Redwood Shores (ip-192.com): Oracle seems to plan to end the OpenSolaris project, according to an internal memo. "All of Oracle’s efforts on binary distributions of Solaris technology will be focused on Solaris 11," the memo says. "We will not release any other binary distributions, such as nightly or bi-weekly builds of Solaris binaries, or an OpenSolaris 2010.05 or later distribution. We will determine a simple, cost-effective means of getting enterprise users of prior OpenSolaris binary releases to migrate to S11 Express."
The community driven open source project initiated by Sun Microsystems seems to be dead. Instead, Oracle sees growth potential in the enterprise market for the commercial release of its operating system. "The growth opportunity for Solaris has never been greater," the memo says. "As one example, Solaris is used by about 40% of Oracle’s enterprise customers, which means we have a 60% growth opportunity in our top customers alone. In absolute numbers, there are 130,000 Oracle customers in North America alone who don’t use our servers and storage yet, and a global customer base of 350,000. That’s a huge opportunity we can go attack as a combined company that will increase Solaris adoption and the overall Hardware server revenue. Our success will also increase the amount of effort ISVs exert optimizing their applications for Solaris.”
Oracle says that it will continue to deliver upstream contributions to open source based projects, including Apache, OpenSSL, Gnome, X11, and others. Through the Oracle technical Network, it will provide design information and documentation.
The real question is what’s next! The open source database MySQL could be high on the list. "We can’t do everything," the memo (available here) says. "The limiting factor is our engineering bandwidth measured in people and time."
Recent Comments