Oracle Releases Solaris 11.4 Public Beta With GNOME 3 Desktop, Secure UEFI Boot

[aht0]

you do seem to care enough, not only did you check out the thread, you even posted in it

[speculatrix]

I'm not really sure why Phoronix needs to report on Solaris, as it's only relevant to the big corporate dinosaurs still locked into it. Nobody in the modern world cares. Well, not unless they're going to a computer museum.

[grok]

Even if you only plan to run minesweeper and emacs, better to consult with a lawyer first. If you plan to install software and/or use it as a server you shoud hire your own legal team. Better safe than sorry!
Next time you pass by a hobo or panhandler without stopping or see a tent tucked away near the river, remember it may be a former Oracle customer who violated a provision of a software license or agreement.

[FirstPersonBSOD]

Is it OK for someone to provide benchmark instructions as long as the results are not disclosed to the public?

[Michael_S]

Forbidding benchmarks is just a way to speed the death of Solaris. The only message people receive is, "We're afraid to reveal that we can't compete".

Oracle can get away with that for their database because it's a market leader. But Solaris is in a steep decline, this just sticks another nail in the coffin.

[dungeon]

Cool, then just don't bencmark it

[Delgarde]

Yes! Slowlaris is dead, bloated cow, so they don't want anyone to benchmark it against enterprise class operating systems like Linux.

I don't disagree, but this is Oracle... I think they'd ban independent benchmarking just on principle, because they're a bunch of bastards.

They're the same people who do stuff like restricting the distribution of the database drivers for talking to an Oracle database... almost every other database, the drivers are open-sourced and available from standard package repos, but Oracle make you jump through hoops with license agreements. It's stupid – they should be making it as easy as possible for customers to use their over-priced database – but no, making developers miserable is what they do. Bastards...

[Delgarde]

I guess this never occurred to me, but how does Oracle get away with distributing an operating system that has CDDL and GPL software mixed?

Because there's nothing wrong with doing so... the same reason Microsoft can distribute GPL software as part of WSL, and AIX can provide various GNU utilities. The GPL says nothing about bundling GPL software as part of a distribution, other than the requirement to provide source for the GPL parts.

Basically, the GPL covers derivative works, whether forking a GPL-licensed piece of code, or incorporating that code into a different piece. But that's not as open-ended as you think, because it essentially just covers the case where you're combining code into a single executable, whether that's an application built around a library, an in-process plugin for an application, or something like a module loaded into a kernel.

So as Ikundrak says, that's a problem for something like ZFS, because linking a bunch of CDDL code into a GPL kernel is definitely forbidden. But simply distributing a CDDL application in a GPL-heavy Linux distro (or GPL applications and libraries in a CDDL Solaris system) doesn't break any rules, because that's just bundling a bunch of applications together (an aggregate work, rather than a derivative one). That said, they do still have to abide by the terms of both licenses, so the Solaris distribution would need to make source code available for the GPL components as required by the GPL.

(Note, I'm simplifying a lot here, because these are legal documents where the details are complex. But I've covered the basic ideas).

"Forbids benchmarking"? Say whut? I didn't know such a thing existed in this already magical world

Yes! Slowlaris is dead, bloated cow, so they don't want anyone to benchmark it against enterprise class operating systems like Linux.

[lkundrak]

I guess this never occurred to me, but how does Oracle get away with distributing an operating system that has CDDL and GPL software mixed?

They do "mere aggregation" as understood by GPL.

If they won't let their CDDL software be distributed with Linux distros, how can they include GPL software in their OS?

The CDDL licensed software is okay for Linux distros. See [1].

[1] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Licen...ood_Licenses_2

The only reason why they don't ship more CDDL stuff is that the license doesn't seem to be used by that many projects:

# dnf repoquery -a --qf '%{license}\n' |grep CDDL |grep -v 'or GPL' |wc -l
14

My guess is that you were referring to ZFS in particular. In that particular case, combining it with Linux is not considered a mere aggregation, it would need to be linked to the kernel.