Ubiquitous Talk

Months of silence from Oracle on any official statement about OpenSolaris support and development have passed. With that inaction the OpenSolaris Governing Board has motioned to disband and has passed this motion. This now leaves Oracle alone with its not so open “Open Source” operating system. Unfortunately this inaction does not follow Larry Ellison’s public statement indicating that OpenSolaris support would continue. In my view closing the source code until Oracle develops a new release of Solaris  is certainly not what I consider an Open Source effort.  Granted that most of the development of OpenSolaris code was performed by SUN Engineers, this would be expected as the Solaris  OS source was only exposed for 5 years and this really is a short window of time for other developers to familiarize with the code. Surely Larry as a intelligent man knows that this will result in the abandonment of OpenSolaris by the 40,000+ users that were actively exploring it. The only viable alternative will now be held by Nexenta in Illumos. In the background IRC chatter we have seen leaked email evidence that Oracle wishes to keep Solaris closed and will only release the OpenSolaris source when they have greatly distanced the public from it’s features. Not a good move for the Open Source world but that’s the way this bit of history is unfolding.

I’m looking forward to working with Illumos, hopefully you are too.

Maybe Mr. Ellison could do some rethinking about what legacy he would like to leave the world.

Regards,

Mike

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 24th, 2010 at 9:26 PM and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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