OpenSolaris

» see opensolaris.org as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

For anybody learning this trade in Turkey in the middle 2000s, a free Unix meant a Linux ISO you downloaded and burned to a CD. Solaris meant expensive hardware in a photograph. That gap is the whole reason OpenSolaris existed and also the reason I only ever read about it: Sun was trying to move its operating system off its own machines and into the place where the free thing already was, several years after the free thing had won.

The opening happened in stages. The CDDL license cleared the Open Source Initiative on 14 January 2005 and DTrace was published eleven days after that, which was the trailer rather than the film. The bulk of the Solaris source went out on 14 June 2005. A charter followed in February 2006, setting up an OpenSolaris Governing Board that community members actually voted for. Sun was not simply publishing a tarball. It was building the machinery of a project that could outlive a decision made in its own boardroom.

It never quite worked. The distributions arrived late, with 2008.05 in May of that year and 2009.06 a year after it, both of them good and both of them landing into a market that had already standardized on something else. What OpenSolaris had was engineering nobody else had yet: ZFS, which treated a filesystem and a volume manager as one problem, and DTrace, which let you ask a running production machine questions without stopping it.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what was in the box ~

Zones were the other one. Sun shipped lightweight operating system containers years before the container word meant anything to anyone, and shipped them with the boring parts already handled, because a company selling to banks cannot ship the exciting half of an idea. Anyone who arrived at this stack in 2015 through Docker was rediscovering an argument Sun had finished making in 2005.

The problem was never the technology. It was that Solaris cost money to develop and Linux did not, and every year the reasons to pay for the difference got thinner. Sun's answer was to give the code away and hope the community would carry the maintenance the way it carried Linux. Communities do that for things they started, which turns out to be a different proposition than doing it for a large vendor's product on the vendor's terms.

~ the memo ~

Oracle closed its purchase of Sun in January 2010. For seven months nothing was said and the promised 2010.03 release did not appear. The governing board could not get anyone at Oracle to talk to it at all. On 2 August the board passed a resolution demanding Oracle appoint a liaison by 16 August or it would trigger the clause returning control of the community to the owner.

The answer came sideways. On 13 August an internal Oracle email leaked, telling employees that the company would stop publishing OpenSolaris source and would ship a product called Solaris 11 Express instead. It was never announced to the community it ended. The board met on 23 August and voted unanimously to resign. Under the charter, that handed responsibility for appointing a new board to Oracle, which never appointed one. The last build, 134b, was published that November by people who no longer had a project.

~ what survived ~

The fork was already running before the memo leaked. Garrett D'Amore announced illumos on 3 August 2010, ten days ahead of it, originally as an effort to replace the pieces of OpenSolaris that had never actually been opened. When Oracle shut the door, illumos became the kernel instead, and OpenIndiana launched on 14 September as a distribution on top of it. Both are still going.

ZFS had the bigger afterlife. It escaped through the fork and picked up a second implementation on FreeBSD and Linux. It now runs storage in places that have no idea whose operating system it came out of. Oracle kept Solaris, which is technically still a product and has not been culturally alive for over a decade. Sun gave away the parts that survived and sold the parts that did not, and the memo that ended the giving was written to staff rather than to anybody who cared.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »