Oracle != Open
Oracle will never ever continue the "open" technologies from Sun simply because they are not immediately profitable. Thinking otherwise is self-delusion.
Alarm bells have started ringing inside the former Sun Microsystems' OpenSolaris community over the project's potential future with database giant Oracle. OpenSolaris developers have complained they've been "completely ignored" by Oracle despite reaching out, with their questions over the project's future going unanswered. …
What do you mean 'immediately profitable'? Are you implying that Oracle should follow the same underpant gnomes strategy of giving everything away for free and hoping some money turns up at the end?
There is a reason Sun went from being a titan of the industry to being bought by a DB company.
Oracle are trying to absorb nearly 30,000 people, at a rates which varies from country to country. I'm seeing this from the inside and I can assure you it is non-trivial work. Hardly surprising that an opensource project which doesn't immediately have revenue is a lower (not necessarily low) priority.
Note that like any "open" project the support also has to come in part from the developers who use it.
Give them time...
Within a couple of days of their original announcement of closing kenai.com the main active thread on the site was discussing alternative sites.
With that, and the fact that it was the big active projects that were leaving in droves (including all of mine) probably helped change the minds. The kenai architecture is far superior to the old java.net one and (from what I gathered from various places) cheaper to run.
Still no updates since Feb 5th when they changed their minds however :-(
Let's hope my gut feeling about this (created by years of being exposed to corporations) is wrong. The gut feeling is that "Oracle's main customer base is big corporations and government contracts, and they have no interest in any product making it easy for small operations to compete with their big customers", and as such they want products like OpenSolaris to die a horrible death.
Which is sad, really. Opensolaris properly polished could really give Linux, OSX, *BSD some proper competititon, both at server and workstation ends, and with a little extra spitshine even compete on end-user desktops.
However, doing so would give Oracles main customers competition. Given Oracles track record, I have a bad feeling.
//Svein
p.s. I'm a FreeBSD enthusiast myself, but admit OpenSolaris is better at a lot of things.
for Oracle to drop OpenSolaris. It's a good product and for noobs it's easy to install and there are actual, relevant, and at least fairly current books one can buy (from Sun, Oracle now) to learn how it works, what things do, and how to set things up.
With people starting, all to slowly IMO, to move away from M$ it would be a real shame to loose OpenSolaris which could truly be a gateway to even bigger things for Oracle, in the long term.
Do corporations think about the long term anymore?