OpenSolaris board resigns in protest over Oracle’s attitude

Open source community fear Oracle's hostile moves are part of a growing trend

In another blow to the OpenSolaris project the entire governing board has voted to disband itself.

The dramatic move came a week after a leaked Oracle memo spilled the beans about the company's plans for the open source version of Solaris, including stopping development of the platform and encouraging existing users to move to the commercial version of the software.

The OpenSolaris Governing Board (OGB) registered a motion to disband itself in a response to Oracle’s position and hand control of the project back to Oracle using section 1.3.5 of the OpenSolaris Constitution.

“Without the continued support and participation of Oracle in the open development of OpenSolaris, the OGB and the community Sun/Oracle created to support the open Solaris development partnership have no meaning,” the motion read.

“The desire and enthusiasm for continuing open development of the OpenSolaris code base has clearly passed out of Oracle's (and thus this community's) hands into other communities.”

John Plocher of the OGB reported that the motion was “unanimously (but sadly) adopted”.

The move by the OGB was greeted with sadness in the open source community. Dave McAllister, Adobe's director of open source and standards wrote that Oracle’s actions, coupled with its legal challenge to Android, showed the company had replaced Microsoft as the enemy of open source.

“I do wonder who’s next in the shift from open source commitment that Oracle seems to be leading,” he said.

“No company is perfect. But these recent moves seem to indicate that the axis of evil has shifted south about 850 miles or so.”