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Why Oracle won't kill openSolaris

By Sean Michael Kerner on July 13, 2009 5:07 PM

From the "speculation of pre-mature termination" files:

Lots of chatter today about Oracle planning on killing off openSolaris, once it completes its acquisition of Sun.

O RLY?

I don't think so. Killing openSolaris is at this point the same as killing Solaris itself which would be madness. While Oracle is a huge backer of Linux it has many customers on Solaris. The future of Solaris, what was once called Solaris Next is openSolaris.

In the true open source fashion openSolaris is the project that develops new technologies for Solaris. OpenSolaris is not just a standalone open source project, it is the Solaris 11 incubator. Sun officials most recently re-iterated that fact when openSolaris 2009.06 was released last month

Now there may be a question of priorities once Oracle takes over Sun which could limit the investment in Solaris overall. But don't forget that Oracle today supports multiple flavors of Unix, Linux and Windows.

Oracle supports a multi-OS strategy because that's what its customers want. I doubt very much that Oracle would want to alienate its own customers (that is, Oracle users who have been running Solaris for years).

I've queried Oracle multiple times over the last several months and they've declined to comment. Sun's people on the other hand are hoping nothing will change.

"Here's the big secret that I can reveal," Larry Wake, group manager for Solaris software, told me in April. "All the concerns and problems that our customers have now that we're trying to solve with Solaris will be utterly unchanged over the next 12 months. Everything that we're doing today, I believe applies to anything that will happen over the next 12 months."

The truth is though - my personal opinion aside - we just don't know exactly what will happen. I do think that Wake's comments will hold and that customers are the ones here that hold all the important cards.

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