Developers angry as Oracle kills off OpenSolaris

Is OpenOffice next?

Oracle's suit against Google is possibly the first of many relating to Java. Now Oracle is reining in OpenSolaris. This obviously raises questions over Oracle's involvement with OpenOffice. Oracle is obviously trying to monetise much of the work Sun seemed happy to do for free as a contribution to the open source community.
You can't knock Oracle's capitalist spirit but it does seem to be shaping up as a significantly "anti-open" company.

By milliganp on 16 Aug 2010

It might be worth mentioning that Illumos announced a 'spoon' of the code a short while ago and announced the project would fork openSolaris as of last Friday while staying compatible with the mainstream Oracle stuff.

The Illumos project can be found at www.illumos.org

By forquare1 on 16 Aug 2010

I can't see this being a plus for Oracle in the long term - the OpenSource community must have been responsible for finding loads of bugs - and fixing them - in Solaris over the years, thereby enhancing both the reliability and the security of the OS as well as saving costs for Sun/Oracle.

The result will surely be increased costs, reduced reliability of Solaris, and is a nail in the coffin of the whole shebang.

By SwissMac on 16 Aug 2010

My personal experience after trying and failing to install OpenSolaris in 2009 was that it was more of a marketing ploy than an attempt to genuinely compete with Linux on the server.

It just did not support an adequate range of hardware, and couldn't even identify a 500GB SATA disk-drive. A network card I could understand, but a disk-drive?

It would require an enormous investment to bring it up to the level of compatibility we expect from Linux and Windows. Sun didn't have the resources and Oracle probably would rather make some money instead. As far as I can tell it was only ever supposed to be a kind of 'gateway drug' to the commercial Solaris ecosystem and the fact that it was open-source was incidental. It's not like they've pulled it from the market anyway, just changed the release cycle.

By c6ten on 16 Aug 2010

SwissMac - that's the theory, but the reality varies, depending on the community.

OpenSolaris has always been more like Apple's Darwin (the BSD underlying OS X) - i.e. more of a vendor-led project, than one with a large and active community.

Equally, Solaris has had a reputation for reliability for a couple of decades now - certainly a lot stronger than Linux until relatively recently. There are other ways to develop quality software (excellent engineers, an emphasis on quality, good technical leadership, etc).

It's amusing to see people who go the other way and think developing open source is as easy as announcing a project and shoving some starter code up and hoping the crowd will do magic.

It seems particularly difficult to develop an open source community around a single vendor product (Mozilla's Firefox may be an exception. WebKit works because it is no longer seen as 'Apple's WebKit').

By JulesLt on 19 Aug 2010