On August the 13th, 2010, Oracle sent a <a href=”memo to its Solaris Engineering employees stating that no OpenSolaris 2010.05 or later distribution will be released.
Access to Solaris source code will be through Oracles Technology Network as part of Oracles Technology Partner program. Oracle will distribute updates to CDDL and other opensourced license code following Solaris releases.
This is not a surprising move by Oracle considering their failure to engage the Open Solaris board which helped spawn a spork called Illumos. I do see this strategy as Oracle attempting to bring focus to their engineering teams driving Solaris further into the Enterprise space pushing out other competing Unix operating systems.
This move could backfire though.
Oracle has lost (or let go) many talented hackers recently such as Simon Phipps, Stewart Smith, Tim Bray, Jay Pipes, Kohsuke Kawaguchi and James Gosling. With this recent announcement will the exodus continue?
Whilst I sit and wait to see what this move does to Solaris and its community, I’ll continue to read Jonathan Schwartz’s (ex Sun CEO) insightful, frank and open blog appropriately titled “What I Couldn’t Say…”.
opensolaris songbird wallpaper by maccu
