Pete Zaitcev ([info]zaitcev) wrote,
@ 2007-04-11 10:45:00
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Jeff Bonwick the ambassador, bis
Kir of OpenVZ fame is picking on Jeff's use of "vibrant" in comments to the previous post. I agree that it was funny, but I would rather not concentrate on Jeff's choice of words. For sure, his advocacy was ham-fisted and full of idiotic FUD (which pissed DaveM off). But that's not important. The important part is that he finds it necessary to promote Solaris on a storage appliance, and the arguments he uses for it. He is saying, "So what if we have no drivers and no applications, and we are hard to use, but look at our ZFS and DTrace!"

This is the problem OpenSolaris is facing today in the nutshell: it has no breadth. It has a very limited number of excellent technologies, such as ZFS. They are very interesting, but they confer no advantage outside of very narrow niches, such as the storage appliance. To get the breadth, you have to have thousands of simple humans like Pete Zaitcev. Your OS can't survive with just Jeff Bonwick and Val Henson (who has quit Sun). I'm aware of the productivity gap according to Brooks and Paul Graham, but the problem is, while Jeff is 10 or 100 times more productive than I am, he is not 1000 times more productive. Plus, we have Stephen Tweedie.

So, what to do? Sun alone cannot hire as many programmers as Microsoft or Oracle. So they have to grow a "community", and it has to be "vibrant" and "large", of which OpenSolaris' community is neither currently. It may be "high signal-to-noise", which is easy when you're small. Just ask NetBSD people.

Life is not as simple, of course. For one thing, I ignored the OpenOffice here for simplicity, but it's an important application running on Solaris. And then there's Java where Sun exhibits a passable stewardship.

BTW, since we're on it, isn't ZFS patented? OpenSolaris may be open source, but you can't just throw it into your storage appliance and ship it without paying Sun. With Linux and XFS (or ext4), you can. This is something Jeff neglected to mention on his blog as if it's not an issue at all. It would be nice if he reassured prospective appliance manufacturers in this regard.

UPDATE: Nick Istre reminds me about the patent grant in comments. How silly of me.


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[info]dummybump
2007-04-12 01:15 am UTC (link)
According to Wikipedia (so, take the usual grain of salt or what have you), ZFS is licensed under the CDDL, which is incompatible with GPL. There is/was an attempt at porting ZFS to the Linux FUSE system (which might be interesting to see come about, given Sun's claims about ZFS), but I haven't kept up with it at all.

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[info]zaitcev
2007-04-12 02:27 am UTC (link)
Ah, that's right. CDDL implies a patent grant. Although I thought a catch existed, like you could not modify the code without coming outside the grant. I honestly didn't follow it either, which is why I asked.

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ZFS Patent
[info]manoj_joseph
2007-04-21 05:13 am UTC (link)
BTW, since we're on it, isn't ZFS patented? OpenSolaris may be open source, but you can't just throw it into your storage appliance and ship it without paying Sun. With Linux and XFS (or ext4), you can.

This is incorrect. Please see
http://www.opensolaris.org/os/about/faq/licensing_faq/#patents

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Re: ZFS Patent
[info]zaitcev
2007-04-21 05:26 am UTC (link)
Already noted by other commenters. Please pay attention.

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Solaris hard to use
[info]manoj_joseph
2007-04-21 05:18 am UTC (link)
"So what if we have no drivers and no applications, and we are hard to use, but look at our ZFS and DTrace!"

Have you tried Solaris ever? Have you tried open solaris recently? Please do. It is not hard to use.

http://www.genunix.org/distributions/belenix_site/
http://www.sun.com/software/solaris/solaris-express/

-Manoj

(Reply to this) (Thread)
Re: Solaris hard to use
[info]zaitcev
2007-04-21 05:32 am UTC (link)
You missed the point completely. It's not relevant and is not being discussed here if I find Solaris easy to use. What is being discussed is Jeff's implicit admission as a part of his value statement for Solaris on the storage appliance. The statement which you quoted above was Jeff's, not mine (although it was paraphrased).

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