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OpenSolaris governing board threatens dissolution

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Re: OpenSolaris governing board threatens dissolution

#51

Post by bitwize »

rbanffy wrote: post #48
bitwize wrote: post #40

That's a threat?! Larry Ellison: "Uh, sure, we'll get right back to you on that." [Larry alt-tabs back to his word processor with a draft of his Solaris Developer Trial licensing plan: foree for 30 days followed by a $9000-per-seat licensing fee]

Larry may not be the nicest guy around, but he's no idiot. He just spent a ton of money on Sun and something like this would put that much more momentum behind commodities he cannot control (like Linux)

Indeed, Ellison is no idiot, and that's precisely what he's been doing: putting Sun's formerly free properties behind strict paywalls in order to get the company cash-flow-positive again after Sun bled money giving away the geese that laid the golden eggs.

Re: OpenSolaris governing board threatens dissolution

#52

Post by koenigdavidmj »

schwonder wrote: post #3

Why do they need a blessing from Oracle though? "If you don't like it - fork it" doesn't apply here? Licensing issues?

Some of it is still closed source (mainly the libc, if I recall). You lose out on patching those parts if you don't play nice with Oracle.

Re: OpenSolaris governing board threatens dissolution

#53

Post by there »

adbge wrote: post #49

I installed FreeBSD a couple weeks back just so I could play around with ports and ZFS. Getting ZFS to work with the bootloader is kind of a pain (should be fixed in FreeBSD-9, I'm hoping) but otherwise I was blown away by just how intuitive ZFS is to use and how ridiculously powerful. ZFS was introduced in 2005(!) and I'm still amazed by how far ahead of the pack it is. It's really a damn shame that we can't get ZFS…

if you feel like playing around with filesystems, try dragonflybsd (http://www.dragonflybsd.org/). it has some neat things like its unique hammer filesystem and virtual kernels.

Re: OpenSolaris governing board threatens dissolution

#54

Post by nitrogen »

ax0n wrote: post #11

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.

Add client-side Java and JavaFX to that list. Sun was already failing on the desktop, but Oracle seems to have even less interest. Thank goodness HTML5+js will soon reach enough penetration to replace Java as a portable application framework.

Re: OpenSolaris governing board threatens dissolution

#55

Post by ax0n »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #26
ax0n wrote: post #11

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.

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!

I switched from Parallels when Parallels started sucking AND THEN wanted more money for me to upgrade to 3.x. VirtualBox, back then, was anemic but functional. Now, it's really going places with features that still trail behind the commercial brands you know and love, but when you consider it's free, it's hard to complain too much.

Re: OpenSolaris governing board threatens dissolution

#56

Post by patrickgzill »

illumin8 wrote: post #43
melling wrote: post #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 modul…

I went to an OpenSolaris users group last year. They were talking about new network features like being able to assign sub-interfaces to different zones. Stuff that VMware ESX had available for years. I was thoroughly unimpressed. The concept of Zones or FreeBSD jails has some appealing aspects; not needing to load multiple kernels in memory, for example, but by this time, Hypervisors such as VMware that deduplicate…

What kind of ratios are you actually seeing with VMware's deduplicate memory features? I have not seen much on anything I am running, though I admit I don't have them overcommitted very much on RAM (total RAM allocated to all VMs is about the same as physical RAM in the system).

Re: OpenSolaris governing board threatens dissolution

#57

Post by cperciva »

nailer wrote: post #24
cperciva wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

FreeBSD already has jails, so there's no point bringing in Solaris zones; but we're generally quick to bring in features from OpenSolaris. DTrace, for example, is available for the FreeBSD kernel now, and work is underway to make it available for FreeBSD userland too.

Re: OpenSolaris governing board threatens dissolution

#58

Post by bensummers »

koenigdavidmj wrote: post #30
nailer wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

After using svcadm, use svcs (or functions in libscf) to find out what's going on.

Re: OpenSolaris governing board threatens dissolution

#59

Post by bensummers »

nailer wrote: post #23
bensummers wrote: post #15

Earlier 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?

And dependencies, configurable restarting based on failures in other services, delegation of administrative privileges to other users, configuration of managed services through arbitrary properties, integration into OS fault reporting, reliable management of server processes using Solaris Contracts.

You're right, the XML config is a bit nasty.

Re: OpenSolaris governing board threatens dissolution

#60

Post by rbanffy »

bitwize wrote: post #51
rbanffy wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Larry may not be the nicest guy around, but he's no idiot. He just spent a ton of money on Sun and something like this would put that much more momentum behind commodities he cannot control (like Linux)

Indeed, Ellison is no idiot, and that's precisely what he's been doing: putting Sun's formerly free properties behind strict paywalls in order to get the company cash-flow-positive again after Sun bled money giving away the geese that laid the golden eggs.

They only laid golden eggs because they were relevant. If his clients decide to migrate away from Solaris, they may also decide to migrate away from Oracle. Being legacy-only is not good for long-term revenue.
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