Oracle has quietly extended paid support and upgrades for Solaris 11.4 to 2037 – three years past its previous deadline – and did the same for earlier versions of the OS last year.
↫ Simon Sharwood at The Register
One of the biggest “what could have beens” of the past two decades. Had Oracle not closed Solaris up after acquiring Sun, an open source Solaris might’ve been something more tangible than what it is today. Of course, Oracle gonna Oracle and they were always going to screw things up, open source or not, but had Solaris stayed open we’d have had a more concerted, centralised development effort instead of what we have now, where the open source Solaris community is working off the last OpenSolaris codebase from 14 years ago.
I remember back then, installed opensolaris on my laptop and being impressed by it. Today i have same feeling with good old Debian.
Nothing better than a reasonably polished, stable, non-fragmented OS. I had that feeling when using PC-BSD back in the day.
Linux is just too indecisive.
I think the rot had set in well before Oracle. All they did was keep the wheels turning so they can keep the holdouts paying until 2037. Somehow they have manged to keep enough to justify keeping it going for another decade!
Sun’s frankly botched attempt to open source the OS took nearly a decade (during which its userbase was in freefall) meanwhile porting all its USP (DTrace) to linux
To compound that, bringing in people like Ian Murdock (of Debian fame) to OpenIndiana caused multiple conflicts as to the direction of the project. Tasking someone to lead a project who had a fundamentally different outlook on how the project should be governed, compared to the parent company, was never going to end well.
Oracle just stopped flogging the dead horse.
Adurbe,
I’m curious what you think Sun could have/should have done differently?
Open source is inherently a rough business model. Even redhat, the corporate champion for FOSS, has gone through a dichotomy as their corporate motives turn them away from FOSS principals. They’ve been locking down SRPMS behind their corporate licensing program in ways that aren’t compatible with FOSS principals.
Oracle’s a convenient target, there leadership never believed in FOSS, only profits. IMHO Sun’s embrace of FOSS felt genuine on the other hand, but it didn’t save the company and even in hindsight I’m not clear what they could have done.
Either commit to being proprietary and keep stuff like DTrace and ZFS proprietary (and even then it would’ve been a tough battle, they were already losing marketshare even when those things were Solaris-exclusive) or commit to FOSS instead of the half-hearted approach they chose. The whole “we have an open-source variant of the OS but the true variant you want is proprietary” deal and the choice of CDDL gave customers objectively less power than was the GPLv2 and your average GNU/Linux distro gives.
Basically, either try to justify your existence as a proprietary vendor in the face of “good enough” open-source competition of join them.
Let’s see how that works for them in the face of binary-compatible RedHat forks (aka competitors) such as Rocky Linux. Imagine all those support contracts migrating to Rocky Linux (CIQ). IBM thinks that just because their mainframe customers won’t install anything else than whatever IBM gives them, RHEL customers are similarly bound despite the fact the OS runs on commodity x86-64 boxes.
kurkosdr,
The reason ibm/redhat chose this path was to interfere with those forks. I don’t know how well it’s working out for them.
I know we discussed this recently. A previous comment of yours hit the nail on the head and deserves a follow up…
https://www.osnews.com/story/136275/red-hat-comments-on-its-controversial-source-code-availability-change/
It took me a while to figure out what Red Hat is actually doing, and the gist of it is, if it looks like you’re sharing their SRPMs downloaded through their portal, they will cancel your account and deny access to the portal. I.E, you lose access to updates, downloads, and other services. They will cut you off from accessing RedHat products.
They will still uphold the letter of the GPL and give you source code, but they will deny access to future RedHat updates, patches, and products.
Drumhellar,
IMHO that’s an additional restriction under the GPL. Also terminating an account for actions that are expressly permitted by the license agreement seems legally dubious. But of course these are matters for the courts. Does anyone know if it’s been tested?
@Drumhellar
Isn’t this essentially a license on top of the GPLv2 license? How is it even compatible with the GPL? This is the problem with the whole RHEL situation: it’s very confusing to anyone who isn’t following very closely.
Also, it’s possible to get RHEL on AWS EC2 (https://aws.amazon.com/partners/redhat/faqs/), so what prevents someone from firing up a RHEL EC2 instance and getting those SRPMs without having to enter into any contract with RedHat? In fact, that’s how Rocky Linux does it: https://rockylinux.org/news/keeping-open-source-open/
Same for RHEL docker images.
So, what is RedHat really achieving here (other than annoying their fans)? Considering it’s possible to get access to RHEL (which grants you rights to the source under the GPL) without entering a contract with RedHat.
I hope it gets tested. It’s an attempt to workaround the GPL that can be used by other companies in the future too.
To kurkosdr’s point…
“Basically, either try to justify your existence as a proprietary vendor in the face of ‘good enough’ open-source competition of join them.”
This seems to apply just as much to ibm/redhat of today as it did to oracle/sun. Redhat built their name on FOSS, but their current owners seem determined to make FOSS more of a one-way street. Redhat are allowed to take FOSS code from others without limitation, but they threaten penalties for those taking FOSS code from redhat. It goes against the spirit of FOSS.
kurkosdr,
That’s very true. I know some of us here are redhat fans. If we give the all-clear for redhat to do this, say because we consider them “good guys”, then this could become a FOSS loophole for everyone else too. Once we accept such loopholes, I do worry what this would mean for FOSS across the board.
For example, android could be licensed to OEMs with new restrictions penalizing source code distribution. “It’s still GPL”…I call bullshit! Sure some might pretend it is, but additional distribution restrictions does not comply with GPL.
The way I read it is, the software is governed by the GPL2, the easy-access portal is governed by Red Hat’s license. Presumably they’ll still give you source code after they terminate your portal access, because the GPL obligates them to, but they are not obligated to go beyond what the GPL requires.
This is pretty shitty, but I doubt it’s a violation of the GPL. The GPL does not obligate anybody to maintain business relationships with customers.
The real question is whether or not the scripts for generating SRPMs constitutes a derived work or not. After all, they are not necessary for compiling the software into a usable state.
Drumhellar,
Is this simply your take, or has this actually been tested? Each time we debate this we seem to be at a loss for actual examples.
It’s obvious that this is an additional restriction on end users. And it’s clear that additional restrictions are explicitly prohibited by the GPL. The question is whether redhat’s additional restrictions are considered within the scope of the GPL. That’s something only a court could definitively answer. If external restrictions & punishments are allowed to stand, them it effectively nullifies the GPL’s rights and represents a significant loss to FOSS: end-user rights that had been explicitly granted by FOSS licenses can now be overturned by more corporate legalese.
When you read the GPL license, I don’t think there’s any question these are explicitly included.
I think the broadly outlines some of the mistakes sun were making. The whole “part open, part not” meant the OS’s community didn’t really form around it and didn’t stop the user free fall.. Coupled with the will they /won’t they on x86 meant they cut themselves out of the growing market where Linux was already the default choice for many.
“I’m curious what you think Sun could have/should have done differently?”
It would have been a good start if their sales-team wouldn’t have permanently told their customers how good the next generation of Sparc will be, while they were selling them the current generation…
smashIt,
Adurbe was referring to software, but as you are bringing up hardware I think Sun was having trouble there too. I don’t remember the exact configurations, but I always felt the Solaris workstations workstations we had at school were noticeably slower than x86 computers of the time. Sun servers may have done ok in the 90s when unix was more important, but with the rise of linux and commodity x86 PCs I think it must have gotten harder for Sun to sell their hardware and software competitively. After all, Linux was free, and cheaper than Solaris even with support contracts from redhat.
If I may add, it’s time to admit that when a “good enough” piece of FOSS software (or even a clean piece of freeware) comes about, proprietary competing solutions tend to become obsolete. And that’s fine, nobody is owed sales.
Examples:
– Firefox made Opera obsolete (and before that IE had made Netscape obsolete on Windows)
– GNU/Linux made the various Unixes obsolete on the server
– VLC, MPC-HC, and Kodi made various proprietary DVD player applications obsolete (Cyberlink survives by providing Blu-Ray support and charging through the nose to those who need it)
– 7-zip made WinRAR obsolete (RARlab survives by giving people unlimited free trial with a minor nag screen and selling essentially the same software forever)
So, Solaris was already fighting a losing battle, being proprietary and then being partially-open-source-but-not-quite (and the CDDL license allowed Sun to have a pull-out plan to make Solaris proprietary again, while the GPLv2 doesn’t allow for that).
At the end of Sun’s days, they were fighting a losing battle with their only customers being technologically conservative banks, and those contracts stopped coming with the GFC. Ponytail dude open-sourcing Solaris’ few remaining advantages (DTrace and ZFS) hastened the demise.
I was actually starting to roll OpenSolaris out to enterprise servers and talking about licensing it. It was an awesome server operating system with a lot of modern features. Then Oracle purchased Sun, and I nope’d the hell out.
OmniOS the might still be relevant for some organizations. I use it for a box with loads of HDDs with ZFS, to store backups.
https://omnios.org/