OpenSolaris governing board threatens dissolution

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?

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.

I went to an OpenSolaris users group last year. They were talking about new network features like being able to assign sub-interfaces to different zones. Stuff that VMware ESX had available for years. I was thoroughly unimpressed. The concept of Zones or FreeBSD jails has some appealing aspects; not needing to load multiple kernels in memory, for example, but by this time, Hypervisors such as VMware that deduplicate memory blocks pretty much negate any advantage Zones/Jails once had.

ZFS definitely has some potential though. I hope it will be released under a more liberal license that will allow a direct Linux kernel module as opposed to fuse support.

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!

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.

Add client-side Java and JavaFX to that list. Sun was already failing on the desktop, but Oracle seems to have even less interest. Thank goodness HTML5+js will soon reach enough penetration to replace Java as a portable application framework.

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

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.

This article got submitted too:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1512766

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.

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.

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.

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.

Yes, otherwise people would be able to create dummy accounts and vote themselves up for nothing.

Exactly. The Sun Community License.

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.

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.

Some of it is still closed source (mainly the libc, if I recall). You lose out on patching those parts if you don't play nice with Oracle.

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)