Even ignoring the OpenSolaris project, It's not at all rosy in "real" Solaris land, either. Requests for information and clarification are going unanswered, and I know
of several managers who have had hardware quotes and support tickets
ignored - there's a near total blackout of information from Oracle. People are fleeing Solaris in droves, and migrating to anything they can: Linux, FreeBSD (Dtrace and ZFS), AIX - hell, even HP-UX looks like a safer bet at the moment. And I never thought I'd find myself saying that!
It certainly appears that Oracle
are doing a superb job of killing Solaris. But why would they do this, having paid all that money for Sun and announcing that they will increase
spending on Solaris development ?
Well, this
post on Slashdot (allegedly from a Sun/Oracle employee) confirms my
suspicions as to why they may be doing this. Oracle just really doesn't care about Solaris as a general
purpose data centre OS any more. There's just no money in it, and although I
personally find it tragic it does make sense. It's probably also why they're killing all
their OEM deals - why help a competitor sell hardware, when all you'll see from it is a possible support contract for the OS ? Oracle's overall aim is to have
Solaris relegated to the role of running as the bottom layer in an
Oracle "database machine", Java appserver bundle or inside a "Fishworks" storage appliance.
It excels at
these tasks, and it would obviously fit into Oracle's stated goal of
being a one stop shop, where if you want to run Oracle, they'll sell you
the bundle - hardware, storage, OS and software. If they no longer want Solaris to be a dominant general purpose OS, then their approach
makes sense. They don't need a "community" around the product, they
don't need open source developers porting applications to it, and they
certainly don't need the overhead of running and managing a community
portal any more. Unless you are running (and paying for) Oracle applications on Solaris, you're probably more of an annoyance to them at the moment and I get the very strong idea that they'd rather you just quietly went elsewhere.
I just wish that if this was their plan, they'd make some sort of statement about it; rather than ignoring the Solaris community in the hopes that they'll eventually get frustrated and leave without Oracle having to spell it out for them. I think the way they are going about it
reprehensible and it's a tragic end for such a historic and innovative
OS. Sadly though, Larry is all about the bottom line and the old, altruistic Sun approach
just wasn't bringing in the big bucks. As the Slashdot poster said : "Profit is king here. Anything else is overhead, and overhead eats into
Larry's yacht fund."
Edit: Now it's official : http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/08/13/opensolaris_is_dead/
Even ignoring the OpenSolaris project, It's not at all rosy in "real" Solaris land, either. Requests for information and clarification are going unanswered, and I know of several managers who have had hardware quotes and support tickets ignored - there's a near total blackout of information from Oracle. People are fleeing Solaris in droves, and migrating to anything they can: Linux, FreeBSD (Dtrace and ZFS), AIX - hell, even HP-UX looks like a safer bet at the moment. And I never thought I'd find myself saying that!
It certainly appears that Oracle are doing a superb job of killing Solaris. But why would they do this, having paid all that money for Sun and announcing that they will increase spending on Solaris development ?
Well, this post on Slashdot (allegedly from a Sun/Oracle employee) confirms my suspicions as to why they may be doing this. Oracle just really doesn't care about Solaris as a general purpose data centre OS any more. There's just no money in it, and although I personally find it tragic it does make sense. It's probably also why they're killing all their OEM deals - why help a competitor sell hardware, when all you'll see from it is a possible support contract for the OS ? Oracle's overall aim is to have Solaris relegated to the role of running as the bottom layer in an Oracle "database machine", Java appserver bundle or inside a "Fishworks" storage appliance.
It excels at these tasks, and it would obviously fit into Oracle's stated goal of being a one stop shop, where if you want to run Oracle, they'll sell you the bundle - hardware, storage, OS and software. If they no longer want Solaris to be a dominant general purpose OS, then their approach makes sense. They don't need a "community" around the product, they don't need open source developers porting applications to it, and they certainly don't need the overhead of running and managing a community portal any more. Unless you are running (and paying for) Oracle applications on Solaris, you're probably more of an annoyance to them at the moment and I get the very strong idea that they'd rather you just quietly went elsewhere.
I just wish that if this was their plan, they'd make some sort of statement about it; rather than ignoring the Solaris community in the hopes that they'll eventually get frustrated and leave without Oracle having to spell it out for them. I think the way they are going about it reprehensible and it's a tragic end for such a historic and innovative OS. Sadly though, Larry is all about the bottom line and the old, altruistic Sun approach just wasn't bringing in the big bucks. As the Slashdot poster said : "Profit is king here. Anything else is overhead, and overhead eats into Larry's yacht fund."
Edit: Now it's official : http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/08/13/opensolaris_is_dead/