Oracle apparently shuts doors on OpenSolaris

Five years after Sun Microsystems began a bold effort to rejuvenate Solaris by attracting outside programming involvement, Oracle apparently is scrapping what remains of the OpenSolaris project.

Oracle acquired the Sun version of Unix in January, but has shown little of Sun's interest in building a vibrant external community of programmers around Solaris to match some of Linux's collaborative advantages. The OpenSolaris board has been left in limbo with no contact from the company for months. Even with no official communications, though, Oracle's inattention sent a strong indirect message that OpenSolaris wasn't on the company's priority list.

Now Steven Stallion, a programmer who worked on OpenSolaris for four years, published on Friday an Oracle memo that appears to lay out the company's new Solaris position. Oracle didn't respond to my question about the memo's authenticity, but it passes the sniff test for me, and it's another blow to OpenSolaris.

Sun released Solaris source code under an open-source license called the Community Development and Distribution License. That license will continue to be used, meaning at least some of Solaris will be openly available, but only as an afterthought rather than in a way that would let outside programmers actively shape the software as it's created, it appears.

Read More | CNET

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