Due to me not working for OSNews these past eight weeks, I've been a bit out of the loop, as I didn't really follow technology news. I did notice that a lot is going on in OpenSolaris land, and today, Oracle has outlined what it has planned for Solaris 11 - and according to some, the fears about OpenSolaris' future were justified.
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Member since:2005-07-06
Of course. OpenSolaris only came about because Sun wanted to try and tell people Solaris was open source when competing against Linux suppliers, whilst secretly not relinquishing any control whatsoever. So yes, OpenSolaris was always an inferior subset of Solaris.
That strategy obviously hasn't worked (Sun went bust) so Oracle and Ellison are going in the opposite direction - make Solaris, and SPARC on the hardware side, high end premium platforms to satisfy Ellison's ego trip of competing against IBM, so they're the equivalents to AIX and Power. Solaris on x86 is all but dead again once the dust settles.
It's a somewhat better strategy than the doomed one that Sun had for ten years in all honesty, which was to try and pretend that PCs, cheaper and more powerful x86 hardware and an open source 'Unix' in Linux would all disappear when they woke up in the morning.
Member since:
2010-02-18
Solaris was always a superset of OpenSolaris (all the proprietary bits they threw in).
Still, the lack of any commitment to OpenSolaris is a worrying change from the old Sun propaganda.