Blog O’ Matty

The state of OpenSolaris

Matty and I haven’t really spoken much about the current state of the OpenSolaris project. Oracle has been pretty tight with releasing any type of information about their plans / directions in which they will be taking Solaris / OpenSolaris. Its caused a lot fusteration.

The OpenSolaris Governing Board threw down the gauntlet and has threatened to dissolve pending some direct interaction / involvement from Oracle. Ben Rockwood has made his opinion made and a lot of what he has to say makes sense.

Sun spent a lot of effort / time / money / energy / excitement in trying to build the OpenSolaris community while they were still an independent entity from Oracle. UNIX admins played / tinkered with Linux at home, and it made its way into the data center and into production applications as it matured and became a rock solid technology. There is value in having the community embrace your O/S in a non-enterprise setting — such is the target market for OpenSolaris adoption. Its how the popularity of Linux overtook the large traditional UNIX implementations. (Solaris, AIX, HP-UX) If Oracle abandons OpenSolaris and allows the OGB to dissolve, I believe it will be a step in the wrong direction.

mike on July 14, 2010 | Filed Under Oracle

4 Comments

KFR on July 14th, 2010

It sounds like the Oracle merger went like this

Fire all SUN (Senior) Managers.
Take all the good SUN Software/Oracle and move it to Oracle.
Take all the (good) engineers and move them to Oracle.
Build new business flows inside of oracle for hardware and software sales/production.
Muzzle the New Oracle employees.

SUN was not efficient in the way that it sold/built hardware and software but it worked ok.

Oracle basically said, this is garbage, we can build better. This left a huge vacuum. Examples of this that I have seen are:
x4140′s EOL’ed with no notification to channel and customers
Education Institutions unable to purchase/renew SUN Ray Hardware and Software.
OpenSolaris in a frozen state.

Oracle says that SUN is contributing to the balance sheet but behind the scenes, the business processes are in complete pandemonium.

I keep hoping that Oracle will fill the vacuum. At some point, we as a customer, we will need to move on to a different vendor for some of our hardware/software.

matty on July 14th, 2010

Hey KFR,

I feel your pains. I’ve pretty much given up on Solaris and OpenSolaris, and have moved on to Windows and Linux. Several years ago I was one of the biggest Solaris fan boys there was, but ended up giving up my Solaris roots after learning just how messed up the opensolaris community was. I wish Oracle the best of luck with whatever they decide to do with Solaris and OpenSolaris. I hope Solaris succeeds, and OpenSolaris is given back to the community.

- Ryan

dasmo on July 16th, 2010

I can’t even buy machines from Oracle anymore. We were buying about 40 machines every six months, which probably doesn’t seem like much. We were buying the machines with support and are yet to use it though.

Felipe Alfaro Solana on July 16th, 2010

I also was to used kind of a (Open)Solaris fanboy but I’m pretty disappointed. Not with the community itself, which I think it’s great, but with the development pace of OpenSolaris. And after the Oracle acquisition, it seems like the development pace slowed down from already slow to frozen. It’s a pity, as ZFS and DTrace are the reasons why I keep using Solaris at home.