Solaris No More Free, Open Solaris May Die

Good Oracle has started closing the 'free as in beer' shops of Sun Microsystem. According to reports the free Solaris operating system is no longer free of cost.

Rebranded Oracle Solaris operating system, the UNIX OS will now be available for a 90 days trial version and then users have to pay to buy a licence. Earlier, under Sun, the OS was available for free but users had an option to buy support from Sun. This may seem OK for enterprise customers as cost of OS is miniscule compared to cost of services. Companies like Oracle generate extremely thick revenues through services and support.

But bad news is for the community as Open Solaris has an uncertain future. Oracle has made clear that not all features from Oracle Solaris will be added to Open Solaris. Oracle may not even release the code of most of the new features of Oracle Solaris thus keep an edge over UNIX competitors and community version. While price factor does not matter much, the code factor does matter a lot.

Closing the code is againts the entire concept of the Free Software movement
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Dan Roberts, director of Solaris product management at Oracle had earlier said, "There may be some things we choose not to open source going forward, similar to how MySQL manages certain value-add[s] at the top of the stack. It's important to understand the plan now is to deliver value again out of our IP investment, while at the same time measuring that with continuing to deliver OpenSolaris in the open."

Nicole Yankelovich posted a Sun Blog which says, "I know everyone likes to get the bad news over with first, so I'll start with that. We found out on Friday that development resources are no longer being applied to Project Wonderland.

The good news is that those of us who have worked so hard to bring this project to life still wholeheartedly believe in it. A core group of the Wonderland team intends to keep the project going. We will be pursuing both for-profit and not-for-profit options that will allow us to become a self-sustaining organization. Having anticipated this possible outcome, we already have some promising irons in the fire.

As a first step in this next phase of the project, we will be releasing a Wonderland v0.5 Preview 3 release early next week.

There is so much great momentum behind Wonderland. To our knowledge, there are currently three companies offering Wonderland-related products, and eight companies offering Wonderland world-building services. There are countless exciting university projects and a number of corporations that have seen the advantages of Wonderland over other platforms. We are seeing new people posting on the forums almost every day.

Any concrete help you can give us would, of course, be welcome, but what we are asking for now is your moral support and your continued participation in our thriving community. Let's stand together in our determination to keep this project moving forward."

Peter Tribble  wrote on his blog post Oracle's acquisition of Sun that, "After a prolonged wait, Oracle have now completed their takeover of Sun. Late January, they presented their plans for taking Sun's products forward.

OpenSolaris wasn't even mentioned.If you look carefully, it's on a slide, but that's about it.

That silence has continued. OpenSolaris has - publicly at least - been completely ignored by Oracle. It's as if we don't exist."

What do you think is the future of Open Soure at Oracle?