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05.17.10 Is It Time For OpenSolaris Users To Jump Ship?  By Alex TrentSince Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems and with it, several open source technologies, OpenSolaris users want to know where Oracle's priorities lie. OpenSolaris has had three stable releases in approximately six month intervals since June 2008. The latest release was due in March, but now we're halfway through May with no release. Not even a single post has been made on the OpenSolarsis website http://www.opensolaris.com. Something is very, very wrong. What happened? Dan Roberts, Oracle Executive, claimed in February that, "rumours of its [OpenSolaris] death have been greatly exaggerated". Was he just saying that to hold off the fires and flames of impending doom? Recently Oracle changed the license to the comercial version of Solaris to no longer allow free use. Now Solaris downloads are limited to a trial time of 90 days. This news, with no corresponding statement on the future of OpenSolaris begs the question, "is it time for OpenSolaris users to jump ship?" Luckily there are currently nine different OpenSolaris derivatives with two of them Nexenta http://www.nexenta.org and NexentaStor http://www.nexenta.com/corp making releases recently. NexentaStor 3.0.2 was released last week. To switch to a whole new OS, for OpenSolaris users this might be a bit of a change, as Nexenta for example, is an Ubuntu Linux based OpenSolaris derivative, but at least the project is still actively releasing new builds and has an active community http://www.nexenta.org/projects/site/boards. What other alternatives are there? Well theres always FreeBSD http://www.freebsd.org and its major derivatives, PC-BSD and DesktopBSD. FreeBSD and its deravitives all support the major features of OpenSolaris, ZFS and DTrace. Trying new systems may not be a solution for some and I hope for their sake that OpenSolaris does continue to live on, but all things must pass, just as Amiga and BeOS users had to eventually move on so will OpenSolaris users. There may be a way for the community to save OpenSolaris by creating a fork of the official distribution, but due to the relatively small user community this may not be possible. Besides, old school Solaris admins can sometimes be unwelcoming to the influx of new OpenSolaris users, no doubt they don't care much for OpenSolaris and surely would love to see it go. As to those that have already accepted the passing of OpenSolaris, my condolences, I grieve with you. About the Author: Alex Trent is a staff writer for WebProNews |
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