Yeah as much as Linux folks believe Red Hat is their friend and giving everything away for free, you are sadly mistaken. Red Hat has always been about making money from Linux, make no mistake about it. And seeing how Novell is having issues, it's very likely that Red Hat will continue to be the dominant Linux distro. While I'm saddened and extremely upset at how things have turned out for the OpenSolaris community, I do wonder how much the nightly updates have helped the likes of AIX and Linux over the past few years. And maybe there is more to that comment in the memo that was leaked.
The good news is that the OpenSolaris code is out there and there are plenty of distros popping up. This is a good thing and forces the community to carry the torch and bring OpenSolaris to wider audiences. This is very much how Linux started, minus the commercial backing. It started out from bits and pieces that formed the SLS distro which turned into Slackware and the rest is history. The further OpenSolaris spreads and is molded to fit the specific needs of users (desktops, servers, appliances, storage back-ends, switches, etc.), the better. And I'm sure that Oracle will get the Solaris 11 Express program moving soon and will probably make some money. It'll definitely help generate interest in Solaris 11, the same way that the betas for Solaris 10 did for many of Sun's largest customers. I don't agree with the OpenSolaris distribution being killed off. I personally believe that Sun should have taken a cut of it last year and released Solaris 11. It's more stable than Solaris 10 was when it was released. The thing that always bugged me about the OpenSolaris distribution is that it wasn't pieced together or controlled by the community. We should have been at the driving wheel of that distribution. Instead, it went from being an in-house project to hijacking our efforts and pushing us as a community out of the way. Basically saying, here is what you're going to use and we don't care if you like the way we do it or not. And what did we end up with? A very desktop centric cut of the ON world and none of the integration we expect out of a Solaris build (look at the mess AI is for example over Jumpstart). Now I can understand Oracle's concerns about having the latest and greatest out in the open for the competition to exploit and copy. I've seen AIX 6 struggle to reinvent itself to catch up to Solaris 10, and it still has a way to go.. but they have WPARs(think zones), their own trusted extensions, and even their own probevue (think dtrace). So the writing is on the wall. IBM is Oracle's enemy in what remains of the UNIX wars.. it's just Oracle Solaris, IBM AIX, and HP HP-UX. Oracle is trying to protect it's IP and secret sauce from being hijacked ahead of commercial releases. It makes good business sense and that's what Oracle is good at. Of course, this sucks for the rest of us who want the latest and greatest features in our OpenSolaris boxes and want it now! It's been a fun ride and now things will slow down considerably here on the OpenSolaris.org site. It's time for the OpenSolaris based distros to shine and do the things that Sun and Oracle couldn't do, empower the developers, users, sysadmins, enthusiasts, etc. to make a better OS. *-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-* Octave J. Orgeron Solaris Virtualization Architect and Consultant Web: http://unixconsole.blogspot.com E-Mail: [email protected] *-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-* ----- Original Message ---- From: Shawn Walker <[email protected]> To: carlopmart <[email protected]> Cc: [email protected] Sent: Fri, August 20, 2010 12:04:58 PM Subject: Re: [osol-discuss] OpenSolaris cancelled, to be replaced with Solaris 11 Express On 08/20/10 09:41 AM, carlopmart wrote: > Shawn Walker wrote: >> On 08/20/10 03:26 AM, Gabriele Bulfon wrote: >> ... >>> I can't see any other OS (nor M$ nor OSX) that to be licensed >>> requires annual support subscription...when you buy Wins or Macs, you >>> pay once for your license, that's all (unless you really want or need >>> support from M$ or Apple). >> >> RedHat enterprise Linux requires a subscription, and you lose the >> right to use it if you stop the subscription. >> > > That's not correct. You lose only the support, but you can use it on > several servers as you want and it is legal. Only lose the support (and > the right to download updates). See also section 5: https://www.redhat.com/licenses/us.html -Shawn _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list [email protected] _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list [email protected]
