What are you doing when you want to promote some product? You say to you friends, colleagues and acquaintances: use it, it's great! And they understand, that it maybe not great, but at least useful. And they use it. Sun understood it. And we had OpenSolaris. I worked as Sun Campus Ambassador and promoted it. And (Open)Solaris was a great OS: it had ZFS, DTrace, Zones, Projects and quite understandable RBAC system. And it was cool to use this OS. I wanted to find and report some bugs to make it better. I wished to port some soft to make Solaris pleasant OS. And what do we have now? Solaris 11 Express and end of OpenSolaris.
Blame on Oracle. They are going to spoil everything they touch. I didn't believe that they were able to shoot themselves in the leg. But they are talented enough to do it. With OpenSolaris Sun Solaris began new life. Without such high priority project it is doomed. Other OS are coming. Of course, one of them will be Linux (it's not ideal, but free and have a lot of features that Solaris will never have: support for almost all hardware you can imagine and all soft you may ever need), I hope one of them will be FreeBSD (at least we'll have ZFS and DTrace here, jails are good replacement for zones, especially after completion of new jail resources control project), Windows Server will be alive and prosperous. But AIX, HP/UX and Solaris will be dead. Because they were already dead. One of this great systems was near its resurrection. But its owner decided to bury it alive.
It's not good news, but expected one. Oracle was quite stupid to make other irrelevant steps. So, I think the next time I'll see Solaris 10 will be in museum. It will be among OS/2, Amiga OS and SCO Unix. Without new blood every project is doomed. OpenSolaris gave this giant new blood. But this is just a part of history now. Blame on Oracle.
This is bad news. I pity the people like Roland Mainz who founded the first community Opensolaris projects, the ksh93 integration and the POSIX utility modernisation projects, and spend the larger part of 4 years to plan and execute them and is now getting his work ruined by Oracle.
ОтветитьУдалитьOn the bright side I see that Apple will pick up that work now. Nothing is better than having a competitor, i.e. Sun, to pay development and testing and then take over the glass shards Oracle created by shattering the Opensolaris projects and pick up one of the most valuable parts of it - for free.
I bet Larry will vomit when he reads that.