A Solaris Puzzle

I wrote about issues installing an operating system on some new hardware a few days ago. Since then I've done more exploring. A subsequent attempt to install Ubuntu 10.10 on the same box was a success, right up to the part where you reboot from the newly-installed system. That was a total failure and required power cycling to escape.

Then, several restarts later (due to my lack of speed on the DEL key), I managed to get at the BIOS. I decided to start from scratch, and loaded the safe defaults. Then I went through and tweaked it carefully (and very conservatively). After that, it booted fine. To be sure of this, I rebooted it (both warm and cold) about 30 times. All good. Then I left it to its own devices with a bunch of stuff running for a couple of days. Still good.

Then I tried again to install my Solaris-11 system, hoping that it would work on the new setup. No joy at all. The installer crashed, several times, in exactly the same place as before (i.e., long before getting close to actually installing anything). I really wanted to be able to use ZFS, which I think is a wonderful file system, but it seems impossible for me to install Solaris on any reasonably up to date hardware that I have available. I think I'm over this now and will wait for some other operating system that I can bear to use offering native ZFS.

Is Oracle the new SCO?

I avoided Java for many years, partly because I thought it was a failure in language design and partly because I found Sun's tight control disconcerting. I avoided Solaris because of Sun's tight control and because there were plenty of satisfactory alternatives.

When OpenSolaris appeared, I began to experiment with it. It still felt risky, but operating systems are much easier to change than the languages you use to create software with, so the risks seemed acceptable. When Sun made moves to open Java up, I began to consider using it or, more likely, other languages that built on the JVM.

Then Sun fell in a hole and I put things on hold. I had some hopes for a takeover by IBM, based on my belief that that they might continue the Sun stuff of interest in a way I could live with. That might have been unduly optimistic, but is now irrelevant. IBM went away and Oracle stepped in. Oracle is not a company I have ever admired in any way and it is run by a man I find even less admirable than Bill Gates. But many analysts, who claimed to have better sources of information than I have, seemed to think that Oracle would probably continue with OpenSolaris and would certainly nurture Java.

Now it appears that OpenSolaris is dead. And Larry Ellison has decided to tackle Google over Java. I have no idea how that will unfold. I do know that Google have the money to withstand a legal challenge. I'd like to see Oracle do a SCO and collapse under the legal mess, although I fear that they might survive. I am certainly going to avoid OpenSolaris and Java for the next few months or years. I'm also starting to think about alternatives to OpenOffice. I'd love big Oracle customers to announce that they are going to walk away from Oracle because they can't rely on Oracle's ability to survive.

At least database technology is pretty much a solved problem and alternatives to Oracle exist and others can be created. So it will be possible for people to drop the Oracle database money pit. Getting everybody to walk away from their Java investments will be much harder, but I'd like to see people considering that too. At least I have nothing to lose, having no investment in either Java or Oracle. But I will be cheering for anybody who helps to cut the ground from under Oracle.