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

What momentum may that fork have?

[alfredos]

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?

Re:What momentum may that fork have?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry if you missed it but many of the OpenSolaris "devs" were either directly employed by Sun or companies with close ties to SUN. There was never any real grassroots development of OpenSolaris, and despite all the hype about what "may" happen post Oracle any further development is going exactly where it went before, nowhere.

Re:What momentum may that fork have?

[bsdaemonaut]

Nothing, but if we always did the sensible thing we'd miss out on much of the good software that we have today, such as Linux. There was a time that when it offered very little. It happened to be in the right place at the right time and today we get to enjoy what came about because of it. In regards to OpenSolaris, honestly the whole thing makes me a little sad. I realize commercial Solaris is still around, but it seems like every year we have less choices. I don't know about you, but I don't feel like that's a good thing.

Re:What momentum may that fork have?

[Kjella]

I'd say slim at this point. It doesn't help that all CDDL code is incompatiable with all GPL code so they got plenty wheels that need reinventing unless there's a BSD library for it. Yes, I know you can say the same about the GPL but there's not nearly as much that Linux would want. ZFS and DTrace would be two big ones though, but hopefully the concepts can be incorporated in Linux even if the code can not. Then again, if it'd been GPL then Linux would probably have scavenged all of it already, I guess that was the point of making it GPL-incompatible...

Re:What momentum may that fork have?

[Abcd1234]

Nothing, but if we always did the sensible thing we'd miss out on much of the good software that we have today, such as Linux. There was a time that when it offered very little.

Oh come on, that's revisionist history at best. When it was first released, it offered an alternative to Minix, and was one of the few protected-mode-capable Unix clones available for x86. As it progressed, it offered the first kernel (sorry Hurd) for a GNU-based OS.

Linux *always* had a niche to fill. I can't see how the same is true of OpenSolaris.

Re:What momentum may that fork have?

[samkass]

I realize commercial Solaris is still around, but it seems like every year we have less choices. I don't know about you, but I don't feel like that's a good thing.

I kind of felt the same way in the late 90's when BeOS was dying and the MacOS's future looked bleak. Linux had extremely weak driver support, and OS/2 had finally given up the ghost. It looked like Windows might become the only survivor of the 90's. But today there is a new diaspora of OS distributions and platforms. These things ebb and flow. My advice is to not worry so much about choice in general and just try to find something you like and contribute to it.

Re:What momentum may that fork have?

[jd]

Why can't we have a knife! I wanna knife! >sniff<

(One of the big benefits of OpenSolaris is that there's a hell of a lot of commercial software for Solaris that hasn't been - and may never be - ported to Linux. This would matter less if the ABI/IBCS module had been maintained, as Linux could then run Solaris binaries natively.)

Re:What momentum may that fork have?

[amorsen]

There's basically Windows, traditional Unix with X11 (with only Linux, *BSD and AIX left), and Unix + different UI (Mac OS X). Plus some embedded systems and some mainframe-like systems, but Unix is eating both.

We aren't exactly witnessing a Cambrian explosion.

Re:What momentum may that fork have?

[samkass]

Unix + different UI (Mac OS X)

and iOS, Android, Blackberry, Windows Mobile 7, WebOS, ChromeOS, Playstation/XBox custom OSes, and a few others. And clumping all "Linux" into one (from Ubuntu to Red Hat's Enterprise) is a bit of over-generalization.

In short, if you like playing around with new and interesting programmable systems, it may not be a Cambrian explosion, but we've certainly come out of the temporary bottleneck of the late 90's.

Re:What momentum may that fork have?

[Galactic Dominator]

[quote]First, FreeBSD's ZFS may be "well underway", but it's showing no signs of being usable any time soon. Let it suffice to say that anyone paying attention or using FreeBSD ZFS for much more than one or two small servers is likely to agree that their implementation is not "enterprise ready" as they so arrogantly claim.[/quote]

Hmm, it's been usable for many of us for quite some time. Not to say there haven't been problems with it, but less the equivalent point in OpenSolaris history since FreeBSD is able to import well tested code and patches for issues the first gen ZFS had in OpenSolaris.

[quote]Second, I'm not so stupid as to fool myself into thinking ports on BSD is a sustainable administrative tool. Nexenta, and I believe Illuminos, use apt.[/quote]

Again, many of us have used ports with great success for a long time. Personally, I find it easier than working with deb packages, and far easier than working with rpm's.

[quote]FreeBSD appears to be in decline as a project. I can't speak for developer activity, but I can say that their ability to actually ship code that works has become diminished since 7.1 or so. Entire subsystems have not worked for quite some time, yet they keep shipping it and saying "it'll be fixed in a couple years" (referring to USB and AHCI). Quite a few drivers have also had regressions.[/quote]

Wow this is like a broken record. The are no problems with either AHCI or USB for the vast majority of users. There were some changes to USB in 8.0, eg switched to being based off of libusb, device renaming, etc. AHCI and some the other related controller drivers were new in 8.0 as well, There were a few corner cases that didn't work well, but it's seen widespread usage with a great deal of success. The updates included in 8.1 address the corner cases and some further performance improvements. It's hard knowing what your issue is since you speak in generalities, but I assure you there are far more happy FreeBSD users than people like you.

[quote]In addition to ZFS, the Solaris kernel has dtrace, zones, and BrandZ.[/quote]

It's true OpenSolaris's zone are more advanced than FreeBSD jails, but for most uses the differences negligible. BSD Jails also integrate nicely with ZFS and FreeBSD's GEOM layer. OpenSolaris also has XEN dom0 support, I'm surprised you didn't take the opportunity to bag on FreeBSD's lack of it.

[quote]ZFS on Solaris/OpenSolaris/Nexenta is usable today. Not only does it "have" it, but you're able to trivially export an iSCSI device, use deduplication, and (not 100% sure on this one, just read about it having been added to Solaris in April) do differential filesystem snapshots. FreeBSD's implementation has none of this, giving it little more appeal than current btrfs on mdraid (and in some ways, less).[/quote]

It's trivial to export ZVOL on FreeBSD as iscsi targets. Granted it's not quite as nice as OpenSolaris since FreeBSD doesn't have an iscsi target in it's base system but there is a great one in ports and with a two minute wrapper script you have exactly the same functionality.

People talk of deduplication like it's some sort of magic bullet, but I think most of those people have no idea the overhead that imposes on the file system. Once they discover the resources necesscary to run it effectively, much of the enthusiasim fades away. It's a really a very select usage were deduplication would be economically feasible to implement.

Doesn't seem like you understand much about ZFS. Differential snapshot are integral to ZFS, you can't have ZFS with getting it so yes FreeBSD does have differential ZFS snapshots. Perhaps you're misidentifying this? http://netmgt.blogspot.com/2010/03/zfs-snapshot-differences.html Interesting, they have integrated diff into ZFS now. Trivial to do without the integration, if that's actually a make or break feature you need a new sys admin.

While you're getting some learning here, you s

Re:What momentum may that fork have?

[Kismet]

Yes, I am quite aware of how the term is "commonly" used, which is precisely the precondition for my complaint. Otherwise, why complain at all? I'm not sure what your argument is.

If we distinguish "junk science" from actual "science," why not "junk revisionism" or "negationism" from legitimate "revisionist history?"

Since the vocabulary needed for talking about a worthwhile and valid way of reexamining history has been overloaded to mean the same thing as its false and invalid counterfeit, legitimate revisionism suffers.

The problem is compounded every time someone pulls out the fallacy, "That's revisionist history!"

Imagine if politically motivated rubbish and honest research required the equivocal term, "science". One of those disciplines, the one more difficult to justify to the layman, might suffer as a result. Whenever we wanted to debunk something, we'd just hurl the epithet, "science", at it.

That's what I'm complaining about. It's just a crazy, petty Stallman-esque neurosis I have.

Uses for Opensolaris

[cc-rider-Texas]

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?

Re:Uses for Opensolaris

[cc-rider-Texas]

For my 64 bit machine, both opensolaris and gcc-2.95.3 and the ancient software will install/compile seamlessly, including my T61 laptop. I have installed it on an older 32 bit ubuntu install, but the old software doesn't like linux very much, and will not compile under any other gcc either. Opensolaris works just fine for it though, especially considering that the old software was developed for unix in the early 90's anyway. I just really don't want to get into modifying the gcc configure files that would allow gcc 2.95.3 to be compiled on a newer 64 bit machine with linux on it.

Re:Is it really dead?

[Frequency Domain]

It's not dead, Oracle just told them to go fork themselves.

bOrg

[mark72005]

When will we get an Ellison/Borg icon for /. ?

Only a good thing

[MonsterTrimble]

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.

And nobody cared....

[Fished]

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!

64-way DB Servers

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:64-way DB Servers

[TheRaven64]

Saying RHEL runs on mainframes is a bit misleading. RHEL runs in smallish partitions of a mainframe. You can run a few thousand RHEL instances on an IBM Z-series (or whatever they're called this week) mainframe, but you can't just run a single instance of RHEL as you can with z/VM. The RHEL support is there for people who have a mainframe and want to use some of the spare capacity to replace some x86 servers. It's not something you would buy a mainframe for.

Re:Question here.

[WebMink]

Check out the Illumos announcement. Slides 18 and 19 in the deck about that. The Illumos people have made a bootable system with closed bits of libc (including full locale support) replaced, replacements for the most critical closed source utilities and replacements for some drivers. Still to do:

• NFS/CIFS lock manager
• Full kcf module/daemon (crypto framework)
• Trusted Extensions (labeld)
• Many more drivers

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).

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

[vadim_t]

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.

True. But what's the reason for that?

In the words of Danese Cooper, who is no longer with Sun, one of the reasons for basing the CDDL on the Mozilla license was that the Mozilla license is GPL-incompatible. Cooper stated, at the 6th annual Debian conference, that the engineers who had written the Solaris kernel requested that the license of OpenSolaris be GPL-incompatible. "Mozilla was selected partially because it is GPL incompatible. That was part of the design when they released OpenSolaris. [...] the engineers who wrote Solaris [...] had some biases about how it should be released, and you have to respect 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.

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.

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.

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

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.