bahamat's comments

There’s nothing in GPL that prevents or prohibits closing later versions. This is also true for the CDDL. The reason Oracle was able to close Solaris after it had been open is that Sun had required a contributor license agreement that assigned the copyright for your code to Sun before they would accept your changes. This would work even for the GPL.

The CLA is actually what initially prompted the illumos fork even before Oracle closed the gate.

Joyent initially had a CLA on Node.js for business reasons that (as far as I know) everyone in engineering disagreed with. When we were finally able to make Triton (née SmartDataCenter) open source we also eliminated the CLA for node.

We now have contributions from many people under the MPLv2 in Triton, and we are no longer the exclusive copyright holder which means that it is pretty much impossible\* for Samsung to close it again.

* We would have to either rip out all those commits or get every contributor to either relicense or assign copyright to Joyent.

You may want to try it again. We (Joyent) are using some of the latest Supermicro hardware in our cloud.

Most of the application specific images have stopped receiving updates. This is because they were time consuming to create/validate, and were mostly just the base-64 image with whatever package pre-installed via pkgin. This was also happened around the time of the rise of Docker, so most people were opting for docker images produced by upstream maintainers.

In most cases, you can just make a base-64 image and `pkgin in` whatever package you wanted and it's pretty much the same thing.

The Prometheus stuff is heavily used by us internally, and while it's usable, it's pretty experimental (i.e., changing quickly). I don't see any pull requests or issues that are obviously from you, so if you point me at something I can take a look at it.

1. CDDL is fully BSD compatible. The license is file based, so it's non-infecting, and binaries can be re-licensed. Win/win.

2. Most already do. Some even believe that 1 makes CDDL compatible with GPL as well and so ship binaries.

3. Patent protection in CDDL is extremely strong. Rumor has it that Oracle wanted to kill illumos via litigation, but never went ahead with it because they knew they'd never win because of the CDDL.

I don't see how it could. Except that maybe we'll see some more Solaris refugees coming in.

illumos has been a thriving project for over six years, fully independent from Oracle. There has been zero code sharing, and little interaction of any kind.

The significant difference here is that it's running unmodified Linux binaries. Compile on Linux, run in windows.

You should be able to compile functioning Linux binaries on Windows and run them on Linux as well.

After Oracle bought Sun. It was never a part of Solaris 11. I don't know if it's still part of Solaris 10 or not, but even if it is, it's only barely usable.

But it's alive and well (and awesome) in SmartOS, with active work going on to merge it into OmniOS, and eventually will be upstreamed to illumos-gate.

As has been pointed out on Twitter,

> this is funny because his main beef is actually due to systemic problems inside Intel, not Illumos or FOSS

https://twitter.com/kevinbowling1/status/714352429333086208

> The only thing I disagree with in the article is debugging vs. restarting. In the old model, where you have a sys admin per box, yes you might want to log in and manually tweak things. In big distributed systems, code should be designed to be restarted (i.e. prefer statelessness). That is your first line of defense, and a very effective one.

But if you never understand why it was a bad state in the first place you're doomed to repeat it. Pathologies need to be understood before they can be corrected. Dumping core and restarting a process is sometimes appropriate. But some events, even with stateless services, need in-production, live, interactive debugging in order to be understood.

That same web page lists Linux as harmful.

http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/operating-systems/linux/

Every time I see someone point out a problem with systemd the response always seems to be "that's just <subcomponent>, and using it is optional".

Why can't systemd developers/apologists take responsibility for their bad design and horrible decisions?

It's that, plus cloud orchestration (i.e., SmartDataCenter) which includes sdc-docker, providing the Docker API and image management.

SmartOS runs just fine on AMD CPUs. KVM support for AMD hasn't been merged to illumos-kvm yet (mostly just due to time), but you can do your own builds with it (https://github.com/jclulow/illumos-kvm/).

But Triton containers don't run in KVM anyway. They run natively on the OS with no VM. So you can download and run Triton on AMD today, just as you can with Intel CPUs.

It's not a different architecture. SmartOS is x86 based, as are the Linux binaries.

What lx-brand zones do is present an alternate system call table to the binaries executed inside the zone. Those "lx" calls are compatible with the Linux system call table and get mapped and/or translated to illumos kernel system calls. Binaries don't know the difference.

Not true at all.

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&feature=youtu.be...

I don't see why it's on the CDDL to fix. CDDL is a file based source license, the resulting binaries can be freely linked against binaries with different licenses. Section 3.6 explicitly says so!

The primary difference between MPL 1.1 and CDDL 1.0 with MPL 2.0 is that sections 1.7 and 3.3 of MPLv2 explicitly bow to GPL, a concession made by Mozilla to attempt to end this nonsense. Section 3.7 of MPL 1.0 and 1.1 (3.6 of CDDL) are clauses that imply GPL compatibility, without explicitly naming GPL. That wasn't good enough for the FSF, thus, MPLv2.

MPL was chosen as a template for CDDL because sections 3.7 (CDDL 3.6) gives it a quality like BSD, that the binaries can be larger works with different license terms while the rest of the license retains the copyleft qualities of the source code. Thus, CDDL would have "all the advantages of BSD, all the advantages of GPL".

Any supposed incompatibility is in the legal opinion of the FSF, who never stated their reasons, only the final conclusion, preventing healthy discussion on the matter.

Since the FSF and GNU identify all versions of MPL and CDDL to be "free" and "copyleft", why is the burden on CDDL or MPL? The FSF could have solved this by explicitly naming MPL/CDDL in GPLv3 (as they did with AGPL).

> CDDL is and was created with the purpose of being GPL incompatible, because Sun did not want Linux to be able to use ZFS and DTRACE

Not true at all.

* https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/31ny87/i_am_the_cto_o...

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&feature=youtu.be...

The problem with the GPL is that it presupposes its own supremacy and refuses to work with other free licenses. Two prime examples are MPL and CDDL (which was based on the MPL). Both of which GNU regards as free software licenses, but says to not use them because they don't bow to the FSF.

The binary in memory linking clause is the most harmful thing to ever happen to free software. It destroys collaboration and restricts user freedom. It causes partisanship and infighting within our communities and prevents good ideas, the best ideas, from being freely shared (breaking both freedoms 2 & 3!). GNU has declared war on other licenses for far less than that.

Can we all admit that the in memory linking clause makes GPL non-free software? We'd all be better off to realize it.

We know. The culture in Unix was always sharing source and user collaboration. When AT&T finally tried to exert control there was a large movement within the community to go free of AT&T code. GNU and BSD were both a reaction to that.

The rise of x86 and the availability of free Unix (in the form of BSD or GNU) was destined to destroy the proprietary Unix market. In 1991 neither BSD nor GNU had kernels booting on x86, leading Linus to eventually release Linux in August.

Linux had the luxury of being the only readily available Unix-like kernel on x86 for several years.

The USL v BSDi lawsuit slowed BSD efforts for nearly two years while Linux gained mindshare and features (specifically x86 features & drivers). Once the suit was settled out of court development took a long time to regain momentum.

Net/2 was released in June of 1991 (before Linux!), so if the USL lawsuit hadn't happened, we might all be running that instead.

And illumos has interfaces and functionality not available in Oracle Solaris. That's Oracle's decision, not ours.

I didn't mean to imply that there aren't talented and smart engineers working on Solaris at Oracle. I am, however, underwhelmed by 11.1 and 11.2, which I see as a management problem, not an engineering one. But the point I was making is that when the illumos community talks about Dtrace, zones, ZFS, etc, you can't discount that and say "no, that was Sun" because the people who were the primary developers of those technologies are now with illumos. Saying that Bryan, Adam and Mike can't take credit for Dtrace is just silly.