Information freedom for open source users.

When the OpenSolaris Governing Board issued their ultimatum to Oracle on July 12, few thought it would have the desired effect of saving OpenSolaris. The board sent a message that if Oracle didn’t start to show some interest in OpenSolaris by August 23, they would disband and leave OpenSolaris without leadership and guidance. more>>

An anonymous reader writes “Phoronix is reporting that an Indian technology company has been porting the ZFS filesystem to Linux and will be releasing it next month as a native kernel module without a dependence on FUSE. ‘In terms of how native ZFS for Linux is being handled by this Indian company, they are releasing their ported ZFS code under the Common Development & Distribution License and will not be attempting to go for mainline integration. Instead, this company will just be releasing their CDDL source-code as a build-able kernel module for users and ensuring it does not use any GPL-only symbols where there would be license conflicts. KQ Infotech also seems confident that Oracle will not attempt to take any legal action against them for this work.’”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

mysidia writes “Last month, it was mentioned that the OpenSolaris governing board issued an ultimatum to Oracle. It turns out that Oracle continued to ignore requests to appoint a liaison after the governing board’s demands. This morning, the board unanimously passed a resolution to dissolve itself. Source code changes are no longer available, and it would appear that OpenSolaris and community involvement in the development of Solaris have been killed as rumored. We recently discussed a ‘Spork’ of OpenSolaris called Illumos. Perhaps now, this will have a chance at becoming a true fork.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Despite personal beliefs, everybody treads a bit more carefully on Friday the 13th. But no amount of precaution could protect the Open Source community from the wave of bad luck that fell last Friday. Oracle finally lived up to the fears many have been afraid to speak. more>>

On August 3 Nexenta hosted a conference call to announce a new open source project called “Illumos.” Illumos is an open source alternative to a critical part of the OpenSolaris distribution free from the binds of Oracle. more>>

When Oracle began the acquisition of Sun, few doubted that MySQL was the main asset of interest. With MySQL still breathing six months later, users hoped Sun’s other projects would survive as well. But despite Oracle’s early claims and intermittent assurances that OpenSolaris would remain open source software, very little else has been said. more>>

Oracle released a set of 59 patches on Monday to fix security vulnerabilities across its entire range of database, application, and middleware products.

The patches include fixes for three critical flaws affecting virtually every supported version of the company’s Database Server technology.

Oracle will release on Tuesday 59 patches to fix security weaknesses affecting hundreds of products, according to a notice on its website.

Twenty-one of the vulnerabilities affect products related to Solaris, the Unix operating system Oracle acquired through its purchase of Sun Microsystems. Seven of them can be exploited remotely over a network without requiring a password or username, Oracle said.

Oracle will acquire Secerno, which makes firewall products for databases that protect against hackers and data breaches, the companies said Thursday.

The purchase price was not disclosed. The transaction is expected to close at the end of next month, according to Oracle.

boer lee writes with the news that you can expect trouble in downloading firmware updates for your Sun server if you purchased it before March 16, 2010. “In a somewhat surprising move (and without any notification to customers), Oracle shut down public access to firmware downloads. I learned this the hard way when I contacted Oracle customer service almost two weeks ago. Yes, it took 13 days for me to get access to the firmware download for systems under the standard warranty (i.e. less than a year old).”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

One of the most appealing aspects of journalism is that, sometimes, you get to give billionaires like Larry Ellison (right) some free advice.

Our story begins late last month, after I suggested here that Oracle was “taking OpenSolaris back.”

I got a lot of blogospheric pushback, calling me out by name. Masoud Kalali at JavaNet said I got it wrong. This spread halfway around the world, then  to NatMac, to Jessica Thornsby, and finally Alex Gorbachev demanded I stop the FUD. I wish I’d seen it.

Their main point was that the OpenSolaris license didn’t change, only the basic Solaris conditions. Point taken. But what is most interesting to me (although I could always be wrong again) is the reaction from Oracle itself.

Silence. And this silence has many customers wondering whether Oracle is interested in open source at all.

The silence is telling. It’s the dog that did not bark. Oracle is going about its business, bloggers notwithstanding, ignoring even ServerWatch’s recent claims that OpenSolaris is going bye-bye.

It reminds me a bit of politics, not in a partisan sense but in a tactical sense. That is, the first response to a charge is to ignore it. You only address it when the charge gains traction.

That is conventional wisdom, but as Democrats claim they learned in the health reform debate, that conventional wisdom is wrong.

In my own case, I’m sure a phone call from some Oracle PR maven would have gotten quick results. But that didn’t happen. There was no official request for a correction, not even an official response in the Talkbacks.

I am not saying here that it’s Oracle’s fault I got something wrong. Point is that silence is a vacuum that gets filled by others, not to your advantage. The concerns about the future of OpenSolaris are spreading rapidly to other Oracle assets, to Java and to OpenOffice.

No doubt Oracle believes that actions speak louder than words. But something I have said repeatedly here, and will continue to say, knowing that at least here I’m right, is that open source is not just business. Treating it as just business is a mistake. Open source always has an element of politics in it, because you’re dealing with communities, not just customers.

Oracle ignores this at its financial peril.

An anonymous reader writes “Since Oracle’s acquisition of Sun, all open source projects that now have Oracle as their primary sponsor are worried about their future, and FUD is spreading quickly. Very few public statements have been made by Oracle executives, particularly regarding OpenSolaris. The community is arguing about the difficulties of forking the code base when most (if not all) of the developers are employed by Oracle. Now Oracle wants the community to prove that open source can be made profitable. What arguments can the Slashdot crowd provide to convince Oracle about that?”
Reader greg1104 tips related news about licenses for Solaris. According to an account manager, “Solaris support now comes through a contract on the hardware (Oracle SUN hardware).”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader writes “Since Oracle’s acquisition of Sun, all open source projects that now have Oracle as their primary sponsor are worried about their future, and FUD is spreading quickly. Very few public statements have been made by Oracle executives, particularly regarding OpenSolaris. The community is arguing about the difficulties of forking the code base when most (if not all) of the developers are employed by Oracle. Now Oracle wants the community to prove that open source can be made profitable. What arguments can the Slashdot crowd provide to convince Oracle about that?”
Reader greg1104 tips related news about licenses for Solaris. According to an account manager, “Solaris support now comes through a contract on the hardware (Oracle SUN hardware).”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Oracle today patched a critical Java vulnerability that is being exploited by hackers to install malicious software.

The security update to Java SE 6 Update 20 patches a bug disclosed last Friday by Google security researcher Tavis Ormandy, who spelled out how attackers could run unauthorized Java programs on a victim’s machine by using a feature designed to let developers distribute their software. Only systems running Windows are at risk.

Matt Asay suggests that Google and Sun made the same bets on the future, and so far only Google has won. (To the right, the best CEO ponytail evah!)

I would like to respectfully disagree. Not just that they made the same bet. But that Google has won.

Let’s review our history first.

Sun came to open source as a large, proprietary hardware business. Its revenue was, and is, driven by sales of servers, not software. And that business was sinking long before Scott McNealy made his dramatic turnaround on open source.

Google, by contrast, is a product of the open source ethos. It has no proprietary baggage. More important, its constant emphasis on cost reduction in delivering Internet services has made it enormously profitable.

In open source Sun bet on tools, on Java and mySQL. It bet on the business side of the open source market.

Google is betting on the consumer side. Its Android and Chromium projects are designed to enable mass market Linux devices of all types — handheld, tablet, and laptop.

Finally, and most important, we don’t yet know whether Google has won its bet. The different financial pictures of the underlying companies make it impossible to see any result.

What’s clear in Sun’s case is that open source was not the business. Hardware was always the business. Open source was a way to put lipstick on that pig and have it dance hoping someone would want to buy  it.

That someone was always assumed to be IBM, but it turned out to be Oracle, which lacked IBM’s commitment to open source and didn’t see the lipstick, only a barbeque.

What’s clear in Google’s case is that its revenue is still driven by advertising. Open source is an even smaller portion of its revenue stream than it was for Sun, back in its ponytailed heyday.

Ads still subsidize everything Google does. The acquisition of Doubleclick turbocharged Google’s results, because its technology and sales efforts were combined with Google’s low infrastructure costs. Android is still not “accretive” to earnings — as the Wall Streeters say.

And it’s hard to tell when that might happen. Google’s intent here is to increase Web traffic, to widen mobile data streams so they are no different from fixed, and know it will get its share of the increased wealth that generates.

So to summarize. Sun was about hardware, Google about services. Sun was sinking when it came to open source, Google was rising. We don’t know that Sun’s open source efforts brought it anything more than a suitor, and Google’s success with open source may always remain opaque, impossible to measure in a bottom line way.

Other than that, they’re identical.

The gauntlet has been laid down.

Former mySQL architect Brian Aker keynoted the mySQL Con in Santa Clara this week and pushed Drizzle, a mySQL fork he hopes to build a company around by the time of June’s OSCON in Portland.

Described as “an open source microkernel DBMS for high performance scale-out applications,” Drizzle will be seeking enterprise customers who depend on scaled mySQL but share Aker’s distrust of Oracle.

Think of it as a software version of the Tea Party. In this case, Aker has to turn anti-Oracle anger into the help needed to support things like 64-bit systems and solid state drives, built on C++, and with enough enterprise support contracts to move forward.

It won’t be easy.

Like any fork Drizzle starts from nothing. No money, no infrastructure, no paid staff, and no sales talent. Just code and raw anger.

This fork was actually launched two years ago, while Aker was at mySQL, and was then described as “an optimized and trimmed down” version of the database. Later in 2008 it was described as a complete re-think of mySQL aimed at clouds running MapReduce.

Between now and OSCON Aker has to figure out exactly who his target customers are, based not on what his developers want to do but on what companies willing to run the risk of dumping mySQL demand. It’s the difference between a fun sideline and something you need to make a living from.

I wonder how many current mySQL customers are willing to depend upon an unproven database, no matter its political bonafides. Before anyone writes support checks Aker needs to prove he can make good on some promises.

Having just a vision’s no solution, everything depends on execution.

It was a busy day for IT administrators and information security professionals. Not only was yesterday Microsoft’s Patch Tuesday for the month of April, it is also the day of Adobe’s quarterly security updates.

It’s not just that James Gosling has left Oracle.

It’s not just that he’s considered the “father of Java.”

It’s the way that he did it that will leave a mark.

Gosling actually left on April 2, then opened a new blog (at Nighthacks.com) a week later to confirm the rumors he’d gone and to leave some rather cryptic hints that things are not all rosy over in Oracle-land:

As to why I left, it’s difficult to answer: Just about anything I could say that would be accurate and honest would do more harm than good.

Open Office was a money sink, and mySQL expected to lose its best-and-brightest. But Java was Sun’s great open source success story, its crown jewel. Gosling’s leave-taking is going to leave a mark.

The fact that his cartoon-like image on the new blog sports that image of Duke, the open source Java mascot (above), rather than a branded Java image should also speak volumes. Apparently Gosling is no longer willing to be Oracle’s Butler. (Sorry, couldn’t stop myself on that one.)

Seriously. The willingness of developers to expand the footprint of an open source project is based, in part, on their confidence that the sponsor has their back, that it’s as committed to the project as they are, and that its open source bonafides are in order.

Gosling’s leaving adds to the impression that Oracle’s open source bonafides are not in order.

blackbearnh writes “Brian Aker, former Sun MySQL guy, and current proponent of the Drizzle MySQL fork, gave O’Reilly Radar an update on where MySQL is at the moment. During the interview, he was asked to speculate on Oracle’s original motives for acquiring Sun. ‘IBM has been moving their pSeries systems into datacenter after datacenter, replacing Sun-based hardware. I believe that Oracle saw this and asked themselves, “What is the next thing that IBM is going to do?” That’s easy. IBM is going to start pushing DB2 and the rest of their software stack into those environments. Now whether or not they’ll be successful, I don’t know. I suspect once Oracle reflected on their own need for hardware to scale up on, they saw a need to dive into the hardware business. I’m betting that they looked at Apple’s margins on hardware, and saw potential in doing the same with Sun’s hardware business. I’m sure everything else Sun owned looked nice and scrumptious, but Oracle bought Sun for the hardware.’”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Oracle has moved Solaris onto its quarterly security patch schedule, meaning users of the Sun Microsystems operating system will now know months in advance when they will be getting security updates.