OpenSolaris was dropped by Oracle
As many people already suspected, Oracle will ditch OpenSolaris as announced here: OpenSolaris cancelled, to be replaced with Solaris 11 Express. The first Solaris 11 Express release is expected end of this year. If is has similar usage restrictions like the Oracle 10 Express database then it will be quite useless.
OpenSolaris was a good thing for both, Sun and its customers. Customers had a continuous preview of upcoming features in new Solaris versions. Sun was getting feedback from customers. The community was able to contribute to the product. It had a similar role for Sun as Fedora has it for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) or OpenSUSE for Novell.
Still open source, but closed development model
While most parts of Solaris are staying open source, Oracle switched the open source development model into a closed source model. Quoting the announcement: 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.
This will also affect other projects and products such as FreeBSD’s ZFS support and Nexanta.
Light at the end of the tunnel
The light at the end of the tunnel is the newly founded project Illumos. A main sponsor of the project is Nextanta, as its main building block of the product is OpenSolaris.
What is the OpenSource strategy of Oracle?
It is unclear what Oracle is planning for its other open source products such as OpenOffice, MySQL and Java. In the past, all of those products have been open source enablers for companies. The is little to no information about those products.
Not really fun….