2010-02-25
Reading the Oracle tea leaves for Solaris
(Disclaimer: I am currently feeling pessimistic about both the future of Solaris and our future with Solaris.)
The big news lately is the combination of the fact that Oracle is now charging even for security patches to Solaris and rumors that Oracle will entirely end OpenSolaris support. So, what do these tea leaves suggest to me about the future of Solaris and OpenSolaris?
My initial reaction is that the move to charging for Solaris 10 security patches effectively means the end of the free version of Solaris 10 as a useful operating system to install for general use (sadly, some people will be persuaded that they don't actually need security patches; they're wrong). Any free version of Solaris 10 is now basically a sampler, much like Oracle has done with a personal use version of their database, and I wouldn't be surprised if the Solaris license was revised to reflect that in a while.
More generally, I don't believe that Oracle has suddenly decided to get into the operating system business, and I see these events as support for this view. Unlike Sun, I expect that Oracle sees Solaris as necessary and potentially useful infrastructure for their other products, not as an end to itself (especially not as a profitable end, because it hasn't been). Solaris can be justified as an independent entity and expense only so long as it pays its own way, and the same is true of OpenSolaris.
My guess is that commercial support for OpenSolaris can't ever pay its own way (especially on the very limited and mostly useless terms that Sun offered before) due to a very small potential market, so I rather expect that it is not long for this world and that Oracle will not sell support for further official versions of OpenSolaris.
(Commercial support for Solaris is safe so long as Oracle uses it as a base for their own products.)
Will OpenSolaris itself continue to exist? I don't know. There are costs to operate opensolaris.org and to have now-Oracle people deal with the OpenSolaris community; the question is how much benefit Oracle derives from the community, especially given that Oracle isn't in the operating system business as such. My impression is that outside contributions to OpenSolaris have been low, but I could be off-base.
2010-02-21
It's sinking in that Sun is gone
I know, I'm behind the times, but it is slowly sinking in to me that Sun is gone; that Sun Microsystems, the company of Andy Bechtolsheim and Bill Joy, the source of NFS among so many other things, is no more. What pieces of it survive are parts of a software company.
I'm sad about this not so much because of the end of Sun the company, but because it underlines the end of an era: Sun was the last survivor, in a way the last remnant, of the group of 1980s Unix workstation vendor that collectively started the era of Unix workstations and servers. Realistically that time has been over for a while now, but while Sun still existed a little bit of the dream lingered on. Now, that remnant is gone.
That this touches me is a matter of personal history. I got into this field at just the right time to be swept up in all of this, so that my image of Sun was formed when they were the premiere Unix workstation company for normal people (SGI was better, but they were too expensive for anyone but graphics pros; ordinary people could actually aspire to use a Sun someday). And Sun did a lot and gave us a lot in the course of being that company; much of the Unix environment I use every day comes ultimately from that era and Sun's work. To see it all come to nothing in the end is, yes, a bit sad.
(Technically HP still exists, but I never considered them a real Unix workstation company; they just sold Unix machines as a sideline, much like IBM. It was never anywhere near close to the heart of either company.)
Thus, to me this marks the end not just of a company but the definite closure of an era and the end of the last remnant of the dream of the Unix hardware vendor and of the many associated dreams that spun off from it (such as the RISC dream); when your last champion (which was also your first champion) finally falls, that's it.
(The good news is that the torch of Unix has not been extinguished; that passed long ago to the free Unixes (among which I include Linux).)