The Oracle OpenSolaris Farce
July 1st, 2010
Well it was meant to be OpenSolaris 2010.03. Then Oracle happened, and they stated 2010.1H (first half). This has come and gone.
Is it ever going to arrive?
According to the rumour mill September 2010 is a possible new target date. Or just "Sometime in 2010". But who knows.
Some are even starting to wonder if Oracle are turning OpenSolaris 2010.03 into Solaris 11 proper. If they supported this on Dell+HP hardware in addition to their own (As Sun did prior to the acquisition), that would be an extremely enticing proposition.
Time will tell. Oracle are not stupid. But this silence and complete lack of communication is insanely frustrating.
Some might be wondering, why all the hoohaa anyway? It’s just an operating system, right? Well.. because OpenSolaris is evolving at an incredible rate, and the new features list since OpenSolaris 2009.06 came out is absolutely enormous. Those who have used the development branches have tasted the forbidden fruit, and they want it. They really god damn want it.
OpenSolaris 2009.06 was an interesting toy. But OpenSolaris 2010.? has finally reached the prime time. Solaris 10 containers, COMSTAR iSCSI/FCoE framework, the new Crossbow Networking stack, the latest ZFS features including separate cache and log devices, plus of course ZFS Deduplication, Xen 3.4 support via xVM.. the feature list is enormous.
In the mean time Nexenta is chugging away churning out new releases with backported fixes from the latest sources. I might have to check out Nexenta again. I never thought I’d say this, but I actually much prefer IPS and beadm to apt-get and apt-clone. Plus I dread to think how they’ve implemented Zones on Nexenta. But the full GNU Userland is rather appealing.
My advice to Oracle: Don’t fuck this up.
Entry Filed under: General
2 Comments Add your own
1. Dave | July 11th, 2010 at 8:27 am
Agreed 100 percent with what you have written here. I’m going nuts with the total radio silence - it’s almost like they’ve (unfortunately) taken a leaf out of Apple’s book.
I’ve contacted Oracle sales asking for a heads up and expressing interest in an affordable basic support package for OSOL…but I don’t expect a response.
Let us know if you do look into Nexenta - I’d be interested in following this.
2. Open Source JavaFX Petiti&hellip | July 17th, 2010 at 6:11 am
[...] they do not have an open source strategy (as evidenced by the apparent total lack of support for OpenSolaris) I’m not sure what good this will do – but nevertheless it’s a worthy cause and I [...]
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