To get ROS and a few more robot related software tools and libraries as nice binary packages robotpkg might also be of interest: http://robotpkg.openrobots.org
Probably someone from the unleashed project can give a better answer, but my understanding is mostly unhappiness about the illumos contribution process.
The illumos RTI (request to integrate) process is designed to ensure a certain quality of contributions.
The downside of this is that it sometimes takes a long time to contribute a change.
For illumos there is also pretty high expectation of backwards compatibility.
What unleashed now offers is a place to do more radical changes and quickly iterate on new ideas.
While the small illumos community is already pretty fragmented my personal hope is that in the future work done by both projects keeps getting merged from time to time.
Maybe this also serves as a wakeup call to the illumos project to make some improvements to the contribution process itself.
Oracle has been slowly killing Solaris for some time. At the same time the community has already saved it - this is what illumos is about. It exists and is open source.
There seems to be a lot of odd nostalgia for Solaris in the comments here and on twitter. I think that's missing the point of the article.
Yes, Oracle Solaris is dead. But illumos is better, open source, alive and here to stay.
You can use illumos today, right now, and have your ZFS, mdb, DTrace and zones.
It really is open source and we're a community using and improving it. For 7 years now already.
As illumos is only the basic building block of the operating system (but unlike linux includes kernel + basic userland) one usually runs one of the distributions:
- SmartOS, developed by Joyent as a cloud hypervisor. Supports zones, KVM and lx-branded linux containers. [1]
- OmniOS CE, a minimal distribution targeted for bare metal server installations [2]
- OpenIndiana, similar to the traditional opensolaris. If you care about GUI this is probably the one. [3]
- Tribblix, modern components with retro style [4]
Sure, the user base is smaller than Linux. But that is also true for FreeBSD which is used by Netflix and Whatsapp.
Running a different OS than most other people can give your company an advantage and I know that ZFS and zones have done that for mine.
Things make a lot more sense now. For having been interested tangentially in OpenSolaris (I still have its "bible" as a monitor stand) I never knew Illumos was the kernel, and other OSes based on it. I assumed all the different Solaris spinoffs were complete forks, and thus assumed they were all dead or dying.
I will say the wikis are not inspiring; many on Illumos, OpenIndiana and SmartOS have pages last edited multiple years ago. For Illumos, I think your info above is more useful than the alphabetical listing of distros on the wiki. I think the marketing on OI's site could better tell the "why use me over Fedora/Ubuntu/BSD?" story, and SmartOS could spend less time selling its public cloud service, and more time telling me how to create a private cloud. Its docs are not super discoverable.
All just observations; take them for what they're worth. I do think it's neat that Solaris has lived on, and it makes me want to throw up a lab server to poke around a few hours. Thanks for your work and the comment.
Oh yes, the wikis definitly do need some love.
Documentation is beeing worked on as far as I know.
A lot more of activity is going on in irc on freenode, so if you start playing with your lab server or are just interested in general you might want to drop by in #illumos or #smartos.
- zones allowed for a much higher deployment density and better utilisation of our hardware than other virtualization technology would have.
- zfs snapshots. We've integrated those into our product and when a customer messes up they now have button to instantly restore to a known good state.
Doing both of these things would have been a lot harder on another os.
A different OS can solve some of the pain points of the mainstream options. Depending on your business, the features a different OS brings could have a large impact on performance or stability.
Potential areas for improvement could be anything from filesystem to process concurrency to virtualization.
The comment up above in the chain was wondering whether running Solaris (or derivatives) offered any advantage. While I'm sure the packages you listed _run_ fine, how difficult would it be to find support for each when running on Solaris? You can run those softwares on Solaris, but is Solaris on the "supported platforms" list?
Not debating here, BTW; I enjoyed my time with Solaris and then its offshoots.
Edit: The thinking here only applies to systems running in production where official support is pretty much mandated.
What do you mean "find support" ? This is open source software. Your sysadmins are your first line of support. If they can't debug issues, work with the open source community, and write basic patches in C you have the wrong staff.
First: Really, the requirement for vendor 'support' is something I've always had a bit of a hard time rationalizing.. Getting a vendor in for consultancy/implementation help is a bit of a different story though and is often worth it.
Back to support.. The old "Alright, we pay RedHat or Oracle for support for when something breaks" thing.. The reality is when something does go arse over bollocks you'll get two options from your vendor (at least from sun, oracle, redhat, ibm and sap in my experience): upgrade to the latest version, or downgrade until you get a code fix from the vendor. Your critical oracle 10 db running on some older redhat point release shits itself? Not their problem. Hope you have backups. They will take file a bug internally to prevent it happening again but they can't do much more than you can internally to get things back up.
I've been in ops for almost 15 years and I still don't have a single story of a vendor 'saving the day' outside of hardware support (actually, that's not true -- once Joyent solved a problem for us by patching some servers within about an hour of us reporting a problem which remains the single greatest support experience in my life).
We worked out how to do software upgrades and rollbacks a decade ago, if one shitty linux kernel package is enough to down your business then yeah, you're doing things wrong and hopefully will learn from the experience, but paying a support fee per instance isn't going to help you recover or avoid those things.
I think we agree, all I'm trying to say is at least in my experience: You're almost always better spending your money on good staff than support contracts.
Second: In what world do you live in that your sysadmins can write kernel patches during prod outages? Maybe your reality is very different to mine, but adding/changing code has never been the solution to bad outages (and I've been through some gnarly ones, trust me) for me so far...
I can write kernel patches. Any good SA >= 10 years with C can. And we don't because it is a symptom we notice and not the problem and we are interested in a fix only as a way to survive till the cure. Kudos to the rest of your post. God bless the elders in this industry.
I've worked in places where "official" commercial-level support is required when a system is in production. In those situations, I didn't have control over the staff at any level, just pointing out it's a thing I've seen at least twice in 20 years and 4 jobs.
They run more than just fine; usually an illumos based OS will run circles around Linux on the same hardware, and the real slap is that it won't sacrifice reliability nor correctness of operation to do that.
I think you're missing the most important application for Solaris users: Oracle (the database).
The people who is going to suffer the most from Oracle killing of Solaris are largely its own database customers. I honestly doubt many Solaris customers are running an open source stack on top of it. It's the closed source applications that will be trouble some.
No, I wouldn't (having developed since 1995) but I will state that having dealt with multi-platform builds and development for bsd and linux + darwin (until recent iterations of macos)
that solaris is a pitfa, just as much as macos, and one is enough.
Ugh. Unix is absolutely the worst development target. It's clunky, ad-hoc, it uses some horrible ancient programming language and an even more horrible ancient scripting language. Like democracy, it's definitely the worst example of its type ever to have been invented.
I'd suggest your experience|expertise is lacking. My first couple of months were bad but then I learned to appreciate the expressiveness and facility of even a bad shell language and the open horizon of how things were done. This comment seems to be classic troll or sour grapes.
It was a joke, actually. The quote I was referencing is, "Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others that have been tried." I actually wrote a (short) book on the ways of the Unix shell, which hopefully qualifies me to have an opinion on the matter. Although UHH is quite dated, there is and has been a great deal of legitimate criticism of Unix, and for that matter C and Bash as well. You have mistaken my opinion on the matter, but your eagerness in assigning negative qualities here is something you might want to examine. To be clear, I do consider Unix and Bash to be imperfect but essential tools for any programmer.
If there were something better than Unix we would replace Unix with that something and keep the name. But yes, that was the joke, and no, it was not a very good one.
You don't have to get up at two o' clock in the morning to run fsck on a filesystem based on 30 year old concepts, for example. Or when you reboot the system, you don't have to wait 18 hours for fsck to complete because it's been more than 180 days since the last filesystem check. And I've many more examples, if you're truly interested.
The nostalgia I feel is for Sun, for MPK17, for the people I got to work with, and the technology. Of those things only Sun is gone, but the people scattered, and technology, though still vibrant, is still always at risk -- it depends too much on Bryan Cantrill and friends to keep it going, while the Linux crowd blissfully ignores all the good ideas and reinvents every wheel badly.
We're in a dark ages with a sliver of light. We might be in it for a while. People who have never used ZFS, SMF, DTrace, or FMA, have no idea that they are stuck in the dark.
There seems to be a lot of odd nostalgia for Solaris in the comments here and on twitter.
There is nothing odd in that: contrary to the Linux party line and all the Linux hype, before illumos and SmartOS, Solaris was the most advanced operating system on the planet. As others have very accurately described and pointed out in the comments on the other reduction in force thread, this was sadly lost on the Linux generation which "grew up on the PC in their parents' basement".
Whatever reasons apple had for not using ZFS at that time wasn't some "IP shadow" as the CDDL includes a patent grant.
OpenZFS is open source and there is nothing murky or scary about it.
There is nothing stopping Linux from mainlining ZFS at the source level apart from kernel developers reluctance to give into "layering violations." Somebody can correct me if I'm wrong.
To wit: I am not sure if linking and terms of binary distribution matter after sources have merged for open source projects. If you have the source code and have right to modify, merge and distribute it, arguing about static or dynamic linking and binary distribution is like arguing about the color of your car door after the car has been made. It's inconsequential compared to amount of IP and resources put into the source code, and easily changed by any user (to a different architecture lets say).
Modifying has no meaning when it comes to binaries. But it's core to copyleft and open source. You would only care about binary licensing if you were a closed source product, and had to have ultimate control. If somebody had complete copyright over a ZFS binary, they could say how it can be used or not. The way an EULA would restrict you. Since no such copyright holder or binary exists for ZFS, and only source does, I don't think most people would stop collaboration in source code once the licenses are compatible.
Linking exceptions are for those who do own all of the copyrights and want to distribute along side open source software, and having a distinction otherwise in the open source world adds to license proliferation and makes no sense. ZFS doesn't have a single copyright holder acting on it's behalf, it has lost certain privileges because of this. I'm sure Oracle would be troll about this too, but they would probably be wrong given FreeBSD and OpenZFS.
I do think the GPLv3 fails a little bit because of the same argument. But I'm no lawyer.
I doubt (given what I heard from lawyers on the topic) that the legal system cares if a work has static or dynamic linking technology. What matters are the legal concepts which previous legal cases have been settled on.
Intent by everyone involved such as the author, the accused and the law writer. If the author intended that the work is used in one way, and the accused knew this but decided to go against it, then that carries a lot of weight. Similar, if the law writer intended the law to address a specific situation, that also carries weight.
Precedence from cases that involve derivate work. There is a fuzzy line when two works merge to create a third. Music has a large legal history, parts which are contradicting itself.
And last there is the law itself. Modifying for example is a explicit exclusive right in some places (such as the US). One case involved a person who bought a painting, cut it down into squares, and rearranged them into a mosaic version. The painter sued and won the case, arguing exclusive right to create modifications. If something is binary or source code should irrelevant to the question about if the "work" has been modified based on what the author originally created.
I think we know what Sun wanted, they wanted to make money from Opensolaris and ZFS by building a community around it and selling services and products around it. After a decade, all that's left now is the source code, and if Oracle wants to wait until ZFS becomes bigger to sue Canonical or Netgear, well, that shows their intentions as well.
As this timeline and some Googling shows: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenZFS#History
Sun did work in good faith with Apple, and the Linux community to get them to adopt ZFS, unsuccessfully (successfully with FreeBSD). Additionally, the fact that Sun did successfully open source quite a few things (virtualbox, jenkins, openam, solaris, staroffice, netbeans, etc..) and relicense Java from SCSL to GPL, makes their intentions towards the open source community pretty clear. Yes, they wanted to make money, but they probably open sourced and created more open source communities than any other company in SV history.
Now, about modification, any open source license listed by the FSF will grant modification rights to users. I don't think compiling is making a derivative work. It's like unfolding a chair to sit on it. It's just a part of normal usage of software, you can decompile a binary and learn from it, also normal usage. The compiler is a tool, like a screw driver or paint gun that will let you assemble a chair or paint your car. Reading and learning from source code is usage too. Modifying the actual source code would be a real modification and could be making ZFS work on an Raspberry Pi, which is allowed by open source. Given that Sun wanted ZFS to be widely adopted in open source, they adopted the CDDL to let people modify ZFS so it could be used by OSes other than Solaris. This is what the OpenZFS community enables, and is completely compatible with GNU/Linux or Apache open source norms. Oracle might come knocking for money, but that's not the history of Sun or current ZFS contributors, who are just out to make better software using the open source process. They would probably not disagree with what Netgear or Canonical did, and if they did, it would be on the OpenZFS mailing list and in a news story or two. It's not.
You can't copy books and sell them, and I can understand you can't modify an original artwork and not affect the copyright owner's rights. You can correct an error in a book or claim inspiration from a painting to make another. You can't claim copyright if someone uses a binary in a VM when you didn't intend it. You can give others the right to modify source code, and ask that others do the same. That is open source and the GPL. OpenZFS, FreeBSD, have as much standing as Oracle, which is really none, to actually stop someone from porting ZFS to anything they would like and distribute it along side proprietary or open source software.
I have heard a few different version of the intention behind ZFS license, through I can't say that for a legal case I have enough information to have a definitive opinion. Some people say that ZFS license was created with the explicit purpose to be incompatible with linux in order to not compete with solaris, but I would agree that Oracle has a thought case in court if they want to wait only to sue later. That is a practice that the legal systems tend to strongly dislike.
The other side is of course each one of the linux developers, each holding the full power of copyright. To cite SFLC, no free software developers have ever sued an other free software developer over license incompatibility, so its very unlikely to happen with ZFS. Such court cases really on happen between companies.
So to sum up, a case over ZFS is very unlikely, but I would not bet on what would happen if android suddenly started to use ZFS.
I think the Sun leadership at the time wanted ZFS to be on Linux up to the point of licensing it under the GPL. The employees wanted a more BSD-like license[1], so that's the correct context under which you can look at how Solaris was licenced. It's not about being in Linux or not, it's do we want Solaris to be under a more BSD like or GPL license. I think this conversation was bigger a decade or more ago, and frankly the GPL has had more commercial success since then. If Solaris had been GPL'd is an interesting thought experiment, and too bad it's just that. Netbeans was GPL and CDDL dual licensed.
I wonder what Linux Torvalds thinks about merging ZFS into Linux now, he wasn't too keen a decade ago. Sun is no longer around, someone worse like Oracle has taken their place. A couple of lessons for the open source community here, I think. And Brian Cantrill nails in on the head in the youtube video link.
ZFS will need to be on Linux first before it can show up on Android or media centers or gaming consoles, and I don't doubt Oracle's ability to find a way to patent troll anything. But it will be just that: patent or copyright trolling.
To add a couple more things: Oracle has been developing ZFS sans open source for the past few years as well, which means they've stopping caring about OpenZFS and/or have lost the right to.
Canonical, Debian and SFLC have really done with right thing by distributing ZFS on Linux, using AFS as a precedence. I hope more merging like this can happen in open source in the future.
Linux distributions are very similar to each other. Having package management as the main thing that sets them apart.
In illumos land these different distributions exist because they have very different design goals and visions.
But I agree that the illumos community is also a lot smaller and maybe (sadly) too small for each distribution to be commercially successfull.
I'm extremly sad about this announcement as OmniOS is a great operating system and the team behind it did a fantastic job.
As a user I like the minimal setup and clear stable releaes.
From what I've read the community is now thinking of possibly consolidating with OpenIndiana for that usecase. So while having less commercial supporters is a pity the community is determined to keep pushing forward.
