Oracle kills OpenSolaris?

[techieMoe]

Solaris 10 no longer free as in beer, now a 90-day trial

Oracle has revised the licensing terms on Solaris proper, which used to be available for free without support. Now it follows a 90-day trial license similar to Novell's SLED or Redhat Enterprise. That in itself isn't much of a story.

However, there's some real doubt as to whether OpenSolaris (released under the CDDL) will continue to get updates from Oracle as Solaris moves forward. Personally, I see this as the first couple nails in the coffin for OpenSolaris, and perhaps Solaris in general. It seems Oracle is intent to close Solaris back up, and in my opinion the current marketplace isn't going to support that for long.

What do you all think?

[bigtomrodney]

I think it's all going to die. I always felt that if openSolaris had gone GPL or BSD that it would have been deeply embraced by the community (and even the wider industry). Not too many people were interested in the perceived one-way deal that the CDDL was. As much as I'm hating Oracle right now I really think this was going to happen sooner or later under Sun anyway.

And we didn't even get our ZFS under the GPL!

[Rubberman]

And off they marched, singing "So long, it's been good to know you!" (shades of Pete Seeger and The Weavers). I've worked with Sun systems since I did some consulting for them in 1984 (original MC68K box). My last work on Solaris was to port a kernel driver to Solaris x86 last year. I suspect that was the last time I'll do anything substantial on "Sun" systems.

[coopstah13]

wouldn't surprise me, seeing as how oracle already has their own linux distribution, but i'm not sure it runs on SPARC and if they will even continue to make sparc architecture machines, given how expensive and terrible they are

[Rubberman]

Well, there is some work going on in the Sparc-Linux universe: Aurora SPARC Linux Project
As for Sparc hardware, I've used a lot of it in large-scale manufacturing systems that had to run 24x365, and had very little trouble with them. I know a number of semiconductor fabs that use them for their MES, though HP Itanium (HPUX) systems are more prevalent these days in that domain.