Oracle has yet to publicly admit or state their intentions for OpenSolaris, the open source version of the Solaris operating system. However, a memo leaked earlier today has revealed what’s going down. OpenSolaris is officially dead and buried. This memo was sent to all Oracle employees on Thursday afternoon.
Effective immediately, Oracle will no longer be releasing any binary distributions of OpenSolaris. Oracle is also discontinuing all nighly and bi-weekly builds. Customers who bought into the OpenSolaris mantra Sun was selling will have to migrate to the Solaris 11 Express release when it becomes available to obtain and keep support, until the commercial release of Solaris 11.
This is not simply Oracle kicking things when they’re down. Sun pushed OpenSolaris on their customers very aggressively, offering very well priced support contracts for major builds. As a result, there are a large number of customers who now find themselves in a position where their choice is to either purchase Solaris 11 Express, or to run on an operating system with no support.
Oracle will continue to license major parts of Solaris under the CDDL license, and there won’t be any changes there. Closed areas will remain closed, open areas will remain open, with deviations requiring individual review. However, distribution of code will occur only after major Solaris releases. This means the next set of code—including ABI components—to be released will be when Solaris 11 is released. Source code will no longer be publicly available outside of those releases, which has the potential to cripple Illumos. New features will now trickle down from Solaris 11, instead of be sucked in from OpenSolaris.
The leaked memo also revealed that Oracle has 350,000 customers worldwide, and Sun previously had about 35,000 customers. Oracle figures that 40% of their Enterprise customers run on hardware from their new competitors like IBM, HP, and Dell. They plan to very aggressively target these customers running on non-Oracle hardware and storage.
The overall tone of the memo is extremely negative and derogatory toward OpenSolaris and open source in general. Quoting, “Solaris is not something we outsource to others, it is not the assembly of someone else’s technology, and it is not a sustaining-only product.” Emphasis mine, of course. Oracle also intends to make a very aggressive push to remove competing hardware; “From a business perspective, the purpose of our investment in Solaris engineering is to drive our overall server business“.
Overall, this could be extremely damaging to open source efforts like Illumos and OpenSolaris distributions. To maintain parity, they must have frequent access to source code and regular updates of it. Solaris receives monthly patch bundles which fix numerous issues, and the code for these patch bundles was usually added to the source repositories. That will no longer be the case. Instead, they will only receive code updates tied to major Solaris 11 releases, which are generally every 6 to 12 months.
Oracle has issued no public statements on the future of OpenSolaris in many months, and has not commented on the authenticity or veracity of the leaked memo.
Articles RSS