In no uncertain terms, the Director of Solaris product management at Oracle, Dan Roberts, says OpenSolaris will continue as an open source entity and Oracle will actively support and participate in the community. There are some questions regarding which direction Oracle will take in open sourcing some of OpenSolaris' technologies and the level of support that will be offered, but generally speaking, all is well, affirms Roberts.
Oracle plans to continue Sun's roadmap practically unchanged, but it will move towards a direct channel model, said Nicky Sheridan, country manager at Oracle South Africa (SA), who believes this will improve service to customers and take away part of the "less value-added perspective of the business" from channel partners.
With its acquisition of Sun, Oracle is now the world's largest purveyor of open source software. However, as Ken Hess notes on the DaniWeb Forum Index, Oracle's support didn't start with its purchase of InnoDB, MySQL or Sun. The company has a history of supporting free and open source software and has done much for the FOSS community.
The headline for IDC's press release on the 4Q09 server market sums things up nicely: "Worldwide Server Market Rebounds Sharply in Fourth Quarter as Demand for Blades and x86 Systems Leads the Way." Gartner found that while the worldwide server market recovered in the second half of 2009 from the economic downturn, plummeting sales in high-end systems resulted in a decline in overall revenue in the fourth quarter.
Oracle says it has not issued an end of life for OpenSolaris, writes eWeek's Chris Preimesberger. Speculation began when a Feb. 24 posting on the Oracle Website entitled "End of Service Life Status for OpenSolaris Operating System" appeared, which addressed general policies involving the service life of a product.
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