Not if they don't want or need a community around their product. I posted about this above, but I suspect Oracle are of the opinion that there's no money to be made selling Solaris as a general purpose OS. They probably just want it as the bottom layer in a hardware & software bundle, tuned to running Oracle or Java workloads.
They’ve completely alienated and scared off the community around OpenSolaris, killed any lines of communication by clamping down on employee blogs and ignored open letters from highly influential and important community members begging for *any* kind of information. They’ve forbidden Sun/Oracle employees from heading up the Solaris user groups and booted the meetings out of their buildings; turned Solaris 10 into a 30-day trial, and pushed back the 2010.x release of OpenSolaris with no word as to it’s planned release date, or even if it is being continued as a product.
Oracle are doing a superb job of killing Solaris - at least, as we knew it to be.
Oracle just really doesn't care about Solaris as a general purpose OS (there's no money in it), and it makes sense although I personally find it tragic. It's probably why they're also killing all their OEM deals. I strongly suspect Oracle's overall aim is to have Solaris relegated to the role of running as the bottom layer in an Oracle "database machine" or Java appserver bundle.
It excels in these tasks, and it would obviously fit into Oracle's stated goal of being a one stop shop, where if you want to run Oracle, they'll sell you the bundle - hardware, storage, OS and software. If they no longer want it to be a dominant general purpose datacenter OS, then their approach makes sense. They don't need a "community" around the product, they don't need open source developers porting applications to it, and they certainly don't need the overhead of running and managing a community portal anymore.
I think the way they are going about it reprehensible, and it's a tragic end for such a historic and innovative OS but you can see why. Larry is all about the $$$, and Sun's approach just wasn't bringing in the big bucks.
While I may agree with you when it comes to Sun's generic x86 boxes (although they have some really nice engineering) and most of their StorageTek arrays, it would be a tragedy if Sun's Niagara boxes (T-series coolthreads processors) and storage servers (X4500 and 7000 "Amber Road" series) died. Those are truly innovative and unique products, and there is no equivalent out there from any manufacturer.
There's also some great software that Sun have developed, and it would again be a crying shame to see IBM b0rk it all up in favour of their own competing products. For instance, even though you may personally favour Eclipse over Netbeans, the competition from Eclipse lit a fire under Sun's behind and it's come on leaps and bounds recently.
Without competition, the market stagnates and innovation dwindles away. I can't see much good coming from this deal, if it goes through.
Well, not natively. But there are a bunch of 3rd party replication/clustering products that do that for you. The original thought was that a replication engine should be pluggable as everyone has different requirements, so it shouldn't be in the main database. However, they've relaxed that stance a little - there was an announcement of an effort to build a native replication engine being in for 8.4, but it looks like it won't make it until 8.5 or so. But they are working on it (and they recognise something like MySQL's replication has attracted a lot of developers so I would imagine something along those lines).
"I just hope IBM keeps Java, Open Office and the rest as they are and doesn't start to try to make money off them.".
While this is a valid concern (remember, Sun is by far the largest open source contributor out there), that'd be the least of my concerns. I'd be more worried if some software or hardware would even be continued.
I can't see a merged company running duplicate lines of hardware OR software, and whichever way it goes, people are going to be pissed. Just look at the HP/Compaq train wreck, and that was relatively mild in comparison (Tru64/HP-UX etc.). With Sun and IBM, they've got to choose between either a massive duplication of effort, or pick one of Solaris/AIX, MySQL/DB2, SPARC/POWER, Galaxy/iSeries, Storagetek (including the ZFS-based products like Thumper/Amber Road)/IBM storage, Websphere/Glassfish, Netbeans/Eclipse - the list goes on.
Both companies produce such an enormously varied range of hardware and software, I just don't see it working without some serious cuts and massively pissed off customers. Those Tru64 customers didn't all just take it on the chin and migrate over to HP-UX like the good customers they were supposed to be, for instance. If you were working in a x64 Solaris shop, and got told that your migration path was to AIX on POWER, would you move ? Or would you take your business elsewhere ?
"By simply turning > into > Rubbish. That's one of the most basic errors made when people start trying to filter out XSS. Suppose you have a form that takes a user's name and then uses it in a hidden field on the next page ? You could quide easily do something like :
UserName" style="background:url(javascript:alert('Getting rid of angled brackets won't help you here'))
Not an angled bracket in there, yet on most systems that'll work and display a popup. Hence the reason it's really not that simple, and the parent post referrs to "an arms race against the latest techniques"
Sudo can use LDAP as well. Why not leverage that if you're using LDAP anyway ? You can then store all your sudo information in one central repository; no more maintaining hundreds of individual files...
Re:There's also the itsy bitsy license change...
on
Nessus 3.0 Released
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
And if I wanted to host this at our datacentre, in order to scan the systems on our network which is firewalled off from the outside world ? I'd then have to shell out for additional rack space, power, etc. Not to mention that in many environments "just bung a live CD into an x86 box" won't get past upper management ? Throwing additional hardware (even if it is "commodity" as you say) is hardly a great solution and only further encourages vendors to provide closed source solutions.
Once the source is closed, your option of running software on the platform of your choice may be gone forever. You're then totally dependant on the developer to continue supporting your platform. You also, by extension, have to hope they never go out of business, especially if their product incorporates some sort of time-locked licensing. If they wake up one morning and decide that it's no longer economically viable to continue building their product for your platform, you're screwed. Never mind that you may have built your entire infrastructure around a certain technology, and it's not economically viable for you to jump ship to whatever the flavour of the month is; if you want to continue running closed source product X, you have to dance to the beat of the developers' drum.
Re:There's also the itsy bitsy license change...
on
Nessus 3.0 Released
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Which is a major PITA, as there's currently no download for anything other than x86 Linux/FreeBSD. I run Nessus on Solaris (I'm the maintainer for the Blastwave.org packages), and it is this ramification of the license change that I find most infuriating. It wouldn't perhaps be so bad if Tenable could guarantee that all platforms would have binaries available for them - but this means they're leaving a large section of their userbase out in the cold. And woe betide you if you're running anything they consider really obscure or not worth supporting. Here's to the continued development of the forked GPL version.
I've been running my Blastwave packages[1] of the betas and RCs since the first snapshots became available, and I've been massively impressed with this release. Moving autovacuum into the main package is a really nice touch - all you have to do now is uncomment a few lines in postgresql.conf and it handles it all for you.
The new roles system is also amazingly useful. You can set up a range of roles with a variety of permissions, and then let users "assume" those roles. So you can log in with a day-to-day account, and when you need to do some admin work just SET ROLE [name of your super-user role] and then revert back once you're done. Great if you want to give a junior DBA the ability to create databases, but not the ability to modify other things (such as creating new roles).
Congratulations to the PostgreSQL team anyway - for doing things "the right way":)
But then, BeOS _is_ largely POSIX-compliant. It ships with a bash shell, runs Apache, PHP, SSH, Perl, Python and most GNU / open source utilities (and it's even got an X server if you do need it). It's just that you don't need to go mucking around in the terminal to get things done - it's very much like Mac OS X in that regard.
2. People not happy with big blue can migrate to another vendor without having to take an OS change into account. That means less lock in.
Well, not exactly. If they are running IBM's POWER processor, then they can't really move their applications to another vendor, as no-one but IBM "does" POWER. They could move to another platform and still run Linux (say, x86 for example), and manage to apply _most_ of their sysadmin experience - but any proprietry, binary-only applications running on that box would have to either be bought again or re-licensed. So there would be an OS change, even if it's only from one architecture to another.
What will be interesting is how the software market adjusts to these multi-core processors becoming more widespread and popular (particularly with dual-core Opteron on the way). They're going to have to rethink things a bit with regards per-processor licensing. From what I recall, Oracle (and many others) consider a dual-core processor two separate processors, and charge accordingly. Anyone running one of these chips would then get stung for a 8 (or possibly 32) processor license.
It covers setting up the Linux side of things, adding network support and then installing OpenVMS. It's a great (geeky) exercise and provides a good way to learn an alternative to the Unix way of doing things.
While I've been using Solaris and other Unixes for too long to seriously contemplate "re-tooling", I can appreciate the elegance and unique approach OpenVMS brings to many tasks.
I'll second the suggestion for IMP - it rules. One other thing, though - as PHP doesn't support persistent IMAP connections, you'll find that it can be quite slow in some cases. The Horde project has recently released a Imap Proxy, which speeds things up a fair amount, and reduces load on the servers. It works very nicely, and is extremely simple to set up.
Oh, and I have heard of people having bad experiences using a PHP accelerator with Horde, although I've had it running with no problems here. YMMV, etc....
"I was writing a complex WHERE clause with multiple ANDs and ORs and I forgot to put the parentheses around OR statements, and that crashed the whole mysqld."
It was like "bleep bleep bleep bleep bleep". It was a really good query. It was like... a bummer.
Considering that Borland's Kylix is a strong solution for cross-platform develoment on both Windows and Linux (not just for Delphi either - from what I hear, the latest versions include Borland's C/C++ compiler) this could be a real blow. I mean, what's the likelyhood of Microsoft carrying on development of Kylix ?
Then again, there was that story recently about Microsoft getting into Linux software development...
Day of the Tentacle ? That's some bizzare Japanese Hentai game, right ?
Re:Is it five years only?
on
Slashdot Turns 5
·
· Score: 2, Informative
OOG the caveman. Sheer genius. I only got an account recently, but have been lurking for years - OOG's posts always cracked me up.
It was the bizzare way that his posts would always be the most rational of the entire thread - but be expressed in a proto-JeffK ALL CAPS rant. And all that stuff about breaking heads - classic.
Slashdot Mirror
Not if they don't want or need a community around their product. I posted about this above, but I suspect Oracle are of the opinion that there's no money to be made selling Solaris as a general purpose OS. They probably just want it as the bottom layer in a hardware & software bundle, tuned to running Oracle or Java workloads.
They’ve completely alienated and scared off the community around OpenSolaris, killed any lines of communication by clamping down on employee blogs and ignored open letters from highly influential and important community members begging for *any* kind of information. They’ve forbidden Sun/Oracle employees from heading up the Solaris user groups and booted the meetings out of their buildings; turned Solaris 10 into a 30-day trial, and pushed back the 2010.x release of OpenSolaris with no word as to it’s planned release date, or even if it is being continued as a product.
Oracle are doing a superb job of killing Solaris - at least, as we knew it to be.
Oracle just really doesn't care about Solaris as a general purpose OS (there's no money in it), and it makes sense although I personally find it tragic. It's probably why they're also killing all their OEM deals. I strongly suspect Oracle's overall aim is to have Solaris relegated to the role of running as the bottom layer in an Oracle "database machine" or Java appserver bundle.
It excels in these tasks, and it would obviously fit into Oracle's stated goal of being a one stop shop, where if you want to run Oracle, they'll sell you the bundle - hardware, storage, OS and software. If they no longer want it to be a dominant general purpose datacenter OS, then their approach makes sense. They don't need a "community" around the product, they don't need open source developers porting applications to it, and they certainly don't need the overhead of running and managing a community portal anymore.
I think the way they are going about it reprehensible, and it's a tragic end for such a historic and innovative OS but you can see why. Larry is all about the $$$, and Sun's approach just wasn't bringing in the big bucks.
- Sun's HW products going to trash...
While I may agree with you when it comes to Sun's generic x86 boxes (although they have some really nice engineering) and most of their StorageTek arrays, it would be a tragedy if Sun's Niagara boxes (T-series coolthreads processors) and storage servers (X4500 and 7000 "Amber Road" series) died. Those are truly innovative and unique products, and there is no equivalent out there from any manufacturer.
There's also some great software that Sun have developed, and it would again be a crying shame to see IBM b0rk it all up in favour of their own competing products. For instance, even though you may personally favour Eclipse over Netbeans, the competition from Eclipse lit a fire under Sun's behind and it's come on leaps and bounds recently.
Without competition, the market stagnates and innovation dwindles away. I can't see much good coming from this deal, if it goes through.
Well, not natively. But there are a bunch of 3rd party replication/clustering products that do that for you. The original thought was that a replication engine should be pluggable as everyone has different requirements, so it shouldn't be in the main database. However, they've relaxed that stance a little - there was an announcement of an effort to build a native replication engine being in for 8.4, but it looks like it won't make it until 8.5 or so. But they are working on it (and they recognise something like MySQL's replication has attracted a lot of developers so I would imagine something along those lines).
"I just hope IBM keeps Java, Open Office and the rest as they are and doesn't start to try to make money off them.".
While this is a valid concern (remember, Sun is by far the largest open source contributor out there), that'd be the least of my concerns. I'd be more worried if some software or hardware would even be continued.
I can't see a merged company running duplicate lines of hardware OR software, and whichever way it goes, people are going to be pissed. Just look at the HP/Compaq train wreck, and that was relatively mild in comparison (Tru64/HP-UX etc.). With Sun and IBM, they've got to choose between either a massive duplication of effort, or pick one of Solaris/AIX, MySQL/DB2, SPARC/POWER, Galaxy/iSeries, Storagetek (including the ZFS-based products like Thumper/Amber Road)/IBM storage, Websphere/Glassfish, Netbeans/Eclipse - the list goes on.
Both companies produce such an enormously varied range of hardware and software, I just don't see it working without some serious cuts and massively pissed off customers. Those Tru64 customers didn't all just take it on the chin and migrate over to HP-UX like the good customers they were supposed to be, for instance. If you were working in a x64 Solaris shop, and got told that your migration path was to AIX on POWER, would you move ? Or would you take your business elsewhere ?
"By simply turning > into >
Rubbish. That's one of the most basic errors made when people start trying to filter out XSS. Suppose you have a form that takes a user's name and then uses it in a hidden field on the next page ? You could quide easily do something like :
UserName" style="background:url(javascript:alert('Getting rid of angled brackets won't help you here'))
Not an angled bracket in there, yet on most systems that'll work and display a popup. Hence the reason it's really not that simple, and the parent post referrs to "an arms race against the latest techniques"
Sudo can use LDAP as well. Why not leverage that if you're using LDAP anyway ? You can then store all your sudo information in one central repository; no more maintaining hundreds of individual files...
And if I wanted to host this at our datacentre, in order to scan the systems on our network which is firewalled off from the outside world ? I'd then have to shell out for additional rack space, power, etc. Not to mention that in many environments "just bung a live CD into an x86 box" won't get past upper management ? Throwing additional hardware (even if it is "commodity" as you say) is hardly a great solution and only further encourages vendors to provide closed source solutions.
Once the source is closed, your option of running software on the platform of your choice may be gone forever. You're then totally dependant on the developer to continue supporting your platform. You also, by extension, have to hope they never go out of business, especially if their product incorporates some sort of time-locked licensing. If they wake up one morning and decide that it's no longer economically viable to continue building their product for your platform, you're screwed. Never mind that you may have built your entire infrastructure around a certain technology, and it's not economically viable for you to jump ship to whatever the flavour of the month is; if you want to continue running closed source product X, you have to dance to the beat of the developers' drum.
Which is a major PITA, as there's currently no download for anything other than x86 Linux/FreeBSD. I run Nessus on Solaris (I'm the maintainer for the Blastwave.org packages), and it is this ramification of the license change that I find most infuriating. It wouldn't perhaps be so bad if Tenable could guarantee that all platforms would have binaries available for them - but this means they're leaving a large section of their userbase out in the cold. And woe betide you if you're running anything they consider really obscure or not worth supporting. Here's to the continued development of the forked GPL version.
I've been running my Blastwave packages[1] of the betas and RCs since the first snapshots became available, and I've been massively impressed with this release. Moving autovacuum into the main package is a really nice touch - all you have to do now is uncomment a few lines in postgresql.conf and it handles it all for you.
:)
The new roles system is also amazingly useful. You can set up a range of roles with a variety of permissions, and then let users "assume" those roles. So you can log in with a day-to-day account, and when you need to do some admin work just SET ROLE [name of your super-user role] and then revert back once you're done. Great if you want to give a junior DBA the ability to create databases, but not the ability to modify other things (such as creating new roles).
Congratulations to the PostgreSQL team anyway - for doing things "the right way"
[1]=http://www.blastwave.org/testing/
But then, BeOS _is_ largely POSIX-compliant. It ships with a bash shell, runs Apache, PHP, SSH, Perl, Python and most GNU / open source utilities (and it's even got an X server if you do need it). It's just that you don't need to go mucking around in the terminal to get things done - it's very much like Mac OS X in that regard.
JDS (version 3) is present in the current Solaris Express builds, so should be in the final product.
2. People not happy with big blue can migrate to another vendor without having to take an OS change into account. That means less lock in.
Well, not exactly. If they are running IBM's POWER processor, then they can't really move their applications to another vendor, as no-one but IBM "does" POWER. They could move to another platform and still run Linux (say, x86 for example), and manage to apply _most_ of their sysadmin experience - but any proprietry, binary-only applications running on that box would have to either be bought again or re-licensed. So there would be an OS change, even if it's only from one architecture to another.
-Mark
What will be interesting is how the software market adjusts to these multi-core processors becoming more widespread and popular (particularly with dual-core Opteron on the way). They're going to have to rethink things a bit with regards per-processor licensing. From what I recall, Oracle (and many others) consider a dual-core processor two separate processors, and charge accordingly. Anyone running one of these chips would then get stung for a 8 (or possibly 32) processor license.
Perhaps a better solution would be to adopt the approach taken by IDC (which Sun obviously seem quite happy to back) of counting processor sockets, instead of cores.
Anyone know what other software companies are planning on doing with their per-processor licensing ?
-Mark
If anyone is interested in running OpenVMS on it, take a look at http://www.wherry.com/gadgets/retrocomputing/vax-s imh.html.
It covers setting up the Linux side of things, adding network support and then installing OpenVMS. It's a great (geeky) exercise and provides a good way to learn an alternative to the Unix way of doing things.
While I've been using Solaris and other Unixes for too long to seriously contemplate "re-tooling", I can appreciate the elegance and unique approach OpenVMS brings to many tasks.
-Mark
It's what's known as "eating your cake and having it too"....
Yup, and I can see the red bar as well. Not a subscriber, either. "Problems with this story?" guff appearing as well.
Ho hum.
I'll second the suggestion for IMP - it rules.
One other thing, though - as PHP doesn't support persistent IMAP connections, you'll find that it can be quite slow in some cases. The Horde project has recently released a Imap Proxy, which speeds things up a fair amount, and reduces load on the servers. It works very nicely, and is extremely simple to set up.
Oh, and I have heard of people having bad experiences using a PHP accelerator with Horde, although I've had it running with no problems here. YMMV, etc....
"I was writing a complex WHERE clause with multiple ANDs and ORs and I forgot to put the parentheses around OR statements, and that crashed the whole mysqld."
It was like "bleep bleep bleep bleep bleep". It was a really good query. It was like... a bummer.
Considering that Borland's Kylix is a strong solution for cross-platform develoment on both Windows and Linux (not just for Delphi either - from what I hear, the latest versions include Borland's C/C++ compiler) this could be a real blow. I mean, what's the likelyhood of Microsoft carrying on development of Kylix ?
Then again, there was that story recently about Microsoft getting into Linux software development...
Day of the Tentacle ? That's some bizzare Japanese Hentai game, right ?
OOG the caveman. Sheer genius. I only got an account recently, but have been lurking for years - OOG's posts always cracked me up.
It was the bizzare way that his posts would always be the most rational of the entire thread - but be expressed in a proto-JeffK ALL CAPS rant. And all that stuff about breaking heads - classic.
s/he/she/g.
Take a look at the reviewer's name.... and her website http://www.eugenia.co.uk/.
Maybe they should change their slogan from "HP invent" to "HP assimilate" ?
Actually, shouldn't that be .ho ?