OpenSolaris Governing Board Dissolves Itself

mysidia writes "Last month, it was mentioned that the OpenSolaris governing board issued an ultimatum to Oracle. It turns out that Oracle continued to ignore requests to appoint a liaison after the governing board's demands. This morning, the board unanimously passed a resolution to dissolve itself. Source code changes are no longer available, and it would appear that OpenSolaris and community involvement in the development of Solaris have been killed as rumored. We recently discussed a 'Spork' of OpenSolaris called Illumos. Perhaps now, this will have a chance at becoming a true fork."

Comments

Re:Another instance of BSD vs. GPL licensing...

[VGPowerlord]

...and why the GPL is superior. With the GPL, it is prohibited to take work private that has been built by the community. The BSD license /* encourages */ it. I see on the website of an deeply involved OpenSolaris develor where he is complaining about Oracle not adhering to the spirit of the open source license. I suggest that there is only the /* letter */ of an agreement whenever "push comes to shove." Spirit goes out the window.

This is slightly off topic, but there's a certain form of irony here.

Licensing issues is the reason that Linux has no ZFS support. But the GPL is the ultimate "can't re-license" license. No, seriously, you are forbidden by the license to re-license GPL code under non-GPL licenses, even if they are stricter... see sections 1, 2, 6, and 10 of the GPLv2.

One could argue that the GPL doesn't adhere to the spirit of the open source license.

The ZFS issues? The term for this is "hoist by your own petard."

Note: You can still bypass this by getting permission from the original author(s), but that has nothing to do with the GPL; it is a general statement about copyrights.

had a zfs scare, today (freebsd 8.0 to 8.1 hiccup)

[TheGratefulNet]

this was kind of scary; and I think it was *my* last nail in the coffin for zfs. for me, that is (ymmv).

I had a freebsd 8.0 system up for quite a long time (over 100 days). I often keep the /usr/src area current via cvsup but had no reason to reboot until the system hung under heavy load. when it rebooted, I found I was 'half 8.1' and half 8.0, still. this threw zfs out of sync and the pool would not be mounted! what a scare, let me tell you (I had all my valuable stuff on that 6TB pool).

had to reboot to kernel.old, do a zfs scrub (took overnight), then rebuild World, reboot to have World be seen, then rebuild kernel to 8.1. then reboot again. finally zfs and the kernel saw eye to eye and my 6TB pool was mountable again.

I know that 'better sysadmin' might have avoided this, but I don't think I've ever had anything on linux be this way. I've used reiser, jfs, xfs - all the fs's. don't think I've ever had to do things this drastic just to mount my 'raid' set like this. it was scary.

now, given the fact that opensolaris was the nearest upstream to freebsd for zfs and that opensolaris pretty much is no more, I have very little actual confidence in zfs and support, going forward. its scary enough with all the new concepts, as it is; but I need to feel good about it; now and years from now. this version incompatibility worries me! its fine to have new features be ignored if you run older systems but this 'we wont mount you AT ALL' stuff is just for the birds! why on earth would a fs be designed like that? its not real-world and I'm not sure I like this idea, to be honest.

I did think about going with pure opensolaris instead of freebsd8.* but I'm just not sure that there's a good compelling reason to stay with bsd anymore and zfs seems like a non-starter for me, given my experience with it.

(plus, on the same exact hardware, linux md-raid and freebsd zfs compared, linux keeps up (no pauses) and is overall faster on nfs and samba than bsd/zfs is. and zfs really 'wants' at least 4gb to run. that's asking too much, too, I think).