The OpenSolaris Board Just Killed Itself, As Expected

Last month we reported that the OpenSolaris Governing Board may kill itself if Oracle would not appoint a liaison to the OpenSolaris community to interact with and communicate their future plans. After that OGB death threat was announced, the Illumos project was announced, which is basically a fork of OpenSolaris. Less than two weeks ago, however, Oracle finally announced it would be killing off OpenSolaris and making other changes to how Oracle Solaris is developed and delivered. With that said, the OpenSolaris Governing Board approved the decision this morning to end itself and return control of the OpenSolaris community to Oracle.

The agenda from the OpenSolaris Governing Board meeting that took place today can be found on Genunix.org. Following Oracle's announcement of no longer releasing source-code until after the next Solaris update is released rather than its previous real-time changes when developed by Sun Microsystems, abandoning OpenSolaris, and Oracle shutting off its OpenSolaris tap of code changes last week, the board's decision today was inevitable.

During today's short and final OpenSolaris Governing Board meeting, the members all collectively resigned, which results in the OGB custody being handed back to Sun Microsystems / Oracle. Under the OpenSolaris governing charter, Sun / Oracle could appoint new board members until a special election can be had, but more than likely Oracle will put the final bullet into OpenSolaris right now.