UNIX Consulting and Expertise
Golden Apple Enterprises Ltd. » Page 'OpenSolaris – turmoil in the community'

OpenSolaris – turmoil in the community

The continued silence from Oracle is causing a bit of a stir in the OpenSolaris community. The OGB (the governing board for the OpenSolaris community) has given Oracle an ultimatum – appoint a liaison to the community by August 16th, or the OGB will dissolve and dump things back in Oracle’s lap.

Peter Tribble has a good take from the OGB’s point of view here, and Ben Rockwood shares his frustrations here.

In the meantime, the Nexenta guys (who count a number of excellent ex-Sun Solaris chaps amongst their number) have said to sit tight and wait for some news. Out of all the community distributions, Nexenta seem to have the talent and business plan to push forward a solid product built around Oracle’s sources.

As well as checking out Nexenta Core, I’d recommend keeping an eye on Alasdair Lumsden’s efforts to get a community OpenSolaris distribution up and running.

The most notable silence so far on the OpenSolaris lists has been from Joyent – they’re heavy users of OpenSolaris, and it’s pretty key to their business. Are they rolling their own custom distribution internally?

Oracle’s attitude to user groups, smaller Sun partners, and communities around products like OpenSolaris and Lustre has been appalling. Lack of communication and transparency is the least of the problems.

Yes, Sun was a big company, and yes, integration of a bottom-up culture like Sun’s into a top-down culture like Oracle was always going to be painful. But it’s been a year since Oracle bought Sun, and it’s not like they didn’t know what they were getting.

I’m sitting tight for Oracle OpenWorld in September, because there will be a slew of relevant announcements then. Yes, the continued silence from Oracle is pretty poor – but it’s the way they run things, and hopefully post OpenWorld we’ll be seeing some changes in the way Oracle operates.

Like this post? Spread the word!
delicious digg google
stumbleupon technorati Yahoo!

Comments are closed.

Top of page / Subscribe to new Entries (RSS)