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Solaris is no longer free

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Re: Solaris is no longer free

#11

Post by cmelbye »

amerine wrote: post #7
ghshephard wrote: post #4

Sun was embracing Open Source to some degree - though they were always a little schizophrenic on that policy, and never really held to a clear position for about 3-5 years in the middle - but the last few years they seemed to "get it". While this is a minor change (it doesn't appear to affect OpenSolaris) it does seem to be indicative of Oracle taking a few (small) steps away from that position. But, on the flip side…

I'm willing to bet that your percentages are off. I would say at least 85% of the folks around here use Linux on their servers, with a 1-5% using a BSD and the 1-14% using Windows. Solaris (read OpenSolaris) filling in the gaps within the fluctuations above.. which is a shame, there is some really cool technology in OpenSolaris/Solaris 10.

I think your predictions are pretty accurate. I would use Solaris because it does have a lot of cool features (Solaris zones being one of the most interesting to me), but I'm unsure about the licensing situation, so I've held off for now.

Re: Solaris is no longer free

#12

Post by forkqueue »

umjames wrote: post #6
iigs wrote: post #3

Solaris has gone back and forth between fully commercial, to free + free updates, to commercial, to free without updates, to now commercial again. In my experience using solaris at the bottom-end has been kind of a non-starter for a decade now because Sun yo-yoed the licensing enough to remind people they shouldn't use it. Honestly, good riddance. Oracle can go figure out what they're trying to do and this will motiv…

DTrace would be nice for starters.

Yup, DTrace and ZFS are pretty much the only things Solaris brings to the table above what Linux offers.

Interestingly I've never come across any pure Solaris shops that run ZFS, I suppose because if you're conservative enough only to use Solaris, you're too conservative to trust ZFS.

Re: Solaris is no longer free

#13

Post by barrkel »

ghshephard wrote: post #4

Sun was embracing Open Source to some degree - though they were always a little schizophrenic on that policy, and never really held to a clear position for about 3-5 years in the middle - but the last few years they seemed to "get it". While this is a minor change (it doesn't appear to affect OpenSolaris) it does seem to be indicative of Oracle taking a few (small) steps away from that position. But, on the flip side…

I'm using Nexenta (Debian/Ubuntu-based userland on OpenSolaris kernel) for my home NAS, primarily because of ZFS. Works well enough, but of course it's not a production server.

Re: Solaris is no longer free

#14

Post by alnayyir »

forkqueue wrote: post #12
umjames wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DTrace would be nice for starters.

Yup, DTrace and ZFS are pretty much the only things Solaris brings to the table above what Linux offers. Interestingly I've never come across any pure Solaris shops that run ZFS, I suppose because if you're conservative enough only to use Solaris, you're too conservative to trust ZFS.

DTrace and ZFS are both available on FreeBSD.

Call me a BSD bigot (even though I use Linux/OS X at work) but I really fail to see any rational reason to use Solaris at this point.

We have a Solaris database + filestore at work, mostly for Z-raid, but now that FreeBSD has ZFS, when it gets EOL'd (with a vicious grin on my face) it's going to be a BSD box that replaces it.

Re: Solaris is no longer free

#15

Post by nailer »

umjames wrote: post #6
iigs wrote: post #3

Solaris has gone back and forth between fully commercial, to free + free updates, to commercial, to free without updates, to now commercial again. In my experience using solaris at the bottom-end has been kind of a non-starter for a decade now because Sun yo-yoed the licensing enough to remind people they shouldn't use it. Honestly, good riddance. Oracle can go figure out what they're trying to do and this will motiv…

DTrace would be nice for starters.

SystemTap (the kernel probing tool build into Linux) is coming along pretty well - I needed to create something to alert me when arbitrary apps set TCP_NODELAY last week, spend a little while looking at SystemTap, made a simple script that probes at tcp.setsockopt(), got the info I needed, and printed it presentably.

I added the script to http://sourceware.org/systemtap/wiki/WarStories . Check it out and others, it's pretty easy to pick up.

Re: Solaris is no longer free

#16

Post by buster »

forkqueue wrote: post #12
umjames wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DTrace would be nice for starters.

Yup, DTrace and ZFS are pretty much the only things Solaris brings to the table above what Linux offers. Interestingly I've never come across any pure Solaris shops that run ZFS, I suppose because if you're conservative enough only to use Solaris, you're too conservative to trust ZFS.

Zones too. I think they offer more then what the usual jail does. Never really used both of them, but.. yeah, zones sound nice, too :)

Also, solaris is probably the most stable OS i've ever worked with.

Re: Solaris is no longer free

#17

Post by thibaut_barrere »

forkqueue wrote: post #12
umjames wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DTrace would be nice for starters.

Yup, DTrace and ZFS are pretty much the only things Solaris brings to the table above what Linux offers. Interestingly I've never come across any pure Solaris shops that run ZFS, I suppose because if you're conservative enough only to use Solaris, you're too conservative to trust ZFS.

I'd add SMF (unless you know about something similar that's built-in into Linux ?).

Re: Solaris is no longer free

#18

Post by rbanffy »

Solaris 10 used to be "free as in beer".

My biggest fear is that some Oracle exec seems this a a way to meet his revenue target at the expense of making Solaris irrelevant and risking the same for OpenSolaris.

Re: Solaris is no longer free

#19

Post by patrickgzill »

My guess: they are about to ship ZFS deduplication in released version of Solaris (right now dedupe is only in OpenSolaris), and realize that they can bump up their numbers, at least temporarily, by trying to charge for it.

Re: Solaris is no longer free

#20

Post by cturner »

cmelbye wrote: post #11
amerine wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm willing to bet that your percentages are off. I would say at least 85% of the folks around here use Linux on their servers, with a 1-5% using a BSD and the 1-14% using Windows. Solaris (read OpenSolaris) filling in the gaps within the fluctuations above.. which is a shame, there is some really cool technology in OpenSolaris/Solaris 10.

I think your predictions are pretty accurate. I would use Solaris because it does have a lot of cool features (Solaris zones being one of the most interesting to me), but I'm unsure about the licensing situation, so I've held off for now.

The thing that has always impressed me about Solaris is its well-roundedness. Not the user-environment, which compares badly to typical linux and BSD setups (svrV vs BSD kludge; standard install lacks lots of useful tools; dev tools and libraries less likely to have support). Rather, the mechanisms that bind it to the hardware, and allow you to do types of control and monitoring that aren't feasible with linux/freebsd stuff. Solaris has had that close-to-the-hardware advantage.
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