Woah, It Looks Like Oracle Will Stand Behind OpenSolaris

Since Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems last year, the future of the Solaris and OpenSolaris operating systems have been called into question especially as the OpenSolaris 2010.1H release was missing and has been that way for months now with no official communication from Oracle. A new OpenSolaris release hasn't come in more than a year and we still are left wondering if or when it will arrive. Even the OpenSolaris Governing Board is out of the loop and they may abandon the cause in August if Oracle doesn't make their OpenSolaris intentions clear and appoint a liaison. This evening though is one of the first signs that Oracle may let the OpenSolaris operating system live on with their support.

Not only has the OpenSolaris 2010 stable release been missing for months, but so has the OpenSolaris development snapshots. While under Sun Microsystems' control, there were bi-weekly snapshots of Solaris Nevada (the codename for the next-generation Solaris OS to eventually succeed Solaris 10) and this new code was then pulled into new OpenSolaris preview snapshots available at Genunix.org. The stable releases of OpenSolaris are based off of these Nevada builds. However, there haven't been any new bi-weekly builds since build 134 in early March and that arrived nearly a month after build 133. OpenSolaris 2010.03/2010.04 was supposed to be based off of a later revision to either build 133 or 134. The new evidence we have this evening is that OpenSolaris may live on under Oracle as they are working on Nevada Build 145.

As the first email of its kind in months, Alan Coopersmith who is a known X.Org contributor and longtime Sun Microsystems employee now working for Oracle, has written a new email entitled "IPS distro-import changes needed for X packages for nv_145." Alan immediately began this public email by saying, "Just when you thought you'd never see another one of these biweekly mails...."

The rest of Alan's email goes on to talk about the X.Org packages in Nevada build 145 that need to be updated. Beyond the technical details for the X IPS package changes needed, no details were given about when we may actually see an OpenSolaris Nevada Build 145 released publicly or the stable release of OpenSolaris 2010.XX. Unless Oracle is just misguiding their employees about the future of Sun's OS or letting them waste more resources on the OS while knowing it will be killed off, it looks like we may see Oracle starting to get behind OpenSolaris.

For now we can only hope Oracle issues an official statement shortly, which would ideally be backed by the long-awaited Oracle OpenSolaris 2010 release.