Recently, I posted about the future of OpenSolaris and the lack of response from Oracle.
Oracle still has no official response, and has no word on where OpenSolaris is going. However, a memo to Oracle Engineering was leaked and then posted to the OpenSolaris Discussion mailing list (osol-discuss) and was later confirmed by an Oracle employee to the mailing list.
William Yang has a nice write-up on the memo and its salient points; in short:
- Oracle will no longer let OpenSolaris track Solaris development.
- Solaris code will stay under the CDDL license.
- “OpenSolaris” as a distribution will no longer be released.
- Code will only be released after Solaris is released.
Also interesting is Oracle’s reasons for closing down OpenSolaris:
- Not enough man-power.
- Releases Solaris technology to competitors.
- Prevents users from using Solaris.
Oracle has never been a popular company; most Oracle DBAs in my experience have never been happy with Oracle’s support or licensing, for example. This contrasts with Sun, which has always had a positive image.
In the area of open source, Oracle has always been a champion of closed source, in contrast with Sun which had been a positive open source champion. As a result of this, we are seeing more and more open source projects by Sun either closed down or changed into closed source: consider the closing of Project Kenai (a SourceForge-like site for open source projects), the fears over the future of MySQL, and the death of OpenSolaris.
The OpenSolaris experience under Oracle has echos in MySQL: Monty Widenius, the founder of MySQL, was quite vocal in his opposition to the Oracle purchase of Sun, and expressed his fear that MySQL would become closed source. Perhaps his experience with SAP and MaxDB had something to do with that – MaxDB had been released under the GPL through 7.6, when it was returned back into SAP and became closed source once again.
About the time that Oracle announced its purchase of Sun, Monty began the GPL-licensed version of MySQL, MariaDB which has taken hold, and the European Union mandated that MySQL shall remain dual-licensed. I wonder if MySQL’s fate would have been similar to OpenSolaris if it had not been for Monty.
It would be interesting to track the other open source projects now under Oracle’s umbrella:
UNIX Administratosphere 