Guest post by The OpenIndiana project has been officially announced. OpenIndiana is part of the Illumos foundation and a community distribution which aims to to continue OpenSolaris, previously shut down by Oracle. Some details of the announcement were published on c0t0d0s0.org.
I think there should be a law that says that if a company A takes over company B, and company B had open source projects, then part of the take over deal is that those projects are maintained at least at their current level. If they naturally die, then so be it, but company A shouldn’t kill them off.
If you adopt a child, you have the responsibility of looking after it.
Just my 2c worth (actually, in Australia 5c is the smallest coin, so maybe thats my 5c worth) 🙂
Edited 2010-09-15 00:10 UTC
It would be nice and would certainly work in the users’ favor, but it’s rare the government really does anything good for users. Unless they’ve got massive piles of $$$… like Oracle.
Why is there a need for a law, when the license is now working exactly how it was intended?
The source is open, the project can be forked when it stops being actively maintained by its original developer, this seems to be the case. So the license worked exactly how it was supposed to.
> The source is open, the project can be forked when it
> stops being actively maintained by its original
> developer, this seems to be the case.
Actually it’s not exactly the case here. I.e. Oracle maintains and actively develops the code (which will be the base of their upcoming Solaris 11), but they stopped providing the actual binary distribution of OpenSolaris (trying to push users to use commercial version of Solaris), and also shifted the development to much more closed mode. Oracle didn’t stop doing source updates yet, but they probably will make it less frequent (in the worst case they can eventually stop them).
I think you are confused as to the difference between a charity and a business
The great thing about OpenSource the project won’t die as long as there are those out there willing to put in the effort to maintain and improve them.
Congrats.
I really think Oracle’s dropping of Open Solaris is a good thing, for Open Solaris. It wont be governed by people who don’t understand OSS. I think its much easier to start from OSS and create a paid/supported version of it, than to take a closed source subscription version and create an open source version of it. This will allow it to move in directions that may not necessarily be the best for Oracle/Solaris. It can compete with it. It can change things that Oracle doesn’t want to change for Solaris.
I’m now more optimistic about what was open solaris than before when Sun was running the show. But then again, I’ve been wrong before.
The problem is that there does not seem to be a development community large enough to really make up for the lack of code contribution from Solaris parent company (SUN then, Oracle now).
So without that, OpenSolaris’s future is iffy at best. I wish them luck, but their main problem is going to be to gain developers and maintain their enthusiasm.
Now that is an orphaned project, I fail to see what an OpenSolaris-like OS has as differentiator, given that most of the exciting technologies like Dtrace and ZFS already made it to FreeBSD for example. Unless the value proposition is that they will incorporate whichever code Oracle opensources from evolving versions of Solaris.
They will develop their own stuff slowly, but if Oracle releases the future code drops by doing updates to the public mercurial repos, merging that into the illumos and openindiana trees should be manageable.
+1 (apparently I’d already moderated you recently)
I used to run OpenSolaris on one of my systems at home but since the uncertainty of the project after Oracle took over, I switched to FreeBSD (technically I switched back to FreeBSD, having been a user prior to OpenSolaris) as the daemon had a stable working build of ZFS.
It would be a pity to see OpenSolaris die as I think theres more justification for it’s existence than some of the more generic Linux distros out there. However sadly I too think OpenSolaris will really struggle to attract enough developers just to maintain the OS – let alone build new features that will push OpenSolaris forward.
Edited 2010-09-15 11:50 UTC
The lack of developers is very real. I’m just hopeful that the existing developers, many of which are talented now ex sun employees can push the code in the direction that they want, without worrying about what is best for Solaris.
If they do develop some cool things, that would naturally attract more developers & users. A lot of If’s, I realize. But I guess this will give us a real opportunity to see if the world really wants an Open Solaris Like OS.
On a good note, things can be incorporated into Illumos that Opensolaris lacked IMO, such as a decent open patch and package manager. The last time I tested Opensolaris, you had to reinstall in order to receive the update.
Again, I could be wrong in regards to the latest versions of Opensolaris since I haven’t bothered with it since in favor of Solaris Express
Started to test it out, and it seems pretty stable and useable.