6 ms·

Solaris is no longer free

72 points by ax0n 17y ago

riffic 17y ago
this doesn't change the status of OpenSolaris.
- Niten 17y ago
  No, not directly. But they're trying to squeeze as much money as possible out of hardware and licensing by limiting users' ability to run Solaris for free on beige boxes, and that does seem to tilt the odds in the open question of whether Oracle will continue to let OpenSolaris thrive, or whether they will marginalize it to maximize short-term profit. I say short-term profit because, in taking this course, Oracle seems to forget that many of the part-time tinkerers and educational or small business users whom they've just priced out of Solaris will be the ones making "enterprise" purchasing decisions in the future. This revised licensing agreement ensures that such users will be more comfortable and familiar with the competition instead--Linux, BSD, even Windows (Microsoft has done a fantastic job ensuring that their software is affordable in the education and small business sectors, while simultaneously maintaining a healthy profit margin in enterprise sales).
- hapless 17y ago
  The primary reason to run Solaris is to have access to the broad base of Solaris ISV and IHV products. OpenSolaris will is incompatible with Solaris in many notable ways. (e.g. uses GNU for libstdc++.) Losing free Solaris x86 means I can no longer recommend it -- not when CentOS, a 100% ABI-compatible RHEL clone, exists.
iigs 17y ago
Solaris has gone back and forth between fully commercial, to free + free updates, to commercial, to free without updates, to now commercial again. In my experience using solaris at the bottom-end has been kind of a non-starter for a decade now because Sun yo-yoed the licensing enough to remind people they shouldn't use it. Honestly, good riddance. Oracle can go figure out what they're trying to do and this will motivate the open source OS hacker community to get the relevant features of Solaris implemented (or surpassed) in other OSes.
- umjames 17y ago
  DTrace would be nice for starters.
  - amerine 17y ago
    I'm sure you already know, but DTrace is in FreeBSD.
  - forkqueue 17y ago
    Yup, DTrace and ZFS are pretty much the only things Solaris brings to the table above what Linux offers. Interestingly I've never come across any pure Solaris shops that run ZFS, I suppose because if you're conservative enough only to use Solaris, you're too conservative to trust ZFS.
    - alnayyir 17y ago
      DTrace and ZFS are both available on FreeBSD. Call me a BSD bigot (even though I use Linux/OS X at work) but I really fail to see any rational reason to use Solaris at this point. We have a Solaris database + filestore at work, mostly for Z-raid, but now that FreeBSD has ZFS, when it gets EOL'd (with a vicious grin on my face) it's going to be a BSD box that replaces it.
    - buster 17y ago
      Zones too. I think they offer more then what the usual jail does. Never really used both of them, but.. yeah, zones sound nice, too :) Also, solaris is probably the most stable OS i've ever worked with.
      - forkqueue 17y ago
        Solaris zones are awful, and a good example of where Linux is far superior to Solaris. The creators of Zones seemed to have user-mode-Linux as their model, and it shares most of the annoyances of that too. It's not virtualization, and it's not a jail - it's a middle ground which is good for neither. Agree with you to some extent on stability - I've seen Solaris boxes with a load of 300+ still up and running although unusably slow, where Linux would almost certainly have died from resource starvation. In general use, both Linux and Solaris are pretty damn reliable though.
ghshephard 17y ago
Sun was embracing Open Source to some degree - though they were always a little schizophrenic on that policy, and never really held to a clear position for about 3-5 years in the middle - but the last few years they seemed to "get it". While this is a minor change (it doesn't appear to affect OpenSolaris) it does seem to be indicative of Oracle taking a few (small) steps away from that position. But, on the flip side (and I say this as someone who learned Unix on SunOS 2.6 in 1998 - I still type ps -ef, and as a Joyent user, though tcsh has given way to bash in my finger memory) - Solaris really is an edge operating system for the masses, somewhat more akin to AIX. Pretty much the common (server) OS for the masses is Linux, with Open/Free/NetBSD making up the majority of those not going with Windows. The only people I know using Solaris these days (and this is just an anecdote, so be gentle :-) are people running Oracle or other environments that need to be enterprise robust on vertically scaled system, people using sparc gear, or people who have a legacy investment in Solaris. This is sad - as few as five years ago, Solaris was still a popular choice for new companies - the OS was just so rock solid stable. I'd love to hear a YC survey on OS choices for server backends - my bet is 50%+ on Linux/BSD, less than 10% Solaris. I'm wondering what percentage of the remaining 40% is Windows, and if AIX ever gets a vote. I'm presuming HPUX is not chosen for new companies any more, and I fervently pray that everyone steers clear of SCO.
- amerine 17y ago
  I'm willing to bet that your percentages are off. I would say at least 85% of the folks around here use Linux on their servers, with a 1-5% using a BSD and the 1-14% using Windows. Solaris (read OpenSolaris) filling in the gaps within the fluctuations above.. which is a shame, there is some really cool technology in OpenSolaris/Solaris 10.
  - cmelbye 17y ago
    I think your predictions are pretty accurate. I would use Solaris because it does have a lot of cool features (Solaris zones being one of the most interesting to me), but I'm unsure about the licensing situation, so I've held off for now.
gcb 17y ago
and the earth is no longer square
rbanffy 17y ago
Solaris 10 used to be "free as in beer". My biggest fear is that some Oracle exec seems this a a way to meet his revenue target at the expense of making Solaris irrelevant and risking the same for OpenSolaris.
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
patrickgzill 17y ago
My guess: they are about to ship ZFS deduplication in released version of Solaris (right now dedupe is only in OpenSolaris), and realize that they can bump up their numbers, at least temporarily, by trying to charge for it.
jorgecastillo 17y ago
But OpenSolaris is still open source. If the community believes OpenSolaris is such an important asset to lose I am sure they can pick up the development if they want. And we already have the most important OpenSolaris technologies in FreeBSD so it wouldn't be that big of a deal anyways.

72 points by ax0n 17y ago

riffic 17y ago

this doesn't change the status of OpenSolaris.

Niten 17y ago
No, not directly. But they're trying to squeeze as much money as possible out of hardware and licensing by limiting users' ability to run Solaris for free on beige boxes, and that does seem to tilt the odds in the open question of whether Oracle will continue to let OpenSolaris thrive, or whether they will marginalize it to maximize short-term profit. I say short-term profit because, in taking this course, Oracle seems to forget that many of the part-time tinkerers and educational or small business users whom they've just priced out of Solaris will be the ones making "enterprise" purchasing decisions in the future. This revised licensing agreement ensures that such users will be more comfortable and familiar with the competition instead--Linux, BSD, even Windows (Microsoft has done a fantastic job ensuring that their software is affordable in the education and small business sectors, while simultaneously maintaining a healthy profit margin in enterprise sales).
hapless 17y ago
The primary reason to run Solaris is to have access to the broad base of Solaris ISV and IHV products. OpenSolaris will is incompatible with Solaris in many notable ways. (e.g. uses GNU for libstdc++.) Losing free Solaris x86 means I can no longer recommend it -- not when CentOS, a 100% ABI-compatible RHEL clone, exists.

iigs 17y ago

Solaris has gone back and forth between fully commercial, to free + free updates, to commercial, to free without updates, to now commercial again. In my experience using solaris at the bottom-end has been kind of a non-starter for a decade now because Sun yo-yoed the licensing enough to remind people they shouldn't use it. Honestly, good riddance. Oracle can go figure out what they're trying to do and this will motivate the open source OS hacker community to get the relevant features of Solaris implemented (or surpassed) in other OSes.

umjames 17y ago
DTrace would be nice for starters.
- amerine 17y ago
  I'm sure you already know, but DTrace is in FreeBSD.
- forkqueue 17y ago
  Yup, DTrace and ZFS are pretty much the only things Solaris brings to the table above what Linux offers. Interestingly I've never come across any pure Solaris shops that run ZFS, I suppose because if you're conservative enough only to use Solaris, you're too conservative to trust ZFS.
  - alnayyir 17y ago
    DTrace and ZFS are both available on FreeBSD. Call me a BSD bigot (even though I use Linux/OS X at work) but I really fail to see any rational reason to use Solaris at this point. We have a Solaris database + filestore at work, mostly for Z-raid, but now that FreeBSD has ZFS, when it gets EOL'd (with a vicious grin on my face) it's going to be a BSD box that replaces it.
  - buster 17y ago
    Zones too. I think they offer more then what the usual jail does. Never really used both of them, but.. yeah, zones sound nice, too :) Also, solaris is probably the most stable OS i've ever worked with.
    - forkqueue 17y ago
      Solaris zones are awful, and a good example of where Linux is far superior to Solaris. The creators of Zones seemed to have user-mode-Linux as their model, and it shares most of the annoyances of that too. It's not virtualization, and it's not a jail - it's a middle ground which is good for neither. Agree with you to some extent on stability - I've seen Solaris boxes with a load of 300+ still up and running although unusably slow, where Linux would almost certainly have died from resource starvation. In general use, both Linux and Solaris are pretty damn reliable though.

ghshephard 17y ago

Sun was embracing Open Source to some degree - though they were always a little schizophrenic on that policy, and never really held to a clear position for about 3-5 years in the middle - but the last few years they seemed to "get it". While this is a minor change (it doesn't appear to affect OpenSolaris) it does seem to be indicative of Oracle taking a few (small) steps away from that position. But, on the flip side (and I say this as someone who learned Unix on SunOS 2.6 in 1998 - I still type ps -ef, and as a Joyent user, though tcsh has given way to bash in my finger memory) - Solaris really is an edge operating system for the masses, somewhat more akin to AIX. Pretty much the common (server) OS for the masses is Linux, with Open/Free/NetBSD making up the majority of those not going with Windows. The only people I know using Solaris these days (and this is just an anecdote, so be gentle :-) are people running Oracle or other environments that need to be enterprise robust on vertically scaled system, people using sparc gear, or people who have a legacy investment in Solaris. This is sad - as few as five years ago, Solaris was still a popular choice for new companies - the OS was just so rock solid stable. I'd love to hear a YC survey on OS choices for server backends - my bet is 50%+ on Linux/BSD, less than 10% Solaris. I'm wondering what percentage of the remaining 40% is Windows, and if AIX ever gets a vote. I'm presuming HPUX is not chosen for new companies any more, and I fervently pray that everyone steers clear of SCO.

amerine 17y ago
I'm willing to bet that your percentages are off. I would say at least 85% of the folks around here use Linux on their servers, with a 1-5% using a BSD and the 1-14% using Windows. Solaris (read OpenSolaris) filling in the gaps within the fluctuations above.. which is a shame, there is some really cool technology in OpenSolaris/Solaris 10.
- cmelbye 17y ago
  I think your predictions are pretty accurate. I would use Solaris because it does have a lot of cool features (Solaris zones being one of the most interesting to me), but I'm unsure about the licensing situation, so I've held off for now.

gcb 17y ago

and the earth is no longer square

rbanffy 17y ago

Solaris 10 used to be "free as in beer". My biggest fear is that some Oracle exec seems this a a way to meet his revenue target at the expense of making Solaris irrelevant and risking the same for OpenSolaris.

deleted 17y ago
[deleted]

patrickgzill 17y ago

My guess: they are about to ship ZFS deduplication in released version of Solaris (right now dedupe is only in OpenSolaris), and realize that they can bump up their numbers, at least temporarily, by trying to charge for it.

jorgecastillo 17y ago

But OpenSolaris is still open source. If the community believes OpenSolaris is such an important asset to lose I am sure they can pick up the development if they want. And we already have the most important OpenSolaris technologies in FreeBSD so it wouldn't be that big of a deal anyways.