Oracle Solaris 11 Express Released

comay writes "Today Oracle released Solaris 11 Express 2010.11. It includes a large number of new features (PDF) not found in either Oracle Solaris 10 or previous OpenSolaris releases, including ZFS encryption and deduplication, network-based packaging and provisioning systems, network virtualization, optimized I/O for NUMA platforms and optimized platform support including support for Intel's latest Nehalem and SPARC T3. In addition, Oracle Solaris 10 support is available from within a container/zone so migration of existing systems is greatly simplified." Reader gtirloni adds, "Oracle also announced that this is not a beta or preview, but a full, supported release aimed at everybody developing, testing, prototyping or demonstrating applications running on the latest Solaris release (not allowed to be used in production)."

Comments

Re:Full, Supported Release -- That we can't use

[syousef]

So, it's a "Full, Supported Release", but we can't use it for anything except as a development platform (and what to deploy on?).

From the license agreement: We can't "use the Programs for your own internal business purposes... or for any commercial or production purposes"

So in reality, it's just a way to show off, an try to keep people from jumping ship to linux.

It's definitely the antithesis of FOSS -- nothing is free about it.

They're just giving away the development tools for free. So when/if developers use them, and end users like the result, they've got you by the short and curlies. It's a time honoured tradition, often rightly or wrongly compared to a drug dealer's "the first hit is free, kid".

Yes, looks that way to me...

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

This is only allowed to be used in dev. They killed Open Solaris. It certainly seems like they are killing a good part of the *free* stuff from Sun to me.

Solaris 11 will be available in 2011

[gtirloni]

Solaris 11 Express is aimed at people that want to preview the features that will come in full production mode in Solaris 11. But they are also offering support for the Express edition today (the license terms are kind of cryptic, as always). I can't see how Oracle is killing Solaris no matter how hard I try to imagine that.

Re:Solaris 11 will be available in 2011

[ToasterMonkey]

He's talking about OpenSolaris... The open source branch. He's right about that, it's effectively been killed.

Technically, that open source branch has not been killed, OpenSolaris the distribution has been rebranded as Solaris Express and supposedly the source will be released following binary releases rather than leading it. There are other projects based on that source that predate OpenSolaris, and then there is OpenIndiana which is supposedly going to be to Solaris as CentOS is to RHEL.
Something like that anyway.

All this OpenSolaris is dead talk amuses me. If anyone gave a damn about it, they'd simply be waiting for Solaris Express 11 that was announced when OS "died" or working with the other community driven Solaris distros with real communities. If you don't give a damn... what's this all about?

Re:Solaris 11 will be available in 2011

[jonwil]

Illumos is the real future of OpenSolaris IMO.
Efforts are being made to remove anything from OpenSolaris that is closed source (especially anything with limits on redistribution)

Re:Solaris 11 will be available in 2011

[makomk]

OpenSolaris the distribution has been rebranded as Solaris Express

With a licence agreement that forbids you from actually using it for anything. Want to use it? You need to pay Oracle a load of money, and they may not even let you do that unless you replace all your hardware with stuff supplied by them.

Yesterday's News

[segedunum]

Solaris had it's shot at being something the Slashdot crowd could pick up and run with, but given that you can't use Solaris for anything useful now I'm not sure how this qualifies as news. Solaris is now a very high-end OS that's as relevant to people as AIX is, because that's the only feasible place it can survive now.

Re:Yesterday's News

[ToasterMonkey]

Solaris had it's shot at being something the Slashdot crowd could pick up and run with, but given that you can't use Solaris for anything useful now I'm not sure how this qualifies as news. Solaris is now a very high-end OS that's as relevant to people as AIX is, because that's the only feasible place it can survive now.

Why, because it's not "cool" or it doesn't meet some technical criteria? Is there really no space between IBM midrange hardware running AIX and the "Slashdot crowd"?
I'm thinking that's a shockingly large amount of space.

Re:Solaris was the only good thing from Sun.

[renegadesx]

OK I'll bite.

Personally I agree with AC on Netbeans... it is a pile of crap. Eclipse is nice enough and I agree C# is a much neater language for application development but Java does have it's place and not going away anytime soon (just no more Java in SAP please).

MySQL is crap if you are trying to run big databases that usually run on Oracle, DB2. Otherwise it's fine for its intended purpose. Personally I would switch to Postgres as I still worry of MySQL's future.

OpenOffice is bloated but it is supposed to be. It's feature rich and designed to be an alternative to the 800lb Gorilla known as Microsoft Office, personally I find that to be the true star of the Sun software suite. Compatibility has not been an issue with me for a long time except VB macros (which need to die badly)

Time to move to RHEL 6

[mikelieman]

There's a wonderfully simple solution to this. Time to move off them expensive SPARC boxes...

Re:Solaris was the only good thing from Sun.

[CynicTheHedgehog]

I'm curious about all of the NetBeans hate. NetBeans ships with:

  - A standard Ant- or Maven-based build system with stellar support for both
  - All kinds of VCS integration (CVS, SVN, Mercurial)
  - Plugins for Jira, Bugzilla, and other ticketing systems
  - Support for every major app server
  - Very decent XML/schema editor with auto-complete and recognition of tags in context-sensitive help
  - An incredibly powerful formatting and styling engine
  - Has an integrated database query tool with SQL syntax highlighting
  - Ctrl+o to quick-search any type in any project you have open (ctrl+shift+o for any file, period) with recognition for acronyms/camel case abbreviations
  - Excellent integration wtih JUnit
  - SVN revision highlighting with mouse-over diff and undo/revert (change by change)
  - Incredible diff and conflict resolution interface
  - WYSIWYG JSF editor
  - JSF tag auto-complete (even with Seam and other third-party taglibs)
  - A full-featured profiler with the ability to take snapshots the entire runtime
  - JavaDoc validation and auto-complete
  - Project groups so you don't have to close and re-open your IDE to switch "workspaces"
  - Language support for Ruby, C++, PHP, and scripting languages (JavaScript, Groovy)

I can appreciate that there is a group of developers that prefer to use lightweight editors and command-line tools, and that's fine. But if you like big honkin' IDEs then NetBeans is a worthy platform, and I've found it to be a huge time saver.

Re:Solaris was the only good thing from Sun.

[Rysc]

MySQL is crap if you are trying to run big databases that usually run on Oracle, DB2. Otherwise it's fine for its intended purpose. Personally I would switch to Postgres as I still worry of MySQL's future.

Funny. I'd switch to Postgres because I worry about data integrity. Who cares what MySQL's future looks like?