Here's a view from a prominent member of the (rather small) OpenSolaris community: http://www.cuddletech.com/blog/pivot/entry.php?id=1134
He's not exactly impressed.
OpenSolaris governing board threatens dissolution
21–30 of 64 posts
Re: OpenSolaris governing board threatens dissolution
#22Out 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,…
Wait a year or two - RHEL 6 has btrfs (copy on write with btrees) in tech preview now.
Re: OpenSolaris governing board threatens dissolution
#23Out 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 withou…
Isn't SMF just parallelism and horrible XML config files?
Re: OpenSolaris governing board threatens dissolution
#24Earlier 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.
FreeBSD has ZFS too. We've been seeing a lot of people migrating from OpenSolaris over the past few months due to Oracle.
I wonder if the OpenSolaris people would consider a merge? Ie, work on zones, any useful Solaris management tools, etc...
Re: OpenSolaris governing board threatens dissolution
#25Here's a view from a prominent member of the (rather small) OpenSolaris community: http://www.cuddletech.com/blog/pivot/entry.php?id=1134 He's not exactly impressed.
Remember the OGC is headed by Schilly. Who's quite famous for actively campaigning to stop people patching his OSS cdrecord to use regular device files, and has a reputation of being very outspoken against anyone who disagrees with him.
Re: OpenSolaris governing board threatens dissolution
#26I'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.
I was not aware VirtualBox was controlled by Oracle. I just switched to it because it was a free alternative to Parallels. Suddenly, I care about this issue!
Re: OpenSolaris governing board threatens dissolution
#27(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 modul…
Solx86 was always the red-headed stepchild. I don't think Red Hat would have gotten nearly the traction in did if say Oracle on Solaris on Intel/AMD was as well-supported as Oracle on SPARC. Classic case of "innovator's dilemma" - Sun were unwilling to risk the lower end of their SPARC business.
I personally have been involved in projects where we've replaced a million dollars worth of SPARC kit with 50 or 100 grands worth of Intel running Red Hat. It would have been easier, cheaper and quicker to have just swapped the hardware and recompiled... TCO is not (just) in the hardware, it's in the people you need to program and operate it. We had guys with 20 years BSD/SunOS/Solaris experience, developers and sysadmins.
But who'd risk their mission critical systems on an OS the vendor is embarrassed of?
Re: OpenSolaris governing board threatens dissolution
#28(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 modul…
But why now? There must have been a good reason for Sun to continue developing their own UNIX variant. I can understand the value-add coming from ZFS, but why having to maintain your own kernel? They could have built their own Linux/BSD distribution with ZFS and any other Sun-branded additions. I guess my question is not "why now" but rather "why not 5 years ago".
I don't really know much about Solaris, just trying to understand the business reasons behind their decision to compete with Linux kernel.
Re: OpenSolaris governing board threatens dissolution
#29(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 modul…
But why now? There must have been a good reason for Sun to continue developing their own UNIX variant. I can understand the value-add coming from ZFS, but why having to maintain your own kernel? They could have built their own Linux/BSD distribution with ZFS and any other Sun-branded additions. I guess my question is not "why now" but rather "why not 5 years ago". I don't really know much about Solaris, just trying t…
Hm... perhaps because they have thousands of paying corporate customers who started using Solaris before Linux even existed, and they needed to transition them to a newer/expensive hardware without affecting their Solaris-tuned software?
(just thinking out loud, can there be any other reason?)
Re: OpenSolaris governing board threatens dissolution
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 withou…
Isn't SMF just parallelism and horrible XML config files?
Hard to figure out whether your service state modification (say, a service restart) worked too. It always returns 0, never has output, and you have to dig for a log file to figure out what happened.