OSOL no longer free...

[neu5eeCh]

Feh. I had a little partition all set to go for OSOL 2010.03. Thought it might be fun to play around with - try out ZFS. The latest version was supposed to have been released March 26th. Wouldn't you know it, Ellis just announced that OpenSolaris will no longer be "open". All h*ll is breaking loose at the OSOL forum.

Turns out that Ellis has also revoked perpetual licenses. Wow.

Guess I'll have to tool around with FreeBSD or PCBSD - just killing time until 10.04 is released.

[mickie.kext]

Can you please provide a link to that information where Ellison says that OpenSoLarry's is going to be closed?

[neu5eeCh]

Can you please provide a link to that information where Ellison says that OpenSoLarry's is going to be closed?

I just spent the last ten minutes looking for that link. Couldn't find it. I may have misread some of the information coming out of the Solaris community. Feel free to change the title of the thread. I'll keep looking.

My impression, which now seems incorrect, was that OpenSolaris would start charging $30 dollars for hobbyists (read desktop users) and the like - that patches would no longer be available without a purchase, etc., etc....

[reyfer]

I think the info was talking about a change in the license of Solaris 10, not OpenSolaris

[mickie.kext]

http://news.dzone.com/dose/dzone-daily-dose-329

http://www.infoworld.com/d/open-source/license-change-leaves-sun-solaris-users-crossroads-858?page=0,0

[dragos240]

Oh oracle, why did you HAVE to buy out sun. I just hope they don't ruin mySQL.

[neu5eeCh]

http://news.dzone.com/dose/dzone-daily-dose-329

http://www.infoworld.com/d/open-source/license-change-leaves-sun-solaris-users-crossroads-858?page=0,0

Also some brief information here:

http://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20100329#news

[forrestcupp]

The change is not for open solaris, yet. But is Oracle really going to keep it going forever?

It's a good thing there are already other developing teams working on forks of openoffice.org.

[gnomeuser]

I some what hate to say it but (Open)Solaris must cost a lot of manpower and thus money to keep going. Oracle are already heavily invested in their Unbreakable Linux product, perhaps the best thing for everyone involved would be to gradually discontinue the Solaris codebase and relicense it to be compatible with Linux.

I would really like to see Oracle not be forced to keep OpenSolaris alive, I would much rather see them providing a transition plan for their existing customers to Unbreakable Linux and have them focus their investments Linux.

There is very little to gain from keeping OSOL alive for them and so much to be lost, there is also much to be gained for users if they aren't betting on two horses.

I will be happy to celebrate a respectful funeral for a once proud piece of software, I think Solaris earned it's retirement by now

[DeadSuperHero]

Like the others before me have said, it looks like OpenSolaris is unaffected for the most part.

This is a bummer though, as I quite liked Solaris for a lot of reasons. ZFS was fantastic, and their OpenSolaris desktop offering was quite nice. The only thing I really didn't care for was their package manager, which was dog slow.

I guess we'll just have to wait and see where things go, but this bums me out majorly.

[swoll1980]

I didn't know a company could open source, get some free development, then close the source. It just doesn't seem right. Can Linus decide to do this with Linux, or no?

[themarker0]

Oh oracle, why did you HAVE to buy out sun. I just hope they don't ruin mySQL.

It already has a paid version. Its not really moving from what i see tbh. Sqlite seems like a better choice for me imho. Someone told me (Can't cite it, over msn) that MySQL wasn't in active dev, while MySQLI was. Most programs run at least MySQLI aswell as MySQL, so couldn't we just use it?

[Chronon]

I didn't know a company could open source, get some free development, then close the source. It just doesn't seem right. Can Linus decide to do this with Linux, or no?

The copyright holder can change the license on the copies they are distributing at any time. They can't change the license on the copy of the source that you already checked out, as far as I understand. The last open version of the code could be forked and developed, I believe.

[Regenweald]

A while back I read that, even under Sun, Solaris was being phased out and Opensolaris would become the defacto product. No i'm not citing anything, google is your friend. Opensolaris is too powerful a platform with way too many server innovations to be eol'ed. I believe the Oracle stance(from some of the webcasts that I saw after the acquisition finalization) was basically: If a customer wants Linux, we have you covered and if they want UNIX, hey we've got you covered too.