OGB resigns, OpenSolaris canned – or is it?

As expected the OpenSolaris OGB have officially thrown in the towel. Plans have been leaked internally from Oracle showing that they are going to stop open development of OpenSolaris.

All pretty much expected, and hopefully this will be the ‘jumpstart’ that the OpenSolaris community needs to start pushing community distros and community code.

What a lot of the peanut gallery commentators have missed is that this doesn’t spell the end of any OpenSolaris development. Oracle will still release code, just after a long-ish delay. This is a clearly a tactic to address people like Nexenta, who are directly competing with Oracle in the open storage space – where there’s an awful lot of money up for grabs.

There are pluses and minuses for all of this – to get an idea read these posts from Ben Rockwood and Joerg Mollenkamp to see the view from both sides of the fence.

The big plus for existing Solaris shops – and yes, it is a plus – is the return of Solaris Express. Specifically Solaris 11 Express, which should be appearing sometime after OpenWorld.

The death of SX:CE was a massive mistake from Sun – OpenSolaris was too far ahead of current shipping Solaris versions, and it made any sort of planning or roadmap to implement new features impossible, especially in a large environment. You know, those big corporate Solaris/SPARC shops who paid Sun’s bills?

The return of Solaris Express gives these guys – the ones who pay big money to Oracle – a chance to evaluate new features, plan out a deployment/upgrade strategy. Which means it’s much more likely they’ll stick with Solaris, take advantage of the new features – and continue to pay money to Oracle.

Sadly for Oracle they seem to have handled Solaris with all the deftness and tact of IBM with OS/2. Getting all bullish with licensing and support costs without giving your customers solid roadmaps and upgrade plans is pretty amateurish.