As far as Oracle is concerned, OpenSolaris should just go off somewhere and die.
In a leaked e-mail to Solaris software engineers, Oracle said, “We will not release any other binary distributions, such as nightly or bi-weekly builds of Solaris binaries, or an OpenSolaris 2010.05 or later distribution. We will determine a simple, cost-effective means of getting enterprise users of prior OpenSolaris binary releases to migrate to S11 Express.”
Steven Stallions, an OpenSolaris developer, published the e-mail on his blog. He said, “This concludes over four years that I (and many other external contributors) have worked on the OpenSolaris project. This is a terrible sendoff for countless hours of work – for quality software which will now ship as an Oracle product that we (the original authors) can no longer obtain on an unrestricted basis.”
ComputerWorld’s Cyber Cynic Steven Vaughan-Nichols couldn’t help but say, “I told you so.”
“Welcome to the Larry Ellison school of open-source thought,” Vaughan-Nichols said. “As I’d been trying to tell OpenSolaris developers all along, the god-king CEO of Oracle doesn’t give a damn about any open source that doesn’t directly benefit Oracle. The moment Oracle acquired Sun, OpenSolaris’ fate was sealed.”
And if OpenSolaris developers decide to keep the project alive outside of Oracle, there’s not certainty that Oracle won’t sue them, just ask Google.
