I've been following this for a while. OpenSolaris, VirtualBox and MySQL are all things I was worried about surviving in the wake of Oracle's takeover. I use all three quite a bit.
OpenSolaris governing board threatens dissolution
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Re: OpenSolaris governing board threatens dissolution
#12Earlier quoted context omitted.
I do, our webservers run it. ZFS with automatic snapshots has saved my ass quite a few times already. Sending incremental snapshots (for backups) to offsite location (another OpenSolaris machine) is also easy and efficient. But, if linux had ZFS i'd probably use that instead.
Could you clear something up for me? If ZFS is so highly coveted (which I've inferred from recent discussions), why doesn't every operating system under the sun support it?
In a nutshell, the issue is that the Linux kernel which is licensed under the GNU General Public License is incompatible with ZFS which is licensed under the Sun CDDL. While both the GPL and CDDL are open source licenses their terms are such that it is impossible to simultaneously satisfy both licenses. This means that a single derived work of the Linux kernel and ZFS cannot be legally distributed.
http://wiki.github.com/behlendorf/zfs/faq
FreeBSD has it, but it's been largely abandoned on Mac OS X.
Re: OpenSolaris governing board threatens dissolution
#13Out of curiosity, does anyone here use OpenSolaris for anything?
I use it on a few workstations. It's a fine operating system, but I'm admittedly a bit of an enterprise UNIX head that's disenchanted with where Linux has gone. For the last decade or so, I've come to like some of the other free operating systems such as the BSD family and OpenSolaris.
Re: OpenSolaris governing board threatens dissolution
#14Why do they need a blessing from Oracle though? "If you don't like it - fork it" doesn't apply here? Licensing issues?
99.99999% of code contributions come from Sun^H^H^HOracle. What's the point of forking? It'd be much the same outcome, a code base which never quite gets released.
Re: OpenSolaris governing board threatens dissolution
#15Out of curiosity, does anyone here use OpenSolaris for anything?
We use Solaris 10. Which isn't quite the same thing, of course.
The Solaris kernel is excellent. The Solaris 10 userland, not so (except for the newer core stuff like SMF), and OpenSolaris is supposedly a Solaris kernel with a saner userland. But I'm yet to be convinced it is stable enough to run in production, and the new packaging system looks mildly troublesome.
And it's still difficult to get it to install without X.
Re: OpenSolaris governing board threatens dissolution
#16I'd love to have a lively discussion here about OpenSolaris, could not upvote this enough (actually I don't think my upvote counts at all, is that because I don't have karma yet?)
Yes, otherwise people would be able to create dummy accounts and vote themselves up for nothing.
Re: OpenSolaris governing board threatens dissolution
#17Why do they need a blessing from Oracle though? "If you don't like it - fork it" doesn't apply here? Licensing issues?
I'm not sure, but I'm guessing that 'Solaris' is a trademarked term, owned by Sun (now Oracle). If you fork it, you can't call it 'Solaris' anymore. You'd have a hard time selling/promoting this new unix os that no-one has heard of.
Re: OpenSolaris governing board threatens dissolution
#18Why do they need a blessing from Oracle though? "If you don't like it - fork it" doesn't apply here? Licensing issues?
I'm not sure, but I'm guessing that 'Solaris' is a trademarked term, owned by Sun (now Oracle). If you fork it, you can't call it 'Solaris' anymore. You'd have a hard time selling/promoting this new unix os that no-one has heard of.
You're right, it would have to be a different name.
However, if there were a sufficient community around it, this would not be a problem. But because it's so driven by Sun, and they never really managed to build an active community, there is no one who would naturally start using the forked OS.
Re: OpenSolaris governing board threatens dissolution
#19(Open)Solaris died a few years ago. It has got some great features like Zones and ZFS, and it's still very stable. However, they lost the hearts and minds of almost everyone. I used OpenSolaris for a few months as my desktop. They don't have the package support of Linux, or the large community. Gotta remember to get GNU Make before Sun's Make in PATH, Gnu sed before Sun's, or was the other way around, Perl CPAN modules not compiling... What a waste of time.
As Scott McNealy said: you've gotta get all your wood behind one arrow. That arrow is now Linux.
Re: OpenSolaris governing board threatens dissolution
#20Out of curiosity, does anyone here use OpenSolaris for anything?
I use Nexenta, which uses the Solaris kernel, but with a Debian server-style userland, as a NAS. If ZFS were on Linux, I too would switch to it. Straight Solaris is like travelling back in time in comparison to the usual GNU userland, and while it's got nicely integrated ideas - like the services, logging and monitoring, etc., - the cost of being in a less mainstream branch is reasonably high.
At least with Nexenta, you have an apt-get which might work for some common packages. With straight Solaris, I have to go through all my shell scripts and only use POSIX options, etc., which turns out to be quite a pain.