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The Future of OpenSolaris Revealed
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.
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.
From the memo:
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.
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.
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
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.
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.