6 ms·

OpenSolaris governing board threatens dissolution

80 points by mattyb 16y ago

thesnark 16y ago
Out of curiosity, does anyone here use OpenSolaris for anything?
- BlueZeniX 16y ago
  I do, our webservers run it. ZFS with automatic snapshots has saved my ass quite a few times already. Sending incremental snapshots (for backups) to offsite location (another OpenSolaris machine) is also easy and efficient. But, if linux had ZFS i'd probably use that instead.
  - cperciva 16y ago
    FreeBSD has ZFS too. We've been seeing a lot of people migrating from OpenSolaris over the past few months due to Oracle.
    - nailer 16y ago
      I wonder if the OpenSolaris people would consider a merge? Ie, work on zones, any useful Solaris management tools, etc...
      - cperciva 16y ago
        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.
  - cmelbye 16y ago
    Could you clear something up for me? If ZFS is so highly coveted (which I've inferred from recent discussions), why doesn't every operating system under the sun support it?
    - mattyb 16y ago
      In a nutshell, the issue is that the Linux kernel which is licensed under the GNU General Public License is incompatible with ZFS which is licensed under the Sun CDDL. While both the GPL and CDDL are open source licenses their terms are such that it is impossible to simultaneously satisfy both licenses. This means that a single derived work of the Linux kernel and ZFS cannot be legally distributed. http://wiki.github.com/behlendorf/zfs/faq http://wiki.github.com/behlendorf/zfs/faq FreeBSD has it, but it's been largely abandoned on Mac OS X.
  - mattyb 16y ago
    It's coming along. http://wiki.github.com/behlendorf/zfs/ http://wiki.github.com/behlendorf/zfs/
- ax0n 16y ago
  I use it on a few workstations. It's a fine operating system, but I'm admittedly a bit of an enterprise UNIX head that's disenchanted with where Linux has gone. For the last decade or so, I've come to like some of the other free operating systems such as the BSD family and OpenSolaris.
- bensummers 16y ago
  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 without X.
  - nailer 16y ago
    Isn't SMF just parallelism and horrible XML config files?
    - koenigdavidmj 16y ago
      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.
      - bensummers 16y ago
        After using svcadm, use svcs (or functions in libscf) to find out what's going on.
    - bensummers 16y ago
      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.
- barrkel 16y ago
  I use Nexenta, which uses the Solaris kernel, but with a Debian server-style userland, as a NAS. If ZFS were on Linux, I too would switch to it. Straight Solaris is like travelling back in time in comparison to the usual GNU userland, and while it's got nicely integrated ideas - like the services, logging and monitoring, etc., - the cost of being in a less mainstream branch is reasonably high. At least with Nexenta, you have an apt-get which might work for some common packages. With straight Solaris, I have to go through all my shell scripts and only use POSIX options, etc., which turns out to be quite a pain.
  - nailer 16y ago
    Wait a year or two - RHEL 6 has btrfs (copy on write with btrees) in tech preview now.
    - mprovost 16y ago
      btrfs is also an Oracle project.
    - wazoox 16y ago
      Don't even wait, Next3 is stable. Out of efficient snapshots, other ZFS goodies are easily covered with lvm, etc.
    - jonhohle 16y ago
      Why wait? FreeBSD has support for ZFS now as well as a great package system.
      - nailer 16y ago
        Well for one, Btrfs is more efficient in some cases, according to the ZFS developers.
schwonder 16y ago
Why do they need a blessing from Oracle though? "If you don't like it - fork it" doesn't apply here? Licensing issues?
- ax0n 16y ago
  Exactly. The Sun Community License.
- bensummers 16y ago
  99.99999% of code contributions come from Sun^H^H^HOracle. What's the point of forking? It'd be much the same outcome, a code base which never quite gets released.
- rmc 16y ago
  I'm not sure, but I'm guessing that 'Solaris' is a trademarked term, owned by Sun (now Oracle). If you fork it, you can't call it 'Solaris' anymore. You'd have a hard time selling/promoting this new unix os that no-one has heard of.
  - bensummers 16y ago
    You're right, it would have to be a different name. However, if there were a sufficient community around it, this would not be a problem. But because it's so driven by Sun, and they never really managed to build an active community, there is no one who would naturally start using the forked OS.
    - drivingmenuts 16y ago
      May I be the first to suggest calling it either "Rheya" or "Kelvin"?
    - rbanffy 16y ago
      The community around it is not sufficient. The license prevents borrowing code from Linux. It can, however, borrow BSD code. But not even that would be enough to keep it alive and evolving.
roundrubik 16y ago
I'd love to have a lively discussion here about OpenSolaris, could not upvote this enough (actually I don't think my upvote counts at all, is that because I don't have karma yet?)
- Goladus 16y ago
  Yes, otherwise people would be able to create dummy accounts and vote themselves up for nothing.
  - rbanffy 16y ago
    Some things I have been observing can be explained by that. I believe this gotcha is being actively circumvented.
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
ax0n 16y ago
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.
- pavel_lishin 16y ago
  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!
  - ax0n 16y ago
    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.
- kls 16y ago
  I don't think you have anything to worry about virtualbox, virtualization and cloud computing are now instrumental to growth. Oracle did not have a comprehensive strategy. With VirtualBox it gives them a jump start on building a roadmap to one. The other two, yeah they are in trouble. I was worried about Netbeans and Glassfish before the acquisition because it is the most rapid way to develop in Java and the best solution out there in the latest class of IDE / server run-time combos. They just released new versions so I am starting to feel some relief on that one. I got bit on OpenSolaris and OpenSSO I used both of them extensively and they killed both pretty quickly.
  - spudlyo 16y ago
    I don't think MySQL is in trouble. The MySQL community is strong, and innovation from the likes of Google, Percona, Facebook, and others has been just as important as of late than anything that Sun/Oracle/Innobase has done. There are plenty of ways that MySQL can succeed even if Oracle were to completely abandon it. I don't worry about MySQL at all.
melling 16y ago
(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 modules not compiling... What a waste of time. As Scott McNealy said: you've gotta get all your wood behind one arrow. That arrow is now Linux.
- gaius 16y ago
  Solx86 was always the red-headed stepchild. I don't think Red Hat would have gotten nearly the traction in did if say Oracle on Solaris on Intel/AMD was as well-supported as Oracle on SPARC. Classic case of "innovator's dilemma" - Sun were unwilling to risk the lower end of their SPARC business. I personally have been involved in projects where we've replaced a million dollars worth of SPARC kit with 50 or 100 grands worth of Intel running Red Hat. It would have been easier, cheaper and quicker to have just swapped the hardware and recompiled... TCO is not (just) in the hardware, it's in the people you need to program and operate it. We had guys with 20 years BSD/SunOS/Solaris experience, developers and sysadmins. But who'd risk their mission critical systems on an OS the vendor is embarrassed of?
- ratcliffco 16y ago
  But why now? There must have been a good reason for Sun to continue developing their own UNIX variant. I can understand the value-add coming from ZFS, but why having to maintain your own kernel? They could have built their own Linux/BSD distribution with ZFS and any other Sun-branded additions. I guess my question is not "why now" but rather "why not 5 years ago". I don't really know much about Solaris, just trying to understand the business reasons behind their decision to compete with Linux kernel.
  - mipolonsky 16y ago
    Hm... perhaps because they have thousands of paying corporate customers who started using Solaris before Linux even existed, and they needed to transition them to a newer/expensive hardware without affecting their Solaris-tuned software? (just thinking out loud, can there be any other reason?)
bensummers 16y ago
Here's a view from a prominent member of the (rather small) OpenSolaris community: http://www.cuddletech.com/blog/pivot/entry.php?id=1134 http://www.cuddletech.com/blog/pivot/entry.php?id=1134 He's not exactly impressed.
- nailer 16y ago
  Remember the OGC is headed by Schilly. Who's quite famous for actively campaigning to stop people patching his OSS cdrecord to use regular device files, and has a reputation of being very outspoken against anyone who disagrees with him.
  - rbanffy 16y ago
    If the OGC head is a problem, this, certainly, solves it. Oracle can easily make a new OGC the following day and name whoever they are comfortable with (or whoever they think will help OpenSolaris get developed in the right direction.
- rbanffy 16y ago
  This article got submitted too: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1512766 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1512766
pinkode 16y ago
Maybe its for the best. I'm not a big fan of autotools, but proliferation of semi-compatible UNIXes was the reason behind this mess. I'd be absolutely happy with just Linux/BSD/Macs to worry about.
bitwize 16y ago
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]
- rbanffy 16y ago
  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)
  - bitwize 16y ago
    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.
    - rbanffy 16y ago
      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.
adbge 16y ago
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 into the Linux kernel because of licensing.
- there 16y ago
  if you feel like playing around with filesystems, try dragonflybsd (http://www.dragonflybsd.org/ http://www.dragonflybsd.org/). it has some neat things like its unique hammer filesystem and virtual kernels.
c00p3r 16y ago
It is now as dead as say Digital Unix or OpenVMS.
RyanMcGreal 16y ago
The Imperial Senate will no longer be of any concern to us.

80 points by mattyb 16y ago

thesnark 16y ago

Out of curiosity, does anyone here use OpenSolaris for anything?

BlueZeniX 16y ago
I do, our webservers run it. ZFS with automatic snapshots has saved my ass quite a few times already. Sending incremental snapshots (for backups) to offsite location (another OpenSolaris machine) is also easy and efficient. But, if linux had ZFS i'd probably use that instead.
- cperciva 16y ago
  FreeBSD has ZFS too. We've been seeing a lot of people migrating from OpenSolaris over the past few months due to Oracle.
  - nailer 16y ago
    I wonder if the OpenSolaris people would consider a merge? Ie, work on zones, any useful Solaris management tools, etc...
    - cperciva 16y ago
      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.
- cmelbye 16y ago
  Could you clear something up for me? If ZFS is so highly coveted (which I've inferred from recent discussions), why doesn't every operating system under the sun support it?
  - mattyb 16y ago
    In a nutshell, the issue is that the Linux kernel which is licensed under the GNU General Public License is incompatible with ZFS which is licensed under the Sun CDDL. While both the GPL and CDDL are open source licenses their terms are such that it is impossible to simultaneously satisfy both licenses. This means that a single derived work of the Linux kernel and ZFS cannot be legally distributed. http://wiki.github.com/behlendorf/zfs/faq http://wiki.github.com/behlendorf/zfs/faq FreeBSD has it, but it's been largely abandoned on Mac OS X.
- mattyb 16y ago
  It's coming along. http://wiki.github.com/behlendorf/zfs/ http://wiki.github.com/behlendorf/zfs/
ax0n 16y ago
I use it on a few workstations. It's a fine operating system, but I'm admittedly a bit of an enterprise UNIX head that's disenchanted with where Linux has gone. For the last decade or so, I've come to like some of the other free operating systems such as the BSD family and OpenSolaris.
bensummers 16y ago
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 without X.
- nailer 16y ago
  Isn't SMF just parallelism and horrible XML config files?
  - koenigdavidmj 16y ago
    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.
    - bensummers 16y ago
      After using svcadm, use svcs (or functions in libscf) to find out what's going on.
  - bensummers 16y ago
    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.
barrkel 16y ago
I use Nexenta, which uses the Solaris kernel, but with a Debian server-style userland, as a NAS. If ZFS were on Linux, I too would switch to it. Straight Solaris is like travelling back in time in comparison to the usual GNU userland, and while it's got nicely integrated ideas - like the services, logging and monitoring, etc., - the cost of being in a less mainstream branch is reasonably high. At least with Nexenta, you have an apt-get which might work for some common packages. With straight Solaris, I have to go through all my shell scripts and only use POSIX options, etc., which turns out to be quite a pain.
- nailer 16y ago
  Wait a year or two - RHEL 6 has btrfs (copy on write with btrees) in tech preview now.
  - mprovost 16y ago
    btrfs is also an Oracle project.
  - wazoox 16y ago
    Don't even wait, Next3 is stable. Out of efficient snapshots, other ZFS goodies are easily covered with lvm, etc.
  - jonhohle 16y ago
    Why wait? FreeBSD has support for ZFS now as well as a great package system.
    - nailer 16y ago
      Well for one, Btrfs is more efficient in some cases, according to the ZFS developers.

schwonder 16y ago

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

ax0n 16y ago
Exactly. The Sun Community License.
bensummers 16y ago
99.99999% of code contributions come from Sun^H^H^HOracle. What's the point of forking? It'd be much the same outcome, a code base which never quite gets released.
rmc 16y ago
I'm not sure, but I'm guessing that 'Solaris' is a trademarked term, owned by Sun (now Oracle). If you fork it, you can't call it 'Solaris' anymore. You'd have a hard time selling/promoting this new unix os that no-one has heard of.
- bensummers 16y ago
  You're right, it would have to be a different name. However, if there were a sufficient community around it, this would not be a problem. But because it's so driven by Sun, and they never really managed to build an active community, there is no one who would naturally start using the forked OS.
  - drivingmenuts 16y ago
    May I be the first to suggest calling it either "Rheya" or "Kelvin"?
  - rbanffy 16y ago
    The community around it is not sufficient. The license prevents borrowing code from Linux. It can, however, borrow BSD code. But not even that would be enough to keep it alive and evolving.

roundrubik 16y ago

I'd love to have a lively discussion here about OpenSolaris, could not upvote this enough (actually I don't think my upvote counts at all, is that because I don't have karma yet?)

Goladus 16y ago
Yes, otherwise people would be able to create dummy accounts and vote themselves up for nothing.
- rbanffy 16y ago
  Some things I have been observing can be explained by that. I believe this gotcha is being actively circumvented.

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

ax0n 16y ago

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.

pavel_lishin 16y ago
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!
- ax0n 16y ago
  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.
kls 16y ago
I don't think you have anything to worry about virtualbox, virtualization and cloud computing are now instrumental to growth. Oracle did not have a comprehensive strategy. With VirtualBox it gives them a jump start on building a roadmap to one. The other two, yeah they are in trouble. I was worried about Netbeans and Glassfish before the acquisition because it is the most rapid way to develop in Java and the best solution out there in the latest class of IDE / server run-time combos. They just released new versions so I am starting to feel some relief on that one. I got bit on OpenSolaris and OpenSSO I used both of them extensively and they killed both pretty quickly.
- spudlyo 16y ago
  I don't think MySQL is in trouble. The MySQL community is strong, and innovation from the likes of Google, Percona, Facebook, and others has been just as important as of late than anything that Sun/Oracle/Innobase has done. There are plenty of ways that MySQL can succeed even if Oracle were to completely abandon it. I don't worry about MySQL at all.

melling 16y ago

(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 modules not compiling... What a waste of time. As Scott McNealy said: you've gotta get all your wood behind one arrow. That arrow is now Linux.

gaius 16y ago
Solx86 was always the red-headed stepchild. I don't think Red Hat would have gotten nearly the traction in did if say Oracle on Solaris on Intel/AMD was as well-supported as Oracle on SPARC. Classic case of "innovator's dilemma" - Sun were unwilling to risk the lower end of their SPARC business. I personally have been involved in projects where we've replaced a million dollars worth of SPARC kit with 50 or 100 grands worth of Intel running Red Hat. It would have been easier, cheaper and quicker to have just swapped the hardware and recompiled... TCO is not (just) in the hardware, it's in the people you need to program and operate it. We had guys with 20 years BSD/SunOS/Solaris experience, developers and sysadmins. But who'd risk their mission critical systems on an OS the vendor is embarrassed of?
ratcliffco 16y ago
But why now? There must have been a good reason for Sun to continue developing their own UNIX variant. I can understand the value-add coming from ZFS, but why having to maintain your own kernel? They could have built their own Linux/BSD distribution with ZFS and any other Sun-branded additions. I guess my question is not "why now" but rather "why not 5 years ago". I don't really know much about Solaris, just trying to understand the business reasons behind their decision to compete with Linux kernel.
- mipolonsky 16y ago
  Hm... perhaps because they have thousands of paying corporate customers who started using Solaris before Linux even existed, and they needed to transition them to a newer/expensive hardware without affecting their Solaris-tuned software? (just thinking out loud, can there be any other reason?)

bensummers 16y ago

Here's a view from a prominent member of the (rather small) OpenSolaris community: http://www.cuddletech.com/blog/pivot/entry.php?id=1134 http://www.cuddletech.com/blog/pivot/entry.php?id=1134 He's not exactly impressed.

nailer 16y ago
Remember the OGC is headed by Schilly. Who's quite famous for actively campaigning to stop people patching his OSS cdrecord to use regular device files, and has a reputation of being very outspoken against anyone who disagrees with him.
- rbanffy 16y ago
  If the OGC head is a problem, this, certainly, solves it. Oracle can easily make a new OGC the following day and name whoever they are comfortable with (or whoever they think will help OpenSolaris get developed in the right direction.
rbanffy 16y ago
This article got submitted too: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1512766 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1512766

pinkode 16y ago

Maybe its for the best. I'm not a big fan of autotools, but proliferation of semi-compatible UNIXes was the reason behind this mess. I'd be absolutely happy with just Linux/BSD/Macs to worry about.

bitwize 16y ago

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]

rbanffy 16y ago
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)
- bitwize 16y ago
  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.
  - rbanffy 16y ago
    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.

adbge 16y ago

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 into the Linux kernel because of licensing.

there 16y ago
if you feel like playing around with filesystems, try dragonflybsd (http://www.dragonflybsd.org/ http://www.dragonflybsd.org/). it has some neat things like its unique hammer filesystem and virtual kernels.

c00p3r 16y ago

It is now as dead as say Digital Unix or OpenVMS.

RyanMcGreal 16y ago

The Imperial Senate will no longer be of any concern to us.