I'm increasingly getting the feeling that the delay is because Oracle is working to re-brand OpenSolaris the binary distro as Solaris 11. They are committed to "Solaris" and they are apparently committed to contributing to the OpenSolaris code base (and indeed you can see business as usual in their regular put-backs, now at b144), but this is not to say they are committed to rolling out binary distributions or updating either /release or /dev. For all we know they might have already dropped these as silently as Sun dropped Rock. I had thought the original plans for OpenSolaris after its first release was that the community would take over the management of the release schedule and road map, but it has remained a spectator sport, where the community watches and waits for Sun/Oracle to issue updates. If Oracle would at least say they've stopped doing this, the community could try to step in and pick it up, but at the moment no-one knows if it's a stop or a pause. I wonder if anyone who pays for support on OpenSolaris feels they're getting value for money - do they still produce update patches for support customers?
One worst-case scenario not mentioned is this, that Oracle continues to say and do nothing about (open)solaris indefinitely, leaving everyone guessing how many months/years they should wait before switching to an OS with a known future. I think Oracle is totally lost in this market - they're used to selling high-end databases, but that's a totally different ball game, and they're applying their assumed best practices in the most inappropriate way, probably arrogantly thinking Sun was wrong about everything. Sun had made mistakes, but was reversing them. Giving away Solaris 10 was starting to reverse the decline of Solaris. OpenSolaris got a lot of attention and publicity, and won a lot of new fans / future customers / future Solaris-friendly sysadmins. One of the selling points of Solaris was that the same kernel runs on everything from a laptop to a mainframe, but Oracle has made that point irrelevant. Now that no-one will pay to support Solaris running on anything smaller than a mainframe, who cares that you can run it (unpatched) on a laptop? For businesses that like to have a single OS for all systems to keep sysadmin work simple, once the 'free' Solaris 10 becomes un-viable as an option for workstations and servers, those platforms will move to linux and then there will be less reason to keep 'paid for' Solaris on the mainframes. If everyone loses interest in OpenSolaris (seems to be Oracle's wish), then no-one will want to learn it, Solaris sysadmins will become more rare (and therefore more expensive), no corporate buyer will recommend an OS that is hard to find the staff to run it, so it just perpetuates the spiral towards becoming ever more niche until it loses critical mass in the market and dies off completely. This is the absolute antithesis of the "ubiquity first, profits later" business model. -- This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
