Pythian Group

Update 04-Aug-10: I’m happy to see The Illumos Project announcement.

Update 17-Aug-10: So Oracle seems to drop OpenSolaris project. Let’s see if Illumos pulls it off.

I’m tired reading all over the internet — Oracle taking back OpenSolaris, Open Solaris May Die
?, Solaris Is Dead, Save Open Solaris, Oracle taking back OpenSolaris.

I’m so sick of it!

I see that some don’t even know the difference between OpenSolaris and commercial Oracle Solaris (former Sun Solaris 10)!

Wake up people! Oracle did make commercial Solaris 10… eh… commercial, that is. They (well, Sun but Oracle paid big $$ for it) have invested lots into Solaris IP and they have full rights to actually charge money for it and they probably should. Struggling Sun made commercial Solaris free to use in desperation to maintain their rapidly shrinking market share. Oracle doesn’t need that – they are not desperate. You’ve made the right decision Oracle – keep Solaris commercial and use these funds to continue developing this great operating system (or whatever makes business sense).

Having said all this, what does it have to do with OpenSolaris? Nothing!

OpenSolaris was and is free. I have just quickly skimmed through the licensing (Binary License and CDDL) and there are no caveats that I can see like 90 days limitation or whatsoever. All the OpenSolaris goodies are still available to everyone for free.

Whining starts that Oracle will not contribute to OpenSolaris anymore. Come on people! Couldn’t you just appreciate what’s been done already and what a great product OpenSolaris is? If you forgot what open-source is about, it’s about community contributions and not about a single vendor giving away its IP so that everyone around can scream how great open-source movement is what great products it produces. If one vendor pulls out and community can’t sustain product development, then the product cannot live its normal open-source life.

Get over it! Want a high quality software with great support without any fuss? Pay $$. Want a high quality free open-source software? Make it happen!

Update 13-Jul-10: I’m keeping an eye on the OpenSolaris community news and it’s been so far discouraging..

When Oracle announced Oracle 11.2 for Solaris (x86-64), I decided to try a silent installation of Oracle on OpenSolaris, even though it is not certified.

I downloaded the Solaris ISO and installed it as 64-bit on one of my virtual machines with 1Gb of RAM. Installation of the OS went without a problem and I was soon enjoying a look at OpenSolaris. I eventually stopped admiring the good-looking interface (interesting—do they sell OpenSolaris-style doughnuts somewhere in Sun’s offices?), and connected through a plain old black-and-white ssh terminal to execute the silent installation.

Based on the silent installation that I had earlier executed on Linux for 11.2, I started the following: Read the rest of this entry . . .