On Wed, 2010-07-14 at 01:06 -0700, Peter Taps wrote:
> > Btw, if you want a commercially supported and maintained product, have
> > you looked at NexentaStor? Regardless of what happens with OpenSolaris,
> > we aren't going anywhere. (Full disclosure: I'm a Nexenta Systems
> > employee. :-)
> >
> > -- Garrett
>
> Hi Garrett,
>
> I would like to know why you think Nexenta would continue to stay if
> OpenSolaris goes away.
>
> I feel the fate of Nexenta is no different than the fate of my startup
> company. Both of us are heavily dependent on zfs. And we know OpenSolaris
> version of zfs is the most stable version.
>
> Any business that is dependent on zfs must plan for two things as a
> contingency:
>
> 1. Look for an alternative for zfs
> 2. Look for an alternative for OpenSolaris
>
> Preferably both need to be open source with no licenses attached.
>
> Ideally, zfs lawsuit will be put to rest and Oracle will commit for
> continuing to support OpenSolaris.
>
> Regards,
> Peter
Nexenta is investing in the technology within OpenSolaris heavily -- and
we are working on an effort which will decouple our product from a hard
dependency on bits from Oracle's Solaris. I can't talk too much about
this right now, but I will probably have a lot more to say about this
early next month. Upshot of this is is that if OpenSolaris goes away,
we will continue to be able to work with the source code we have (plus
in house source code we are creating to replace certain bits we don't
have source to today!), so that our future is not so dependent on
Oracle's continued good will.
We're also hiring in engineering and growing a world class kernel team,
so we can continue to sustain and improve the code even if Oracle were
to pull the plug on OpenSolaris sources. We already have innovations in
our code base which Oracle's tree lacks -- even though we have made our
sources for the OS available for Oracle.
That said, I feel extremely confident that while Oracle *may* pull the
plug on this "OpenSolaris" thing, the *source* code which makes up the
critical platform bits (ON) for both Solaris and OpenSolaris will
probably continue to be released as source code going forward. There
are simply too many positive benefits to its customers, and frankly too
many customers would leave Oracle (not just Solaris, but go from Oracle
to DB2) if Oracle were to pull a stunt such as ceasing the delivery of
source code. (And further, even though the "request-sponsor" process
has been a dismal failure, I suspect that there will always be a way for
contributors to send improvements back to Oracle, even if the formal
OpenSolaris process for it were to go away.)
Now, the question of ZFS is IMO a lot more concerning. If we were
suddenly unable to continue to work with ZFS due to patent
considerations, there is no question that this would have a devastating
impact on our business. It would have a devastating impact on Solaris
too. We have mitigation plans in place for that eventuality which I
cannot discuss, but it would be extremely painful to us, as well as
everyone else in this ecosystem.
The good news is that so far it seems likely that NetApp's suit will
fail.
- Garrett
_______________________________________________
zfs-discuss mailing list
zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org
http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
