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OpenSolaris is dead

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Re: OpenSolaris is dead

#51

Post by azakus »

wipt wrote: post #47
spudlyo wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"We will continue to grow a vibrant developer and system administrator community for Solaris." -- I really wonder how. They really killed the wrong Solaris. If they embraced the GNU userland (as OpenSolaris did) they would have had a much better shot at getting more raised-on-Linux admins and developers to embrace their OS. As it is, the current BSD flavored Solaris tools are so crufty and incompatible it leaves many…

Did OpenSolaris use GNU userland? Or are you confusing the official branch with on of the forks? BSD isn't dead, and is different but not in bad ways. Don't bad mouth something (BSD) because you don't use it. Companies are much less likely to embrace GNU anything, GNU just doesn't fly that way. BSD license is much more permissive, and therefore much more attractive to companies.

OpenSolaris had a GNU userland. The BSD ancestry of the Solaris userland isn't the problem. The problem was the senseless defaults and cryptic command structures ("shutdown -g0 -i5 -y" instead of "shutdown")

Re: OpenSolaris is dead

#52

Post by cookiecaper »

pclark wrote: post #38

Everyone seems to have missed - or be ignoring - the fundamentals of Oracle. They aren't in this game to change the world (ala Sun), or improve the lives of developers, they're in this to make bucket loads of cash if products they acquire will not make them money - they will ruthlessly cut it. They aren't hackers. They aren't designers. They aren't entrepreneurs. They're business men. Similarly if you dare compete wi…

The thing is, as someone stated below, Oracle is all about short-term wins. If Oracle wins this patent suit against Google and gets lots and lots of damages from it, that's nice, but it'll scare everyone away from Java. That's not good for Oracle or anyone else. If they'd just cool their jets and let things like this slide while focusing on creating great Java-based products and improving the Java ecosystem, they'd have much better long-term prospects. Even Ellison stated that Java is the most important product Oracle has ever acquired, and he's going to kill it in desperation to milk every last cent of licenses that he can get today.

If Oracle continues with this kind of ruthlessness, they may squeeze several million out of Google et al, but Java is done for. Nobody will want to use that platform anymore because it will be too risky legally. It'd be a huge opening for .NET and other competitors. Java would go the way of COBOL, only running in the darkest abysses of megacorporations that never modernize.

You can be happy that Ellison doesn't play this "good for developers" thing, but what's good for the goose is good for the gander. By promoting software development and Java development specifically, Oracle would be ensuring generations of Java programmers, and lots of Java-related services and licenses from enterprises. If someone without any programming experience learns Java to write code for Dalvik/Android, as they may because Android is a "cool" platform that would attract young programmers, they can and likely will go on to big corporate environments and continue to work in Java.

Re: OpenSolaris is dead

#53

Post by cookiecaper »

jimbokun wrote: post #39
nailer wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of Oracle's moves are short term plays. Growing the Java and Unix industries would allow them to sell boxes. These do the opposite, in favor of making cash now.

"Growing the Java and Unix industries would allow them to sell boxes." I am highly skeptical of this. I believe this was the stated strategy of many of Sun's decisions, and it did not work out well for them.

It's a long-term strategy and Sun ran out of juice. The strategy doesn't work by itself; you do the kinds of things Sun was doing to keep the ecosystem active and healthy, and then you release and aggressively promote a commercial Java IDE and make a ton of cash, and build other products on top of the ecosystem that you sustain.

In my opinion Sun's downfall was a serious overestimation of SPARC's performance. They needed to move and get something else out there.

Re: OpenSolaris is dead

#54

Post by wmf »

spudlyo wrote: post #46
moondowner wrote: post #13

OpenSolaris was dead long ago, this only opened the eyes to the people optimistic that things will change and there will be a future OpenSolaris release. "We will determine a simple, cost-effective means of getting enterprise users of prior OpenSolaris binary releases to migrate to S11 Express." -- Says enough. "We will continue to grow a vibrant developer and system administrator community for Solaris." -- I really…

"We will continue to grow a vibrant developer and system administrator community for Solaris." -- I really wonder how. They really killed the wrong Solaris. If they embraced the GNU userland (as OpenSolaris did) they would have had a much better shot at getting more raised-on-Linux admins and developers to embrace their OS. As it is, the current BSD flavored Solaris tools are so crufty and incompatible it leaves many…

Last I heard, Solaris 11 was based on OpenSolaris Indiana with the "new" userland and IPS rather than the "crufty" stuff. I guess we'll find out when 11 Express comes out (and no sooner, thanks to the new "no peeking" policy).

Re: OpenSolaris is dead

#55

Post by pclark »

cookiecaper wrote: post #52
pclark wrote: post #38

Everyone seems to have missed - or be ignoring - the fundamentals of Oracle. They aren't in this game to change the world (ala Sun), or improve the lives of developers, they're in this to make bucket loads of cash if products they acquire will not make them money - they will ruthlessly cut it. They aren't hackers. They aren't designers. They aren't entrepreneurs. They're business men. Similarly if you dare compete wi…

The thing is, as someone stated below, Oracle is all about short-term wins. If Oracle wins this patent suit against Google and gets lots and lots of damages from it, that's nice, but it'll scare everyone away from Java. That's not good for Oracle or anyone else. If they'd just cool their jets and let things like this slide while focusing on creating great Java-based products and improving the Java ecosystem, they'd h…

I think Oracle will have considered this, no idea what their long term strat is. I sometimes wonder if Larry cares about long term gains or once he retires he's done.

Re: OpenSolaris is dead

#56

Post by pclark »

pclark wrote: post #38

Everyone seems to have missed - or be ignoring - the fundamentals of Oracle. They aren't in this game to change the world (ala Sun), or improve the lives of developers, they're in this to make bucket loads of cash if products they acquire will not make them money - they will ruthlessly cut it. They aren't hackers. They aren't designers. They aren't entrepreneurs. They're business men. Similarly if you dare compete wi…

btw, I hope I don't sound like some kind of -- Oracle fanboy (which would be quite ironic considering my comments yesterday: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1598533)

just trying to state that (IMHO) Oracle is a very different beast to Google, MSFT, et all.

Re: OpenSolaris is dead

#57

Post by rbanffy »

wmf wrote: post #54
spudlyo wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"We will continue to grow a vibrant developer and system administrator community for Solaris." -- I really wonder how. They really killed the wrong Solaris. If they embraced the GNU userland (as OpenSolaris did) they would have had a much better shot at getting more raised-on-Linux admins and developers to embrace their OS. As it is, the current BSD flavored Solaris tools are so crufty and incompatible it leaves many…

Last I heard, Solaris 11 was based on OpenSolaris Indiana with the "new" userland and IPS rather than the "crufty" stuff. I guess we'll find out when 11 Express comes out (and no sooner, thanks to the new "no peeking" policy).

I won't.

Oracle took a very clear stand about how they intend to generate value, one I cannot agree with and that I will not enable. I am an enthusiast of open-source and free-software, of value created by sharing and openness instead of ruthless competition and secrecy.

I was considering the use of OpenSolaris in a production environment, mostly due to ZFS. Now I won't. Maybe I'll think again about ZFS if and when FreeBSD takes whatever they can and fork it into a filesystem and toolset that's useful for me. These developments go completely against what I want and what I believe.

Enjoy your legacy products and your short-term profits, Larry. It won't last long.

Re: OpenSolaris is dead

#58

Post by rbanffy »

motters wrote: post #14

Having never used OpenSolaris this is no hardship for me. However, it's looking like Oracle is a company that is quite hostile to open source, so this also raises concerns for what will happen to the likes of OpenOffice and VirtualBox. In general it also raises questions about the wisdom of open source developers assigning their copyrights over to a particular company, who may subsequently choose to betray their gene…

I can assure you the GPL parts of NetBeans will survive. I cannot say the same about the CDDL parts. I assume people will still contribute to it, but I guess it's a question of time before Oracle decides to turn a quick buck out of NB and close down the CDDL stuff.

Re: OpenSolaris is dead

#59

Post by wmf »

wmf wrote: post #31
strlen wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The btfs developer works at Oracle (and also works on OCFS).

It is a bit hard for me to reconcile Oracle's contributions to Linux with their seemingly mercenary attitudes towards Solaris and Java.

Erik Trimble answered this: "With the various Linux projects, Oracle was pretty much required to share back, so they played nicely. With Solaris, the mindset seems to be that "We own this, so let's make fat bank on a cool technology, and not let others steal our business"." http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/opensolaris-discuss/20...

Re: OpenSolaris is dead

#60

Post by Kilimanjaro »

Oracle will become the most hated company in the world (after mircosoft) when they kill java (because of ineptitude), kill mysql (because they can) and kill opensolaris (oops, they just did it)
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