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)."
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".
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
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.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
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.