xxxxSolaris?

Posted on November 1, 2009

Here’s something in the category of “things that makes you go wha?!?”: The OpenSolaris Security Summit has been renamed to simply “Solaris” Security Summit.

If we’ve been looking for the first shot fired at OpenSolaris this would seem to be it. The question is whats next? When you combine this with the recent resurrection of “Solaris Next” (aka: Solaris 10++) it starts suggesting something is in the works, undoubtedly Oracle orchestrated.

Now, at this point I’m not jumping to any conclusions, and I don’t think you should either. Oracle’s intentions seem fairly clear at the moment and entirely positive for the future of Solaris and SPARC; and we know that X86 is also a part of that vision. Turning some love away from the OpenSolaris distro towards Solaris will be a welcome change for large enterprise customers, and undoubtedly a motivating factor.

My advise is to watch and wait… the wheels are turning.

If folks from Oracle/Sun are reading this; do what you wish with the Solaris product roadmap, but the community and source for Solaris are a critical part of a successful future. Please feel free to reassure us that we won’t lose that. I personally rely on access to the source for problem analysis and research on a daily basis and having access to Solaris developers, both badged and unbadged, is something I never want to be without again.