The state of OpenSolaris


Matty and I haven’t really spoken much about the current state of the OpenSolaris project. Oracle has been pretty tight with releasing any type of information about their plans / directions in which they will be taking Solaris / OpenSolaris. Its caused a lot fusteration. The OpenSolaris Governing Board threw down the gauntlet and has threatened to dissolve pending some direct interaction / involvement from Oracle. Ben Rockwood has made his opinion made and a lot of what he has to say makes sense.

Sun spent a lot of effort / time / money / energy / excitement in trying to build the OpenSolaris community while they were still an independent entity from Oracle. UNIX admins played / tinkered with Linux at home, and it made its way into the data center and into production applications as it matured and became a rock solid technology. There is value in having the community embrace your O/S in a non-enterprise setting – such is the target market for OpenSolaris adoption. Its how the popularity of Linux overtook the large traditional UNIX implementations. (Solaris, AIX, HP-UX) If Oracle abandons OpenSolaris and allows the OGB to dissolve, I believe it will be a step in the wrong direction.

This article was posted by Matty on 2010-07-14 11:36:00 -0400 -0400