Oracle: the touch of death for open source
I guess this is the end of OpenStack.
Oracle has started sponsoring an open-source cloud tech that it already uses within its commercial offerings, as the company tentatively embraces a market it once reckoned inconsequential. The company announced on Tuesday that it had become a "Corporate Sponsor" of the OpenStack Foundation, following El Reg reporting in …
I agree. Now they can officially call themselves sponsor, and in the next two years they will fork it, call it something different and license it to their [fill appropriate adjective here] corporate clients with too much cash available. Sounds much like Oracle "Unbreakable" Linux (RedHat Enterprise Linux clone).
Luckily RHEL is still alive and kicking, unlike MySQL which finds forks and replacements today, like for example MariaDB (with its main driver, the original developer of MySQL).
On other news, Oracle works on killing Solaris (so far a few enthusiasts with some commercial backing are holding up well - Indiana, SmartOS, Omni etc), and continues butchering Java.
OpenStack should have set a signal saying: No thanks Oracle, we don't actually want you to be our sponsor. But that takes guts and money from other sources. Too bad. It would have been great PR too.
This article is a pretty good description of a parasite.
Take all you can give nothing, or in this case very little, back.
It's a modus operandi used by others of course, but in this case it's pretty shameless. Even Microsoft contributes some stuff when it wants in on a project that may suit its own ends. For example Samba or Joomla.
I can't speak for all of Oracle but from the Oracle Solaris side, once the paperwork is complete we plan to be contribute our OpenStack Nova, Neutron and Cinder drivers along with bug fixes, code reviews and just be good, contributing community members.
As for the why, the answer is pretty simple. Solaris has a number of unique features in terms of file systems (like ZFS), virtualization (Zones combined with fine grained resource management), in-production dynamic tracing across the stack (DTrace), compreshensive fault management (FMA for hardware, SMF for software), network virtualization (Crossbow), safe software lifecycle (boot environments coupled with IPS), etc, etc. The infrastructure there makes ideal building blocks for building up IaaS on x86 or SPARC based systems.