An Exit Strategy

2010-03-31 08:24:35 by jdixon

News broke recently that Oracle would begin enforcing old-school licensing policies on Solaris. The future of OpenSolaris has been in question for some time now. The writing is on the wall, in this geek's opinion. Oracle is a revenue-generating monster with blinders towards open source. The product manager in me appreciates the directness of it. The hacker in me despises them for raping Sun Microsystems and pulling the rug out under from the rest of us.

This will almost certainly renew interest in BSD distributions. Sure, Linux will get plenty of (re-)adopters migrating off Solaris. But keep in mind that many Solaris users left Linux for greener (read: more stable) pastures. They've tasted the delicacies of ZFS, Dtrace, project Crossbow and zones. Linux is a big bitter pill to swallow after you've tried those.

Fortunately, users have a choice. Although I'm not a big user of FreeBSD myself, I appreciate the work they've put into porting ZFS and Dtrace. They have OpenBSD's PF packet filter and experimental support for Valgrind. There are plenty of reasons to love FreeBSD right now. Suffice it to say that I'll be testing my alternatives and looking for an exit strategy from Oracle.