SaaS data loss: The problem you didn’t know you had
Oracle's goals for Solaris are to run it on its own and a select number of other platforms, and tune it to run its own software stack well. But OpenSolaris and now Illumos may have divergent goals, and some code this new community wants and needs may not be added into the OpenSolaris distribution by Oracle.
"We will make changes in the code that Oracle will not take back into the code," D'Amore concedes. "This has more to do with Oracle business decisions. Some of the code we create Oracle would like to have open source replacements for. But the things that people in the community want to work on are not the same things Oracle wants to work on."
As for Sun's idea of getting Solaris running on everything possible, D'Amore says that "Oracle totally gets that this was the wrong way to capitalize on Solaris" and the fact that Oracle could buy Sun for $5.6bn is the only proof you need. "I think Larry is right," D'Amore says, referring to Oracle's chief executive officer. "Solaris is going to be in a lot more shops, but on a much tighter base of hardware."
For now, D'Amore says the main thing is for the contributors of the Illumos project to create their tweaks to the ON core and submit them back to Oracle through OpenSolaris and submit them to the same quality control and monitoring processes that Sun used.
D'Amore is currently in charge of Illumos as a benevolent dictator, and Nexenta is supporting his work on the project and kicking in some funds. A dozen developers have joined the effort so far, and D'Amore is soliciting corporate sponsorship of the effort.
The project could expend over time to include other affiliated projects, such as those dealing with X11, desktop, and C++ runtime components as well as alternate OpenSolaris distributions on Power, ARM, and mainframe processors.
Having said all the delicate things about wanting a "collaborative and cooperative relationship" with Oracle for OpenSolaris development, D'Amore says that if the OpenSolaris community were abandoned or shut down by Oracle, "then this starts a big fork".
Illumos is for the moment a kind of insurance policy for the OpenSolaris community, until Oracle announces its plans for the project - perhaps at OpenWorld 2010 in late September. ®
COMMENTS
Submit post: Illumos sporks OpenSolaris
"I know that RedHat makes a profit and has for years, whereas Sun didn't make a profit from Slowaris on x64 or OpenSlowaris EVER."
I don't know where you got your figures from but:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/04/10/sun_software_biz/
"... Sun said that based on results in the first and second quarters of fiscal 2009 (from July through December 2008), its software business was humming along at a $600m annual run rate and growing at a 21 per cent rate ... "
and "... But that is not really the Sun software story. Sun had $1.91bn in services revenues - which includes hardware and software support not included in the above numbers - in those six months ..."
The article talks about how they're not making money like they used to, but It's still well ahead of RedHat http://www.redhat.com/about/news/prarchive/2008/fourthquarter.html for instance.
I know you're a troll, I know that facts don't stop you, I know you hate Solaris for existing, and that somehow it's existence causes you to foam at the mouth, but give it a rest already
@Matt -- Can't spell, does not know what dead is, and needs an education
You spelled OpenSolaris incorrectly.
-- why on Earth does he thnk any more people will be interested if they manage to get it to the point where it is without any corporate backing behind it?
1) Because huge Oracle is not as responsive as some community members desire
2) Because code which Oracle is not interested in accepting into the OpenSolaris will be able to be accepted into Illumos.
3) Because Illumos distributions can be built with special embedded features that Oracle is uninterested in (i.e. 128Meg memory, old devices drivers, etc.)
4) Because people like Solaris features (i.e. Xen, DTrace, Containers, ZFS, future Lutre integration, run older Linux & Solaris apps in Branded Zones, etc.) which huge Oracle may not find as necessary to advance in their business model
5) Because multiple other businesses are dependent upon Solaris and they don't want their businesses to be placed at risk due to the whims of a single person (i.e. linus) or company (i.e. oracle)
6) Because some people caught the gnu religion but still love real operating systems (i.e. gnu has not delivered decent kernel goods)
-- A fork... will die just as surely as the current version is.
OpenSolaris ARC's are being checked in daily - it is more alive than the fictitious Matt Bryant (or whatever he calls himself when the time/place suits him)
Illumos is not a fork but can offer other communities the possibility of a fork
-- Didn't anyone tell him about Linux?
Yea - doesn't run thousands of lines of POSIX shell scripts, lame 16 Gig file system limitations on proven file systems, lame production debugging instrumentation, lame backward compatibility, lame non-linux compatibility, lame licensing that makes other open source commercial contributions difficult to leverage
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