Solaris 11.4 Free For Open-Source Devs, Non-Production Use

Oracle has begun making a new version of Solaris 11.4 available for free/open-source developers and for non-production personal use. Phoronix reports: Solaris 11.4 CBE is the "Common Build Environment" and intended for open-source developers and strictly non-production personal use... That is if you want Solaris for new installs in 2022. The new Solaris 11.4 "CBE" spin is effectively a rolling release and from Oracle's perspective hopes to ease the integration of the open-source software relied upon by Solaris rather than being bound to the dated 11.4.0 GA release.

Downloading the new Solaris 11.4 CBE does require an Oracle account. The CBE builds are also described as "similar to a beta, they are pre-release builds of a particular SRU." The non-production use license is put out under the Oracle Technology Network Early Adopter License Agreement for Oracle Solaris. Oracle will allow upgrading from these free CBE releases to paid SRU releases under Oracle support contracts. More details for those interested in Oracle Solaris 11.4 CBE via the Oracle Solaris blog.

And nobody cars

[Valgrus Thunderaxe]

There's no good will left after Ellision bought Sun and shut out everyone who used Solaris without paying **exhorbitant** fees for the OS that used to be gratis for hobbyists.

Re:

[slashdot_commentator]

Pretty much killed Java's growth. I hope that somehow Oracle's strategic decisions after buying Java paid off for them. /s

Under a different regime, ZFS could be the primary disk management system for all consumer hard drives.

Re:

[Mahldcat]

And this is why you see firms making large efforts to avoid the oracle infestation? To the point where they spend engineering/dev cycles to fully switch from Oracle JRE/JDK to OpenJDK.

Similarly there is also a pretty large mass exodus from MySql to Percona, and Mysql Workbench for HeidiSql...

Re:

[slashdot_commentator]

Its obvious that Oracle operates on the tick model, and is destroying its customer base.

I was just pointing out that Sun had marketable products that Oracle destroyed by not embracing the modern open source software philosophy.

Re:

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Can Oracle be trusted?

[PhunkySchtuff]

And the answer is no. Who in their right mind would use this, knowing that the moment Oracle's lawyers smell the hint of money in the water, they will change the licensing requirements again so that what was once free is now an expensive licence. They have form in this regard, they have done it before, and you're crazy if you don't think they'll do it again.

Once upon a time, Solaris was a solid alternative to Linux on commodity x86 hardware. Today? Not so much. The only reason to use Solaris is if you're in bed with Oracle, and the only people in bed with Oracle are people with money to burn.

Re:Can Oracle be trusted?

[algaeman]

That's not true. There are lots of people that use Oracle because their bosses are in bed with Oracle and tell them they have to use it.

Re:

[Trailer Trash]

That's not true. There are lots of people that use Oracle because their bosses are in bed with Oracle and tell them they have to use it.

Honestly, this is the case pretty much 100%. Oracle is the kind of company that not only sells exclusively to "management", they probably attempt to keep actual tech folks away until the deal is signed.

Re:

[ArmoredDragon]

There are some cases where you were using some software, and then Oracle acquired it in some sort of takeover, possibly a hostile takeover. Eventually they update the software to remove any license checks and force you to agree to aggressive software audits. Then they later do a software audit and catch you on some sort of technicality, and your choice from there is either buy more oracle products or get sued.

Either way, Oracles lawyers will have their dick in your butt.

Re:

[Lonewolf666]

To prevent this, Solaris would have to be under a license that gives the four freedoms as defined by the Free Software Foundation:
1. The freedom to run the software for any purpose
2. The freedom to study how the software works and to adapt it to your needs
3. The freedom to redistribute copies of the software
4. The freedom to improve the software and distribute your improvements to the public

The article already tells us this is not the case. The limitation to "no production use" is clearly not compatible wit

Re:

[martiniturbide]

To be open source it has to be have this qualities:

1. Free Redistribution
2. Source Code
3. Derived Works
4. Integrity of The Author's Source Code
6. No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor
7. Distribution of License
8. License Must Not Be Specific to a Product
9. License Must Not Restrict Other Software
10. License Must Be Technology-Neutral


This "open" Solaris will be against "6. No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor: "The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in

Re:

[martiniturbide]

Source: https://opensource.org/osd [opensource.org]

Re:Can Oracle be trusted?

[gmack]

No kidding. At a place I used to work, the software devs and the previous jr admin messed up badly. The Oracle cluster was slow so they tried more memory, then tried replacing all of the CPUs with ones with more cores not realizing that would jack up the licensing requirements. Due to someone asking Oracle to price out the cost of one of the other systems and then not following through on an order. (it was too expensive so we went with something else) We got audited. The extra cores cost the company close to half a million dollars since Oracle demanded we buy a bunch of random licenses we didn't need even in the bad config. unneeded Oracle licenses. The best part was that when I investigated the performance issues, the problem was a SAN performance issue. I went through the licensing docs before the audit, there were issues where if you use Oracle's VM software and configure it exactly right, the Hyper-threaded cores don't count as a core needing a license but if you mess up the config or use say VMware, the HT threads count as a full core. I ended up going bare metal and our sales rep asked me why I was asking for so few cores on a system that was otherwise powerful. "Oracle licensing reasons." Then he understood.

These things are designed to maximize your odds of messing up your licensing. You would think it would limit itself to how many cores you licensed and throw a warning somewhere but no, it has to do things in a way that maximizes Oracle's revenue. There was nothing in the logs to warn me we were exceeding our license. And since the hardware changes were made before I even started working there, I had no reason to even check that.

The next year, the Oracle sales reps are wondering why we aren't starting new Oracle projects and opting for other databases for new products, they just didn't get that we didn't like being treated like that. They had a right to do what they did, but they cost the relationship by being so heavy handed.

For me: no Oracle projects if I have a say.

Re:

[slashdot_commentator]

Solaris is a server oriented OS. Its much more reliable than using Windows consumer OSs for those tasks. One might get more security through obscurity using Solaris.

If the DTRACE feature works on consumer level Solaris OS, that may be desirable to some hardcore developers.

But like all of Oracle's moves, only a decade too late to have relevant consequence.

Re:

[PhunkySchtuff]

Solaris was never intended to be an alternative to Windows. Solaris on x86 was a viable to Linux once upon a time, but Solaris on SPARC was where Sun had their sights set, and it was a formidable combination with rock-solid hardware and a powerful operating system that enabled things we can only dream about on the desktop or commodity server space - think about things like hot swap CPUs and RAM, this is possible on Solaris SPARC.
Interestingly enough, Apple built DTrace into Mac OS X. It's utility is somewha

Re:

[couchslug]

"NO never forget GROKLAW" indeed.
Never reward evil. There is money at stake and when money is at stake no one gives a fuck about ideals who is not already an idealist.

Re:

[F.Ultra]

That was SCO with money from Microsoft, what does this have to do with Oracle and Solaris?!

Too little, too late

[CaptainJeff]

I grew up on old Unix. The original System III and V, Solaris, HP-UX, IRIX, and more.
SunOS, and then Solaris, were the best. They were awesome, and Sun Microsystems did a great job with them.
Once Oracle acquired Sun, the neglect to Solaris, and the SPARC architecture, was immense. What Solaris and SPARC are today are hollow shells of what they were. That's sad, but it is what it is.

Re:Too little, too late

[phantomfive]

20 years ago I wanted to use Solaris.

Re:

[Mahldcat]

Or pure curiosity driven by nostalgia...As in I want to screw around with this on a VM purely because of the time I spent working on classwork (labs) that standardized on Solaris (Sparc 5) during most of my post bac and graduate classes.

In addition the student populated IT dept I was involved with trained you up on Solaris--their primary test involve you having to use their Jumpstart mechanism to reimage a "non functional" machine. Can't recall the actual process used, but I "think" it was something where

Re:

[tbuskey]

Solaris was innovative when they developed dtrace, ZFS, Zones and open sourced OpenSolaris, Samfs/QFS, Hudson/Jenkins and a number of things.

When Oracle ripped the rug out from OpenSolaris it was the end of Solaris' future. All the articles, blogs and other knowledge Sun employees created disappeared & redirected to the Oracle Solaris page. That made it harder to support and almost impossible for anyone new to learn Solaris.

Sun contributed many useful things to Unix as a whole. NFS was a major part o

Re:

[cpurdy]

You're not wrong.

But the neglect began at Sun. By the time that Oracle bought Sun, the investment in Sparc and Solaris was near zero.

Oracle does a lot of things wrong, but in this case, the choice was either Sun going bankrupt (and Solaris ending up who-knows-where), or Oracle buying the carcass and milking what they could for CA-style revenue. (CA as in Computer Associates: "Where companies go to die.")

It's of no consequence

[Sebby]

Since no one in their right mind would even come close to touching anything of ORACLE's.

Remember kids, it stands for:

One
Rich
Asshole
Called
Larry
Ellison

And how do you think he got so rich, and became such an asshole? Easy! [ycombinator.com]

I wonder if ooenindiana is still forging ahead

[Dan9999]

I kind of miss the polish of solaris, however because of licensing uncertainty, openindiana would be the only option if I was to attempt using that again.

"It's a trap!!"

[BBF_BBF]

To quote Star Wars, "It's a trap!!!!"

Trust Oracle to wring every cent out of you once you get dependent on their products for any commercial purpose.

Just look at Java.

Re:

[dromgodis]

What about Java? AFAIK you are welcome to use any OpenJDK distro for unlimited commercial purposes without paying anything to Oracle.

Re:

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

I used to love Solaris...

[kiphat]

But I wouldn't touch this with a ten foot pole.

Good luck with that

[lcs]

/Ex OpenSolaris user.

Why Solaris? What's the Use-Case?

[RayDonaldPratt]

When I read the article, I thought "Why?" Why would I invest the time and effort to learn and run Solaris on any machine without some use-case for Solaris? I have Ubuntu on my computer, and the use-case is free software and the opportunity to learn how to use an operating system that is used by businesses throughout the world. Moreover, I can't tell you how deeply it angered me to have to log-in with Microsoft before I could use my computer. When my screen finally went blank and stayed blank after a Windows

Re: Why Solaris? What's the Use-Case?

[CompMD]

There is a significant amount of financial, scientific, and engineering software that was written for the old Unixes, including Solaris, that will never be ported to Linux. It is cheaper and safer for users of this software to stay on SPARC/Solaris systems.

In 2008, I still had a Sun Ultra 1 C3D and SGI Iris Indigo on my desk at work in an engineering company because we had to support our customers on those platforms.

Surpassed

[Misagon]

Oracle's "official" Solaris fork has already been surpassed by the open-source Illumos [illumos.org] fork.
It runs a modern OpenZFS, and have numerous other improvements that Oracle's Solaris never got.

There are several distributions of Illumos, including OpenIndiana for desktops and SmartOS more geared for the cloud.

Re:

[jd]

An open source Solaris could borrow fixes and, in theory, they could pay for a core set of developers that exceeded the number for the open source version.

As was shown by OpenOffice and Mysql, Oracle just doesn't do any of this. It is that which makes me the most skeptical.

The exception, perhaps, would be if they released the Trusted Solaris patches as well. But I saw nothing to suggest Oracle had, and past open source projects indicate security is not a priority to them.

Thanks Larry, but I'll pass

[atheos]

and suggest that people use https://www.openindiana.org/ [openindiana.org] instead

Why Solaris?

[Midnight Thunder]

There used to be a time that Solaris was an attractive offering, along with the hardware Sun sold. Like many of the previous generation of Unix variants, Linux took their place because it was accessible and had a strong community.

Now I ask what makes Solaris attractive today and why would I to use Solaris if I donâ(TM)t have any existing Solaris based software purchases.

How does this differ?

[jd]

OpenIndiana is based on OpenSolaris is based on Solaris.

Unless this is substantially better, properly maintained and incorporates existing fixes, I'm unsure of the benefit of Yet Another Fork.

Re:

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

The big surprise?

[ebvwfbw]

I'd be surprised if they hit 50 unique downloads.

I used to maintain SUN boxes. For decades. Their last release was so hard to use I had to contact Oracle and spend a long time trying to convince them that there was a problem. Even though we had their best paid support for it. It was more install and pray software. Maybe it would be better if all the authentication were done only with SUN products. We had active directory and that works fine with RedHat and others. Sun, not so much. It seemed to DL the entir

Its day has passed

[Guspaz]

The only reason most people would care about Solaris is, I would imagine, ZFS. The problem is that OpenZFS (which is actively developed) has long since surpassed the closed ZFS (which hasn't been updated in almost 4 years), and OpenZFS is available on a wide variety of platforms. Linux, BSD.... and even the myriad modern OpenSolaris forks.

"Rolling updates" at 0 RPM

[Another Random Kiwi]

The original "CBE" release has been out for over a month now... and as far as I can tell there have been no updates to any of either the base system packages or the open source software packages. A rolling release at 0 RPM is not exactly interesting, though it certainly was an improvement over the 11.4 GA which was so old (and broken) it wasn't funny.