Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils - Hector Berlioz
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Oracle kills Open Solaris
THE WOULD-BE DARK EMPIRE of the computing world, Oracle has carried out a night of the long knives on the open source version of its Solaris operating system.
There had been fears that Oracle, which is no big fan of open source software, would kill off Open Solaris after it took over Sun and these have proven to be well founded.
As yet the news has not been announced but according to an internal email that was leaked over the weekend, that is not going to be long in coming.
Penned by Oracle Solaris executives Mike Shapiro, Bill Nesheim and Chris Armes, the email says that Oracle will no longer distribute source code for the entirety of the Solaris operating system in real-time while it is developed, on a nightly basis.
Oracle wants 'new technology innovations' to show up in its releases before the great unwashed get them, the email said.
The Oracle executives said the firm will now release a developer edition of Solaris 11 as "Solaris 11 Express" with optional support service, by the end of the year. Customers on older Open Solaris releases will be "encouraged" to migrate to the new Express platform although it is not clear how this will be accomplished.
Oracle had not been telling anyone about its plans for Open Solaris. The Open Solaris Governing Board threatened to dissolve in July if Oracle failed to appoint a liaison officer by August. It hasn't done so yet, and we guess it is not going to now. µ
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Seeing the damage that Oracle has done so far by weaponizing its acquired Sun assets (slashing Open Solaris, Java-bombing Google, monetizing the previously-free open-document MSoffice plugin, etc.), I would think it wise that some open-source-friendly company buys Novell before SCOracle (or Microsoft) gets a hold of it.
Google must have a couple of billion to spare to secure the prize of UNIX IP (as well as a nice defence against further attacks by Oracle on the open source community)? Probably cheaper to buy Novell than to pay hordes of legal fees to defend Dalvik.
Of course, just because Microsoft could stand to benefit handsomely from any decrease in Android sales doesn't mean they necessarily had anything to do with these most recent attacks on open source. But since they have been behind almost every other attack so far, yeah, I bet Ballmer phoned up Ellison and made up some little deal so he could sell more of his crappy Windows mobile licences.