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Oracle's senior manager assures in a public act held over the Internet the survival of the open version of the operating system created by Sun Microsystems, as well as that the new company will continue to offer support to this community initiative. The next version of OpenSolaris could be released later this month. |
After months of uncertainty following Oracle's announcement of the acquisition of Sun Microsystems, the OpenSolaris situation has finally been clarified. Some pessimistic voices were betting on a cancellation of the project, since Oracle is not a company very given to supporting free software *, while others affirmed that the future of the project was protected by the purchase-sale contract signed by Sun.
At the recent Annual Meeting of the project, held virtually via IRC (Internet Relay Chat) on the # opensolaris-meeting channel of the FreeNode network, Dan Roberts (Director of Product Management for Oracle and former Sun Microsystems executive) He assured that Oracle will continue to trust this project and that OpenSolaris will continue to be free software. However, he also explained that, like Sun, there may be parts of certain technologies that Oracle prefers to keep closed. In fact, the acquired company never stopped mixing open solutions with other proprietary ones, so the new Oracle will inherit this way of proceeding.
In fact, and as can be inferred from Roberts's words, Oracle is going to invest heavily in Sun Microsystems' software platform, both in its proprietary version (Solaris) and in its free base (OpenSolaris), and also in the hardware inherited from the acquired company, since it will continue to invest efforts (even more than Sun, according to Roberts) both in the x86 and SPARC versions of this platform, from which it follows that Sun's hardware will also be developed.
The next revision of OpenSolaris, 2010.03, should see the light - as its name suggests - throughout this month, a point that Roberts also gave as safe.
Roberts' statements have been collected by various online newspapers dedicated to new technologies.
* in fact, she is known in computer circles as 'the other Microsoft'
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