There was no need for the OpenSolaris Governing Board to kill OpenSolaris at all, Oracle was already planning to do it themselves.
In an internal email sent to OpenSolaris development team by Mike Shapiro, Bill Nesheim and Chris Armes, they have informed the OpenSolaris Development Team that the OpenSolaris project has been discontinued. Oracle will now be focusing their resources on Solaris 11 and there will be no other binary distributions including OpenSolaris.
This is what they wrote:
All of Oracle’s efforts on binary distributions of Solaris technology will be focused on Solaris 11. We will not release any other binary distributions, such as nightly or bi-weekly builds of Solaris binaries, or an OpenSolaris 2010.05 or later distribution.
Source: wikipedia.org
In the same email, they have also announced that they will release an open-source version of Solaris 11 as Solaris 11 Express. However, unlike OpenSolaris which is released way ahead of the commercial product, Solaris 11 Express will not be released ahead of the commercial version. It will be released after the commercial product have already shipped.
We will have a Solaris 11 binary distribution, called Solaris 11 Express, that will have a free developer RTU license, and an optional support plan. We will determine a simple, cost-effective means of getting enterprise users of prior OpenSolaris binary releases to migrate to S11 Express.
The email has since then been leaked and you can see it here. There has been no official words from Oracle so far.
What are your thoughts on Oracle killing off the OpenSolaris Project?
