Oracle shelves OpenSolaris

Oracle's latest move was predicted by many in the open source community

Oracle has finally closed the OpenSolaris development project in a move that has angered the open source community.

OpenSolaris software engineer Steve Stallion posted on his blog the lengthy email detailing the closure which was sent internally to all engineers working on the project.

In essence, Oracle has decided to release open source versions of Solaris only after the commercial one ships.

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

"We will no longer distribute source code for the entirety of the Solaris operating system in real time while it is developed, on a nightly basis."

Stallion reacted angrily to the news, which is understandable given that he and his fellow engineers have been working on the project for over four years.

"This is a terrible send off 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," he wrote.

"I can only maintain that the software we worked on was for the betterment of all, not for any one company's bottom line. This is truly a perversion of the open source spirit."

Earlier this week, John Fowler, Oracle's executive vice president of systems, outlined the roadmap for Solaris 11, the next commercial version of the flagship operating system.

The new code will include better support for virtualisation, scaling and the management of disparate systems, he said.