Submitted by The OpenSolaris governing board fell on its collective sword Monday and resigned en masse after Oracle continued to ignore its ultimatum to appoint a liaison guy to work with it on the future of the open source project. The move was anticlimactic to say the least. Oracle last week leaked an internal e-mail into the wild effectively saying OpenSolaris is dead. The news of the mass resignation, coupled with Oracle suing Google claiming Android infringes on its Java patents, had Adobe’s director of open source and standards David McAllister casting Oracle as the New Microsoft and saying “the axis of evil has shifted south about 850 miles or so”.
Bad news this. Sounds like Oracle is on a dark path for OSS.
I’m most concerned about software I rely on day to day: Openoffice and Virtualbox. Will we have to find alternatives?
Nature hates vacuum.
I estimate that the gap Oracle left behind will be filled in by some other organisation. It will just take some time
So it is that why most of the universe is vacuum? 😉
It isn’t really though. Partials are constantly being created and destroyed, gravitational forces are present and there’s a wash of background radiation.
And that’s not to mention the highly theoretical stuff like dark energy and dark flow.
In short, true vacuums don’t exist.
Oh really? So how come we have plenty of it in the universe?
I dislike anthropocentric view of the world, but that’s slightly offtopic.
I’m also worried about OpenOffice, we don’t have an alternative fork at the moment [GoOo is bunch of the patches].
Serious question: is KOffice really so bad that it can’t be considered a viable alternative to OpenOffice?
Yes.
As for the article: no surprise here. I don’t think that anyone in their right mind liked the idea of Oracle buying Sun; I certainly didn’t. The “AoE” hasn’t shifted one bit; it always included Oracle.
It’s a good office suite, but it is not as Office compatible as OpenOffice. Works good though.
Ubuntu’s OpenOffice includes go-oo’s patches. IBM relies on ODF and has Symphony support (OpenOffice with Eclipse UI).
For virtualization (in Linux), KVM is okay, Bochs is for cross-CPU emulation, open-VZ is nice when you just want Linux sandboxing. They will all be wrapped by virt-manager someday.
Virtual particles are being created spontaneously, out of the energy of space itself. Space also contains, hydrogen, helium, hydrocarbons and other molecules.
Even in space, it’s not a true vacuum.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_particle
wel we do have qemu not as visually appealing as vbox but most of the functionality is up to task.
What’s wrong with waiting later this year for Solaris 11 Express and using it? It’ll come with optional support which should be cheap like around $20. Unless I’m missing something.
I get the openness will be done away with but isn’t it going to be better?
From what I understand it appears that Oracle is putting more money into Solaris than Sun ever did – for example there is in developed to replace all other power backends a (and scheduled for release 2011Q4) libpower that’ll provide a unified framework for power management which will hopefully be exposed in a nice user friendly way as an alternative to the upower backend used in GNOME at the moment. I wonder whether we’ll see the same in the form of replacing HAL when it comes to hardware detection and automounting of storage on the desktop. All these may sound like they’re outside the scope of Oracle’s goal until you realise that Solaris is in effect a desktop operating system by virtue of people using it through Sun Ray terminals.
Although I’m disappointed about the development becoming more closed source, if it means that development resources are increased in the area then I think it is a good compromise given that the alternative is a slow death through neglect and lack of investment.
Solaris is a server OS with a side of Desktop.
upower is not “gnome technology”, it’s desktop linux technology.
libpower seems (on superficial glance – quick googling didn’t tell much, as opposed to what I found by googling for upower) to be something that predates, and is made redundant by, upower.
There was a leaked slide show which talked about a new libpower set for release in 2011Q4 which apparently will replace the old one – the new one will be a lot more fine grained and efficient apparently (rumour has it).
I understand that it isn’t gnome technology but there is a close affinity between GNOME and upower/udisks.
are we even sure there will be a Solaris Express any more? I hope there is because I still love Solaris, but I am not so sure… might be switching out my OpenSolaris instal for Free/PCBSD
Where were you this month when Oracle made the official announcement regarding Solaris 11, Solaris 11 Express, and the roadmap going forward?
Yes, OpenSolaris as a source-based development version for people to hack on is dead. The binary-based Solaris 11 Express will take its place. After official Solaris 11 releases are made, source code for the what-used-to-be-OpenSolaris parts will be made available for others to look at.
IOW, the OSS development that occurred via OpenSolaris is dead, and Oracle is taking Solaris back to it’s binary-only roots.
i’ve been hiding under a rock for a while. Glad to hear Solaris Express will still be around, as it will be, so will I
.
2/3 of the dtrace developers are at other Solaris-related companies now. They are not the only Solaris developers to leave Oracle and still focus on Solaris.
Edited 2010-08-28 00:37 UTC
I believe that Larry Ellison is Darl McBride in disguise.
Seriously, Ellison has always been a complete egomaniac but he lacked the muscle and nerve to Peacock strut like we knew he could. With Sun in his pocket and Java on the brain the delusion of grandeur with this man is all too obvious.
Do Adobe seriously think they have any room to comment about Oracle’s openness?
Well, let’s consider recent events.
On Adobe’s side, the flash 10.1 brought some welcome and much-awaited improvements to the Linux and OSX platforms, and introduced this technology to new mobile OSs. They’ve also announced support for VP8 video in flash.
On Oracle side, the news are a patent lawsuit about Java and Solaris being sunken and drowned in proprietary mud.
Yes, I’d say that Adobe currently can mock Oracle’s awful actions…
Edited 2010-08-27 18:39 UTC
Adobe took those much-awaited improvements away for x86-64 Linux users away recently.
Well, there isn’t even a working x86_64 release of Flash on windows yet
(And one might say that it doesn’t really matter, since we need 32-bit software on an everyday basis anyway, with or without flash)
Not really. Flash is the only 32-bit software that I use (on my computer, anyway).
It’s true that on linux, thanks to the open-source tradition, less software gets distributed on 32-bit binary form. (Instead, when you want something outside of the system repositories, you generally get some ugly source whose compilation is almost guaranteed to fail, but that’s another story).
I assume they told Larry to put it where the Sun doesn’t shine…
Ultimatums are usually given from a position of strength, when you have some leverage or something to bring to the table. Did the governing board seriously think Oracle gave a shite what they did or didn’t do, and whether or not they exist? That’s like an employee of a big corporation going way to the top and saying: “Hey, I want new coffee machines or I’m leaving right now!” Know what the response usually would be to that? Simple and to the point: “Ok, see ya! Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.” The Opensolaris governors board had no leverage, no strength, and absolutely nothing upon which to form an ultimatum, and Oracle held all the cards and now they’ve played their hand and won.
Oracle is here to make money. Period.
Not good for OSS.
-t
There has been several previews of Solaris 11 from Sun:
1) Solaris Express Community Edition distro
2) Solaris Express Developer Edition distro
3) OpenSolaris distro
They have all been killed, but Solaris 11 has been continuously developed.
Now there is a new preview of Solaris 11, from Oracle and it is called
4) Solaris 11 Express
And Solaris 11 is getting closer. Why all the fuzz about different previews of Solaris 11 that is killed? Solaris 11 is not killed. Oracle is actually opening up Solaris 11. Sun never opened up Solaris 10. Oracle is in fact, more open with Solaris than Sun ever was.
which is a much more interesting area of development.
OpenSolaris never attracted much outside support. I suspect that just about every critic of this move doesn’t run OpenSolaris and is just upset that Oracle is not going to be funding every open source pet project that is leftover from Sun.