Score: 1
  
  Well are OSs on x86 is a mixed bad depending on your hardware.
  Well except for Windows but even that can run into unsupported hardware.
  I don't think OpenSolaris was intended to run on ARM , PPC, Power, Mips, or a toaster.
  That is why we have NetBSD and Linux.
  
  --
  See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
25. Re:And... by Improv · 2010-08-13 08:05 · Score: 3, Interesting
  
  I don't think "too different from MySQL" is necessarily a minus. There's very little worthwhile about MySQL, all it had was good marketing and a earlier move to being cross-platform (which is very very important, but as a difference it's gone).
  
  --
  For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
26. Re:And... by Improv · 2010-08-13 08:06 · Score: 4, Funny
  
  Ahh, the databass, such a noble fish.
  
  --
  For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
27. Re:And... by MBGMorden · 2010-08-13 08:07 · Score: 1
  
  FreeBSD, OTOH, is plenty competitive with Linux, and has good ZFS support.
  While I don't think FreeBSD is bad at all on technical merits, and it certainly has enough support that it can't be delcared dead (No matter what Netcraft says), it's still no comparison to Linux as a whole. Sure, it's on better footing in the server arena than on desktops, but when taken overall, Linux is still far more popular than any of the BSDs. Without some serious oddities happening, I don't see that changing. The Unix-variants are all just too close to each other for one to pull ahead at this point. If any open source OS takes the top spot away from Linux (which I don't think will happen, but if it did) I'd wager it will be a non-Unix system. HaikuOS, Syllable, AROS, or ReactOS. Not that I think any of them has a snowball's chance in hell of doing so, just saying that they're different enough that if the OSS world becomes disillusioned with *nix then they're different enough that they might could gain traction at that point.
  
  --
  "People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
28. Re:And... by diegocg · 2010-08-13 08:07 · Score: 2, Interesting
  
  Btrfs might catch up eventually, but for now it's a loss.
  It's working quite nice here in my desktop. I miss the extra RAID modes (which have been available as patches for ages but for some reason haven't been merged), the ability to reconfigure chunks on fly, the possibility of setting different compression/size limits to each volume, the rewrite-corrupted-blocks feature and the fix for the hard link limit with backrefs enabled, but since I don't need them for everyday usage I can live without them.
29. Re:And... by rubycodez · 2010-08-13 08:13 · Score: 1
  
  But OpenSolaris only supports a miniscule amount of the x86 hardware that Linux does, not even talking about laptops where things just get abysmal
  to be fair, there was OpenSolaris for PowerPC project in the works
30. Re:And... by Abcd1234 · 2010-08-13 08:14 · Score: 1
  
  FreeBSD, OTOH, is plenty competitive with Linux, and has good ZFS support.
  Tell that to my laptop. FreeBSD's suspend/resume support is, amazingly, even worse than Linux's...
31. Re:And... by Anonymous Coward · 2010-08-13 08:14 · Score: 0
  
  I always read 'btrfs' as 'bit rot file system'..
32. Re:And... by Third+Position · 2010-08-13 08:24 · Score: 1
  
  Sure, it's on better footing in the server arena than on desktops, but when taken overall, Linux is still far more popular than any of the BSDs.
  
  Not quite - keep in mind OS X is also a FreeBSD derivative.
  
  --
  American Third Position
  Finally, a real choice!
33. Re:And... by CAIMLAS · 2010-08-13 08:24 · Score: 3, Interesting
  
  its 'ok' on freebsd but not all that fast
  That's an understatement. Some of the performance metrics on FreeBSD 8.1 ZFS are so poor that they're not even comparable to OSol. A 10th the performance, maybe?
  Nevermind the FreeBSD implementation is shoddy, at best in terms of stability and hardware utilization in other areas: high CPU, high memory use, a couple versions behind 'official' ZFS, inexplicable instability (particularly when the filesystem is nearing capacity, but I had my test fbsd zfs system reboot itself - twice - during bonnie++ tests), and a handful of other matters.
  And no, don't tell me "it'll be fixed in the next version via higher pool version support". Fix what you did before implementing something new.
  Each new major version of FreeBSD since 6 seems to have taken a couple steps back where there shouldn't have been change until it worked (USB, I'm looking at you). FreeBSD is awesome for network devices and code projects, but it's kinda a wretched nightmare as a general purpose or storage OS.
  ZFS in OpenSolaris is a huge loss. I just hope it's continued onward - albeit a little bit behind "official" solaris - in Nexenta and the other derivative projects. Is that even possible, legally speaking?
  
  --
  ~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
34. Re:And... by diegocg · 2010-08-13 08:25 · Score: 1
  
  Portability has never been critical to the success of a filesystem.
35. Re:And... by drsmithy · 2010-08-13 08:27 · Score: 1
  
  But OpenSolaris only supports a miniscule amount of the x86 hardware that Linux does [...]
  It has excellent hardware support where it matters - brand-name x86 servers (largely because they're all using the same components anyway).
36. Re:And... by edmudama · 2010-08-13 08:31 · Score: 1
  
  OpenSolaris was a Solaris kernel with a modern (gnome?) desktop and a relatively-frequently updated package repository. It was actually quite nice to work with, since you could use old Solaris drivers for some hardware, but still get a "modern" system.
  
  --
  More data, damnit!
37. Re:And... by Trepidity · 2010-08-13 08:32 · Score: 1
  
  FreeBSD has ZFS support, but I wouldn't say it's good ZFS support; it's nowhere near as stable or fast as on OpenSolaris, anyway.
  
  --
  10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
38. Re:And... by Lennie · 2010-08-13 08:37 · Score: 1
  
  There are a lot more developers working on btrfs then just the Oracle developer(s), that is the big difference. I think the one or few btrfs developers working at Oracle might even leave Oracle if they stop with supporting btrfs.
  
  --
  New things are always on the horizon
39. Re:And... by Anonymous Coward · 2010-08-13 08:37 · Score: 1, Interesting
  
  Don't have to hear about them anymore? Look into where Oracle came from. There is a metric shit-ton of power behind that company which is why they don't need to blitz people like us with moronic add campaigns to prosper.
  I wouldn't be surprised if their entire plan for the popular Sun properties is to hit people with them so the public will develop an aversion to even thinking about Oracle.
  Those guys are going to be the last ones that need to change to survive, so all they need to do is be progressive a couple times a decade and they stay ahead of the curve.
40. Re:And... by Anonymous Coward · 2010-08-13 08:40 · Score: 1, Interesting
  
  dtrace is also da bomb.
41. Re:And... by TheRaven64 · 2010-08-13 08:46 · Score: 1
  
  Since we're trading anecdotes, on my ThinkPad, suspend and resume work, and the power button and lit switch both trigger ACPI events that can be configured to do various things under FreeBSD. Linux? Well, it can do the suspend part of suspend/resume...
  
  --
  I am TheRaven on Soylent News
42. Re:And... by OverlordQ · 2010-08-13 08:48 · Score: 3, Interesting
  
  Oracle controls the fate of the best open source advanced file systems.
  If they control the fate, you can't really call them open can you?
  
  --
  Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
43. Re:And... by unix1 · 2010-08-13 08:54 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  Postgre is ok
  I beg to differ. Postgres is not just "ok" - have you looked at its features and their completeness; standards compliance; scalability (clustering); RBAC; programming flexibility; reliability? If you are a developer - how about size and quality of code, optimizer, query execution flow? Postgres probably has one of the best maintained codebase for a complex piece of software you'll ever see.
  In none of the categories above can you even start placing MySQL in the same ballpark as Postgres. It's not even the same league, it's not even the same sport. So, the other part of your sentence is right in a way - it's completely different in these and many other regards from MySQL.
44. Re:And... by Abcd1234 · 2010-08-13 09:00 · Score: 1
  
  Which ThinkPad rev? I have a T61, and FBSD failed horribly on suspend/resume... and I *really* wanted to like it, too. I then tried NetBSD, but alas, accelerated video is basically a no-go (among other things), and thus ended my BSD experiment...
45. Re:And... by Etherized · 2010-08-13 09:03 · Score: 1
  
  You're right, and the Linux community as a whole has certainly embraced btrfs. If Oracle were to just pull the plug on it, the project would continue in some form (which is more than one could say for opensolaris and ZFS).
  The problem as I see it is that Oracle has already shown a willingness to submarine competitors with patents they hold on GPL'd projects. A worst case scenario isn't that btrfs dies; a worst case scenario is that it gets used by Oracle's competitors, and then Oracle decides to go and sue them for patent infringement.
  Oracle: Hey, Red Hat... nice filesystem you got there. Shame if something were to... happen to it...
46. Re:And... by Anonymous Coward · 2010-08-13 09:03 · Score: 0
  
  you can't really call them open
  the parent didn't attribute an unqualified 'open' (whatever that means) to anything. open source work can be and is effectively controlled through copyright, merit, funding and other means.
47. Re:And... by MBGMorden · 2010-08-13 09:04 · Score: 1
  
  It's also not open source (Darwin doesn't count, as that's not really the full OS, and in it's basic Darwin form it sees little use), which negates it from any relevance in this discussion.
  
  --
  "People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
48. Re:And... by masmullin · 2010-08-13 09:06 · Score: 1
  
  the databass nose everything!
49. Re:And... by Mongoose+Disciple · 2010-08-13 09:06 · Score: 1
  
  I don't think "too different from MySQL" is necessarily a minus
  Generally I would agree with you, but if I was looking at migrating an existing project using MySQL with minimum effort (and I think that's going to be a very common case) I might think twice.
50. Re:And... by 0100010001010011 · 2010-08-13 09:06 · Score: 3, Informative
  
  I really hope that Debian/kFreeBSD pulls through. I love ZFS. I honestly couldn't imagine going to another file system, ever, for my server needs.
  I run Xen, all of my Xen disks are just zvols. I accidentally screwed one up, just rolled it back to the last version. Because of the deduplication, I only 'used' the data that had changed.
  Since it's a server, I guess I'll be one of the last to turn the lights out when something finally comes along to replace it. Xen was cake to get running (compared to Linux). It runs a Debian machine and an XP machine. Seemed adequately fast.
51. Re:And... by MBGMorden · 2010-08-13 09:07 · Score: 1
  
  Btrfs is GPL licensed. Who started it is irrelevant. If Oracle drops it then others will pick it up. ZFS's demise will come from it's inability to be integrated into the kernel. If it had been GPL licensed originally then we'd have taken it and ran with it Oracle or no.
  
  --
  "People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
52. Re:And... by PipsqueakOnAP133 · 2010-08-13 09:09 · Score: 1
  
  In other words, Solaris is everything !Linux.
  Hmm... upsides and downsides.
  Stable driver ABI.
  Extremely scalable.
  No open source community infighting.
  Doesn't work on a mobile devices.
  Has a file system worth using.
  Slow moving development speed.
  Predictable deployment environment.
  Dtrace.
53. Re:And... by TheGratefulNet · 2010-08-13 09:14 · Score: 1
  
  zfs can't run on cheap hardware. not competitively.
  I run a dual setup (2 identical setups) of linux md-raid and freebsd 8.current zfs.
  when I do simple things like a dvd rip across the LAN to my nfs/samba servers (bsd and linux are setup to do both, so I can compare) the bsd box *always* lags behind. it feels slow. look at the network switch and the lights *pause* a lot more. yes, to the naked eye, you can see it being slower. you can see progress meters being smooth and fluid on linux/mdraid but not on freebsd/zfs.
  both systems are stronger than most nas's (cel-420 and 2gb of ram with 4 sata drives on intel ICH7 (I think) hubs). also note I'm using intel eepro1000 nics so I'm using MUCH better hardware than most nas's will.
  still, linux wipes freebsd's butt on keeping up with just a simple single-task of a dvd rip across the network. its not like bsd loses packets or data but it takes longer and visually looks slower, just seeing the pauses while the disk farm syncs (and seems to block net i/o until its done!).
  zfs needs 4gb of ram (really) and multi-core cpus. you don't find that on cheap home nas boxes that we are seeing. you find that the onboard cpu often can't even keep up with a gig-e pipe. there isn't enough cpu on those embedded systems to 'do zfs right'.
  sad but true. I wanted to love zfs. I still have it installed. but it underperforms on the same hardware vs linux/md.
  
  --
  
  --
  "It is now safe to switch off your computer."
54. Re:And... by lakeland · 2010-08-13 09:18 · Score: 1
  
  Well, it would be pretty handy if I could format an external drive in something other than FAT32 or NTFS for support on different systems...
55. Re:And... by dgatwood · 2010-08-13 09:22 · Score: 0, Redundant
  
  No, I meant commercial. A commercial OS, at least by my definition, is an OS principally developed and backed by a company. Although Linux distributions are assembled by companies, the vast majority of the development work is done by third parties, and is not done principally for commercial gain, so Linux distros are generally not what I would call commercial OSes.
  Further, I did not mean proprietary. Not all commercial OSes are proprietary. Some examples of nonproprietary commercial OSes are OpenSolaris (defunct) and Darwin OS (also defunct). Admittedly, most nonproprietary commercial OSes don't stick around very long, but they do exist....
  
  --
  Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
56. Re:And... by Raenex · 2010-08-13 09:24 · Score: 4, Funny
  
  Except that *all* these forks have a consistent problem: there is no commercial license available. [...] The GPL is a bit "too free" (or too restrictive, depending on your definition of free) to be palatable.
  Is that you, Monty?
  
  The fact that MySQL sucks as bad as it does...
  Ok, I guess not :)
57. Re:And... by masmullin · 2010-08-13 09:27 · Score: 1
  
  yes you can.
  
  analogy time.
  
  So a farmer has an apple orchard with a very exclusive hybrid apple being grown. the farmer sells the apples and will not prosecute anyone for planting the seeds contained within those sold apples... but you can still safely assume that this farmer "controls the fate" of the new hybrid apple
  
  end analogy
58. Re:And... by dgatwood · 2010-08-13 09:29 · Score: 1
  
  Critical, no, but highly desirable. That's what made ZFS so interesting---the promise of broad availability. Sadly, it isn't working out that way, due almost entirely to Oracle's inept handling of it at every turn, but on the other hand, I can't imagine that anybody actually expected Oracle to be a good citizen of the open source community.... ZFS was doomed the moment they announced their acquisition plans. That's why a BSD license is such a good thing. It means that the technology can't be held hostage by any one company or group.
  
  --
  Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
59. Re:And... by rubycodez · 2010-08-13 09:31 · Score: 1
  
  sadly no, that's not how GNU/Linux got into the mainstream datacenter and that's not how OpenSolaris would have. Some IT staff would need to be able to try it out on pulled old server, old desktop, white box, home PC.....
60. Re:And... by ppc_digger · 2010-08-13 09:32 · Score: 2, Insightful
  
  Not true. The GPL includes a patent license. By releasing the code under it, Oracle gave everyone the right to use their patents freely.
  
  --
  Of all major operating systems, UNIX is the only one originally meant for gaming.
61. Re:And... by caseih · 2010-08-13 09:35 · Score: 3, Interesting
  
  I'm running ZFS with Solaris 10 on a SAN, and while I really like ZFS, I'm anxiously awaiting btrfs and will migrate to Linux the moment btrfs hits stable in RHEL 6. ZFS is good, but that doesn't mean that other file systems like btrfs don't have the potential to be better and cheaper.
62. Re:And... by MemoryDragon · 2010-08-13 09:37 · Score: 1
  
  Wasnt the btrfs development also financed by Oracle, or am I wrong here?
63. Re:And... by j-pimp · 2010-08-13 09:40 · Score: 1
  
  No-SQL is not a database, it's a file store. Calling them a database is an insult to databasses the world over. Yes, there are times when a "no-sql" solution is better than SQL, and the vector is pretty much that point where you realize that storing files in databases makes sense like hauling bales of hay in sports cars does.
  
  Full disclosure, I am not a 10gen employee, but I've contributed some improvements to windows support in MongoDB.
  Mongo is not a relational database. However, its a "real database" and different from the filesystem. They do got that GridFS thing for storing BLOBs that I've not tried. The DB is schemaless, but there are indexes, and you can even do some primitive GeoLocation.
  I've used RDBMS, I've used Mongo, I've used the file system, and I've LDAP. I've even toyed enough with xml documents and XSD schemas to call that a special data store (both filesystem backed adn stored in SQL server). Each has theor own purpose, and I use them all for different things.
  
  --
  --- Justin Dearing http://www.justaprogrammer.net/ We're just programmers.
64. Re:And... by LWATCDR · 2010-08-13 09:46 · Score: 1
  
  Hey it is Solaris. You don't have to try it on some old server or white box to see if it will really work.
  And how hard is it to find an vanilla intel box? One with an Intel chipset? Once you do your good to go.
  
  --
  See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
65. Re:And... by aliquis · 2010-08-13 09:46 · Score: 1
  
  What about HAMMER?
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HAMMER
  http://www.dragonflybsd.org/hammer/
  Old stuff:
  http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/mailarchive/kernel/2007-10/msg00006.html
  http://www.dragonflybsd.org/hammer/hammer.pdf
66. Re:And... by GooberToo · 2010-08-13 09:54 · Score: 2, Insightful
  
  The fact that MySQL sucks as bad as it does works for Oracle, and if they actually kill it, they risk losing revenue!
  IMOHO, the problem with MySQL+Oracle is that it doesn't make sense for anyone but Oracle. The skillset gap between MySQL and Oracle is MASSIVE! So when a project out grows MySQL, its not an automatic Oracle upgrade. Really, what's the incentive other than some very loose association via branding?
  On the other hand, PostgreSQL completely encompasses MySQL (required skill sets and capability) and has a huge overlap with Oracle. To get your feet wet with PostgreSQL, the required skill set is only slightly larger than MySQL. And on the other end, the required knowledge is still less than is required for Oracle; despite PostgreSQL frequently providing superior performance. This means you can stick with PostgreSQL from entry to fairly high end. And, once you actually outgrow PostgreSQL, if you ever do, you have commercial offerings like EnterpriseDB. Which means, your PostgreSQL knowledge is fully protected.
  Anyone not considering PostgreSQL must have money, time, and skills to burn.
67. Re:And... by butlerm · 2010-08-13 09:56 · Score: 1
  
  No-SQL is not a database, it's a file store. Calling them a database is an insult to databasses the world over.
  SQL is not the be all and end all of database query languages. It is possible to write a real (MVCC, transactional, robust) database that doesn't use it. The Versant Object Database is a very good example of a robust non-SQL object oriented database, for example. No doubt there are others. And for some applications an object oriented database will run circles around anything any existing relational database can do.
68. Re:And... by Anonymous Coward · 2010-08-13 10:02 · Score: 0
  
  Not really, BTRFS has not been developed by Oracle people alone for a long time, and too many other companies have bet on it to let it sink.
  Of the key Oracle developers, I'm pretty sure they care more about BTRFS than Oracle, and they would jump ship he moment Oracle threatened their baby. There would be no dearth of companies ready to hire them instantly
  Contrary to OpenSolaris or Mysql, BTRFS has used non-discriminatory 100% copyleft licensing from the beginning, and Oracle has no magic lever to keep it in-house should its developers move to greener pastures.
69. Re:And... by evilviper · 2010-08-13 10:05 · Score: 1
  
  Tell that to my laptop.
  A) We were talking about servers...
  B) Windows has a lot of features Linux is lacking as well. I guess Linux isn't competitive.
  
  --
  Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
70. Re:And... by bhcompy · 2010-08-13 10:14 · Score: 2, Interesting
  
  The fastest database I've ever seen(as far as queries, returning results, performance under load, etc) is a non-sql database. That would be Pick, a hash-file driven multivalue database(ENGLISH query language). Been around since the 60s and still going strong. The only reason it isn't more popular is because the database is it's own operating system as well, so it's emulated on *nix. Databases with 30 years of complex financial data running on Digital Unix with an Alpha processor outperform the latest and greatest hardware configurations I've seen running similar data in a (SQL) relational database(which I see often working with Sybase all day).
71. Re:And... by Anonymous Coward · 2010-08-13 10:28 · Score: 0
  
  zomg Solaris doesn't support my 1990s-era 3DFX Voodoo card! End of the world!
  Name a non-obscure piece of hardware you actually use in a modern x86 server* that Solaris doesn't support.
  *server, as in something that you'd usually find rack-mounted in a data center. Wi-fi in this environment is obscure, just to be clear.
72. Re:And... by John+Whitley · 2010-08-13 10:31 · Score: 2, Interesting
  
  Yes, there are times when a "no-sql" solution is better than SQL, and the vector is pretty much that point where you realize that storing files in databases makes sense like hauling bales of hay in sports cars does.
  It's more than that: it's also for every case where the lookup logic is NOT handled by the database. Consider when queries are fielded by a separate service, such as a dedicated search engine (e.g. Solr/Lucene), leaving the database is relegated to just primary key lookup for full records/documents. At that time the benefits and tradeoffs offered by the various NoSQL solutions suddenly become a LOT more interesting, because that's what these tools specialize in.
73. Re:And... by joib · 2010-08-13 10:33 · Score: 4, Interesting
  
  Btrfs is a product of Oracle. Oracle now owns ZFS outright and controls the fate of Btrfs in terms of developer resources. One guess as to whether Oracle will remain motivated to complete Btrfs.
  If Oracle for whatever reason decides to stop investing in BTRFS, the likely outcome AFAICS is not that BTRFS dies, but rather that Chris Mason and his team jump shop to Red Hat, Novell, Google, IBM or some other Linux contributor with an interest in seeing BTRFS succeed. That's one of the advantages of a collaborative project like Linux which isn't subject to the whims of any single corporation in complete control.
  To the extent that there might be a threat against BTRFS, depends on how the ZFS-WAFL lawsuit plays out. I wouldn't be particularly surprised if Oracle settles with Netapp, covering only official Solaris releases, leaving other ZFS versions (Illumos, Nexenta, FreeBSD, etc.) out in the cold, and perhaps BTRFS as well, depending on to which extent the WAFL patents apply to BTRFS.
74. Re:And... by Anonymous Coward · 2010-08-13 10:44 · Score: 0
  
  but upgrading is not ok, from what I understand. MySQL is a breeze compared.
  Not to knock Postgres, it's good and all that, but upgrading is a nightmare.
75. Re:And... by Anonymous Coward · 2010-08-13 10:47 · Score: 1, Interesting
  
  Well, in every real-world benchmark I've done when evaluating which DMBS to chose MySQL was faster - that's gotta count for something.
76. Re:And... by l0b0 · 2010-08-13 10:49 · Score: 1
  
  +5, sad.
77. Re:And... by jonbryce · 2010-08-13 11:43 · Score: 1
  
  Reiserfs died after Hans Reiser was jailed. What's to say the same thing won't happen to btrfs?
78. Re:And... by unix1 · 2010-08-13 12:04 · Score: 3, Informative
  
  The reason MyISAM (not the whole MySQL) is "fast" is because there is no proper abstraction level between what executes the query and the actual file writes. This is true for simple inserts, simple selects, simple updates. This is also why when MySQL crashes, quite frequently MyISAM tables become corrupt - you can try to repair them, but hopefully you were replicating.
  Besides, you use MyISAM for "speed" and you lose basic functionality like transactions, MVCC, ACID compliance (hmm, did you even have it in the first place?), row/page locks, etc. You can perform direct file writes even faster than that, I guess it counts for something, but that doesn't do you any good either.
  On the other hand, what kind of "real-world" benchmarks did you do? No such "real world" I know of consists of simple inserts and selects. How about cases for:
  - optimized subqueries
  - using index merges
  - reusing indexes in same query
  - partial indexes
  - indexes on expressions
  - transactions with savepoints
  - etc., etc.
  MySQL doesn't do any of the above. Welcome to the "real world."
79. Re:And... by Anonymous Coward · 2010-08-13 12:15 · Score: 0
  
  By "noble," you must mean "yummy!"
80. Re:And... by Anonymous Coward · 2010-08-13 13:11 · Score: 1, Interesting
  
  Replication isn't as good with PostgreSQL. And that matters.
81. Re:And... by dotwaffle · 2010-08-13 13:14 · Score: 2, Informative
  
  A commercial OS, at least by my definition, is an OS principally developed and backed by a company.
  
  Not Redhat then? Nor Canonical? Nor SuSE?
  Seriously, Open Source can be (and is!) commercial. Your post said "Open Source BSD or commercial operating system" - that implies there is a difference. Largely, there is not.
82. Re:And... by GameboyRMH · 2010-08-13 13:24 · Score: 2, Informative
  
  +1. BTRFS is just around the corner, ZFS is loaded with licensing and patent issues to the point that it's practically proprietary software. Forgive me for not crying over ZFS.
  
  --
  "When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
83. Re:And... by BiggerIsBetter · 2010-08-13 13:24 · Score: 1
  
  Replication isn't as good with PostgreSQL. And that matters.
  Take a look at PostgreSQL 9 (or ChronicDB)
  
  --
  Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
84. Re:And... by drsmithy · 2010-08-13 13:32 · Score: 1
  
  zfs needs 4gb of ram (really) and multi-core cpus.
  That's the price you pay for better data integrity and more features. Considering one could build a multicore/4GB RAM box for a few hundred dollars, the price doesn't seem that high.
85. Re:And... by dbIII · 2010-08-13 13:53 · Score: 1
  
  The differences? Much more development work has gone into it making it a more mature file system and nobody is pretending that it is perfect. There are a lot of people developing and using it - even Nokia is involved with btrfs now for the Meego platform.
86. Re:And... by GameboyRMH · 2010-08-13 14:00 · Score: 1
  
  The whole Linux user community is clamoring for btrfs, while reiserfs was little more than a historical footnote when Hans Reiser was jailed?
  
  --
  "When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
87. Re:And... by rubycodez · 2010-08-13 14:12 · Score: 1
  
  the "trying" has to do with getting comfortable with it, and remember even for experienced Solaris admins there were new and different things added to the first release of OpenSolaris
  A "plain vanilla intel box" can very well have a hard disk controller or network card or usb device that isn't supported by OpenSolaris. Speaking as a very long time SunOS/Solaris admin who has tried OpenSolaris on a few boxes and under vmware (which for awhile also had issues) I can tell you it was a very mixed bag of success and failure.
  Ah well, it was too little too late by Sun, they should have done something back in 1995 or so.....
88. Re:And... by rubycodez · 2010-08-13 14:21 · Score: 2, Insightful
  
  you're joking, right? Check out how small the OpenSOlaris HCL is sometime. The disk controller list only has 75 entries! Plenty of Adaptec controllers won't work, plenty of fiber channel HBA won't work, plenty of HP and Compaq smart array won't work, etc. etc. etc.
89. Re:And... by Rubinstien · 2010-08-13 14:41 · Score: 1
  
  I can't say I care for MySQL at all, but as long as there is *any* market share for it I expect Oracle to keep it around. I expected them to kill RDB when they bought it from DEC back in 1994 (thank you Bob Palmer for ruining a great company by selling it off, piecemeal), but it is still going strong: http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/database/rdb/overview/index.html
90. Re:And... by Anonymous Coward · 2010-08-13 15:32 · Score: 0
  
  So you're saying Oracle is the Software equivalent of Agriculture's Monsanto? :D
91. Re:And... by dgatwood · 2010-08-13 15:40 · Score: 1, Interesting
  
  Not Redhat then? Nor Canonical? Nor SuSE?
  Nope. RedHat, Canonical, and SuSE all basically bundle open source software together. Sure, they have developers on staff, but they produce a single or maybe very low double digit percentage of the work that goes into the product. They create packaging tools, installers, custom skins, custom admin tools, etc., and they contribute patches for other things back upstream, but the fundamental core of the OS was created by others, and is largely maintained by others.
  Compare that with a true commercial OS developer like Sun/Oracle, Apple, IBM, etc. and the difference is blindingly obvious. Those companies have developers that create most of the code that goes into their products. Sure, the commercial vendors use Open Source as add-ons in some cases (e.g. Apple bundling Apache), but those companies are almost solely responsible for the bulk of the core code in Solaris, Mac OS X, and AIX, respectively. It's not at all the same development model, and the difference has nothing to do with whether the end result is shipped as open source or as proprietary code. The key difference is whether most of their code is developed in-house, and thus on how much of their own IP they have in the code.
  To give a more graphical illustration, the Linux vendors are content to stand on the shoulders of giants. The commercial UNIX vendors prefer to kill the giants, grind up their bones to make mortar, and use that to build a stone and giant-mortar dais to stand on outside their stone and giant-mortar castle. The Linux vendors usually stand to lose little if a particular GPLed work proved to be toxic. The commercial UNIX vendors stand to lose a great deal more.
  
  Your post said "Open Source BSD or commercial operating system" - that implies there is a difference. Largely, there is not.
  Sure, there is. OpenSolaris isn't BSD-based. It's AT&T UNIX based. AIX, same. Heck, even Mac OS X basically conforms to AT&T at this point. There basically aren't any commercial BSDs (except maybe in the embedded space) because you can't call yourself UNIX if you conform to the BSD conventions, and all the commercial UNIX vendors want to be able to call themselves UNIX.
  There are open source BSD OSes, there are commercial OSes, and there are Linux-based OSes. These are three fundamentally different camps in terms of development methodology that sometimes overlap and sometimes have common interests. Never fool yourself into believing that any two of the camps are the same.
  
  --
  Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
92. Re:And... by Galactic+Dominator · 2010-08-13 15:41 · Score: 1
  
  Several things, but first things first. Net IO always, always, always take precedence over disk io in FreeBSD and has always always always been that way. In terms of disk IO, reads are heavily prioritized over writes on UFS, unsure what happens on ZFS but I think it's a more even distrobution.
  It is quite likely you have a experienced a buggy network driver, is that NIC recognized as an em device? That one and a couple of other intel nic drivers have gotten some recent love as you weren't the only one who experienced stalling. The stall had zero to do with the filesystem behavior and quite frankly it's disconcerting you related the two. A recent 8-STABLE should preform better with your NIC.
  ZFS doesn't really need 4 GB RAM to preform well, 2 does fine on a moderately loaded system. The key is to be using an amd64 build since i386 has limited kernel memory space. It can work on i386, and it does fine with some tuning but anyone using that combo should be prepared to do the tuning themselves.
  
  --
  brandelf -t FreeBSD /brain
93. Re:And... by russotto · 2010-08-13 15:58 · Score: 1
  
  Reiserfs died after Hans Reiser was jailed. What's to say the same thing won't happen to btrfs?
  Chris Mason didn't kill his ex.
94. Re:And... by troll8901 · 2010-08-13 17:01 · Score: 1
  
  I've used RDBMS, I've used Mongo, I've used the file system, and I've LDAP. ... Each has their own purpose, and I use them all for different things.
  Out of curiosity, is there any project that actually requires almost all of these technologies? If so, how many libraries do this project have to import, to make these technologies work?
  No, I'm not a Java or .NET programmer, so I don't know if these languages already have built-in support for these technologies.
95. Re:And... by jhol13 · 2010-08-13 17:33 · Score: 2, Insightful
  
  For me the biggest reason for OpenSolaris is binary compatibility.
  Whenever I update my Ubuntu I fear something will break. Quite often something (outside the distro) does break, especially when the kernel changes.
  Sure those who are happy to use only those programs and hardware directly supported by Canonical may be happy, but I am not one of those.
96. Re:And... by jhol13 · 2010-08-13 17:34 · Score: 1
  
  Yes, it is legal. Goto http://www.illumos.org/.
97. Re:And... by spinkham · 2010-08-13 17:48 · Score: 1
  
  Minor version updates are simple, just update the software.
  Major version updates require a dump/restore, which is slightly annoying but easy for what is a major update. Major versions as old as 2003 are still supported.
  If you can't stomach a backup and restore as part of a major software change, postgresql might not be for you.
  
  --
  Blessed are the pessimists, for they have made backups.
98. Re:And... by Billly+Gates · 2010-08-13 18:14 · Score: 0, Offtopic
  
  I used and liked FreeBSD a long time ago.
  My USB keyboard was supported in FreeBSD 3.4 before Linux and I was deeply impressed. FreeBSD 5.x didn't even support it?? FreeBSD 5.2 came out and I still kept using FreeBSD 4.11 and 4.12 and I realized that the writing was on the wall.
  I have not used it in years as Linux caught up but Linux is now very bloated and not like it once was. FreeBSD is bloated now as well and not as stable.
  Surprisingly Fedora has been the most stable and not as cutting edge compared to Debian and Ubuntu on my laptop. You should give Fedora a try again as its not the unstable bleeding edge junk it was.
  I like Solaris as a server and prefer it. FreeBSD has lost its once solid stability record a while back. Its still more stable than Linux for ISPs but Windows is catching up and Solaris has already been there.
  
  --
  http://saveie6.com/
99. Re:And... by Billly+Gates · 2010-08-13 18:21 · Score: 0, Troll
  
  Postgres is not perfect and is a pain with syntax compared to MySQL. The auto-vacuum can slow it down and the replication is behind.
  I am thinking of creating a website and I like PostreSQL for its features and statistical support. I am also open to closed source alternatives and MS SQL Server has nice anayltical services and data-mining and so does DB2.
  I am not a database administrator or an expert. However, I do want a website with a SQL back-end and need something now with ACID with proper linking with foreign keys. MySQL is catching up but PostgreSQL is already there but a pain to learn.
  MySQL supports multiple users well which is why its included with ISPs and easier to learn.
  
  --
  http://saveie6.com/
100. Re:And... by butlerm · 2010-08-13 18:52 · Score: 1
  
  ZFS in OpenSolaris is a huge loss. I just hope it's continued onward - albeit a little bit behind "official" solaris - in Nexenta and the other derivative projects. Is that even possible, legally speaking?
  Yes, as long as Oracle continues to make code releases. If they quit, support will become very difficult.
101. Re:And... by Lennie · 2010-08-13 19:03 · Score: 1
  
  With OpenSolaris, it wasn't using the GPL everywhere.
  With Google/Java/Oracle, the code Google was mostly using wasn't based on what Oracle is using so it isn't covered by the same GPL.
  
  --
  New things are always on the horizon
102. Re:And... by sydneyfong · 2010-08-13 19:58 · Score: 1
  
  Not really. If enough people want those filesystems to cough up the money and resources to hire those developers, I can imagine that things will still work out somewhat...
  
  --
  Don't quote me on this.
103. Re:And... by Patch86 · 2010-08-13 20:07 · Score: 1
  
  Because while ReiserFS was interesting, it was little more than an incremental improvement over far more mature FS projects? And that it had only a relatively small rate of take up?
  And because it was egotistically self named by an unpleasant convicted murderer?
104. Re:And... by Burpmaster · 2010-08-13 20:59 · Score: 1
  
  Btrfs is already in Linux, an OS that is relevant and will stay relevant. The BSDs don't matter.
105. Re:And... by devent · 2010-08-13 22:07 · Score: 2, Interesting
  
  The GPL only apply to somebody if this somebody modify the source code of the software _and_ re-distribute the modified software. Are there examples where somebody would take, for example MariaDB, modify it and re-distribute the modified package to it's customers? The GPL doesn't concern you at all if you, for example, take MariaDB, modify it to run 500% faster and use it on your servers for the next big internet thing. It's also not a big deal if you take MariaDB, modify it for your application and make the modifications available under the GPL again. Because the modifications are special to your application, nobody would benefit.
  
  The only example where the GPL would concern you, if you are going to embed MariaDB in your software. In that case your software would have to be GPLed, too. But MariaDB is not really a database which you want to embed in your software. You rather going to use something like JDBC or ODBC, in which case the GPL doesn't concern you.
  
  The only commercial thing you want from MariaDB is a service contract and here is the GPL a big advantage, because now you can go to any company that offers a service for it.
  
  So in which case the GPL concern you? In which case would you want to embed something like MariaDB in your software and not using JDBC or ODBC?
  
  --
  http://www.mueller-public.de - My site http://www.anr-institute.com/ - Advanced Natural Research Institute
106. Re:And... by udippel · 2010-08-13 22:34 · Score: 1
  
  If it had been GPL licensed originally then we'd have taken it and ran
  or just not. Depends on the patents that the original owner holds. And on the version of GPL.
  (I am a GPL-person)
107. Re:And... by RichiH · 2010-08-13 22:49 · Score: 1
  
  FWIW, btrfs is mainly sponsored by Oracle...
  Not sure what they plan with Linux, but if the _really_ cared, they would simply release ZFS under the GPL instead of blubbering about their IP and CDDL.
  As of late, most news relating to btrfs seems to point out problems, but maybe that is simply the sign of maturing. Having been bitten by OCFS2 a _lot_, I will step slowly with Oracle-based FS.
108. Re:And... by udippel · 2010-08-13 22:57 · Score: 1
  
  Not. ZFS never made the promise of broad availability. At least not, after it was CDDL-ed. So "Oracle's inept handling ...": didn't you, btw., made a typo? Wasn't it more of "SUN's inept handling ..." that made ZFS not much of a good OSSitizen?
  Secondly, a BSD license is such a good thing. No flamewars, but it doesn't include any non-patent-clause. And suddenly, you stand in your briefs (or even with less), if you have a company and you are sued.
109. Re:And... by udippel · 2010-08-13 23:12 · Score: 1
  
  Chris?
110. Re:And... by drinkypoo · 2010-08-14 01:15 · Score: 1
  
  Critical, no, but highly desirable. That's what made ZFS so interesting---the promise of broad availability. Sadly, it isn't working out that way, due almost entirely to Oracle's inept handling
  That is patent nonsense, pun intended. The license for ZFS was chosen by Sun specifically to prevent its inclusion in the Linux kernel, specifically to prevent its uptake on any platform other than Solaris. FreeBSD may be fantastic but it's not as well-supported as Linux and few corporate shops will take it on broadly. So if you get ZFS in the door with FreeBSD then you're leading up to buying a whole bunch of Sun (now Oracle) equipment. This is a terrible mistake no matter how you slice it; Oracle is abusive to customers, and so was Sun before them, ever since about the time they released Solaris 2. I don't know what else happened in the company at that time (I wasn't paying THAT close attention, I was young) but there must have been SOMETHING going on. I miss the Sun Microsystems that sold us a quality 4.4-BSD on quality hardware.
  
  --
  "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
111. Re:And... by drinkypoo · 2010-08-14 01:46 · Score: 1
  
  No-SQL is not a database, it's a file store. Calling them a database is an insult to databasses the world over.
  
  This is a stupid thing to say because a filesystem (as we know it today) is a hierarchical database. Try not to use words you don't understand.
  
  Yes, there are times when a "no-sql" solution is better than SQL, and the vector is pretty much that point where you realize that storing files in databases makes sense like hauling bales of hay in sports cars does.
  Not sure what this has to do with the relative merits of MySQL.
  
  --
  "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
112. Re:And... by lfd · 2010-08-14 02:06 · Score: 2, Insightful
  
  I beg to differ. I've never had the opportunity of working for Sun (been detached to Oracle back in 2000) but I've switched from Linux to OpenSolaris about a year ago and I will miss it dearly.
  There is definitely an OpenSolaris community and those who want to continue building on OpenSolaris legacy will contribute (or, more modestly use) IllumOs.
  I've been a Linux advocate myself for over 10 years. The truth is, OpenSolaris is much more of a professional OS.
  
  --
  Going on means going far, going far means returning. Tao te Ching
113. Re:And... by ci4 · 2010-08-14 02:26 · Score: 1
  
  I run NetBSD-Current (amd64) on my T61p; basically everything works as expected (including the graphics, i.e. non-accelerated). That is not a problem for me, as I triple-boot it (the others are W7/64 and, of course, OpenSolaris build 134).
  Actually the latter runs best. NVidia acceleration out from the CD, all the keys work, suspend-resume without any problem, Java, AcroRead, even RealPlayer if you wish... W7 is as good as one can expect, but took some time to get all the drivers and the rest; NetBSD lacks the 3D NVidia stuff. I stay mostly under W7 (the VPN client I have to use is only Windows, although I have a spare VirtualBox m/c under OpenSolaris for that), use Crossbow/VirtualBox for network simulations under OpenSolaris, mostly pkgsrc under NetBSD (plus tracking -current).
  It is the best laptop I've ever had, though. I wouldn't replace it even if it is almost three years old (especially with the maxed-out memory and a decent black scorpio disk).
114. Re:And... by wshs · 2010-08-14 04:49 · Score: 2, Insightful
  
  The real world is most users of MySQL don't care a damn about any of those. They care about which is easiest and cheapest to implement. So called MySQL experts are a dime a dozen. When you search Google for database software, you see MySQL on the first page of results, not Postgre, not MSSQL/SQL Server, and not Oracle. Lastly, other than standards zealots, who demands ACID compliance? In the real world, quality is often an afterthought.
115. Re:And... by Anonymous Coward · 2010-08-14 06:43 · Score: 0
  
  I really do hope that MySQL is successfully forked.
  For this you need three things to happen:
  1. the new project needs a catchy name like OurSQL, YourSQL, FreeSQL, etc.
  2. this needs to be "the" MySQL fork, so there are not a dozen each going in different direction, and all of the MySQL community will now support the new project.
  3. projects currently based on MySQL need to switch to the new-name project and totally abandon (as in don't even mention) MySQL.
116. Re:And... by Anonymous Coward · 2010-08-14 09:00 · Score: 0
  
  Postgres is really not that hard to understand ...
117. Re:And... by masmullin · 2010-08-14 17:10 · Score: 1
  
  not quite, but very close actually.
118. Re:And... by j-pimp · 2010-08-14 17:23 · Score: 1
  
  I've used RDBMS, I've used Mongo, I've used the file system, and I've LDAP. ... Each has their own purpose, and I use them all for different things.
  Out of curiosity, is there any project that actually requires almost all of these technologies? If so, how many libraries do this project have to import, to make these technologies work?
  Well its certainly conceivable. I've built a .NET web service that talked to Microsoft SQL server, Active Directory (via LDAP) and OpenLDAP. This was before MongoDB.
  .NET has built in support for SQL server and Microsoft Access. It also has LDAP support, but in my calse I used the Novell library. You need to use NoRM or mongodb-csharp. I'm sure I did some sort of filesystem access a well.
  The number of libraries for such an app is probably not a problem. A large app will end up using several external libraries, or internally developed shared libraries.
  Of course, if you are building an application big enough to need all these, it should use Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) So different modules that need to store data in different ways will be different services (separate programs).
  
  --
  --- Justin Dearing http://www.justaprogrammer.net/ We're just programmers.
119. Re:And... by gullevek · 2010-08-14 22:12 · Score: 1
  
  I run PostgreSQL servers since 2002 and I never had big problem with upgrading from one major version to another. Just install it parallel and then you can test and see that everything works.
  In place updates like MySQL would scare me.
  
  --
  "Freiheit ist immer auch die Freiheit des Andersdenkenden" - Rosa Luxemburg, 1871 - 1919
120. Re:And... by Simetrical · 2010-08-15 22:20 · Score: 1
  
  Of course, Oracle controls btrfs as well, and its future doesn't exactly look so great at this point, either
  Oracle doesn't control btrfs. It's part of the Linux kernel. Oracle pays the one who's currently in charge of btrfs development, Chris Mason, but a) someone else could take over if he left (look at how many developers there are); and b) plenty of other companies would be willing to hire him if Oracle didn't want to pay him to work on btrfs anymore. Oracle has influence over btrfs, but not control.
  
  --
  MediaWiki developer, Total War Center sysadmin
121. Re:And... by Ash+Vince · 2010-08-15 23:53 · Score: 1
  
  I don't think "too different from MySQL" is necessarily a minus. There's very little worthwhile about MySQL, all it had was good marketing and a earlier move to being cross-platform (which is very very important, but as a difference it's gone).
  In my experience of hiring developers there are more out there who are comfortable using MySQL than there are using Postgre, that makes it cheaper to run since new hires are more likely to be able to come in with a fair knowledge you only have to build on rather than train them up in a completely new SQL syntax.
  MySQL has a wider installed user base so unless Postgre is identical to use to this or T-SQL then deploying it will involve some retraining.
  
  --
  I dont read /. to RTFA, I read /. to offend people in ignorance.
122. Re:And... by Anonymous Coward · 2010-08-16 02:02 · Score: 0
  
  Erm, excuse me but making any statements about MySQL based in MyISAM is just plain stupid. MyISAM hasn't been the default pick of the day for a while and frankly the only reason it's still in use because the morons who use it keep pushing around the idea that it is faster than InnoDB.
  This is not the case and hasn't been for a while. InnoDB is easily as fast, if not faster, than MyISAM for almost all usages.
  The bullet list you posted seems pretty valid though ;-)
123. Re:And... by LWATCDR · 2010-08-16 02:21 · Score: 1
  
  If you just want to try it I can think of two solutions.
  One is get an Intel ITX board. Extremtech built a OpenSolaris system using a year to two ago. They tend to be sub $100 boards.
  Or use a VM. I suggest a free one like.. VirtualBox?
  It is was owned by Sun and I am guessing does a good job at running OpenSolaris.http://dlc.sun.com/osol/docs/content/IPS/virtualbox.html
  But the lack of hardware support can also be fixed by the community as long as it is OSS.
  And when it comes to OSS OSs I vote for the more the better.
  
  --
  See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
124. Re:And... by badkarmadayaccount · 2010-08-16 02:47 · Score: 1
  
  My wish - Debian GNU/k* to include OSOL - and I don't mean Nexenta - I mean debian. I'm more of a FC guy myself, but I'm somehow doubtfull the Fedora team is going to include anything non-linux. Though I'm somewhat hopefull someone will wrap up a OSOL kernel with set up linux compat as a kenel package for multiple distros - that may actuall be a good way to save OSOL.
  
  --
  I know tobacco is bad for you, so I smoke weed with crack.
125. Re:And... by Anonymous Coward · 2010-08-16 03:48 · Score: 0
  
  InnoDB is easily as fast, if not faster, than MyISAM for almost all usages.
  This must be the same "real-world" as your GP post was referring to then?
126. Re:And... by badkarmadayaccount · 2010-08-16 04:21 · Score: 1
  
  Actually, I'm kinda hoping somone will come up with a Prolog query engine. Declarative logical constraints seems the perfect fit fora any sort of data access paradigm.
  
  --
  I know tobacco is bad for you, so I smoke weed with crack.
127. Re:And... by badkarmadayaccount · 2010-08-16 04:30 · Score: 1
  
  Not to mention that filesystems are shifitng to database type functionality, with all those extensible metadata fields, powerful storage backends, replication and concurrent use capabilities.
  
  --
  I know tobacco is bad for you, so I smoke weed with crack.
128. Re:And... by unix1 · 2010-08-16 04:36 · Score: 1
  
  Mostly true; if you are running a family blog, or an Intranet for 100 employees for a monthly newsletter who cares about index merges?
  But grow your database to a point where you need to query not 100s, but millions of rows in a meaningful way, then get back to me about "easiest and cheapest."
  
  other than standards zealots, who demands ACID compliance?
  Anyone who cares about data, and where data is important.
129. Re:And... by rubycodez · 2010-08-16 04:49 · Score: 1
  
  needs "guest additions" to run under Virtualbox, like most things
  I predict no one will be writing new device drivers for OpenSolaris, the parrot has shuffled off this mortal coil, run down the curtain, gone joined the choir invisible....
  it's dead, jim.
130. Re:And... by DragonWriter · 2010-08-16 06:57 · Score: 1
  
  No-SQL is not a database, it's a file store.
  
  Non-relational databases -- which existed before relational databases -- remain databases. (No-SQL usually refers to non-relational databases, though it could also, I suppose, encompass relational databases that don't use SQL, like anything that uses a Tutorial or Industrial D.)
  (Of course, using a query language called "SQL", even if it is almost a subset of standard SQL, doesn't mean a database adheres to the relational model -- and MySQL using MyISAM tables to maximize performance, while sacrificing some of the essential elements of the relational model, is certainly an example of that. So its not really surprising that so-called "No-SQL" non-relational DBs would displace MySQL in certain uses, and it certainly isn't an "insult" to databases to call them databases any more than it was an insult to databases to call MySQL one.)
  Neither SQL nor the relational model is the be-all, end-all of databases.
131. Re:And... by DragonWriter · 2010-08-16 09:13 · Score: 1
  
  Actually, I'm kinda hoping somone will come up with a Prolog query engine.
  
  Any Prolog implementation is a query engine, by definition. I suspect what you are really looking for is a Prolog implementation where the store of facts is persistent rather than transitory. I'm not sure that such a thing exists, though many rules engines are conceptually generally similar (though I think that the search strategy used in Rete-based engines is different than that used in Prolog.)
132. Re:And... by turbidostato · 2010-08-16 09:34 · Score: 1
  
  "Not to mention that, while ZFS may not become a universal file system, it could well dominate in NAS appliances, and other proprietary closed-box products running OpenSolaris."
  I don't think so.
  Not because any technical problem with ZFS but because that other beast called "patents".
  And this is not an opinion but a fact: Coraid already tried to build up a NAS device based on ZFS but NetApp made them think it twice by patent violation threatening.
133. Re:And... by turbidostato · 2010-08-16 09:40 · Score: 1
  
  "Btrfs is GPL licensed. Who started it is irrelevant. If Oracle drops it then others will pick it up."
  Correction: others *may* pick it up. ...or may not.
134. Re:And... by turbidostato · 2010-08-16 09:43 · Score: 1
  
  "If Oracle for whatever reason decides to stop investing in BTRFS, the likely outcome AFAICS is not that BTRFS dies, but rather that Chris Mason and his team jump shop to Red Hat, Novell, Google, IBM or some other Linux contributor"
  Are you sure their contracts allow for even thinking to do that?
135. Re:And... by badkarmadayaccount · 2010-08-16 10:48 · Score: 1
  
  More specifically, I'm looking for something that can easily plug in major existing databases.
  
  --
  I know tobacco is bad for you, so I smoke weed with crack.
136. Re:And... by badkarmadayaccount · 2010-08-16 11:13 · Score: 1
  
  And here is why we need specialized CPUs for channel controller type tasks - asynch DMA engines with checksum abilities, sliding window state tracker registers, a descent sized L3 off chip cache for storing TCP state, that sort of thing. THe whole system needs to be one big TOE, and not just some measily chip on the NIC.
  
  --
  I know tobacco is bad for you, so I smoke weed with crack.
Oh Oracle by WrongSizeGlass · 2010-08-13 07:17 · Score: 4, Funny

Oh Oracle, what do you have up your sleeve next? Maybe you'll want to change the spelling of "MySQL" to "MY! SQL"?
1. Re:Oh Oracle by lorenlal · 2010-08-13 07:22 · Score: 1
  
  I figured they'd just re-brand it MyOracle, and find a way to choke it out as soon as they could.
2. Re:Oh Oracle by Yvan256 · 2010-08-13 07:24 · Score: 4, Funny
  
  Just to piss off the Syfy channel, they'll rename it Mi-SQL.
3. Re:Oh Oracle by oh_my_080980980 · 2010-08-13 07:26 · Score: 1
  
  Please, Open Solaris was on life-support BEFORE Oracle bought Sun.
  
  NOBODY USED IT!
  
  Maybe if Sun developed and supported it 10 years ago, it could have turned into something.
4. Re:Oh Oracle by Anonymous Coward · 2010-08-13 07:36 · Score: 0
  
  I hope MariaDB is up to the task of being the fork/drop-in replacement for MySQL now that it has become Oracle's My!SQL...
  http://montyprogram.com/mariadb/
5. Re:Oh Oracle by Anonymous Coward · 2010-08-13 11:09 · Score: 0
  
  The Syfy channel pisses off and sues the M out of the Mi-SQL. It becomes the i-SQL, pissing Apple off. Apple sues the i of the i-SQL. It becomes the SQL, pissing the IBM off. The IBM sues for the SQL and settles for the SQL to become the SEQUEL. The Hawker Siddeley pisses off in a major way and lobbies the Queen to summon her troops.
6. Re:Oh Oracle by earthloop · 2010-08-13 23:55 · Score: 1
  
  And changing Solaris to SoLarry's.
7. Re:Oh Oracle by Anonymous Coward · 2010-08-14 02:19 · Score: 0
  
  Nobody used it because the Solaris crowd is used to much higher quality than the people who worked on OpenSolaris (most notably David Comay, Shawn Walker, Steven Hahn and Dave Miner) were capable of providing.
what a waste! by kiljoy001 · 2010-08-13 07:21 · Score: 1

They could have gone so may directions with an opensolaris platform, but now they are kicking it the curb because it does not generate revenue, or rather they don't see any real way to monetize it.
1. Re:what a waste! by Americano · 2010-08-13 08:24 · Score: 1
  
  Isn't that sort of the way publicly traded businesses are supposed to work?
  If it's not a critical piece of your business and the benefits gotten from maintaining it are not worth the costs of maintaining it, the business should stop spending resources on it.
  The good news is, it's open source. Fork it.
2. Re:what a waste! by butlerm · 2010-08-13 09:03 · Score: 1
  
  "The good news is, it's open source. Fork it."
  Java is theoretically "open source" too. So why is Oracle suing Google? Java and ZFS are covered by dozens of patents - are the patent grants that iron clad that they can't sue a derivative they don't like into oblivion?
3. Re:what a waste! by ChunderDownunder · 2010-08-13 11:29 · Score: 1
  
  'Java', as OpenJDK, *is* open source and is packaged by major distributions, with GPL substitutions for the stuff Sun wasn't going to release.
  Android is not OpenJDK, rather based on Apache's Harmony.
4. Re:what a waste! by butlerm · 2010-08-13 18:49 · Score: 1
  
  Android is not OpenJDK, rather based on Apache's Harmony.
  Doesn't matter. Oracle apparently has good reason to sue Google over it, which means that the technologies that are in OpenJDK are proprietary in some sense, i.e. "pretend" open source, whether due to patents, licensing restrictions, or whatever.
  Aren't the Mono folks regularly criticized for running the same risk with Microsoft?
Wait! by idontgno · 2010-08-13 07:21 · Score: 2, Funny

What does Netcraft say?

--
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
1. Re:Wait! by SilverHatHacker · 2010-08-13 07:24 · Score: 0
  
  In Soviet Russia, Netcraft is dying!
  
  --
  Funny may not give karma, but +5 Informative never made anyone snort coffee out their nose.
2. Re:Wait! by maxwell+demon · 2010-08-13 09:43 · Score: 1
  
  Nothing. They fear a lawsuit by Oracle, because since ancient times the right to predict the future was the sole property of oracles.
  
  --
  The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
3. Re:Wait! by Anonymous Coward · 2010-08-13 15:14 · Score: 0
  
  "Sun, I am disappoint."
implied future GPL violation? by devoid42 · 2010-08-13 07:23 · Score: 1

We will distribute updates to approved CDDL or other open source- licensed code following full releases of our enterprise Solaris operating system.
Would be hard to chastise them though as they should have released the code before any actions could be taken. Though it bothers me that the intent is to delay source release for a market edge.

--

I am a figment of my own imagination.
1. Re:implied future GPL violation? by mr_da3m0n · 2010-08-13 07:30 · Score: 1
  
  Uhm... no. They own the copyright in the first place. They can relicense it on the fly under any terms they see fit, including binary-only-proprietary-release. They are not under any obligation to give you the source code, unless they have integrated GPL code in their codebase. And even then, they only have to give you the source to these.
  Also, the CDDL != the GPL. I'm fairly sure you know this already but, Sun originally chose the CDDL exactly because it was incompatible with the GPL.
  So, in short, no, not going to happen.
2. Re:implied future GPL violation? by devoid42 · 2010-08-13 07:37 · Score: 1
  
  And that case is exactly what I was talking about. The GPL'ed sections that they are using, use of those parts mandates that any changes they make to them are released along with binary release.
  
  And thanks for the compliment, yea I know the parts under CDDL we might not see for a long time. I'm just concerned with the community contributed GPL portions that exist. The memo indicated that a portion of the desktop environment uses these.
  
  --
  
  I am a figment of my own imagination.
3. Re:implied future GPL violation? by 0racle · 2010-08-13 07:55 · Score: 1
  
  that any changes they make to them are released along with binary release.
  
  Only to those they distribute the binaries too, if they ask for it. It doesn't mean they have to put it on the open internet.
  
  --
  "I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
4. Re:implied future GPL violation? by devoid42 · 2010-08-13 08:18 · Score: 1
  
  Only to those they distribute the binaries too, if they ask for it. It doesn't mean they have to put it on the open internet.
  Actually it does (well putting it on the open internet would be the cheapest way to) as per section 3.b.
  
  b) Accompany it with a written offer, valid for at least three years, to give any third party, for a charge no more than your cost of physically performing source distribution, a complete machine-readable copy of the corresponding source code, to be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange; or,
  
  Essentially if they distribute binary code containing GPL derivative they must provide source to 3rd parties that request it.
  
  --
  
  I am a figment of my own imagination.
5. Re:implied future GPL violation? by Anonymous Coward · 2010-08-13 09:22 · Score: 0
  
  GPL only requires you to distribute the source code to people you distributed the binaries. If Alice releases source code under GPL, Bob can take that code, modify it and sell the binaries to Eve. Eve can demand the source code from Bob, Alice can't.
  
  For example, if you distribute copies of such a program, whether gratis or for a fee, you must pass on to the recipients the same freedoms that you received. You must make sure that they, too, receive or can get the source code. And you must show them these terms so they know their rights.
6. Re:implied future GPL violation? by Anonymous Coward · 2010-08-13 11:42 · Score: 0
  
  Though it bothers me that the intent is to delay source release for a market edge.
  What market edge? They just lost all of the testing, feedback and occasional fix from the OpenSolaris community. In fact, by doing it this way, I think they've got the model backwards... Look at Red Hat, who pioneered the concept: Fedora is a general purpose system that gives Red Hat and the rest of its contributor community the chance to premier and provide feedback on technologies that may surface later in Red Hat Enterprise Linux releases..
  Perhaps it's an arrogance thing, where Oracle thinks they're doing us a favour by releasing a freebie version after they build their Enterprise OS, whereas Red Hat sees us as part of process of producing their Enterprise OS. I'll support the latter model, which I believe is more sustainable.
7. Re:implied future GPL violation? by NormalVisual · 2010-08-14 03:32 · Score: 1
  
  Perhaps it's an arrogance thing, where Oracle thinks they're doing us a favour by releasing a freebie version after they build their Enterprise OS, whereas Red Hat sees us as part of process of producing their Enterprise OS. I'll support the latter model, which I believe is more sustainable.
  
  Oracle has almost $114 billion in market cap and made almost $2.4 billion in profit this past *quarter*, which is almost exactly 100 times the profit that Red Hat made during the same time period. Yeah, I'm sure Larry Ellison is really concerned about "the community" and how they contribute to the sustainability of his products.
  
  --
  Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
He's Dead, Jim by DougDot · 2010-08-13 07:23 · Score: 2, Funny

He didn't have a chance. The Oracle Beast disrupted him down to the cellular level.
Why would I even consider using OpenSolaris? by mmell · 2010-08-13 07:24 · Score: 1

So that Oracle can sue me into oblivion for copyright infringement? (See: Java / Android)
And don't tell me that they're different situations - that'll only stay true until Oracle sees an opportunity to 1) crush a perceived competitor in the marketplace, or 2) take huge sums of money from anybody using their technologies who isn't already paying huge sums of money for the privilege.
I can't wait until they get around to killing MySQL.
1. Re:Why would I even consider using OpenSolaris? by Dunbal · 2010-08-13 07:34 · Score: 2, Funny
  
  I can't wait until they get around to killing MySQL.
  Everyone is using Postgre SQL anyway.
  
  --
  Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
2. Re:Why would I even consider using OpenSolaris? by Marsell · 2010-08-13 07:44 · Score: 2, Insightful
  
  Most of OpenSolaris was under the CDDL, which provides protection from patent claims from Sun (now Oracle). So if you used OpenSolaris, they wouldn't have a case through copyright infringement -- it's an approved open-source license -- or through patents they hold. Reality is complicated, so it's always a good idea to read the license code is released under: http://www.opensource.org/licenses/cddl1.php
  In other words: your concern about OpenSolaris specifically is unfounded. DalvikVM wasn't make by Sun and released under the CDDL, so there was no patent protection. This will still have a chilling effect on the Java ecosystem, of course.
  In practice I would use Solaris for databases and storing other critical data. Linux has a long way to go before it has something as mature as ZFS, and I wouldn't trust important data on anything less. DTrace adds introspection that is wonderful on a live database as well. Operating systems are tools, so use them for what they're good at.
3. Re:Why would I even consider using OpenSolaris? by 0racle · 2010-08-13 07:59 · Score: 1
  
  If they were, more opensource tools would support it. Honestly, I'm hoping more will realize that it's in their best interests to support at least both MySQL and PostgreSQL.
  
  --
  "I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
4. Re:Why would I even consider using OpenSolaris? by kestasjk · 2010-08-13 08:01 · Score: 1
  
  Linux has a long way to go before it has something as mature as ZFS, and I wouldn't trust important data on anything less.
  If you like ZFS/Solaris then okay, but you can hardly call ZFS "mature" compared to ext
  
  --
  // MD_Update(&m,buf,j);
5. Re:Why would I even consider using OpenSolaris? by Marsell · 2010-08-13 08:06 · Score: 1
  
  Except that Ext and ZFS are in different classes. Ext provides few of the protections that ZFS does.
  I'm only aware of two filesystems in the same class: ZFS and Btrfs. I'm looking forward to the day I can use Btrfs on production, but until then there's just ZFS. Ext is a non-contender here.
6. Re:Why would I even consider using OpenSolaris? by Anonymous Coward · 2010-08-13 08:12 · Score: 0
  
  Everyone except most everyone.
7. Re:Why would I even consider using OpenSolaris? by edmudama · 2010-08-13 08:35 · Score: 1
  
  If by mature, you mean old, wrinkly, and sun-spotted.
  
  --
  More data, damnit!
8. Re:Why would I even consider using OpenSolaris? by butlerm · 2010-08-13 08:35 · Score: 1
  
  I'm only aware of two filesystems in the same class: ZFS and Btrfs
  You should probably mention WAFL, the internal NetApp not-a-filesystem file system, which was doing things ZFS is now noted for years before. On proprietary, expensive hardware of course.
9. Re:Why would I even consider using OpenSolaris? by Lennie · 2010-08-13 08:43 · Score: 1
  
  Could you also add Ceph to your wishlist ?
  http://ceph.newdream.net/
  thank you. :-)
  
  --
  New things are always on the horizon
10. Re:Why would I even consider using OpenSolaris? by think_nix · 2010-08-13 09:53 · Score: 1
  
  And why do we have backup agents / software ?? F***
11. Re:Why would I even consider using OpenSolaris? by Marsell · 2010-08-13 10:35 · Score: 1
  
  Backups are necessary. But, you know, it's nice to avoid restoring a backup if you don't need to.
  Furthermore, backups don't help with data that flips bits on disk without being noticed, then consumed by the system in some calculation. A lot of filesystems do not notice non-metadata bits flipping, so you could end up end up with false suddenly becoming true in your database, affecting future calculations.
  Once you add RAID, failure conditions become yet more complicated, although some of them become less likely. I don't even know where to begin on that one, except that it isn't a panacea.
  It's easy to go "F***" if you're clueless.
12. Re:Why would I even consider using OpenSolaris? by Marsell · 2010-08-13 10:36 · Score: 1
  
  I'll take a look when I have a moment. Thanks. :)
13. Re:Why would I even consider using OpenSolaris? by Lennie · 2010-08-13 19:13 · Score: 1
  
  The distributed filesystem Ceph adopted btrfs for it's storage. I think this could be really important for Linux servers Ceph keeps the data online, btrfs makes sure the checksums still match.
  
  --
  New things are always on the horizon
I'm glad they're so good at math! by mattdm · 2010-08-13 07:26 · Score: 5, Insightful

From the memo:

As one example, Solaris is used by about 40% of Oracle’s enterprise customers, which means we have a 60% growth opportunity in our top customers alone.

That's wrong in so many ways it makes my brain hurt.
Maybe there's a secret footnote showing that 40% of the enterprise customers which are not currently running Solaris are willing to try it -- that'd work out nicely to 60% growth.
But somehow I doubt it.
1. Re:I'm glad they're so good at math! by idontgno · 2010-08-13 07:35 · Score: 3, Informative
  
  I'm a little suspicious of the apparent over-simplicity of the interpretation I'm about to lay out here, but I temper that with the understanding that this is marketing math.
  "top customers" == "Oracle's enterprise customers".
  40% of Oracle's enterprise customers are running Oracle (the RDBMS... remember that?) on Solaris. That means that 60% are running Oracle on some other OS. (Linux is prominent in that, I think. Can anyone find some statistics?)
  Anyways, that 60% (Oracle on non-Oracle OS) is the "60% growth opportunity" the market-droid is spewing about.
  
  --
  Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
2. Re:I'm glad they're so good at math! by nothings · 2010-08-13 07:45 · Score: 3, Informative
  
  Unpacking the math:
  If they have 40 customers and they grow by 60 customers, they'll have grown by 150%.
  To grow by 60%, they need to grow by 0.6*40 customers. That would be the same as 0.4*60 customers; in other words, they need 40% of the 60 customers remaining, not 100% of the 60 customers remaining.
  In other words, to grow by 60% they need only 40% of the market they're talking about. That's why the grandparent was critizing their math.
3. Re:I'm glad they're so good at math! by idontgno · 2010-08-13 07:58 · Score: 5, Funny
  
  And I'm point out that you're interpreting the marketing statement as someone versed and competent at arithmetic. I'm pointing out that it's marketing math, and therefore needs to be boiled down to 2nd-grade-level.
  I stand by my interpretation: 100% (current Oracle RDBMS customers) - 40% (Oracle+Solaris customers) = 60%.
  Remember: marketing math. Mathematics, Jim, but not as we know it.
  
  --
  Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
4. Re:I'm glad they're so good at math! by Anonymous Coward · 2010-08-13 08:19 · Score: 0
  
  Isn't 60% 120% of 40%? That's 120% growth.
5. Re:I'm glad they're so good at math! by Trepidity · 2010-08-13 08:36 · Score: 1
  
  This seems like unnecessary pedantry. We're talking about market share percentages as a unit: the change from 40% of market share to 50% of market share is a gain of 10% of the market. The change from 40% of market share to 100% of market share would be a gain of 60% of the market. It may be sloppy to talk about this as "60% growth", since that could mean several things, but in context it's clear that it means "we will add 60% of the market to our current share of the market". In other words, it's using "60% growth" analogously to how you might say that a tree underwent "3 inches' growth": it is growth by a particular amount of a particular unit.
  
  --
  10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
6. Re:I'm glad they're so good at math! by Anonymous Coward · 2010-08-13 09:10 · Score: 0
  
  ... [if] 40% of the enterprise customers which are not currently running Solaris are willing to try it
  
  What about those who are willing to try a little bit of Solaris, like at a party or something?
  Sorry, the way you phrased that ("willing to try it") made me think of that bad joke. It's probably only funny to me.
7. Re:I'm glad they're so good at math! by 1729 · 2010-08-13 09:22 · Score: 1
  
  This seems like unnecessary pedantry. We're talking about market share percentages as a unit: the change from 40% of market share to 50% of market share is a gain of 10% of the market. The change from 40% of market share to 100% of market share would be a gain of 60% of the market.
  I tried to parse it that way, but they're not talking about market share, but rather what percentage of their enterprise customers are using Solaris. (I assume they want folks other than their enterprise customers to be running Solaris, as well.)
  I suspect that the person who wrote this memo just doesn't understand math.
8. Re:I'm glad they're so good at math! by Anonymous Coward · 2010-08-13 10:12 · Score: 0
  
  Also, what it really means is 40% of Oracle’s enterprise customers have at least one Solaris box still running, it does not mean all their systems, nor all their Oracle systems, nor even a significant part of their systems run Solaris.
  In fact I wonder how many of those 40% have programs in place to migrate as much systems as possible to platforms not controlled by someone as greedy as Oracle (because if they are Oracle customers, they can have no illusions left about Oracle pricing).
9. Re:I'm glad they're so good at math! by mattdm · 2010-08-14 14:41 · Score: 1
  
  Oh, I'm sure that's what they meant. But the bad math barely skims the things which are wrong with the thinking here.
10. Re:I'm glad they're so good at math! by selven · 2010-08-15 23:08 · Score: 1
  
  I thought Oracle standardized on Verizon math?
  60% growth = 0.60% growth, which is ambitious for Oracle but possibly attainable.
Question about Oracle's OpenOffice? by commodore64_love · 2010-08-13 07:26 · Score: 4, Interesting

I was just reading on wikipedia last night that OpenOffice.org is a "limited" version of the office suite, and that most Linux installs (like Ubuntu) actually come with Go O-O instead because it offers full *.docx functionality that OpenOffice.org does not. Is that true?
If so I've been recommending the wrong office suite to friends, coworkers.

--
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
1. Re:Question about Oracle's OpenOffice? by Svartalf · 2010-08-13 07:46 · Score: 1
  
  Ubuntu doesn't ship with anything other than the OpenOffice.org stuff as best as I can tell. If wikipedia's listing things the way you're describing, it's in need of an edit as it's wrong.
  
  --
  I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
2. Re: Question about Oracle's OpenOffice? by xiando · 2010-08-13 07:46 · Score: 3, Informative
  
  I was just reading on wikipedia last night that OpenOffice.org is a "limited" version of the office suite, and that most Linux installs (like Ubuntu) actually come with Go O-O instead because it offers full *.docx functionality that OpenOffice.org does not. Is that true?
  Go O-O really is a patched version of OpenOffice.org which has more features thanks to these patches. And yes, many GNU/Linux distributions give you Go O-o when you install "OpenOffice.org". The Gentoo ebuild for app-office/openoffice is, for example, the Go O-o version. OpenOffice.org is "limited" in the sense that you can get more features by applying patches who give more features, which is a result of it being very hard to get patches into this project.
  
  --
  9/11: Never forget it was a false-flag operation
3. Re:Question about Oracle's OpenOffice? by bazald · 2010-08-13 07:47 · Score: 2, Interesting
  
  That's really interesting. Apparently OpenOffice.org + a useful patchset has been the norm for some distributions of Linux for some time, and there are builds for other platforms (Windows included) as well.
  http://go-oo.org/discover/
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go-oo
  "About OpenOffice.org" confirms an ooo-build in Lucid Lynx. I'll switch over in Windows later today I guess. Maybe Go-OO should advertise better?
  
  --
  Insert self-referential sig here.
4. Re:Question about Oracle's OpenOffice? by butlerm · 2010-08-13 08:39 · Score: 1
  
  This is off topic, but "OpenOffice.org" is such a lame name for an office suite that I consider it an active incentive not to use it. I installed Oracle.com on my machine today, but it took so much memory I deleted it.
5. Re:Question about Oracle's OpenOffice? by commodore64_love · 2010-08-13 08:57 · Score: 1
  
  Again according to wikipedia, Open Office was the original name used in the 90s, but it was later discovered to be copyrighted by some European company, so Sun/Oracle simply appended ".org" to the end starting around 2000 or 2001.
  
  --
  "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
6. Re:Question about Oracle's OpenOffice? by butlerm · 2010-08-13 09:07 · Score: 1
  
  That is strange. Would someone (other than Microsoft) get away with calling their software "Microsoft.org"?
7. Re:Question about Oracle's OpenOffice? by maxwell+demon · 2010-08-13 09:51 · Score: 1
  
  I guess that trade mark "Open Office" is older than the decision to name the Open Source branch of Star Office "Open Office", in which case it would be Sun who would have been in violation.
  
  --
  The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
8. Re: Question about Oracle's OpenOffice? by Waccoon · 2010-08-13 16:58 · Score: 1
  
  Go O-O
  First GIMP, now "Goo". The Linux community really does take the cake for bad names that don't explain what the software actually does.
9. Re: Question about Oracle's OpenOffice? by Billly+Gates · 2010-08-13 18:48 · Score: 1
  
  I had Ubuntu 9.10 for awhile and wanted OpenOffice 3.2 which Ubuntu came with 3.1
  I manually downloaded the deb files and I thought it looked like crap and missed features like saving a file as a PDF and docx. Now I know why. The windows version is crippled as well. Sigh
  MS Office is the little STD virus people get that keeps spreading. If it were not for that or if we had an alternative I would still use Linux and not stick with Windows or MacOSX. We broke the OS monopoly but now we need a free open source office suite. Like Xfree86 stagnated before Xorg was born we need a new office suite from scratch or a fork of Open Office.
  OpenOffice really sucks.
  
  --
  http://saveie6.com/
Sounds good to me by BitZtream · 2010-08-13 07:30 · Score: 4, Interesting

OpenSolaris distributions were a joke. They would have been fine back in the 90s when it was acceptable for a free UNIX to feel unpolished, incomplete and buggy because even the commercial ones were that way.
Now with other free (as in cost) clones feeling polished and professional, and OSX being user friendly and pretty, theres absolutely no execuse for a company to allow someething like OpenSolaris to exist.
All OpenSolaris ever did was make me feel like Solaris was going backwards rather than forwards, I'm pretty sure I never had an install that 'worked' properly, there was ALWAYS something wrong. Same hardware runs Linux and FreeBSD fine, so its not the hardwares fault. My fault ... maybe, but considering I used to admin solaris boxes a few years back its not like I was completely clueless.
If Solaris Express feels like it used to feel in relation to everything it had around it, then it'll be a great improvement.
The only reasons I would use Solaris at this point are:
I want to use high end Sun hardware, meh, probably unlikely at this point.
I want a UNIX that doesn't feel like it was thrown together by a bunch of people on the Internet, a coherent experience.
I would run Solaris for the same reason I run Mac OSX, I want a professional feeling polished OS. I want to get things done, not play UNIX admin to accomplish what should be trivial tasks. The only time I should see a commandline is when I need to do something completely out of the ordinary.
Sadly, it seems that Linux's popularity killed Solaris, not because one was better or worse than the other, but because Solaris tried to act like it was Linux and just failed completely because Linux's real advantage is the surprising number of people that treat it like a god, they are a useful resource as we all know. No one will probably ever feel that way about Solaris so its just never going to get the support Linux gets from people without it having SOMETHING Linux doesn't have.

--
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
1. Re:Sounds good to me by Anonymous Coward · 2010-08-13 07:47 · Score: 0
  
  like zfs? zones and all the cool stuff solaris had that linux didn't? Comparing hardware support by saying "it worked on linux and freebsd" is just ignorant thats what HCL's are for read it, if your stuff isnt on it don't bitch if it doesn't work, the same statement could be made about freebsd vs linux, linux supports vastly more hardware? does that make freebsd or openbsd useless? your a moron opensolaris had its place, further more its used in production by a large number of people and organizations. Dropping it like this isn't acceptable because you want a fancy fucking gui like you get in OS X thousands of man hours will be pissed away converting away from opensolaris to *shudder* linux or some other OS oracle you killed a beautiful legacy shame on you
2. Re:Sounds good to me by daveofnf · 2010-08-13 08:06 · Score: 2, Insightful
  
  no execuse for a company to allow someething like OpenSolaris to exist
  Be nice now... there's a community of programmers out there.
3. Re:Sounds good to me by Anonymous Coward · 2010-08-13 08:30 · Score: 0
  
  "your a moron opensolaris had its place"
  you're a douche.
4. Re:Sounds good to me by interval1066 · 2010-08-13 08:37 · Score: 1
  
  ".. there's a community of programmers out there."
  Too bad he's right. The only thing truly noteworthy coming out of that distro was zfs. Some of the code in there was so crufty it was sprouting potato roots.It was obvious that only hard-core nut bags cared anything for it. All the newer, cutting edge stuff was and is happening with the Linux kernel based distros, Sys V based stuff needs to be placed gently in a museum labeled "The quaint olden days of Unix".
  
  --
  Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'
5. Re:Sounds good to me by Third+Position · 2010-08-13 08:52 · Score: 1
  
  But zones turned out to be a major PITA to maintain. Ever try patching a zone? You have to patch the global zone first before you can patch the non-global zones. The problem is that the zones aren't truly independent virtual machines. In my shop, we're quickly finding out if you want to share your hardware resources, the easiest way is to install VMWare on a Windows or Linux server, and then just install Linux (or Windows) in the VM's.
  Sure, if you're running a massive database on high-end hardware, then Solaris makes sense. But that's not what you'd use a zone for. Anything that you'd use a zone for is just as easily done with a Linux VM, and since the VM's are truly independent, you have the luxury of running and maintaining whatever operating system best suits your needs in them.
  Solaris zones are a concept that's too little, too late. I can't really see them as much of a selling point for Solaris, other than using them to eke some additional life out of obsolete Sun hardware that's no longer adequate as a primary database server.
  
  --
  American Third Position
  Finally, a real choice!
6. Re:Sounds good to me by butlerm · 2010-08-13 08:58 · Score: 1
  
  If you are in a business like virtual hosting, and need to run large numbers of security isolated environments, Solaris Zones or something like it (there are equivalents on Linux and FreeBSD) will run circles around any VMware / Xen / KVM setup. Thousands instead of hundreds of virtual machines.
  Of course if you want to change the kernel, you must restart everything, and zone/container migration is more an idea than a reality. That is just fine for most hosting environments though.
7. Re:Sounds good to me by r7 · 2010-08-13 09:03 · Score: 1
  
  Solaris tried to act like it was Linux and just failed
  Curious how Solaris tried? IMO the problem was that they didn't try. They had a good thing started with SunFreeware, and Blastwave, but completely dropped that (package repository) ball. That and their lack of a coherent desktop strategy pretty much limited them to non-repo, non-desktop applications i.e., high-end servers. I blame this on management living in their own world and not getting out into the field much.
  I must confess to still liking Solaris for a limited number of datacenter / compute-farm tasks. It has so many fewer bugs than anything GNU, leaving admins free from rpm/deb dependency-hell, upgrade-hell, and the far, far too frequent Linux kernel vulnerabilities and non-backwards-compatible ABI changes.
  That said Sunsolve is but a shadow of its former self, there's still no sign Sun/Oracle will follow through on any of their recent initiatives (javafx, glassfish, java scripting language integration, ...), and no sign they have a clue WRT desktops, low-end entry points, package management, cross-platform compatibility, or much of anything the other 95% of the Unix/Linux mind-share/market is doing.
  The jury is still out on how Oracle might change any of this.
8. Re:Sounds good to me by Anonymous Coward · 2010-08-13 09:34 · Score: 0
  
  You were going great until you started blathering on about how OSX is so wonderful. Spekeaing of an OS that has fans who think it is God.
  
  I want to get things done, not play UNIX admin to accomplish what should be trivial tasks.
  I've never seen anyone who actually uses Linux actually say this, because it's actually not true.
  
  The only time I should see a commandline is when I need to do something completely out of the ordinary.
  Opinions are funny things, aren't they? Considering that I can use the command line when I want to, I use it. It's more powerful for some tasks. Just because my mother clams up at the sight of it doesn't mean I'm going to not use it. To not use it would be a waste.
  I don't have to, but I do want to. I went two years in Ubuntu without using the command line. I learned how to use it, and then I liked it as a useful tool.
9. Re:Sounds good to me by catmistake · 2010-08-13 09:47 · Score: 1
  
  zfs... and dtrace, too
  
  --
  The Admin and the Engineer
10. Re:Sounds good to me by NoGoodOnesLeft · 2010-08-13 09:59 · Score: 1
  
  zones also make sense with resource constraints (containers) if you want to license Oracle or something else that costs per processor. Most low end server class boxes now come with more cores than lots of small-medium businesses can fork over the Oracle licensing cost for.
  
  --
  wow, my very own sig!
11. Re:Sounds good to me by carnalforge · 2010-08-13 12:19 · Score: 1
  
  I want to use high end Sun hardware, meh, probably unlikely at this point.
  Definitely a valid point.
  
  I want a UNIX that doesn't feel like it was thrown together by a bunch of people on the Internet, a coherent experience.
  I would run Solaris for the same reason I run Mac OSX, I want a professional feeling polished OS. I want to get things done, not play UNIX admin to accomplish what should be trivial tasks. The only time I should see a commandline is when I need to do something completely out of the ordinary.
  And, as for the "user friendliness". First things i did on Solaris servers i managed was, nfs mount the EIS CD/DVS, setup-standard.sh & patch, go to sunfreeware.com, get lsof, get vim + dependencies and install, svcadm (on Solaris 10) disable those stupid printer services.
  Then, setup RAID. ZFS? Until ~2 years ago you couldn't use that for boot disks, now not sure, but I wont bet on this. Nevermind the bugs but hopefully now it's stable. Hopefully the costumer has paid a VxVM license. Or, if it was a SF25K it was included. SVM? Ugly ... but the last choice.
  I love Solaris, not only because i was paid to manage it but because is a well thought and functional UNIX. But from there to come and say it's user friendly because you dont have to use the command line is ridiculous.
  And no, I've never had a MAC just to tell that I'm not an apple fanboy.
  
  --
  :wq!
12. Re:Sounds good to me by carnalforge · 2010-08-13 12:27 · Score: 1
  
  Zones, resource pools, profiles (although clumsy to use at first), IPMP, memory management, MPxIO. And on Sparc HW the OBP. For me this are the things i will miss the most from Solaris. IMHO Dtrace is overhyped. ZFS too.
  Ah, and SUN's hardware.
  
  --
  :wq!
13. Re:Sounds good to me by smaddox · 2010-08-13 12:56 · Score: 1
  
  What if you want a decent ZFS implementation with all the recent goodies? Can any other distribution offer that? If so let me know, because I'm currently running an OpenSolaris server precisely for this reason.
14. Re:Sounds good to me by multipartmixed · 2010-08-13 18:32 · Score: 1
  
  > But from there to come and say it's user friendly because you
  > dont have to use the command line is ridiculous.
  I wholeheartedly agree. I also enjoy the fact that the command-line doesn't change willy-nilly from one version to next as GUIs are wont to. For example, ODS^H^H^HSDS^H^H^HSVM administration is still done best with the meta* commands, as has been the case since .... 2.4? Whereas the GUI is totally and completely different. And for no good reason, IMHO.
  > And no, I've never had a MAC just to tell that I'm not an apple fanboy.
  They're not bad, actually. As long as you want a UNIX box, you can treat it just like one and do all your work from the command line. The hardware/software integration is great, and you go a coherent, polished product. If you're an experienced UNIX guy and don't want to piss around with bullshit -- you should try one. They make a great bedroom workstation.
  
  --
  
  Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
15. Re:Sounds good to me by advocate_one · 2010-08-13 19:56 · Score: 1
  
  All OpenSolaris ever did was make me feel like Solaris was going backwards rather than forwards, I'm pretty sure I never had an install that 'worked' properly, there was ALWAYS something wrong. Same hardware runs Linux and FreeBSD fine, so its not the hardwares fault. My fault ... maybe, but considering I used to admin solaris boxes a few years back its not like I was completely clueless.
  I gave up even thinking about it as I couldn't find any information about whether my hardware was supported... the hardware database was next to useless
  
  --
  Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
16. Re:Sounds good to me by Anonymous Coward · 2010-08-13 20:39 · Score: 0
  
  Well my experience with OpenSolaris Nexenta alpha4 has been a good one, some years ago. I installed OpenSolaris in a PII with 256 RAM (!), and the installation and desktop feel was smoother than linux, at the time. It found all the hardware with no problems. It connected automatically to the internet through ethernet. I installed (with apt-get), gcc, g++, g77, python and compiled and ran my programs. I would certainly use it as desktop, if it could also mount samba shares.
  My dream was that it could be an independent FOSS OS, which could run most FOSS software, and which COULD NOT be threatened by patents. SUN had a large enough patent portfolio to protect it. And if OpenSolaris were a more or less good replacement for linux, it would be futile for MS to kill linux with software patents. Everyone would switch to OpenSolaris. Well everyone can dream.
17. Re:Sounds good to me by Anonymous Coward · 2010-08-14 02:38 · Score: 0
  
  You have no clue about the subject, obviously. ZFS is cutting edge code, with the core being slightly over 500 lines of C code. We've had ZFS in PROD one week after it came out in Solaris 10 u2, and it has detected corrupted data due to bit-rot, which it healed, and we survived numerous power outage blips and several flaky drives.
  Also, Solaris's tools for diagnostics, like kmdb, mdb, truss and dtrace are unparalleled in Linux and unparalleled even in the UNIX competitors, whatever's left of them.
  FMA for instance is a hardware diagnostics and telemetry framework that no other OS has, and it reaches all the way down to being able to light up a fault LED on a drive (assuming it has one), in order to allow you to locate it in a sea of servers on a huge server farm.
  Also, SMF: no other operating system has a self healing framework with unified logging and diagnostics, capable of monitoring and restarting a failed service (or taking whatever steps are necessary to correct the fault), as well as understand the dependencies between services and milestones.
  Performance: Solaris 10 runs as fast or faster than Linux on the same i86pc hardware.
  So based on what you wrote, I can conclude that you're a clueless Linux whiner; if you knew and understood how shoddy Linux is, you'd never write what you wrote.
  Hatetoseeyagobye.
18. Re:Sounds good to me by Anonymous Coward · 2010-08-14 08:59 · Score: 0
  
  If you don't ever want to see a command line, WTF are you doing using *nix?!! XD
19. Re:Sounds good to me by daveofnf · 2010-08-14 13:18 · Score: 1
  
  Again, be nice... there's a community of programmers out there.
20. Re:Sounds good to me by Dan+Ost · 2010-08-14 14:50 · Score: 1
  
  Does OSX still treat X apps like second class citizens?
  Last time I tried a Mac, alt-tabbing through my X apps required first alt-tabbing to X and then ~-tabbing to the app I wanted.
  
  --
  
  *sigh* back to work...
Illumos Fork by bill_mcgonigle · 2010-08-13 07:32 · Score: 4, Informative

There are some excellent technologies in OpenSolaris, and it appears The Illumos Project is going to be the place to find them.
I'm not sure this is a bad thing. Oracle's played its hand, and as opposed to Sun's years of "oh, gosh, we don't know if we want to be open or not - how about almost-open?" Oracle said, "screw you guys, we're going to make money off this thing." I frankly don't care about them not releasing an OpenSolaris binary build - Linus doesn't post binary builds - but keeping the source changes secret until after the commercial release just doesn't deal with the realities of Internet Time.
But, because of Oracle's decisiveness, the ON stack, the libc, etc. are all being done right now. I've tried once or twice to contribute to Nexenta and got stuck in the complexity of rebuilding a kernel, despite having done so in linux forever (to be fair the Nexenta guys were awesomely responsive so I didn't really have to do the build myself). This should be fixed.
It might give the OpenSolaris^W Illumos community a chance to succeed, being actually open.

--
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
1. Re:Illumos Fork by idontgno · 2010-08-13 07:40 · Score: 1
  
  It might give the OpenSolaris^W Illumos community a chance to succeed, being actually open.
  And that may be the sole bright spot in this sad saga. An opportunity to cleanly and distinctively fork, so there's clearly Oracle Solaris and Illumos Open Solaris. The weird, coy, half-open thing the community had before was a losing proposition.
  
  --
  Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
2. Re:Illumos Fork by segedunum · 2010-08-13 08:38 · Score: 1
  
  Illumos has got no chance. The last I checked Oracle still required non-CDDL code and drivers, and it certainly required a full Solaris for bootstrapping. On top of that they've got to mainatin Solaris kernel and userspace code as well as doing the job of a distributor. That task is absolutely insane. I'm not sure what backers would want to take that on because the only value is in real Solaris compatibility. Without that it's just another Unix-like operating system amongst many.
3. Re:Illumos Fork by butlerm · 2010-08-13 08:43 · Score: 1
  
  I think we can safely say that it is not going to be called "Illumos Open Solaris", or "Open Solaris" anything for long. Oracle won't tolerate it, any more than Red Hat. If Open Solaris is going to live on, it will be under a new name, and not really a version of Solaris at all, but rather a hopefully mostly compatible fork.
4. Re:Illumos Fork by drsmithy · 2010-08-13 08:44 · Score: 1
  
  It might give the OpenSolaris^W Illumos community a chance to succeed, being actually open.
  Their efforts would be _vastly_ better spent helping to port and/or maintain the handful of genuinely interesting features (ZFS, DTrace, etc) in OpenSolaris, to FreeBSD.
  Now what will happen, is they'll waste their time spinning their wheels for a few years fighting against Oracle's disinterest (if not outright hostility) before the plug is finally pulled for good.
  OpenSolaris was a dead platform the day Oracle bought Sun. It amazes me it's taken some people so long to come to that realisation, and utterly blows my mind that there are people who still haven't.
5. Re:Illumos Fork by drsmithy · 2010-08-13 08:46 · Score: 1
  
  An opportunity to cleanly and distinctively fork, so there's clearly Oracle Solaris and Illumos Open Solaris.
  The problem is that the market for such a product is so miniscule as to make NetBSD look healthily mainstream.
6. Re:Illumos Fork by butlerm · 2010-08-13 08:49 · Score: 1
  
  Without that it's just another Unix-like operating system amongst many.
  ZFS alone is valuable enough that continued licensing allowing, Illumos or something like it is likely to survive for quite some time on that basis alone. Of course if Oracle decides to take ZFS fully proprietary, that might require a ZFS fork at some point in the future, assuming (again) that is even allowed, even under a different name.
  It is like the Java license - pretend open source. How "open source" can something really be if companies like Google and other interested parties can't create arbitrary open source forks and derivatives, even if they have to change the name?
7. Re:Illumos Fork by bill_mcgonigle · 2010-08-13 09:38 · Score: 2, Insightful
  
  The last I checked Oracle still required non-CDDL code and drivers, and it certainly required a full Solaris for bootstrapping.
  That's the part they're fixing that I mentioned in my post.
  
  --
  My God, it's Full of Source!
  OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
8. Re:Illumos Fork by bill_mcgonigle · 2010-08-13 09:41 · Score: 1
  
  Their efforts would be _vastly_ better spent helping to port and/or maintain the handful of genuinely interesting features (ZFS, DTrace, etc) in OpenSolaris, to FreeBSD.
  Well, I can't argue with you there. I suspect being able to build OpenSolaris would be helpful in that transition, so perhaps it's not for naught.
  
  --
  My God, it's Full of Source!
  OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
9. Re:Illumos Fork by segedunum · 2010-08-13 10:13 · Score: 1
  
  Well, if they need anything from Oracle then they're a bit stuck.
10. Re:Illumos Fork by drinkypoo · 2010-08-14 01:08 · Score: 1
  
  There are some excellent technologies in OpenSolaris, and it appears The Illumos Project is going to be the place to find them.
  If only their website would give me some idea of what they were doing without having to play a video...
  
  But, because of Oracle's decisiveness, the ON stack, the libc, etc. are all being done right now.
  Great. Then you'll end up with an effectively unmaintainable kernel; there is just not going to be enough interest by the qualified in the face of Linux.
  
  It might give the OpenSolaris^W Illumos community a chance to succeed, being actually open.
  It has no chance to succeed. The userbase is too small. The only real advantage is ZFS and you can get that on Linux in more and more ways all the time. Someday the performance might even be adequate. I remember what being a Solaris admin was like, and if you fix everything wrong with it, you'll have Linux.
  
  --
  "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
11. Re:Illumos Fork by bill_mcgonigle · 2010-08-15 02:24 · Score: 1
  
  The userbase is too small.
  Compared to what? For instance, there are probably more OpenSolaris/Nexenta ZFS users than NetApp users. If hardware support were narrowed to a few decent options there, the work isn't enormous.
  The only real advantage is ZFS and you can get that on Linux in more and more ways all the time. Someday the performance might even be adequate.
  Right, there's really no option now on Linux that anybody would seriously use. That's changing, slowly but steadily. We have hardware that works today.
  Also, Solaris can eek 20% or so more disk performance out of a machine than Linux can. I'm not sure why, I just see the raw disk rates.
  I remember what being a Solaris admin was like, and if you fix everything wrong with it, you'll have Linux.
  Again, ZFS is the killer app. ZFS makes setting up iscsi, NFS, and smb shares much easier than linux. I do both.
  If not for the CDDL/GPL problem, this would go away almost overnight, but here we are, having to worry about governmental attacks for mixing code.
  
  --
  My God, it's Full of Source!
  OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
12. Re:Illumos Fork by drinkypoo · 2010-08-15 02:40 · Score: 1
  
  Again, ZFS is the killer app. ZFS makes setting up iscsi, NFS, and smb shares much easier than linux. I do both.
  Right, but it's also the only compelling feature. There is literally nothing else in Solaris which does not have a suitable analog in Linux. dtrace is superior, but not so much as ZFS. Since you can get a pretty good ZFS on FreeBSD for creating filers, there is little reason to suffer with the poorly supported OpenSolaris operating system. Only people creating filers with complex disk pools really need ZFS, because for a workstation system it offers no advantages regarding the security of your data and indeed may make your storage less reliable in that context.
  
  If not for the CDDL/GPL problem, this would go away almost overnight, but here we are, having to worry about governmental attacks for mixing code.
  Well, blame Sun for that one. They didn't REALLY want people using it outside of Solaris, and saw *BSD as an also-ran, although it's clearly too soon to make such judgments.
  
  --
  "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
13. Re:Illumos Fork by bill_mcgonigle · 2010-08-16 02:07 · Score: 1
  
  Since you can get a pretty good ZFS on FreeBSD for creating filers
  We really need FreeBSD 9 and v23 pools. That's the win. It's not quite there yet, probably a year away. Block-level de-dup is so important for big NAS.
  Only people creating filers with complex disk pools really need ZFS, because for a workstation system it offers no advantages regarding the security of your data and indeed may make your storage less reliable in that context
  My workstations are Linux, but I keep good backups of them, because every once in a while I suffer a crash that eats ext3/4 and I lose up to a day's work. I'm fairly sick of that, and like bringing up a machine that's always got a consistent filesystem. bcache will likely be good enough at some point to replace the L2ARC, but we're really close to the point of having small SSD's be cheap enough to throw in a desktop machine to make the disk access blazing. Seagate's XT disks help a bit, but they're just limited to not knowing enough about the data.
  
  --
  My God, it's Full of Source!
  OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
A very good kernel maybe by Rhys · 2010-08-13 07:35 · Score: 1

but patch and package management are part of the OS, and on Solaris they stink.

--
Slashdot Patriotism: We Support our Dupes!
1. Re:A very good kernel maybe by LWATCDR · 2010-08-13 08:02 · Score: 1
  
  But that is easy enough to fix.
  just how many good FOSS package management systems do we have?
  apt-get
  yum
  ports
  I mean really that problem has been solved a number of times.
  That would be an easy fix.
  
  --
  See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
2. Re:A very good kernel maybe by keeboo · 2010-08-13 08:30 · Score: 1, Informative
  
  just how many good FOSS package management systems do we have?
  yum
  Sorry but... yum being a good package manager?
  Yum is well thought in theory, but horribly slow in practice.
3. Re:A very good kernel maybe by Anonymous Coward · 2010-08-13 08:32 · Score: 0
  
  But in OpenSolaris, the SVR4 package/patch system is replaced by IPS, which is much more like what you'd expect from a modern OS.
4. Re:A very good kernel maybe by Lennie · 2010-08-13 08:38 · Score: 1
  
  That sounds like Nexenta, Debian/Ubuntu apt/get with OpenSolaris kernel/zfs filesystem.
  
  --
  New things are always on the horizon
5. Re:A very good kernel maybe by Anonymous Coward · 2010-08-13 10:31 · Score: 0
  
  but patch and package management are part of the OS, and on Solaris they stink.
  In a strange twist given that Red Hat is the Linux that costs the big bucks, RPM stinks more than the pkgadd based Solaris package management, while dpkg is better.
6. Re:A very good kernel maybe by NuShrike · 2010-08-13 15:36 · Score: 1
  
  RPM treadmill hell (worse than dll hell) needs to die and go away. But, it'll stick around like forever like Cobol at this point.
7. Re:A very good kernel maybe by udippel · 2010-08-13 22:45 · Score: 1
  
  But that is easy enough to fix.
  Not any longer. That's what Nexenta started off with so, so very well. But the geezers of old-time SUN bosses didn't allow. At all.
  Maybe they were not so much of geezers after all? With the conservative clientèle of SUN, they expect no changes, 100% backward-compatibility. All those 'geeky' and 'nerdy' solutions used to be no-go-zone for those in charge. Plus: control. Think of CDDL. Stay in control. So a new package manager, it had to be.
  It never was possible, under SUN, to extend apt-get (I can divulge some inside info here: apt-get doesn't work with zones, e.g.. And SUN didn't want to extend apt-get for zones.)
8. Re:A very good kernel maybe by walshy007 · 2010-08-13 22:48 · Score: 1
  
  Or rather, the myth of it will continue to linger. I have not had 'rpm hell' as you describe it ever on my fedora systems, which have been in use since before the fedora brand even existed.
  .deb is not superior to .rpm, it all comes down to the maintainers of the packages.
9. Re:A very good kernel maybe by NormalVisual · 2010-08-14 02:51 · Score: 1
  
  IPS is also the reason you can't do sparse zones in OpenSolaris. I'd rather have a package manager that doesn't destroy one of the better features of the operating system.
  
  --
  Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
10. Re:A very good kernel maybe by badkarmadayaccount · 2010-08-16 11:16 · Score: 1
  
  Cite?
  
  --
  I know tobacco is bad for you, so I smoke weed with crack.
11. Re:A very good kernel maybe by NuShrike · 2010-08-16 14:07 · Score: 1
  
  The hell is the dependencies (python, perl, etcetc) do not support multiple-version installation, and the OS is not isolated from 3rd-party package dependencies.
  What version of Python needed to support the latest Mercurial, or Git, RPM SHOULD NOT be dependent on which FC OS version currently installed.
  The hell is being thrown into having to hand-upgrade each RPM (and dependencies) and probably breaking something because neither yum nor RPM will support such an "off/obsolete" OS configuration with auto-download/dependency resolution, when it has nothing to do with the OS/kernel.
  Whereas, with apt (somewhat) and pkgsrc/bsd-Ports what OS installed really doesn't matter. Multiple versions of supporting components (such as gcc) can be installed as needed, and backwards compatibility is maintained longer because of multi-install + OS isolation.
  Windows/MacOS has this freedom where most of the time apps don't care about the OS version installed.
12. Re:A very good kernel maybe by walshy007 · 2010-08-17 12:04 · Score: 1
  
  The hell is being thrown into having to hand-upgrade each RPM (and dependencies) and probably breaking something because neither yum nor RPM will support such an "off/obsolete" OS configuration with auto-download/dependency resolution, when it has nothing to do with the OS/kernel.
  If you are using rpm itself to install a program that is not meant for your system, you deserve all the rpm hell you get.
  Supporting ancient or untested combinations of software is a nightmare. I mean lets start with binutils/gcc/libc, they all have to be of a similar timeframe to work, try to mix and match versions, even compiling them yourself and there is a high likelihood a shitfight would occur because they weren't designed to work together and they all evolve together.
  Basically, for the last ten years at least, if you have rpm hell, chances are you are doing it wrong.
13. Re:A very good kernel maybe by NuShrike · 2010-08-26 07:43 · Score: 1
  
  I appreciate your reply, but I don't feel you've read mine. You also don't seem to have any experience with pkgsrc, nor Ports.
  I did name yum, and I'm installing RPMs meant for the system, specifically FedoraCore9.
  As a specific example, why does the Mercurial RPM from FC project have ANY FC release dependency? It should be dependant only on if I have a minimal Python, and associated packages available. Same with git.
  I should be able to install the latest Python/Git without worrying about how old my FC is. Why doesn't yum either pull the RPM updates for my current FC, or pull the SRPMs to rebuild them if there's incompatibility along with side-by-side support and dependencies? Without that, RPM Hell.
  Why can't I install multiple versions of gcc at the same time? Why is gcc2.95 dependent on any specific FC release, again? The only thing it should need is a patch system for migrating it from the upstream to the current directory structure, nothing else.
  I know specifically that Ports/pkgsrc supports gcc2.95 and toolchain, and forward, for newer OS releases because they update their upstream app patches. Side-by-side installation with the latest gcc4.x (and any number of other gcc versions) is also supported; really.
  RPM Hell is losing RPMs for apps just because the OS updated, and has nothing to do with ABI breakage. The lack of distributed or hosted SRPM configuration updates is what it is.
  This is my view of one of the things that has driven many toward apt and .deb and Ubuntu; RPM Hell.
  In the real world of corporate dev, multiple versions of everything have to be installed and maintained due to releases that are very dependent on specific "bugs/characteristics" of that toolchain.
  Companies spend a lot of man-power to privately and individually maintain that RPM Hell (by building from source instead), when RH/FC could easily mirror what Pkgsrc/Ports does already, and has been doing for years, as shared effort.
  But, as you've demonstrated, there's very little interest, and so the RPM Treadmill is born. Either keep the OS up to date, or be screwed out of any app updates within one year.
Oh great. by Anonymous Coward · 2010-08-13 07:36 · Score: 1, Interesting

First OpenSolaris.
I hope they dont do anything like this with java.....oh wait
Oracle seems real friendly with Open Source by Ash+Vince · 2010-08-13 07:40 · Score: 1

Yup, sure seems like MySQL is in real safe hands now.

--
I dont read /. to RTFA, I read /. to offend people in ignorance.
1. Re:Oracle seems real friendly with Open Source by maliqua · 2010-08-13 08:13 · Score: 1
  
  am i the only one that thinks its time to switch to postgresql ?
2. Re:Oracle seems real friendly with Open Source by TheRaven64 · 2010-08-13 08:52 · Score: 3, Funny
  
  Yes. Everyone else thinks the correct time was several years ago.
  
  --
  I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I abandoned Solaris for Y2K. by Ungrounded+Lightning · 2010-08-13 07:46 · Score: 2, Interesting

I'd had high hopes for Sun's stuff back in '85. But even before being eaten by Oracle they always seemed to be roadblocking any attempt to work with the guts of their system, even for internal use only. Meanwhile, Linux made good on the GNU promise and the freeing of BSD provided an additional open alternative OS (at least three of 'em if you count the project splits as distinct).
I abandoned Solaris on the last of my own machines for Y2K, rather than shell out for upgrades. (Only Linux machines at home at the moment - except for one firewalled-off Windows machine for my wife to run student-Autocad and certain true Windows applications for classwork.)
Some Open Solaris fans tried to claim things were more open than I perceived them to be. But this development underscores the correctness of my choice.

--
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
1. Re:I abandoned Solaris for Y2K. by Anonymous Coward · 2010-08-13 08:05 · Score: 0
  
  I abandoned Solaris on the last of my own machines for Y2K, rather than shell out for upgrades.
  What version of Solaris were you running? Sun gave free y2k patches for all current (and some old) versions of the OS.
2. Re:I abandoned Solaris for Y2K. by segedunum · 2010-08-13 08:30 · Score: 2, Interesting
  
  Some Open Solaris fans tried to claim things were more open than I perceived them to be. But this development underscores the correctness of my choice.
  They were never open. Sun came up with OpenSolaris because they were losing out big time to Linux suppliers and it was a feeble attempt to make Solaris look 'open source' when they were selling it without Sun giving up any control at all.
  
  Frankly, I applaud Oracle for finally being open with everybody rather than continuing Sun's sham. Now it and SPARC can be Ellison's play-things that he can use to go up against IBM, Power and AIX, which is now a different story.
3. Re:I abandoned Solaris for Y2K. by Ungrounded+Lightning · 2010-08-13 08:34 · Score: 1
  
  What version of Solaris were you running? Sun gave free y2k patches for all current (and some old) versions of the OS.
  Don't recall. But it was old and as I recall I did check: It was behind the horizon for the free patches.
  I'd inherited the machine from a startup that shut down, as part of a severance agreement shortly before they went belly-up.
  
  --
  Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
4. Re:I abandoned Solaris for Y2K. by multipartmixed · 2010-08-13 18:36 · Score: 1
  
  You know, I'm 99.9999% sure that Y2K-ready patches were on sunfreeware.com as part of the global patch clusters by mid-1999 at the latest. At least for 2.5.1.
  What were you running?
  
  --
  
  Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
"OpenSolaris, the distribution, is dead." by John+Hasler · 2010-08-13 07:46 · Score: 1

And thus the CDDL serves its purpose.

--
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
1. Re:"OpenSolaris, the distribution, is dead." by butlerm · 2010-08-13 08:53 · Score: 1
  
  Without Oracle support, OpenSolaris or something like it would probably be mostly dead even if it were GPL. The difference would be that stuff like ZFS would make it into GPL operating systems. Making that impossible is perhaps the real purpose of the CDDL.
Fork Now or Still Spork? by PineHall · 2010-08-13 07:52 · Score: 1

So what does that mean for the OpenSolaris connumity? Will Illumos wait for the delayed source code updates and try to stay a "spork"? Or will they decide to go it on their own (fork) and try keep as much compatibility as they can? It is definitely not a good situation for the OpenSolaris community.
in the OpenSolaris Forum by rubycodez · 2010-08-13 07:53 · Score: 2, Funny

Open Source Curious Newbie: "I wish to make a complaint"
OpenSolaris Developer/Community Fanboi in the Forum: "Sorry, we're closing for lunch"
Newbie: "Never mind that, my man. I wish to complain about this OpenSolaris Distro, what I downloaded not half an hour ago from this very user's group website."
Fanboi : Oh yes, the, ah, the 2009.06... What's, ah... W-what's wrong with it?
Newbie: I'll tell you what's wrong with it, my man. It's dead, that's what's wrong with it.
Fanboi: "No, no, it's ah... it's in code freeze"
Newbie : Look, matey, I know a dead OS distro when I see one, and I'm looking at one right now.
Fanboi : No no, it-it's not dead, it's frozen!
Newb : Frozen?
Fanboi : Y-yeah, 'in freeze' Remarkable OS, the 2009.06, isn't it, eh? Beautiful features for the future!
Newb : The future features don't enter into it. It's stone dead!
Fanboi : Nononono, no, no! it's source tree commit is just turned off temporarily!
1. Re:in the OpenSolaris Forum by Anonymous Coward · 2010-08-13 08:53 · Score: 0
  
  It's pining for the fjords!
2. Re:in the OpenSolaris Forum by Anonymous Coward · 2010-08-13 09:58 · Score: 0
  
  Newb: Read, Matey, I know a dead OS when I see one, and I'm looking at one right now.
  [..]
  Fanboi: (looks around) Yeah, allright, sure.
3. Re:in the OpenSolaris Forum by Anonymous Coward · 2010-08-13 14:27 · Score: 0
  
  OpenSolaris Developer/Community Fanboi in the Forum: "Sorry, we're closing for lunch"
  The majority of the developers were Sun employees, non-anonymous, paid professionals. Members of the "community" would often argue with them over silly ideological things, but they kept their cool. Other than a lot of [NO COMMENT]'s it's pretty hard to pick on their forums.
  OOOOOH, by OpenSolaris Forum, you mean THIS one! It's all clear now.
A CDDLy bear. by Stumbles · 2010-08-13 07:55 · Score: 1

As long as it remains CDDL it will go no where.

--
My karma is not a Chameleon.
Summary: OpenSolaris relicensed under WIPL by Anonymous Coward · 2010-08-13 07:58 · Score: 2, Informative

WIPL = Want It? Pay Larry
Derby by Kupfernigk · 2010-08-13 08:07 · Score: 4, Interesting

Watch Derby. Small footprint, backed by IBM, some very nice features indeed (efficient backups and table compression can be called while running) and, although it is actually 100% java you do not need java to run it. It is a very nice way to run small, simple databases (like MySQL 3.2x was designed for), but with features like efficient complex joins and easy window selects. Oh yes, and there's a commercial version (Cloudscape). Oracle faffing with MySQL is a gift to IBM.

--
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
1. Re:Derby by Anonymous Coward · 2010-08-15 06:15 · Score: 0
  
  God no, not derby. Look at H2.
This was so predicable... by Glasswire · 2010-08-13 08:22 · Score: 4, Insightful

Knowing Oracle it was obvious from the day the acquisition was announced that:
1) Oracle will cripple, keep on life support or close-source all open source projects. Larry believes anything users want to use is worth making them pay for. Any open source projects that survive will be strategically useful (like letting a 'free' MySQL contaminate Microsoft's low-midrange database business revenue)
2) Java is what Oracle really wanted in Sun acquisition (see announcement today of lawsuit against Google re Android Java use) and Solaris is useful only insofar as it is part of the value prop for selling Sun, now Oracle, hardware. Solaris will only be pushed by Oracle on non-Oracle hardware if they can make a good license business out of it. Expect that all use of Java in open source implementations will dry up and any commercial implementations will be expected to start pushing license dollars back to Oracle (Which is why somebody at IBM should have been shot for blowing the Sun acquisition over the few measly millions they were fighting over before Oracle pulled the rug out form under IBM -it could have been Oracle kneeling in front of IBM instead of IBM watching the underlying architecture of Websphere and everything else Java based owned by their biggest competitor)
3) Open Solaris was a way to enable a user community (not really a dev community like Linux has) but since it can't be licensed (for money) and there's no really support/services business and it certainly doesn't help sell any Sun/Oracle hardware (which generally always runs the commercial Solaris) it has no place in an Oracle world.
I'm amazed that anybody is surprised.
1. Re:This was so predicable... by interval1066 · 2010-08-13 08:42 · Score: 1
  
  Well, I think fewer are surprised than you think. An Oracle-Sun package is an obvious play. As for Java, well, I guess anything that can compete with .NET (although trust me, I know its a fool's errand) is a good deal for 'ol Larry. The next 4 in this particular space should be interesting.
  
  --
  Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'
2. Re:This was so predicable... by Anonymous Coward · 2010-08-13 09:47 · Score: 0
  
  A few years ago I worked at a fairly large company that didn't have any Unix. This was back before RedHat even had it's IPO.
  All the servers were Windows based plus the AS/400 and IBM mainframe.
  One of the it department heads found this tool that only ran on Unix and he got an old desktop and installed RedHat on it because it was free.
  Later a test server running RedHat was setup. Eventually some more important applications were running on production RedHat servers and RedHat licenses were purchased because you can't have anything important running on an unsupported platform.
  If that happened today with Oracle/Solaris instead of RedHat Linux, Oracles reps would have their foot in the door and possibly be able to get the x64 server hardware business away from the current vendor. They'd be able to pitch Oracle DB vs DB2 and MSSQL. Try and sell their app server instead of the current appserver platform used. Pit their storage solutions up against EMC. etc. etc.
  This is how I remember IBM reps worked. You'd start using one of their products and then you'd get some "free samples" of their other technology hoping you'll like it and switch.
  Oracle/Sun/StorageTek/everything else has a lot of solutions and while they're in a lot of places OpenSolaris could have opened up some more doors for them.
  Sun had the right idea with the whole "give away the razors and make money on the blades" idea but they had problems executing. At some points they said hardware will be free, other times software.
  A lot more people were exposed to Solaris as a result of OpenSolaris, either as a test or home server. They liked what they saw. This could have lead to purchases down the line.
  I think Oracle might have given up on OpenSolaris too early.
3. Re:This was so predicable... by cparker15 · 2010-08-13 10:12 · Score: 1
  
  I'm surprised people actually give Oracle money.
  
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  You must wait a little bit before using this resource; please try again later.
4. Re:This was so predicable... by RocketRabbit · 2010-08-13 19:38 · Score: 2, Interesting
  
  You have perceived something that most miss here: how fucked IBM and a large number of very big companies could be if Oracle really lets loose their patent torpedo salvo. Pretty much all of IBM's big bucks packages are either built on Java, or have significant Java components. Perhaps IBM has the money to pay off Oracle, but maybe not. Forget IBM, though, and look at the small companies doing work with Java who may lose their shirts over this fiasco. Unlike IBM, they don't have an entire building full of attack lawyers to call upon.
  Oracle has fired a shot across the bow of Java. It remains to be seen how it will play out, but I am not hopeful.
5. Re:This was so predicable... by Anonymous Coward · 2010-08-14 02:49 · Score: 1, Insightful
  
  Expect that all use of Java in open source implementations will dry up and any commercial implementations will be expected to start pushing license dollars back to Oracle
  Sounds like there will be much wailing and gnashing of teeth for Java folks. Betting the farm on a language that was as fucked up as Java to begin with pretty much spelled out what was going to happen, acquisition or not. By fucked up, I don't just mean how the language worked (which was kinda bent to begin with) but also how it was licensed.
  Now I see and hear people pissing about with "Linux is old" and "BSD is dead". Next I suppose I'll hear about how OS X is the cat's meow (despite the horrid performance it has as a server OS - and yes, I have personal experience with that steaming mount of catshit). Solaris had a lot of nice features, features that are slowly being emulated or duplicated; somehow, I think we'll all survive.
  In the meantime, I'm still trying to figure out why people are so willingly wanting to be someone else's bitch. It's like watching this girl you know getting the crap kicked out of her every night, but she keeps going back to him because "he's good to me". You shake your head and think "just stand up to him and leave!" but she won't, so it keeps getting worse and worse...so it goes with the tech industry over the last 3-4 years. People are just adoring such crappy treatment, and then they wonder why they keep getting "hurt" by it over and over. News to the wise: pack your shit and never go back. STOP ENABLING THESE ASSHOLES BY USING THEIR PRODUCTS.
6. Re:This was so predicable... by NormalVisual · 2010-08-14 06:51 · Score: 1
  
  You have perceived something that most miss here: how fucked IBM and a large number of very big companies could be if Oracle really lets loose their patent torpedo salvo
  
  Oracle's not the only company that's sitting on a respectable patent portfolio. I'm quite sure IBM and others could make life uncomfortable for Oracle as well.
  
  --
  Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
7. Re:This was so predicable... by RocketRabbit · 2010-08-15 09:15 · Score: 1
  
  Yes, because Oracle has built its whole business on IBM software, right?
  Oh, wait, Oracle did no such thing, while IBM is up to its ears in Java.
8. Re:This was so predicable... by NormalVisual · 2010-08-15 10:46 · Score: 1
  
  Whether Oracle and IBM use either of the other's software has nothing to do with a patent war. I think you're confusing patent infringement and copyright infringement.
  
  Besides, you *are* aware that IBM does more than just Websphere, right?
  
  --
  Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
Illumos by Lennie · 2010-08-13 08:25 · Score: 2, Informative

http://www.illumos.org/ seems to be the closest thing to a community still left for the future of OpenSolaris.

--
New things are always on the horizon
Should I be worried? by chargersfan420 · 2010-08-13 08:44 · Score: 1

Knowing Oracle it was obvious from the day the acquisition was announced that: 1) Oracle will cripple, keep on life support or close-source all open source projects.
I am a constant user of VirtualBox, which belonged to Sun and now Oracle. While it may not be open source, it was free. Should I be worried?
1. Re:Should I be worried? by Nimey · 2010-08-13 09:26 · Score: 1
  
  Most of VBox is open source. The only difference between the "commercial" and "free" versions is that the former has USB support and can be an RDP server for headless use. If Oracle put the commercial version behind a paywall, you'd just need to wait for someone to compile the free version for Windows & Mac and distribute them.
  Its emulated USB is pretty slow, so you wouldn't lose that much.
  
  --
  Hail Eris, full of mischief...
  
  E pluribus sanguinem
2. Re:Should I be worried? by h4rr4r · 2010-08-13 10:24 · Score: 1
  
  1. most of it is open source
  2. Oracle will rebrand it and use it to get people to use oraclevm or they will kill it.
3. Re:Should I be worried? by Toy+G · 2010-08-13 19:05 · Score: 2, Interesting
  
  No. VB complements the Xen/OracleVM offer. I know for a fact that it's extensively used inside Oracle itself. They'll just add features to facilitate integration between VB and OVM (i.e. develop on VB, deploy on OVM).
  
  --
  -- Let's go Viridian.
Ubuntu's OOo is based off go-oo by Sits · 2010-08-13 08:46 · Score: 3, Informative

Recent Ubuntu's ship with an OpenOffice from go-oo - why do you think otherwise (perhaps there's a source I've overlooked)? If you dig into the Ubuntu Lucid source for OpenOffice.org you will see it claims the upstream is go-oo and contains many patches (SVG support, write support for DOCX etc) from go-oo. A quick web search shows the Ubuntu OpenOffice maintainer says Ubuntu's OOo is based off go-oo. This has probably been the case since at least Ubuntu 8.10 (possibly earlier).
Alas, poor Solaris... by dogsbreath · 2010-08-13 08:53 · Score: 3, Funny

Alas, poor Solaris!
I knew it, McNealy, an o/s of infinite capability, of most excellent fancy.
It hath bore my applications on its back a thousand times, and now how abhorr'd in my imagination it is!
My gorge rises at it.
Already in Linux and FreeBSD by Cato · 2010-08-13 08:57 · Score: 4, Informative

ZFS is already available on Linux as a user-space filesystem (http://zfs-fuse.net/) - not fast but quite functional.
FreeBSD 8.1 has the best ZFS implementation outside the Solaris kernel at present - not as recent as the Solaris ZFS but it appears to work pretty well. People who want a really point and click install for evaluation or use at home should try PC-BSD 8.1, which is a repackaged version of FreeBSD with GUI installer and simpler package installation, and is still FreeBSD under the covers - see http://www.pcbsd.org/
However, no matter how great ZFS is, you still need full backups of your ZFS storage, because there are occasions where it refuses to open the storage (zpool) and it has no fsck, by design. I like the design and features, particularly the per-block checksums, media scrubbing and solving the RAID5 write hole (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_RAID_levels#RAID_5_disk_failure_rate), and low cost snapshots - but the 'no data loss by design' ignores the inevitable bugs that do occasionally cause data loss.
1. Re:Already in Linux and FreeBSD by bill_mcgonigle · 2010-08-13 09:59 · Score: 2, Interesting
  
  ZFS-FUSE is a pretty amazing effort, but it tends to be buggy and big on memory consumption, from what I've read. It's also at the wrong layer.
  I have high hopes for ZFS in FreeBSD 9. Due to their compatibility requirements, they can't get zpools > v16 in FreeBSD 8 (and it sounds like it'll only be 15 at this point). If 9 has zpool v23, there will be much rockage.
  Tightly integrated CIFS, NFS, and iSCSI would also be welcome.
  For a straight NAS box, OpenSolaris is just where it's at ... for now.
  
  --
  My God, it's Full of Source!
  OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
2. Re:Already in Linux and FreeBSD by Jeremy+Allison+-+Sam · 2010-08-13 11:53 · Score: 3, Informative
  
  You might actually try *testing* the Solaris CIFS implementation, not just believing the Sun/Oracle press releases about it. You might find it's a bit .. lacking :-). What's their roadmap timetable for an SMB2 server for example ?
  Jeremy.
3. Re:Already in Linux and FreeBSD by smaddox · 2010-08-13 13:04 · Score: 1
  
  However, no matter how great ZFS is, you still need full backups of your ZFS storage
  Backups of ZFS file systems are dead simple: http://blogs.sun.com/timf/entry/zfs_backup
  I wish there was something even remotely close to this in linux world. It's extremely frustration how much I have to go through to back up my linux desktop.
4. Re:Already in Linux and FreeBSD by drsmithy · 2010-08-13 13:22 · Score: 2, Insightful
  
  However, no matter how great ZFS is, you still need full backups of your ZFS storage [...]
  Is there storage for which this doesn't apply ?
5. Re:Already in Linux and FreeBSD by udippel · 2010-08-13 15:38 · Score: 3, Informative
  
  If only I had mod points, I'd mod you +8 Insightful!
  Why? Because of your last paragraph. I for one can only warn the potential users of ZFS. There are chances of you losing all your data. Don't believe me? Search all threads of the almost-defunct forums there, and you'll hit a double-digit number of users who did lose their data. Most important: the developers were and are aware of that fact, and have 'officially' (as officially as open-source-guys can be official) confirmed and conceded this fact, and likewise 'officially' discouraged the use of ZFS without RAID/backup.
  I lost one volume, documented there. A Masters student of mine lost 2 volumes; at an exhibition where we wanted to use ZFS for something else.
  No question, ZFS has some features that are unique and useful. Though not necessarily on a small machine, with a single drive. Hands off in such cases!
  You have been warned!
6. Re:Already in Linux and FreeBSD by bill_mcgonigle · 2010-08-13 16:37 · Score: 1
  
  What problems have you had? I don't push it very hard.
  I'm not arguing for CIFS in-kernel on FreeBSD, but for tighter integration for ZFS and (presumably) Samba. It's the sysadmin aspect of the ZFS tools that makes it really nice to work with.
  
  --
  My God, it's Full of Source!
  OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
7. Re:Already in Linux and FreeBSD by udippel · 2010-08-13 22:29 · Score: 2, Informative
  
  Yes and no. Out of context, your post is almost 'Insightful'. (Or 'Common Sense'.)
  Within the context, though, ZFS promised no data corruption except at hard disk failure, due to atomic writes. Not wanting to delve into details, there was a devil in the details. If someone really was interested, I could do a write up; but in a nutshell, SUN (ie the developers) didn't deliver on this promise. There are a number of cases, confirmed cases, when a perfect hard disk loses data, actually all data, irrecoverably, with the hard drive being 100% okay. As I wrote, details on request (or you search the old forums of OpenSolaris on your own).
8. Re:Already in Linux and FreeBSD by MagnusDredd · 2010-08-14 03:32 · Score: 1
  
  ZFS in OpenSolaris is more than just a File System.
  It's the entire storage system stack AND the associated file system.
  This is why there are TWO major commands that you use to administer it; "zpool" and "zfs". "zfs" is used to deal with the file system. "zpool" is used to deal with the equivalent of the volume manager.
  While the file system is supported by Linux, the stack isn't. The stack is one of the things that makes ZFS great.
  While the ZFS stack has been described as "a rampant layering violation", it's the fact that it's not obsessively partitioned that gives it some pretty incredibly useful abilities.
  The stack offers end to end checksums. Data leaving the drive is checksummed from the time it leaves the drive until it hits RAM, where hopefully ECC takes over in providing data integrity.
  Rebuilding a traditional RAID5 or RAID6 takes the same amount of time even if it's 10% full, due to the fact that the VM doesn't know about files as it only deals with volumes (partitions). Rebuilding a RAIDZ, RAIDZ2, or RAIDZ3 which is 40% full takes 1/2 the time of one that is 80% full, due to "rampant layering violations". :) If a drive starts racking up unrecoverable read errors leading to corruption, ZFS detects this (on scrub or access) and will replace bad blocks provided there's a redundant copy or parity. This does not require a rebuild; the amount of time it takes depends on the amount of corruption. Triple parity RAID support was recently added.
  Mirrors under ZFS write at single drive speed, but read at the speed of a stripe. If you have a co-located server, where you have to pay more for after hours access and for rack units; you can set up a 3 way or 4 way mirror which will provide extremely high data redundancy with RAID-0 read speeds. How much of a web servers disk IO load is writes depends on what it's serving, but generally it is overwhelmingly read heavy so for one of my friends this is extremely useful.
  ZFS offers storage pools as the basic volume structure. Storage pools consist of a number of RAIDs, mirrors, single drives, or iSCSI shares. Data is striped across all devices currently in a pool when the data is written. Online Expansion of storage space is accomplished this way with a single "zpool add" command very quickly. Adding storage is painless the way JBOD often is, with the performance of striping. The downside is that once you've added a mirror, RAID, or drive to a pool; it's there for keeps. Support for removal was supposed to be added at some point...
  Unlike anything else I've ever used, when you create a volume/partition/filesystem on a zpool, you don't specify a size. The size of a filesystem is dynamically reallocated. No more having to manually manage the amount of space allocated to a given partition. The file system will take the amount of space that it's contents require; filesystem limits/quotas are available.
  The ZFS stack supports a high speed zpool cache called a ZIL (writes), and one called L2ARC (reads). This allows for huge performance increases using one or more solid state drives. Seagate is doing something similar in hardware with their new Momentus XT laptop drive, which according to Anandtech is comparable to the WD Velociraptor.
  Referring to ZFS as a filesystem alone, or using it via FUSE neglects 90% or more of what ZFS under OpenSolaris offers. ZFS as a filesystem alone is NOT compelling. It's the whole stack that makes it incredible.
9. Re:Already in Linux and FreeBSD by MagnusDredd · 2010-08-14 03:54 · Score: 1
  
  You should ALWAYS have backups.
  What's interesting is how much people like to trash ZFS as being unstable, referring to all of the reports of catastrophic data loss.
  I've read a bunch of these reports of data loss, before I decided to use ZFS on OpenSolaris for my new fileserver.
  When you refuse to follow the repeated warnings of the vendor about best practices and you lose your data, it's not the fault of the vendor or the technology; it's yours.
  I've read a ton of documentation/articles/manuals/guides which state that many USB enclosures when given the "cache flush" command, will lie. They report completion of the flush when in fact the cache still has data in it. This can lead to the updated uberblock being corrupted and catastrophic pool failure. USB is not only not recommended, there are warnings about it's use.
  Virtual Box by default has the issue as well. Other VMs may not honor write cache flush commands as well.
  And yet, so many morons out there are still using USB enclosures and whining loudly when they lose everything. Others using VMs which don't honor cache flush commands are doing the same.
  I have a bare-metal OpenSolaris install which is using it the way it was intended. I've actually read the documentation. I follow the best practices.
10. Re:Already in Linux and FreeBSD by MagnusDredd · 2010-08-14 04:21 · Score: 1
  
  If only I had mod points, I'd mod you +8 Insightful!
  There are chances of you losing all your data.
  -10 ignorant!!!
  There are ALWAYS chances of this regardless of whatever technology you use.
11. Re:Already in Linux and FreeBSD by udippel · 2010-08-14 04:34 · Score: 1
  
  USB is not only not recommended, there are warnings about it's use.
  I hope someone mods you up +5, as well. As a warning.
  Alas, the losses that we incurred were not based on USB drives. If there is a complete mirror of the forums, I can still retrieve the relevant messages; by the developers.
  0. Never use USB drives [as you mentioned]
  1. Never use a system with a single drive
  2. Even a power supply that works great with Windows or Linux, can induce glitches that render a drive unreadable
  This doesn't mean ZFS was 'useless'. But think of it: OpenSolaris never had reasonable support for any other file system. No, including FAT/vfat. The developers as well conceded it was kind of shoddily written, as a 'hack'; and worked most of the times. NTFS, you know, with limited success, read-only (if memory serves right; likewise ext2).
  So what am I supposed to do with a notebook? Where we usually have a single drive? What about a 'green' desktop with a single 'green' drive? Not encouraged.
  Finally, yes, on a server it makes a lot of sense. I have no qualms to support it there. Though, in the end, it's just a niche. A dangerous niche; because I rather support a filesystem that I am used to, acquainted with, instead of one here and another one there.
  Yep, it is such a sad thing; I myself tried to 'sell' it as 'last filesystem mankind will need'; with atomic writes (the only reasonable solution), in-flight CRC, you name it. But it didn't deliver. That's it. Over. By now, I see the earlier phrase about filesystem and mankind from its other interpretable angle ... .
12. Re:Already in Linux and FreeBSD by udippel · 2010-08-14 04:48 · Score: 1
  
  There are ALWAYS chances of this regardless of whatever technology you use.
  But of course! And of course one needs backup all the time and always. No question here.
  What OP (and myself) are clearly arguing about, it that the premise (promise?) was on 'as long as the hard disk does not crash, your data will be available. Reliably.'
  We ran all possible diagnostics up and down, on all the (different) drives on which we lost access completely; and all were 100% according to what the manufacturers' tests claimed. So, it simply is a case of 'expectations not fulfilled'. If I don't mind losing data through software (file system) errors, ext3, ntfs, even FAT, will do just as well.
  Snapshots are totally phantastic with ZFS, I agree. Backup is straightforward simply, volume management as well, etc. All hunky dory.
  But don't use it for your desktop, don't use it for your laptop, don't use it for USB drives.
13. Re:Already in Linux and FreeBSD by drsmithy · 2010-08-14 08:39 · Score: 1
  
  I think you're missing my point, which is that ALL filesystems require you to keep backups, and therefore "but ZFS means you need to keep backups" is not really a valid criticism.
  I'm not aware of Sun - or anyone else - saying that ZFS removes the need for disaster recovery backups.
14. Re:Already in Linux and FreeBSD by badkarmadayaccount · 2010-08-16 10:50 · Score: 1
  
  Is it posssible to tweak the kernel linker to use a modules interface, say fuse.ko, and simply load a statically linked ZFS filesystem?
  
  --
  I know tobacco is bad for you, so I smoke weed with crack.
15. Re:Already in Linux and FreeBSD by badkarmadayaccount · 2010-08-16 10:53 · Score: 1
  
  Here's a new market niche, ZFS capable external drive enclosures - possibly ATAoE.
  
  --
  I know tobacco is bad for you, so I smoke weed with crack.
CDDL by Anonymous Coward · 2010-08-13 09:11 · Score: 0

Why exactly does Oracle need btrfs now, anyway? ZFS is more mature, and the CDDL is more restrictive than the GPL
The CDDL is so restrictive that it made it into BSD? Right...
RIP Solaris by kawabago · 2010-08-13 09:13 · Score: 1

There is now no reason for anyone to install Solaris anywhere. Bye bye Solaris, Don't call us, we'll call you!
What happens to the community now? by nurb432 · 2010-08-13 09:26 · Score: 1

Exactly what was expected now that Oracle is in charge: A slow painful death.

--
---- Booth was a patriot ----
How the mighty... by satan666 · 2010-08-13 09:33 · Score: 1

Alas, we see the end of the mighty Solaris.
First, Oracle, removes all Sun logos from the Sun website. That was a sure sign of things to come.
Now, we are told no more OpenSolaris. Oh Well. We knew this was coming.
I predict that Solaris will slip further and further down the ladder until 5 years from now it exists no longer (or is almost extinct).
Sun brought this on themselves. In the late 90's they were selling pizza box SPARC 20's for 20K++
The world bypassed them and moved to Linux.
I made a hell of a lot of money as a Solaris SA.
Thank you and so long dear Friend.
1. Re:How the mighty... by wizkid · 2010-08-13 10:06 · Score: 1
  
  "Sun brought this on themselves. In the late 90's they were selling pizza box SPARC 20's for 20K++"
  Actually, I suspect it was more that they had there own leasing company, and they would lease to anyone before the 2001 dot.bomb hit. They had way to much hardware out there on dead leases. That's what killed Sun. I was hoping they'd recover.
  Oracle is not compatible with Sun's philosophy, as scrambled as it has been since 2001, and will succeed in chasing off most the customer base in the next 5 years. At least that's my prediction. They probably won't have enough customers to keep Solaris or Sparc alive at that point. I'd be happy if they took oracle down with em.
  Just about all of the Solaris Engineering talent has left, and I'll bet the rest of the talented folks have updated there resume's.
  
  --
  I take no responsibility for what I say. Even though I'm never wrong :)
Re:Fuck you oracle by maxwell+demon · 2010-08-13 09:54 · Score: 1

Don't. I don't want Oracle to get offspring.

--
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
What does this say... by gabrieltss · 2010-08-13 10:20 · Score: 1

about the future of MySQL and Java? I think OpenSolaris is just the start. Now with Oracle sueing google over Java I think Oracle is going to one at a time kill off any "free" anything they snatch up. OpenSolaris is first and I think Java will be next by their actions against goolge. They may hold off on MySQL as they need it I think as a low cost alternative on windows to SQL Server (which is a piece of cr@p IMHO - I use it daily with Java and hate it).

--
The Truth is a Virus!!!
1. Re:What does this say... by RAMMS+EIN · 2010-08-13 12:27 · Score: 1
  
  I think the MySQL project has been dead pretty much since Sun bought it. Pity, just as MySQL was growing up to become a real database. On the other hand, we have the code and the rights ... life goes on without the original project.
  As for Java, it's already to entrenched to just let die. I am not sure about the licenses older versions of the JDK and JRE used to be distributed under (in particular, if Oracle could, if they wanted to, stop them from being used as they have been), but I am pretty sure that recent versions of the JRE and JDK are completely or almost completely under free software licenses, which means people can keep using them the way they have been doing.
  Personally, I don't think either MySQL or Java are best-of-breed technologies, so I wouldn't be sad if Oracle's actions set people off on a search for better options, but there is no denying that both technologies are very widely used, and so the way this story unfolds is of interest to very many parties.
  
  --
  Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
RIP OpenSolaris by bobstreo · 2010-08-13 10:29 · Score: 1

Never used it, never cared. I had (and still have) solaris 8,9 and 10 64 bit on sun hardware at work and by the time used sun equipment
was cheap enough for home, linux was pretty much better.
I was jonesing for a solaris box for home through the '90s. There were probably thousands of Sun desktops and
servers at the company I worked for. The best I could do was a black and white 21 inch X monitor I used through my dial-up
modem.
I'm not too sure there's any point in *Solaris at all anymore. Oracle seems determined to drive the HW/SW
systems from Sun into the ground. (or even deeper into the ground) either through attrition or pricing.
1. Re:RIP OpenSolaris by OrangeTide · 2010-08-13 11:34 · Score: 1
  
  Linux still lacks a good scalable filesystem that is easy to setup and supports modern features.
  Linux is very very close to doing this, but it's not there yet.
  Also co-scheduling in KVM or VirtualBox on Linux sucks compared to OpenSolaris.
  
  --
  “Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Game Changing Moves by Oracle. by upuv · 2010-08-13 13:02 · Score: 2, Interesting

Seeing Open Solaris killed off was fairly obvious. However combine the fact that they sued Google over Java issues raises interesting thoughts.
These moves and inevitably others are already having consequences. Java as a platform for consumer products is now no longer a given. The assent of Android as the" platform of choice of hardware and software vendors puts Nokia, RIM / HP back in the picture. When just days ago they were an after thought in developers eyes.
I've seen it before. People put business distant between them selves and anything with a lawsuit potential. So is the law suit over Java going to cause a massive migration away from Java?
What is Solaris's future. I think it's rather short less than 10 years left. Price per grunt the upstart Linux is kicking it's butt despite all the very nice features of Sparc and Solaris
Is this the first sign of another shift in IT futures?
OpenSolaris blows. by Anonymous Coward · 2010-08-13 15:13 · Score: 0

Being a strictly Linux and BSD guy over the last couple years, I figured I'd give OpenSolaris a shot.
Dear Oracle,
Please make the installer faster. Dear god I fell asleep on the sofa watching T.V. waiting for that shit. Maybe it was securely wiping the entire drive first? Hell, I even installed Ubuntu over it afterward to make sure that I wasn't crazy, and it installed in like 15 minutes. All your annoying network popups need to go away; your support for WiFi chipsets from a stock install is pathetic. Even the color scheme sucks. Your package manager sucks, and has NOTHING in the default repository. And for fucks sake, PLEASE stop stop trying to make your shit look like Ubuntu. I was expecting something leet, as I've never even touched *.solaris anything in my life. Oracle: everything you touch turns to worthless dust. Stop fucking shit up, you've ruined enough of Sun's hard work.
Sincerely,
A disappointed and former customer
P.S. fuck you Oracle.
Solaris is dead by Anonymous Coward · 2010-08-13 17:07 · Score: 0

I realize this is hard to grasp but solaris is now toast. It's completely vertical. It's an OS in a can. Which means after a few iterations of incest, it's children will look like the elephant man. That's just nature bitches. Get used to it.
Isn't this what Google does? by Mortlath · 2010-08-13 17:28 · Score: 1

How does this differ than what Google does with the Android OS? Or Apple with WebKit?
O.R.A.C.L.E. by Ex-MislTech · 2010-08-13 19:37 · Score: 1

O = Obtuse
R = Ram
A = Abusing
C = Corrupt
L = Lousy
E = Executable

--
google "32 trillion offshore needs IRS attention"
Go O-O is supported by Mircorsoft by Anonymous Coward · 2010-08-13 19:48 · Score: 0

Go O-O is also the path used by Microsoft (via Novell) to get their own patches into Open Office to undermine Linux.
One simple example. There was a project to translate VBA macros into the Open Office native language. Novell has poured money into their own rival project to provide native support for VBA instead. That might sound cool at first, but what it means is that people will get used to the VBA functionality and will not bother learning the native language of OO. The long term result will be that OO always lags behind Microsoft Office in macro functionality and more importantly to Microsoft, OO will always run better on Windows - achieving the primary goal of those contributions, which is to make Linux irrelevant.
Don't expect the Miguels or Shuttleworths of this world to care. They're primarily interested in the opportunities to convert free software into a revenue stream.
Oracle now owns BTRFS and ZFS by Anonymous Coward · 2010-08-13 23:28 · Score: 0

Oracle also owns BTRFS. Anyone that develops IP whilst an employee gives Oracle full ownership of the that IP.
Oracle could change the license of BTRFS from GPL to closed source tomorrow if they wanted to. Sure, folks could fork it but Oracle owns the current copyright to BTFS and thus have a large amount of control over what happens to it.
Oracle should not be let near any open source projects.
Regarding lawsuits and patents, if NetApp took Sun to court because they believed ZFS infringed on WAFL, why wouldn't NetApp sue whoever was using BTRFS in a product if BTRFS is based upon the same principles of operation as ZFS?
1. Re:Oracle now owns BTRFS and ZFS by drinkypoo · 2010-08-14 01:21 · Score: 1
  
  Oracle also owns BTRFS. Anyone that develops IP whilst an employee gives Oracle full ownership of the that IP.
  Oracle could change the license of BTRFS from GPL to closed source tomorrow if they wanted to. Sure, folks could fork it but Oracle owns the current copyright to BTFS and thus have a large amount of control over what happens to it.
  Pure FUD. They have all the control over what happens to their fork, which would be out of the kernel in a hot second.
  
  Oracle should not be let near any open source projects.
  Nonsense. They should only be let near projects using GPLv3 though, to help protect from submarine patent claims.
  
  --
  "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
2. Re:Oracle now owns BTRFS and ZFS by dch24 · 2010-08-14 01:50 · Score: 1
  
  Oracle should not be let near any open source projects.
  I'm just speculating, but Oracle's approach to open source is better than Microsoft's. Lesser of two evils?
  
  As long as BTRFS is perceived as desirable, and as long as the crowds cheer its progress, Oracle won't kill the golden goose. I won't give away any ideas (I agree: Oracle is bad news) but I'm sure they will come up with ways of generating recurring revenue. Good luck! ()
3. Re:Oracle now owns BTRFS and ZFS by Simetrical · 2010-08-15 22:16 · Score: 1
  
  Oracle also owns BTRFS. Anyone that develops IP whilst an employee gives Oracle full ownership of the that IP.
  Oracle could change the license of BTRFS from GPL to closed source tomorrow if they wanted to.
  Lots of people have contributed to btrfs. It's part of the Linus' tree, not a separate thing that Oracle controls. Oracle only holds the copyright on what its employees (like Chris Mason) have written. It couldn't release a closed-source version of the filesystem without getting licenses from all the non-Oracle people who contributed, or rewriting all their code. You only need to look over the commit history to see how many people that is. Most of the commits don't look like they come from Oracle employees, judging by the e-mail addresses.
  
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  MediaWiki developer, Total War Center sysadmin
Opensolaris was dead before Oracle by Anonymous Coward · 2010-08-14 00:30 · Score: 0

While I agree that it's quite sad to see that Oracle is pulling all the IP inside the mothership and handing out 'partner' status to a privileged few, opensolaris as a community, as an opensource project, was dysfunctional and dead long before Oracle came along. The blame for this lays solidly on the shoulders of the management at Sun, management who remain in the same jobs today and who, like Fowler, are doing as they're told. It's still amazing to me that the very people who helped run the company into the ground are still where they were before, doing much the same thing as before only with a different mandate.
In spite of the disappointment many of those who have made valuable contributions to the project over the years feel, this is not an entirely bad thing to focus all the engineers on building the commercial release instead of being hassled by the multitude of broken versions between releases that users provided feedback and bug reports upon installing and using.
The part that should worry people is how tightly Oracle intends to control the IP contained in Opensolaris (and other Sun products) and litigate over use of derivatives, e.g. Nexenta and Illumos.
what's next? by Anonymous Coward · 2010-08-14 01:50 · Score: 0

oracle kills off opensolaris... and has gotten lawsuit-happy with java...
so, how much longer before they (try) to kill mysql and openoffice, too? (or at the very least, do something insanely stupid)
Oracle by falconwolf · 2010-08-14 17:41 · Score: 1

One word: SCOracle
Falcon

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Should there be a Law?
Well... by ThePCKid · 2010-08-15 15:40 · Score: 1

...Oracle's favorite word is one that is about not supporting...