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OpenSolaris is dead

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Re: OpenSolaris is dead

#91

Post by [deleted] »

ergo98 wrote: post #80
dpapathanasiou wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes, I admire Oracle more than the supposed do-gooders at Google. Oracle is a for-profit entity, they will take any legal or tactical advantage they can get (e.g., lawsuit over Java in Android), and they make no bones about it. I don't like everything they do, but you know what you get with them. Google says "don't be evil", yet they back off that principle when it's inconvenient (e.g., caving in to Chinese cen…

>Oracle is a for-profit entity, they will take any legal or tactical advantage they can get (e.g., lawsuit over Java in Android), and they make no bones about it. This has become a bit of a meme lately, and it's pretty tenuous. Google makes lots of money by not being evil. People have given Google tremendous data that no other could get because they have a general trust that it will be used responsibly. In all of the…

[deleted]

Re: OpenSolaris is dead

#92

Post by noonespecial »

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…

Except Oracle doesn't do this. They don't focus on creating, promoting, or even maintaining. They're like the Borg. They assimilate and they rent seek. That's it.

Re: OpenSolaris is dead

#93

Post by nkassis »

lsc wrote: post #69
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…

>Oracle could literally wipe them off the planet if they were inclined. Oracle has a $113B market cap. google has a 155b market cap. granted, both those numbers are large, but Google's is significantly larger. how many google Engineers do you think it would take to build a rdbms that is significantly better than Oracle's product? It's well within Google's capabilities. And yeah, it'd be a patent shitstorm, but it's n…

But Oracle is more profitable and earns more revenues. Market Cap means nothing here. Oracle doesn't need to make a search engine, they have Oracle + Sun's patent, they could make it impossible for Google to build a computer and run software on it with enough lawsuits. Only IBM in my view could survive a patent attack like this.

Re: OpenSolaris is dead

#94

Post by nkassis »

rbanffy wrote: post #57
wmf wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 F…

I'm going to shy away from BSD implementation of ZFS too, Oracle probably has a bunch of patents on that too.

Re: OpenSolaris is dead

#95

Post by caf »

neild wrote: post #21

Note that this is not the end of source code releases of Solaris: We will continue to use the CDDL license statement in nearly all Solaris source code files. We will not remove the CDDL from any files in Solaris to which it already applies, and new source code files that are created will follow the current policy regarding applying the CDDL (simply, that usr/src files will have the CDDL, and the very small minority o…

Note though that there won't be any more binary releases of OpenSolaris - so you'll have to build the whole ball of wax from the code drop yourself. And of course you won't be able to build the /usr/closed components.

Re: OpenSolaris is dead

#96

Post by tzs »

lsc wrote: post #69
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…

>Oracle could literally wipe them off the planet if they were inclined. Oracle has a $113B market cap. google has a 155b market cap. granted, both those numbers are large, but Google's is significantly larger. how many google Engineers do you think it would take to build a rdbms that is significantly better than Oracle's product? It's well within Google's capabilities. And yeah, it'd be a patent shitstorm, but it's n…

> Oracle has a $113B market cap. google has a 155b market cap. granted, both those numbers are large, but Google's is significantly larger

Market cap doesn't translate into assets that can be used in a fight. Some more relevant comparisons:

Oracle: 115000 employees, Google: 22000 employees.

Oracle: $27 billion revenue, Google $24 billion revenue.

Oracle: $9 billion operating income, Google $8 billion operating income.

Oracle: $60 billion total assets, Google $40 billion total assets.

> Could Oracle write a search engine? No. the idea is just silly.

Considering that a single determined programmer can make a great search engine (duckduckgo.com), I find it hard to believe that among all of those 115000 employees, Oracle would not be able to find a few who could make a good search engine.

Re: OpenSolaris is dead

#97

Post by lsc »

tzs wrote: post #96
lsc wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Oracle could literally wipe them off the planet if they were inclined. Oracle has a $113B market cap. google has a 155b market cap. granted, both those numbers are large, but Google's is significantly larger. how many google Engineers do you think it would take to build a rdbms that is significantly better than Oracle's product? It's well within Google's capabilities. And yeah, it'd be a patent shitstorm, but it's n…

> Oracle has a $113B market cap. google has a 155b market cap. granted, both those numbers are large, but Google's is significantly larger Market cap doesn't translate into assets that can be used in a fight. Some more relevant comparisons: Oracle: 115000 employees, Google: 22000 employees. Oracle: $27 billion revenue, Google $24 billion revenue. Oracle: $9 billion operating income, Google $8 billion operating income…

>Oracle: 115000 employees, Google: 22000 employees.

yes, but Oracle is /very/ sales and corporate support (sales) heavy. those people will not help you build a search engine, at least not a search engine with Google's target customers and business model.

Now, 'enterprise search' for internal stuff? Oracle could do that. Oracle might even be able to get corps to pay for a subscription-based 'search for corporations' that cleaned up most of the porn and more shady spam. but they couldn't do an ad-based search targeted at everyone, like google does.

If nothing else, most people are aware that google knows everything about you, and uses that knowledge to serve you ads. this only works because people, by and large, trust google to not go too far overboard.

>Considering that a single determined programmer can make a great search engine (duckduckgo.com), I find it hard to believe that among all of those 115000 employees, Oracle would not be able to find a few who could make a good search engine.

do you think duck duck go will last after it becomes worth spammer time to game them? I've said before that the search engine market has something of a negative barrier to entry; your job is /much/ easier while you are small enough that most spammers ignore you.

Another problem oracle would have is that Oracle isn't cheap. the are used to environments where you can shell out one or two orders of magnitude more than you would for commodity disk to get a really nice storage unit. Running a search engine is all about making the cheapest hardware that could possibly work run without going down when a bit of hardware crashes in a weird way.

Overcoming this cultural bias towards "buy good stuff" is pretty difficult. Then, they will have to face a set of technical challenges they are not used to facing. There are a whole lot of problems that go away when you decide to pay for a really high quality storage unit. I mean it's so bad that I pay 2x as much per gigabyte so I can have "enterprise' sata and not worry about most of those problems. Judging from, say, s3 prices (at scale, its $0.037 per gigabyte for four copies of the data, if my information is correct, which it might not be) it's quite possible that the big players use hard drives that are even more prone to failure than the consumer-grade drives that I have access to.

Re: OpenSolaris is dead

#98

Post by [deleted] »

nkassis wrote: post #93
lsc wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Oracle could literally wipe them off the planet if they were inclined. Oracle has a $113B market cap. google has a 155b market cap. granted, both those numbers are large, but Google's is significantly larger. how many google Engineers do you think it would take to build a rdbms that is significantly better than Oracle's product? It's well within Google's capabilities. And yeah, it'd be a patent shitstorm, but it's n…

But Oracle is more profitable and earns more revenues. Market Cap means nothing here. Oracle doesn't need to make a search engine, they have Oracle + Sun's patent, they could make it impossible for Google to build a computer and run software on it with enough lawsuits. Only IBM in my view could survive a patent attack like this.

[deleted]

Re: OpenSolaris is dead

#99

Post by lsc »

nkassis wrote: post #93
lsc wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Oracle could literally wipe them off the planet if they were inclined. Oracle has a $113B market cap. google has a 155b market cap. granted, both those numbers are large, but Google's is significantly larger. how many google Engineers do you think it would take to build a rdbms that is significantly better than Oracle's product? It's well within Google's capabilities. And yeah, it'd be a patent shitstorm, but it's n…

But Oracle is more profitable and earns more revenues. Market Cap means nothing here. Oracle doesn't need to make a search engine, they have Oracle + Sun's patent, they could make it impossible for Google to build a computer and run software on it with enough lawsuits. Only IBM in my view could survive a patent attack like this.

> Oracle doesn't need to make a search engine, they have Oracle + Sun's patent, they could make it impossible for Google to build a computer and run software on it with enough lawsuits. Only IBM in my view could survive a patent attack like this.

if that's true, then yeah, google is in trouble. I'm certainly not qualified to speculate about legal issues.

Still, the question in my mind would be: "how many of those patents would stand up to determined scrutiny from a well-funded and very motivated team of competent Engineers and Lawyers?

Re: OpenSolaris is dead

#100

Post by ghshephard »

wazoox wrote: post #63
scaleordie wrote: post #11

If at least ZFS can be salvaged from the wreck...

No way. NetApp will rabidly chase and kill whoever dares trying building commercial ZFS applications based upon OpenSolaris or *BSD (CDDL doesn't cover you against patents infringements, remember?). I know a well-known privately-held extremely-high-end storage company who just canned its OpenSolaris/ZFS projects because they won't take the risk to be sued by NetApp. ZFS as open-source is cold dead. Sad, but true.

The only exposure that ZFS has is Patent Based. Some of the interesting ones are expiring in the next four to five years:

http://www.google.com/patents?as_q&num=10&btnG=Googl...

They'll all expire eventually. ZFS (like) file systems will eventually be very succesful.

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