and so the un-freeing of former Sun products begins…
OpenSolaris powers my home brew NAS, because ZFS, DTrace, and a number of other key items it provides simply rock, and allow me to do things more quickly and easily (with less grief) than alternatives I’m willing to consider.
Yesterday, I saw Ben Rockwood’s blog post regarding a license change to Solaris proper, and it seems others sites have taken notice (and referenced his blog).
Though this licensing change is to Solaris, OpenSolaris is still in limbo and this isn’t good news for people like me who run free variants at home, and use what we learn to inform work decisions.
I’m a software developer at work, and as such don’t have the luxury of exploring operating systems on company time. I get what the IT department has decided is best, period.
Having the ability to tinker and learn at home is what drives me to make suggestions or offer informed opinions at work, and provides me with more experience that benefits both home and work.
The server components of my home were entirely Linux until I started tinkering with OpenSolaris (mostly for ZFS). I liked OpenSolaris so much that I switched my personal infrastructure over, and barring a few hiccups, I’m glad I did.
Sadly, where this is headed is that I’ll probably have to switch back, or more likely to Free/OpenBSD which have some of the things I like in the Solaris stack (again ZFS, DTrace etc). Sure, FUSE provides ZFS on Linux, but I’m not willing to trust it with my irreplaceable data just yet.
I’d like to see some statistics of what folks in our industry use at home, and how that influences (or not) what they use at work. Is Oracle heading down a short sighted path, or am I in the minority ?
I would really like to believe that power users who have total freedom to use what they want at home end up driving adoption where they work, which in turn generates direct or tangential revenue for the companies that provide the things they’re using.
Whether this is true or not, Oracle’s track record makes it clear where its interests lie, and thus sadly, where this will all likely end up.