I think Oracle's decision to not keep Solaris open source, at least the ZFS portions, is enormously shortsighted.
The fact that there is a ZFS implementation (with so many of the original ZFS engineers behind it) still being developed in the open and used by multiple operating systems, but especially the Linux juggernaut, shows that Oracle really doesn't have any benefit to keeping it closed any longer.
It has forked.
We now have the Oracle ZFS with features and functionality that is not in the open source variant, and the open source ZFS that is apparently adding features and commands that are not in the closed source ZFS.
A huge selling point for the open source implementation is the fact that if you decide to change vendors or OSes, you can easily do so without having a huge data migration (zpool export on the old, zpool import on the new).
Except, for Solaris 11+. You can't go back and forth between them, so once you're on Solaris 11, you're stuck.
Yes, this is most definitely FUD, but I can easily see this being used in the not-so-distant future once Linux vendors start supporting/advertising it for themselves.
I think that if Oracle were to open (and keep open) the newer releases (even if a few releases behind, like they were originally claiming they would), it would eliminate that argument completely.
Personally, I'd be absolutely thrilled with a cross-platform on-disk ZFS (I triple-boot Linux/OSX/Solaris on my notebook).
Professionally, I'd love to see a cross-platform on-disk ZFS simply to be able to throw the appropriate OS behind the data.
The fact that there is a ZFS implementation (with so many of the original ZFS engineers behind it) still being developed in the open and used by multiple operating systems, but especially the Linux juggernaut, shows that Oracle really doesn't have any benefit to keeping it closed any longer.
It has forked.
We now have the Oracle ZFS with features and functionality that is not in the open source variant, and the open source ZFS that is apparently adding features and commands that are not in the closed source ZFS.
A huge selling point for the open source implementation is the fact that if you decide to change vendors or OSes, you can easily do so without having a huge data migration (zpool export on the old, zpool import on the new).
Except, for Solaris 11+. You can't go back and forth between them, so once you're on Solaris 11, you're stuck.
Yes, this is most definitely FUD, but I can easily see this being used in the not-so-distant future once Linux vendors start supporting/advertising it for themselves.
I think that if Oracle were to open (and keep open) the newer releases (even if a few releases behind, like they were originally claiming they would), it would eliminate that argument completely.
Personally, I'd be absolutely thrilled with a cross-platform on-disk ZFS (I triple-boot Linux/OSX/Solaris on my notebook).
Professionally, I'd love to see a cross-platform on-disk ZFS simply to be able to throw the appropriate OS behind the data.