Oracle Axes OpenSolaris Development

Oracle has effectively shelved OpenSolaris, the five-year-old open source version of the Solaris Unix operating system, according to an internal email sent to Solaris engineers and published on the blog of an OpenSolaris developer.

In the email, published on Friday, Oracle said going forward it will distribute open source versions of Solaris only after the release of the full, finished operating system.

“We will distribute updates to approved CDDL or other open source-licensed code following full releases of our enterprise Solaris operating system,” Oracle said in the email. “In this manner, new technology innovations will show up in our releases before anywhere else.”

Previously Oracle distributed the source code for Solaris on a nightly basis while it was being developed, but this will no longer be the case, according to Oracle.

‘A Terrible Sendoff’

Software engineer and OpenSolaris contributor Steve Stallion, who published the email, said the move was a “perversion of the open source spirit”.

“This is a terrible sendoff for countless hours of work – for quality software which will now ship as an Oracle product that we (the original authors) can no longer obtain on an unrestricted basis,” Stallion wrote in a Friday blog post.

“I can only maintain that the software we worked on was for the betterment of all, not for any one company’s bottom line,” he wrote.

Oracle said it will continue to use the open source CDDL licence statement in “nearly all” Solaris source code files. “We will not remove the CDDL from any files in Solaris to which it already applies, and new source code files that are created will follow the current policy regarding applying the CDDL,” Oracle said in the email.

Radio Silence

The decision follows months of silence over the fate of OpenSolaris, following the finalisation of Oracle’s acquisition of Sun in February of this year. In July the OpenSolaris Governing Board (OGB) decided it would dissolve before the end of August if Oracle had not established communication with the board by 16 August.

Last week Oracle outlined its plans for Solaris 11, saying it intends to release Solaris 11 next year. At the time, former Sun open source chief Simon Phipps noted that Oracle’s Solaris plans did not seem to include open source development.

“Sounds like the rumours that Oracle was no longer going to engage in open source development of Solaris were true,” Phipps wrote in an 11 August blog post. “The best it seems we can hope for is an act-of-grace over-the-wall drop of some of the source code to Solaris 11 after it’s released.”

Earlier this month, Phipps confirmed to eWEEK Europe that Oracle had as yet made no communication to the OGB.

Back in February, Oracle issued assurances that it remained committed to OpenSolaris and to open source, despite the departure of Phipps in March.

In February Oracle director of product management Dan Roberts participated in the OpenSolaris Annual Meeting and assured members that Oracle would continue to support OpenSolaris.

“Oracle will continue to make OpenSolaris available as open source, and Oracle will continue to actively support and participate in the community,” Roberts said, according to an IRC transcription of the meeting. Roberts said at the time Oracle would “continue to deliver OpenSolaris releases, including the upcoming OpenSolaris 2010.03 release”.

That release, originally scheduled for February, and then pushed back to March, never arrived. The current OpenSolaris release is 2009.06, launched in June 2009.