Posts Tagged ‘Opensource’

Oracle ditches OpenSolaris

Sunday, August 15th, 2010

OpenSolaris was dropped by Oracle

As many people already suspected, Oracle will ditch OpenSolaris as announced here: OpenSolaris cancelled, to be replaced with Solaris 11 Express. The first Solaris 11 Express release is expected end of this year. If is has similar usage restrictions like the Oracle 10 Express database then it will be quite useless.

OpenSolaris was a good thing for both, Sun and its customers. Customers had a continuous preview of upcoming features in new Solaris versions. Sun was getting feedback from customers. The community was able to contribute to the product. It had a similar role for Sun as Fedora has it for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) or OpenSUSE for Novell.

Still open source, but closed development model
While most parts of Solaris are staying open source, Oracle switched the open source development model into a closed source model. Quoting the announcement: We will no longer distribute source code for the entirety of the Solaris operating system in real-time while it is developed, on a nightly basis.

This will also affect other projects and products such as FreeBSD’s ZFS support and Nexanta.

Light at the end of the tunnel
The light at the end of the tunnel is the newly founded project Illumos. A main sponsor of the project is Nextanta, as its main building block of the product is OpenSolaris.

What is the OpenSource strategy of Oracle?
It is unclear what Oracle is planning for its other open source products such as OpenOffice, MySQL and Java. In the past, all of those products have been open source enablers for companies. The is little to no information about those products.

Not really fun….

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Posted in Unix | No Comments »

An example why open source software is cool

Saturday, May 15th, 2010

Recently I have set up an Apache Tomcat. As a replacement for the Tomcat manager I deployed Psi-Probe for easy deployment and access to statistics.

Afterwards I installed the production software which needs to add a JVM parameter user.country=CH to have the proper date and time format used in Switzerland. This had a unwanted side-effect to Psi-Probe. The Interface switched to German, no way to switch the language back to English. Since my mother tongue is German, no big deal so far. Really? No! I had really problems to understand what navigation items etc.  are meaning. The German translation was that bad, it actually crippled the application.

I had the choice to either life with it, or change it and contribute it to the project. I made the later. It was about one hour of work. Hours after submitting, the changed translation file it was in SVN. The next version now comes with a much improved German translation.

This is how open source software works. If someone is not happy with the product, simply change the annoying things and submit it upstream. By the way: Psi-Probe itself is a fork of Lambda-Probe which was not maintained anymore from its origin project owner.

Try to do that with closed source software…

Have fun!

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Posted in Uncategorized, Web Servers and Applications | 5 Comments »

Apache HTTP server and its further development

Monday, May 3rd, 2010

The Apache httpd is one of the most stable software pieces which is still in use. The latest huge step forward was with the release of 2.0. Quo vadis Apache httpd? The most current release is 2.2.15. During the 2.2.x release cycle, there have basically been only bug-fix releases (Okay, response header rewrite starting on 2.2.9  is a nice feature). This brings me to the question: What is going on with 2.4?

The answer is quite simple: As you can read on http://httpd.apache.org/docs/trunk/new_features_2_4.html, not much. Why is the Apache httpd developing so slow? From my point of view the answer is quite simple: Apache httpd is finished. It is stable, reliable and has (almost) all features people wish. @Apache httpd developers: Great job! Thanks a lot!

Additionally there are tons of external modules to enhance the capabilities of this really great piece of software.

Honestly I can not publish my wish-list for the Apache httpd because there are no open wishes for me. Can someone have such a wish list? Please let us know and write a comment.

Have fun…

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Posted in Uncategorized, Web Servers and Applications | 2 Comments »

Directory services and Linux

Thursday, October 29th, 2009

LDAP is interesting, but not that easy to set up, at least not the server part.

I made different approaches to install OpenLDAP without success, the problem was always the schemas and initial data load.

With Red Hat Directory Server and its open source pendant CentOS Directory Server I was able to successfully install and maintain a LDAP directory.

Red Hat Directory Server is the successor of the Netscape Directory Server which has been purchased by Red Hat some time ago and has been open-sourced to comply with Red Hats product policy.

Is the Red Hat directory server a replacement for OpenLDAP? Yes and no. Yes because it is a open source product, available for free, and NO because there is only a small community around it.

To have a fully supported environment you need to buy a subscription from Red Hat. The starter is List-Priced @ 5000 USD/year for 500 entries. I think price tag is completely insane.

In contrary the open source variant CentOS directory server is for free. Decide by your self whats the right solution for you, OpenLDAP is definitively not ready for enterprise authentication.

Another approach is authenticating against a Microsoft Active Directory. This causes other problems which will be discussed in a future blog

Have fun!.

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Posted in Red Hat | No Comments »