This you don’t see every day – Oracle doing something fun and interesting.
I’m very happy to announce that today we are releasing a new version of Oracle Solaris 11.4 for free/open source developers and non-production personal use.
Today marks the first delivery of our “Common Build Environment” (CBE) releases for the Oracle Solaris 11.4.To enable us to make new features and fixes available quicker and to more systems Oracle Solaris now uses a continuous delivery model of SRU/micro releases rather than much larger minor releases every few years.
Now, this isn’t a return to releasing Solaris as an open source product – something Oracle cancelled after acquiring Sun – but at least it provides enthusiasts with the ability to install an up-to-date version of Solaris.
It’s all very typical Oracle though – you need an account, and as mentioned, this is only free for non-commercial use, and not open source. The reason for this move is probably to drum up some interest to get developers to port newer versions of popular open source tools to Solaris.
Regardless, it might be a fun weekend for some of us.
My guess is a lot of people don’t care about Oracle Solaris, the community around all the open source versions/distributions is probably more interesting.
I’m always reminded of this talk, the best talk on this topic as far as I know and funny/sad:
https://youtu.be/-zRN7XLCRhc?t=1981
@Lenny,
that video changed my view of Sun as i previously thought that it was SUN that created the CDDL license to keep out GPL SW at face value. I also believed that SUN was hypocritical on it’s open source offering of Solaris and to monetize All releases including Opensolaris out of greed. But after watching this, I’m all for teh OpenIndiana and. SmartOS projects. Hope to see more support for illumos on the driver front.
“and as mentioned, this is free for commercial use”
The blog says “free/open source developers and non-production personal use” which I understand means not free for commercial use.
I have to regrettably give them some credit for this and the free tier on oracle cloud. I wouldn’t rely on either on a permanent basis but its nice while it lasts.
II smell a deeper dive into Oracle’s interest in releasing this version of Solaris. Yes, it’s open source interest. I believe specifically, it’s openZFS interest. It surpassed Solaris ZFS featurewise and is preferred to Solaris ZFS.