Hi Joerg, I understand what you're saying. At the same time, the base code is out there for anyone to use. And Oracle has promised to do code drops after official releases. So we'll get a code drop when Solaris 11 comes out and everyone can pick and choose what they want to integrate with their own builds or distros. It's not like Oracle is pulling the code away from our hands. They just want to be "first" and have an advantage on "when" features are released in binary and source form. It helps them keep Solaris competitive against the likes of AIX, HPUX, and Linux by not giving them code to reverse engineer before a release. And while this can negatively impact the OpenSolaris based distros which will have to carefully integrate Oracle changes, I don't see it has ending or stopping innovation. With a handful of key Solaris engineers leaving Oracle and working in the "wild", there's a much greater chance now that the OpenSolaris community can be autonomous and grow. The biggest problem before Oracle was in the picture for the community is that the entry point for a developer to dive into the Solaris code-base was very high and we simply didn't see much code put-backs from the outside. The reason why is that "we" as a community lacked the expertise on where to start and understand the long and bureaucratic internal Sun process for getting things integrated. So I really see this situation as mixed blessing.
We now have real Solaris kernel engineers outside of the mighty Sun/Oracle Solaris silo who can help the development of our favorite OS grow out in the public. We never had this before and really needed it. It's something that the Linux and BSD camps complained about all the time.. great we have a huge amount of open sourced code, but all the people working on it are behind closed doors. That is no longer the case and I expect a lot more innovation to happen now that these engineers can work freely with direct input and support from the community. Now would it be nice if things stayed the way they were? It would be okay, but we would still be suffering from the lack of innovation from outside of Oracle. It's great to see distros out there that switch out tool-sets and put in GNU stuff and make things easier for desktop users. But beyond that, I didn't see innovation at the core of those distributions that were affecting the core code base. Nexenta was adding a lot of value-add on-top for storage appliances, but that's really it. Not to knock what the ON based distros have done, but it wasn't helping the development community to grow or for innovation to take off outside of Sun. Now with the way things have turned out, I think there is a much greater chance of innovation outside of the walls of Oracle. As a community we have to work with and learn from these kernel engineers to help spawn off a new generation of OpenSolaris developers. *-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-* Octave J. Orgeron Solaris Virtualization Architect and Consultant Web: http://unixconsole.blogspot.com E-Mail: unixcons...@yahoo.com *-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-* ----- Original Message ---- From: Joerg Schilling <joerg.schill...@fokus.fraunhofer.de> To: opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org; knatte_fnatte_tja...@yahoo.com Sent: Sun, October 3, 2010 6:24:15 AM Subject: Re: [osol-discuss] Solaris 11 Express Orvar Korvar <knatte_fnatte_tja...@yahoo.com> wrote: > Actually, I also spoke to a marketing manager high up, about this. He spoke >with some managers high up, about Solaris 10/11 licensing and all the managers >said what you say: "free for personal use". > For the future of Solaris this is definitely not enough. The decision makers of tomorrow are the students from today and these students select from competing OS based on properties.... Being Open Source is important in the univiersity. A "free for personal use" Solaris cannot compete with other OS being OSS (like Linux or FreeBSD). Features alone are not sufficient at the universities, but I doubt that Oracle is able to create a "life stile" product like Apple does... Also note that (as explained before) Oracle cannot make Solaris binary only without at the same time being in conflict with the CDDL. In former times, when Solaris was closed source, Sun did not have all rights to make Solaris OSS. Now Solaris is OSS and Oracle (in a similar way) does not own all rights to make Solaris closed source again. As a result binary only bi-weekly releases do not make sense: - They do not change the bad situation Solaris now has at the universities after Oracle revised Sun's promises, so this would not change the chances for the future of Solaris - This would be in conflict with the CDDL - This would "leak" information from the closed information society Oraxle I believe that Oracle should generally rethink decisions in case that Oracle is really interested in the future of Solaris. Solaris is OpenSource and this cannot be reverted. Oracle has the chance to continue with an OSS Solaris, let Solaris slowly die or let innovation in Solaris happen elsewhere. Jörg -- EMail:jo...@schily.isdn.cs.tu-berlin.de (home) Jörg Schilling D-13353 Berlin j...@cs.tu-berlin.de (uni) joerg.schill...@fokus.fraunhofer.de (work) Blog: http://schily.blogspot.com/ URL: http://cdrecord.berlios.de/private/ ftp://ftp.berlios.de/pub/schily _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
