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Solaris 10 gets new file system, Postgres database, virtualization

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IGBT

Lifer
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NOVEMBER 18, 2005 (COMPUTERWORLD) - Sun Microsystems Inc. is adding an advanced, more powerful 128-bit ZFS file system, new virtualization technologies and the Postgres open-source database to its Solaris 10 Unix operating system, as the company looks to build market share and meet customer demands.
Also key to Sun?s latest move is the addition of ?container? technologies that allow users to run applications designed for Red Hat Linux on top of Solaris using segmented containers. The containers allow Linux binaries to run unmodified inside a secure environment, according to Sun. Similar features, such as the lxrun utility, have been included in Solaris in the past, but the new containers are designed to make the process easier and more seamless.
 
IMO Sun is on a sinking ship and they're doomed no matter what they do. Releasing Solaris under the CDDL is too little too late, especially since the CDDL is incompatible with the GPL. Supporting PostgreSQL is nice, but I would imagine that most people who are willing to pay for Solaris (it's not free for commercial use AFAIK) are also going to want to pay for Oracle as well.
 
Originally posted by: Nothinman
IMO Sun is on a sinking ship and they're doomed no matter what they do. Releasing Solaris under the CDDL is too little too late, especially since the CDDL is incompatible with the GPL. Supporting PostgreSQL is nice, but I would imagine that most people who are willing to pay for Solaris (it's not free for commercial use AFAIK) are also going to want to pay for Oracle as well.
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I think you get a license when you get the hardware. Once a small business pays for the hardware, they might not be in a position to buy an Oracle license. 😛

Just about everything is incompatible with the GPL. And the GPL is incompatible with plenty of other licenses. You don't see the GPLees worrying about that though, do you?
 
I noticed that.

There was a big to-do with combining the GPL code with CDDL userland stuff. It's a big problem, legally...

Plus it doesn't help to immediately piss everybody off that in order to get any information, code, and access to any docs about the 'free and open' Debian/Solaris project you had to email somebody and get a username a password to get access to because it was a 'pilot' program and not ready for public exposure. 😛

They fixed that pretty quickly though, but it didn't make the Debian people happy. As far as for people taking licensing issues seriously.. most end users don't care.. but kernel developers and people like Redhat and Debian take it very seriously. Distros have already have been served papers for distributing kernel items without source code for all of it and such, and other kernel devs are working at making closed source drivers for the Linux kernel as hard as possible to distribute.

Stuff like that is why I think that things like OpenSolaris from sun have a good chance of gaining popularity. They like stable ABIs. Propriatory drivers? No problem! Sun will even work on maintaining backward compatability. The allow you to make programs using non-free licenses using their CDDL'd code. So on and so forth.

Everything people complain about Linux developers licensing and political whatnot. No more Debian-like fanatism you have to deal with. They like closed source, stable ABIs and all sorts of stuff like that.

So I figure it will get a lot of attention for a while. In the long term however I bet it will turn to crap. You'll have about 400 different restrictive licenses for every peice of Solaris software that gets made. (this is one of the major reasons why the GPL is 'viral'.. (besides politics) if you only have to deal with one license it's much easier for developers then dealing with 30 different licenses) Nothing will be portable, and obtaining source code will be fully of dead ends and NDA boobytraps. You'll have drivers with bugs that can't be fixed, have to have crusty stale code in the kernel to support them, and many will only work in x86 and not sparc or AMD64 or work in AMD64, but not x86 or Sparc, or work in Sparc but nowere else, etc etc


ZFS will be aviable for Solaris 10 thru a update or service pack or whatever Sun calls the big updates. At least thats what they said.

ZFS sounds pretty cool, but so did ReiserFSv3 and we saw what happenned with that little bucket of overhype. Maybe Sun will release a BSD licensed version of it that everybody can use, but I doubt it.
 
Originally posted by: drag
ZFS sounds pretty cool, but so did ReiserFSv3 and we saw what happenned with that little bucket of overhype. Maybe Sun will release a BSD licensed version of it that everybody can use, but I doubt it.
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Word has it that ZFS touches a LOT of things in the I/O chain, so it wouldn't be a simple integration...

Would be kind of nice though.
 
Word has it that ZFS touches a LOT of things in the I/O chain, so it wouldn't be a simple integration...
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I would imagine so, from the brief description that I read it looks like a combination of quotas, lvm, a filesystem and probably more.
 
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