Please Be Patient

With all the ruckus surrounding Oracle's apparent abandonment of the community, and OGB's stated intention to suicide, the community uproar has been crazy.

Without giving any details, let me say that a few of us are quietly but diligently working on solutions to the critical problems, and I expect we'll be able to talk much more freely about the solutions we will be offering in early August, which is coming up very soon now.

So, I'm going to humbly ask folks to be patient -- hold your comments, complaints, and flames about Oracle and OpenSolaris and OGB in check please. If you can wait just a little bit longer, then I believe we'll be able to offer a more constructive outlet for your frustration and energies.

Thanks.

Comments

Unknown said…
And why are you holding your cards so close to your chest? Why not share now?
July 15, 2010 at 11:05 AM
jpk said…
I appreciate the update. Speaking as one who has held all his comments. I look forward to August.
July 15, 2010 at 11:05 AM
Unknown said…
I want to avoid getting into a debate about the details that might distract from getting the work done. Once we have something to *show* (call it a prototype), then we'll announce and the mail can fly. :-) So its about staying focused instead of /.'d.
July 15, 2010 at 11:22 AM
Alasdair said…
Hi Garrett,

I'm a little confused. Are you talking as an Oracle employee or as a Nexenta employee? Who is "we"?

Obviously Nexenta is dependant upon Oracle continuing to provide source code updates to the community (which thankfully haven't stopped yet). But the radio silence and lack of communication/engagement with the OGB is highly suspicious and doesn't send a good signal about the continued prospects of OpenSolaris.

Are Nexenta concerned about this? Or do you/other ex-Oracle/Sun staff know enough to not be worried?

Thanks,

Alasdair
July 15, 2010 at 2:07 PM
Unknown said…
I'm not an Oracle employee, but I am Nexenta employee. However, in this particular case, I'm talking as a group of individuals (some of whom are Nexenta employees working with Nexenta sponsorship, but not all) who are working on a solution. More about this will become clear next month.

Nexenta is not wholly dependent upon Oracle source code releases, although right now we track them closely. If that were to stop, then we could continue, but at that point our product and the Oracle code base would necessarily "fork".

Obviously, we ("Nexenta" now) prefer to stay in sync with Oracle as much as possible. It would be unfortunate if Oracle's open source code were to vanish, but not utterly catastrophic to us.
July 15, 2010 at 2:52 PM
Unknown said…
So are you in communication with Oracle? If so why are they not communicating with the OGB? This kind of secrecy is the reason for the uproar you have been witness to.
I guess it will never end, and it does not make these users sit and wait in anticipation like the followers of other products a'la Apple Inc etc. It just makes us more irritated since we had the illusion that we were part of the project not just someone that willingly and with out question fork over absurd amounts of cash on demand.
July 15, 2010 at 3:49 PM
Unknown said…
Chad: No, I'm not in communication with Oracle, I have no idea what Oracle's plans are, apart from what they *were* when I was still an employee there. (I am verboten from talking about them per NDA, and they may have since changed anyway.)
July 15, 2010 at 4:07 PM
gtirloni said…
Garret, If something that doesn't involve another situation where we would be interacting with a single sponsor and a conflicting agenda shows up.. count me in. I think the community only needs a little bit of guidance and room to work. Looking forward to whatever is coming :)
July 16, 2010 at 12:41 AM
Stefan Parvu said…
Probable worth of sending this info to OSOL discuss mailing list or somewhere under OSOL not on your blog! I bet not so many people have your blog bookmarked.
July 16, 2010 at 2:58 AM
Anonymous said…
I like the sounds of that. I think an ideal solution would be a Nexenta-based community distro to replace Sun's OpenSolaris distro which Oracle are clearly not interested in going forward.

(Despite assurances 2010.x would appear 2010.H1 it is obvious this was a bare-faced lie and they have no intention of doing any further binary releases of the OpenSolaris distro).

My guess would be that Solaris Next is cooking and will go out to select enterprise beta partners in September - to be announced at Oracle Open World. This corrects what in my view was a mistake by Sun which was to leave too long a gap between the release of Solaris 10 and Solaris Next, to the extent that enterprise customers (in other words, the customers that Sun actually makes significant amounts of money from) simply did not have access to most of the cool innovations since Solaris 10 FCS.

Cheers

Andrew.
July 16, 2010 at 4:37 PM
David said…
Andrew posts, "...community distro to replace Sun's OpenSolaris distro which Oracle are clearly not interested in going forward."

There has been nothing clear from Oracle suggesting they are not interested in supplying a binary open source distribution. No such announcement has been made.

Andrew posts, "Despite assurances 2010.x would appear 2010.H1 it is obvious this was a bare-faced lie and they have no intention of doing..."

Assurances were not given of a firm commit date, merely a possible timeline with possible features.

The only thing certain is that the lack of a release delayed by a few weeks from a non-committed date is not a bare-faced lie. It does not project obvious intentions.

Andrew posts, "My guess..."

...probably matters as much as my guess. In all, they do not matter until Oracle provides the community an announcement.

A small number of weeks is not too long to wait with a product as substantial as Solaris.

I welcome any OpenSolaris binary distribution from any vendor, with: SVR4, UNIX, and POSIX standards for: SPARC, x86, and ARM.
July 20, 2010 at 1:39 PM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

An important milestone

Yesterday, with very little fanfare, illumos passed an important milestone. This milestone was the integration of  195 Need replacement for nfs/lockd+klm This is work that I originally tasked Gordon Ross and Dan Kruchinin to work while we were colleagues at  Nexenta .  Gordon started the work, picking up bits from FreeBSD as a starting point and gluing it to the illumos entry points.  Dan continued with it, and fleshed out a lot of the skeleton that Gordon had started.  It was subsequently picked up by the engineers at Delphix , and -- after some important bug fixing work was completed -- was integrated into their product quite some time ago -- reportedly its been stable since December in their product. The reason this is such an important milestone, is two fold: First, this represents a substantial collaborative effort, involving contributions from parties across several organizational boundaries.  The level of collaboration achieved here is a w...
Read more

GNU grep - A Cautionary Tale About GPLv3

My company, DEY Storage Systems , is in the process of creating a new product around the illumos operating system.  As you might imagine, this product includes a variety of open and proprietary source code.  The product itself is not delivered as a separate executable, but as a complete product.  We don't permit our customers to crack it open, both from the sense of protecting our IP, but also to protect our support and release engineering organizations -- our software releases consist only of a single file and we don't supply tools or source for other parties to modify that file. One of the pieces that we wanted to integrate into the tree is an excellent little piece of software called Zookeeper , produced by the Apache organization.  Like illumos, Zookeeper has a nice non-viral copyleft license, which makes it nice for integration into our product. However, I discovered that as part of our integration, one of my engineers had decided to integrate GNU grep. ...
Read more

The Hand May Be Forced

Well, as you may have read , Oracle has decided that at some point very soon, we're going to lose normal regular access to the source code for OS/Net. (I.e. the Solaris kernel and supporting programs.) While I would have vastly preferred for Illumos to have a cooperative and collaborative relationship with Oracle , it appears that Oracle doesn't value this. In fact, the exact words were from the management at Oracle were as follows: Solaris is not something we outsource to others, it is not the assembly of someone else’s technology, and it is not a sustaining-only product. While I understand the need to own the technology, there are few things that could be stated that show a stronger NIH attitude than this. Its unlikely that there will ever be a way for Oracle and the greater community to have a collaborative relationship. This is a dark day for OpenSolaris -- its effectively dead now. (Its parent, Solaris, lives on however.) How unfortunate. For Oracle that is. Because...
Read more