Oracle Releases Solaris 11.4 "CBE" Free For Open-Source Developers / Non-Production Use

[antnythr]

I always enjoyed this particular desktop theme shown in the article

[uxmkt]

Yes, let's write free sw for a dead OS. Why does Oracle even bother?

I mean, people write code for DOS today, so I guess someone said let's jump on the bandwagon.

[hoohoo]

I mean, people write code for DOS today, so I guess someone said let's jump on the bandwagon.

MSDOS is not dead though. It is still the OS behind many point of sale systems to this day. So it is widely used in production systems. When was the last time you saw anyone using Solaris? Solaris users are not much more than a couple of recalcitrant neckbeards in the local Uni physics dept, mourning their lost glory and bemoaning the kids these days with their bastardized Linux that's not Real UNIX?

[cjcox]

You'd be surprised. Oracle made $798M on hardware last quarter, and some of that is still running Solaris. Hell, SPARC may still make up some surprising percentage of that. Big enterprise customers with software built and tuned for Solaris, with extremely long cycles to update that code for Linux. Dropping a million bucks on a hardware refresh that's still running Solaris is peanuts compared to the software rewrite costs (and time / risk), especially for those still running it on SPARC hardware. And since they aren't investing much in it, their margins are still decent even as the revenue for that segment continues to decline.

Actually, you might be surprised. As a child of the day when Sun Microsystems was huge, all the big shops that I know have long left Sun and Solaris. It's a far far far cry from the old days. Who builds new on Snoracle? Or, better, who that is sane, builds new on Snoracle? IMHO, anyone that is, has been duped.

[Gonk]

They'd be better off just releasing Solaris under a BSD license and accepting whatever interest and improvements they get from the OSS community. I for one would welcome a BSD licensed OpenZFS that could use some of the improvements made to Oracle ZFS after the fork.

[NateHubbard]

OmniOS is a great replacement. Fast & easy to install. Boots up in seconds. The deep ZFS integration is nice to have. (Normally I use a RHEL clone for servers and Arch for desktops, but I've installed one OmniOS storage box.)

https://omnios.org/

Also: this is my first post here :-)

Just one little issue. That site doesn't explain what OmniOS actually is. It could be a Linux distro, a BSD, or something else entirely from just reading over the info they have on there. I did eventually find a linuxquestions.org post from several years ago that explained it was based on a fork of OpenSolaris.

[evert_mouw]

Just one little issue. That site doesn't explain what OmniOS actually is. It could be a Linux distro, a BSD, or something else entirely from just reading over the info they have on there. I did eventually find a linuxquestions.org post from several years ago that explained it was based on a fork of OpenSolaris.

They share a lot of code with OpenIndiana (the main OpenSolaris fork) and the teams consider a merge. I agree with you that this is not obvious from their site. It shows how much the Solaris-family enthusiasts are an in-crowd IMHO; not a good sign for future development, which is unfortunate, given the code quality which is battle-tested.

[NateHubbard]

It shows how much the Solaris-family enthusiasts are an in-crowd IMHO; not a good sign for future development, which is unfortunate, given the code quality which is battle-tested.

Yeah, I was looking for something like, "based on xxxx", "built from scratch in pure c / assembly / rust" or something. You usually see some explanation of what this thing is on the "about" page, but no.

[uxmkt]

MSDOS is not dead though. It is still the OS behind many point of sale systems to this day [...] When was the last time you saw anyone using Solaris?

Just because you don't see Solaris doesn't mean it's unused. Arguably Oracle is still making money, so someone is using it—and not just beardy university lab guys, and someone is also pushing updates or we would not be hearing news all the time.

[hoohoo]

Just because you don't see Solaris doesn't mean it's unused. Arguably Oracle is still making money, so someone is using it—and not just beardy university lab guys, and someone is also pushing updates or we would not be hearing news all the time.

Could just be Oracle cooking up the books. But yeah, maybe some legacy telco or such is getting taken to the cleaners with long term contracts.

News all the time? Phoronix is the only place that even mentions Solaris as a living product, and that rarely. Even STH and Next Platform only ever mention it as a relic of the past.