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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."
With so much core OS work going to Linux and most of the remainder going to *BSD, which also has already ZFS well underway... What do theyhave to attract devs?
I have to use opensolaris on my intel boxes because I have to use gcc-2.95.3 to compile some ancient software I use for research, and not because of some fancy file system or dtrace. I can't help but wonder if other people are in the same boat. Anybody?
If you give a liberal an enema, he'll turn transparent.
It's not dead, Oracle just told them to go fork themselves.
The Open Solaris council will no longer be of any concern to us! I've just received word that Emperor Ellison has dissolved the council permanently. The last remnants of Sun have been swept away.
From now on, fear will keep potentially traitorous Solaris users in line. Fear of our software patents - and our new super death-ray powered ELAs!
When will we get an Ellison/Borg icon for /. ?
This move by Oracle reminds me yahoo in the .com era. Open Solaris was not a revenue source but it was important as the means to get developers interested in Solaris. I don't think there will be much development or support for solaris from the open source community from now on.
I think this is a good thing for everyone. Hear me out, I'm not an idiot, or at least I'm trying not to be!
Solaris, unlike the other big two open source operating systems - Linux & BSD - has always had the problem of the double edged sword because it always had to serve Sun, which in turn supported it. Now with Oracle punting Solaris to the curb, the community can really see what it's made of. Whether Solaris is an also-ran or if the community can really go full tilt and go in directions that it couldn't because of it's omnipresent master is entirely up to the people who support it. The future is bright for smaller form factors, as well as servers (again) so now it's time to see if they are big time players or another name to the pile of failed OSes.
I wish them well.
I call it 'The Aristocrats'
So what? OpenSolaris was a bad joke anyway.
In the true spirit of OSS, they packed up their bags, stuck out their tongues and said 'fuck it, we're done dealing with you guys, we're going home' ... and thats perfectly within their rights.
It should be noted however, since they were about the only ones using OpenSolaris, no one is really going to notice they are gone.
Using OpenSolaris is roughly the same as running Darwin instead of OS X. Roughly, not really the same, but both are pretty much pathetic bases of the what the person actually WANTS to run, which is the full version. Anyone who would consider running OpenSolaris will just pay the tiny little fee and run the real deal which has slightly (not much mind you) more spit and polish on it.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Oracle didn't care, because Oracle has said that they are no longer interested in having an open development model for Solaris. In fact, the fact that Oracle doesn't care is why they're dissolving in the first place. Solaris users don't care because, let's face it... does anybody actually use OpenSolaris? I work for a huge Solaris shop, and we use stock, Sun-supported Solaris. If we wanted an Open Source operating system, we'd use Linux. We use Solaris for huge database servers that are too big to run Linux (mostly Oracle DB.)
So, that leaves OpenSolaris developers. Look, this is the risk you take when you work on a project dominated by one company, especially when you have a license like the CDDL. I feel bad that you're in this position, but it was kind of predictable, and I really think you're missing the boat with Illumos. You're unlikely to get enough interest to ever make a go of it with Oracle being disinterested. Go work on making Linux better instead!
"He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
Buy your competition and then kill their products. This seems familiar. Where have I heard this one before....
http://xkcd.com/419/
If anyone asks for me, i am in my room with some candles, a Larry Ellison doll and tons of needles.....
I'm retired now, but at my last job we had 20,000+ UNIX servers. My projects - I was a technical architect - had about 300 of those servers. Trying to compare the throughput for most x86 servers to a P590 or HP Superdome or Sun E25K just shows your ignorance of the larger UNIX system capabilities. From a compute standpoint, Intel CPUs are hard to beat, but when you need 10 fibre connections to storage and 20 10GigE connections and have 10,000 concurrent DB users, RH stuff ain't gonna cut it. Sorry, but those are the facts. These servers aren't for a website.
Then you have the issue of getting a vendor that only certifies their program on HP systems to bother with RedHat. The $3M that the DB server HW costs is nothing compared to the software costs for another platform to be supported by some vendors. The software ran on HP-UX - that's all. The software cost $25M for 2 prod instances and 5 non-prod instances (DR, Test1, Test2, pre-prod ... ) This is software you run your business on AND not very well designed. Bigger hardware is always the answer over system design changes. It is cheaper. Our prod DB servers were 64-way with 108GB of RAM. We had 4 of them - 2 production locations with 2 DB srvs each. An active/failover cluster model. We had 4 DR servers that were almost as large located in another data center that got data updates nightly. There were about 20 app servers inside data centers, about 40 app/GIS servers located in the same building as the users who were spread all over the USA for this project. Another 20 servers were used for the dev, test, pre-prod, test2, test3 environments. It was not possible to run all the software on the say system, at least 3 systems were required for each environment. Crap, I know. Back when I worked on it, VPARS were specifically not supported by the vendor, so we didn't use them - anywhere.
Just because RH claims to run on 20+ way systems, doesn't mean any of the software will. BTW, Oracle RAC was not supported by the sw vendor, so lots of small Oracle Nodes wasn't gonna work.
Anyway, you wanted some background on why anyone uses non-RH machines. Oh - we were seeing about 4k TPS on each production system during business hours. Transactions came from client tools, app servers, reporting tools, and ad hoc queries from blackberries and other portable devices.
We had an outage 1 day for about 6 hours around 2004 due to DB corruption - over 10,000 people couldn't do their jobs (half the users). It wasn't good. I'm glad only 1 production site was impacted.
That's plenty of work but there are people willing and able to get it done and they have a bootable system to evolve. The real question is when someone will kick off a full distro around it (since Illumos is purely a kernel).
when you're down to your last piece of tableware, you just have to make do with what's left, unless it's a butter knife and the meal is soup...
(if it was a real knife, you could at least carve a spoon out of something)
True. But what's the reason for that?
Quoted from wikipedia, original source for the quote.
IMO it's most likely that there was an explicit intention of being Linux incompatible as well (meaning, not just because it happens to be GPL licensed). After all, why would Sun give such a gift to its greatest competitor? I think that it doesn't really matter what Linux was licensed under, the license for ZFS would be guaranteed to be incompatible with it anyway.
That's kind of the point of it, yes. I'm not sure what you mean by "stricter" here though. Additional restrictions, like for instance non-commercial usage only would bring it closer to a proprietary license, which is entirely against the intent of it. If you mean things like the AGPL, it would be very difficult to figure out which additional restrictions would be allowable due to favouring what the GPL tries to accomplish, and which wouldn't due to going counter to it, and write some sort of rule that would allow the former but not the later.
Nope. The term for this is "hoist by Sun's very intentional decision to make it be that way".
After all, if Sun were all about complete freedom they would have went with a BSD license. It would have been very easy and they wouldn't have needed to spend time on making yet another license. There must be a reason why that wasn't suitable.
It takes aeons to build up a reputation, but it takes a few days to totally destroy it. oracle should watch its standing with open source community.
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As someone who has tested out ZFS on both BSD and Solaris, and is familiar with the subject, I can tell you quite plainly: The Solaris implementation is good and generally, the BSD / FreeBSD implementation sucks, is buggy, missing features (or key features are buggy).
The OpenSolaris implementation is mature, well maintained, performs well, and is up to date. The FreeBSD implementation is immature, lags way behind OSol development, and seems to be unstable.
If you want a mission critical system running ZFS, FreeBSD is not an option, period.
ZFS is Stable on Solaris, and to a great extent on OpenSolaris and NexentaCore. There may be some gotchas, in OSol, particularly if you use new advanced features such as dedup.
There may also be some performance gotchas with certain hardware in all implementations (e.g. 32-bit proc, less than 2GB of RAM), and if you use gzip compression.
Just because work has been done to port the filesystem to BSD, does not mean it has the same stability or performance characteristics. It might have similar ones in the future, right now it does not. I would call it "Alpha" quality, even if it is in stable versions of BSD, at this point.