Database vendors have started to use their own open source style licenses in a bid to stave off cannibalization by large cloud players such as Amazon Web Services.

The promise of open source database software is that users can freely use the code as they choose. Open source isn't just a marketing hook, but rather a well-defined set of licenses that have been approved as open source by the Open Source Initiative (OSI) and are compliant with the Open Source Definition.

Many database vendors have long used an open core model, in which the foundational model is an open source licensed code base, with added enterprise-grade features for reporting, scalability and management available under a proprietary license.

OmniOS Community Edition weekly releases for w/c 2nd of December 2019 are now available.

OmniOS r151032e ships with the newest Intel CPU microcode in order to address the JCC Erratum issue, there is a fix for supporting USB hard drives greater than 2TB, OpenJDK has been updated, better support for recent Linux distribution releases within LX Zones, ZFS fixes, fixes to the SMB support, and various other fixes. LX Zones is a SmartOS/OmniOS feature for running Linux software in a lighterweight-than-a-VM environment. 

Prospective users of these tools can find plentiful educational resources online, including video tutorials. The UCSC Genome Browser has two archived and searchable listservs, or electronic mailing lists: one for website and data questions, the other for queries on setting up and maintaining Genome Browser mirrors. JBrowse users can ask questions on Github or on the software’s open instant-messaging channel, but Holmes suggests contacting the developers directly. “We have some developers who really like getting feedback from users,” he says.