Friday, August 13, 2010

Open Solaris looks like it's dead and ClosedSolaris

A report appears to give every sign that Open Solaris - now Oracle Solaris - will soon be as dead as a dodo as open technology. Unless, that is,  you sign the terms and conditions (Ts&Cs) that Oracle appears to wish and will be the future.

Steven Gallion, writing on his blog, opens with the headline "OpenSolaris is dead "and then relays an email from Oracle Solaris engineers that, he claims, describes the attitude Larry E has against the open sauce stuff in the future.
Gallion, who is an external developer on the Opensolaris blog, here, describes Oracle's view of the future as a "terrible sendoff" for countless hours of work. It won't be available on an unrestricted basis in the future.
He adds: "I can only maintain that the software we worked on was for the betterment of all, not for any one company's bottom line. This is truly a perversion of the open source spirit."
He quotes, at length, Oracle Solaris engineers' view of the future.
"We will continue to grow a vibrant developer and system administrator community for Solaris. Delivery of binary releases, delivery of APIs in source or binary form, delivery of open source code, delivery of technical documentation, and engineering of upstream contributions to common industry technologies (such as Apache, Perl, OFED, and many, many others) will be part of that activity. 

"But we will also make specific decisions about why and when we do those things, following two core principles: (1) We can’t do everything. The limiting factor is our engineering bandwidth measured in people and time. So we have to ensure our top priority is driving delivery of the #1 Enterprise Operating System, Solaris 11, to grow our systems business; and (2) We want the adoption of our technology and intellectual property to accelerate our overall goals, yet not permit competitors to derive business advantage (or FUD) from our innovations before we do."

Yesterday, as we reported, Oracle launched a frontal offensive against Google, taking the company to court for allegedly breaching patents connected with Java.

Oracle Solaris mouthpieces said that the database giant "will encourage and listen to any and all licence requests for Solaris technology... but we believe there are many complementary areas where new partnership opportunities exist to expand use of our IP."
Perhaps Scott McNealy should be the replacement for Mark Hurd, dead parrot of HP.

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