4 ms·

OpenSolaris: Oracle, where art thou?

17 points by bensummers 17y ago

bensummers 17y ago
If Oracle's stated goal is to make as much money from the carcass of Sun, then why would they be interested in OpenSolaris? The old school Solaris admins, who represent customers who actually pay for support contracts, aren't amazingly keen on OpenSolaris because it does away with all the tools they know and love. While the old packaging tools are awful, there's infrastructure around them. And there's no good replacement for JumpStart, which is essential for large scale admin of Solaris boxes.
ryandvm 17y ago
I'm more interested in seeing what happens with regard to Sun's esteemed ZFS and the GPL'ed competing file system, BTRFS, that Oracle is working on. It seems foolish for Oracle to continue devoting resources to two heavyweight file systems with overlapping functionality. I suppose I'll keep on dreaming that Oracle will update ZFS with a GPL license and the process of inclusion in Linux would swiftly begin...
- ajross 17y ago
  I thought Oracle's sponsorship of btrfs was limited to the two employees working on it, or something like that. Contrast with probably dozens of folks Sun has/had working on Solaris filesystem stuff. Linux work is comparatively cheap, and has significant upsides when measured in community goodwill. Obviously they have to keep supporting existing Solaris customers, as ZFS is a shipping product. But I'd be very surprised if they pulled the plug on a high-profile free software project directly. Maybe if they simultaneously GPLed ZFS, I guess.
- nailer 17y ago
  Same here, but ZFS isn't BTree structured, whereas BTRFS is both Btree and copy-on-write (ReiserFS was Btree but not COW) - giving you better speed along with the similar featureset.
  - bensummers 17y ago
    BTRFS: the new shiny, more potential, but definitely not suitable for use in production. ZFS: uses older ideas (because they didn't think COW B-tree was possible) but is suitable for production use. It'd be nice to have both pushed forward, so there's something for now and something for later.
illumin8 17y ago
I went to an OpenSolaris users group a few months ago just to see what was new in the OS. They had a nice dinner provided by Sun, and then proceeded to tell me all about their new network stack, and some of the features it offers. My impression was that they are playing an extreme game of catch up to Linux. They were announcing features planned for release in 2010 that had been in the Linux kernel for years now. They're really trying to catch up to the virtualization offerings made by Xen and others in the Linux space. Granted, they have ZFS, and one other killer feature that I wish would make it into Linux: CacheFS - use an SSD or other fast storage device to front-end a large slow back-end disk based device. But Solaris and OpenSolaris are clearly operating systems that are in decline. It's apparent that the brain-drain from Sun over the years towards open source has left them with little innovation, which is sad. Layoffs throughout the last decade combined with good engineers that could get jobs elsewhere has probably left them with a staff of disgruntled, underpaid, underqualified, and mostly overseas developers. My big question is whether Oracle will continue with Solaris at all, or push towards Oracle Enterprise Linux. I know they say they will support Solaris, but to be honest, it makes more sense to just repackage Red Hat's code like they're doing now. You get all of the benefits of the open source community with very little software development budget.

17 points by bensummers 17y ago

If Oracle's stated goal is to make as much money from the carcass of Sun, then why would they be interested in OpenSolaris? The old school Solaris admins, who represent customers who actually pay for support contracts, aren't amazingly keen on OpenSolaris because it does away with all the tools they know and love. While the old packaging tools are awful, there's infrastructure around them. And there's no good replacement for JumpStart, which is essential for large scale admin of Solaris boxes.

ryandvm 17y ago

I'm more interested in seeing what happens with regard to Sun's esteemed ZFS and the GPL'ed competing file system, BTRFS, that Oracle is working on. It seems foolish for Oracle to continue devoting resources to two heavyweight file systems with overlapping functionality. I suppose I'll keep on dreaming that Oracle will update ZFS with a GPL license and the process of inclusion in Linux would swiftly begin...

ajross 17y ago
I thought Oracle's sponsorship of btrfs was limited to the two employees working on it, or something like that. Contrast with probably dozens of folks Sun has/had working on Solaris filesystem stuff. Linux work is comparatively cheap, and has significant upsides when measured in community goodwill. Obviously they have to keep supporting existing Solaris customers, as ZFS is a shipping product. But I'd be very surprised if they pulled the plug on a high-profile free software project directly. Maybe if they simultaneously GPLed ZFS, I guess.
nailer 17y ago
Same here, but ZFS isn't BTree structured, whereas BTRFS is both Btree and copy-on-write (ReiserFS was Btree but not COW) - giving you better speed along with the similar featureset.
- bensummers 17y ago
  BTRFS: the new shiny, more potential, but definitely not suitable for use in production. ZFS: uses older ideas (because they didn't think COW B-tree was possible) but is suitable for production use. It'd be nice to have both pushed forward, so there's something for now and something for later.

illumin8 17y ago

I went to an OpenSolaris users group a few months ago just to see what was new in the OS. They had a nice dinner provided by Sun, and then proceeded to tell me all about their new network stack, and some of the features it offers. My impression was that they are playing an extreme game of catch up to Linux. They were announcing features planned for release in 2010 that had been in the Linux kernel for years now. They're really trying to catch up to the virtualization offerings made by Xen and others in the Linux space. Granted, they have ZFS, and one other killer feature that I wish would make it into Linux: CacheFS - use an SSD or other fast storage device to front-end a large slow back-end disk based device. But Solaris and OpenSolaris are clearly operating systems that are in decline. It's apparent that the brain-drain from Sun over the years towards open source has left them with little innovation, which is sad. Layoffs throughout the last decade combined with good engineers that could get jobs elsewhere has probably left them with a staff of disgruntled, underpaid, underqualified, and mostly overseas developers. My big question is whether Oracle will continue with Solaris at all, or push towards Oracle Enterprise Linux. I know they say they will support Solaris, but to be honest, it makes more sense to just repackage Red Hat's code like they're doing now. You get all of the benefits of the open source community with very little software development budget.