“Oracle is a very big software company, and Larry Ellison is a
very rich man. How did they get that way? By selling proprietary
software, not by giving it away. It’s the key point to bear in mind
when looking at the twin train wrecks of Solaris and OpenSolaris,
the two UNIX OSes Oracle controls by virtue of the Sun
acquisition.“Perhaps train wreck is too strong a phrase, but there’s no
doubt Ellison’s vision for Oracle Solaris has very little in common
those of many Solaris developers and users. “It’s picking the Sun
technologies that are commercializable and focusing on those, and
ignoring those that are not. They are just science projects,” is
how Ellison sums up his approach.“As for OpenSolaris and the whole idea of having an open source,
cutting-edge version of an enterprise OS — like Red Hat has with
Fedora and Novell has with OpenSUSE — well, that might be the way
Red Hat and Novell like to develop their enterprise Linux OSes,
but…”
Web Webster has more than 20 years of writing and editorial experience in the tech sector. He’s written and edited news, demand generation, user-focused, and thought leadership content for business software solutions, consumer tech, and Linux Today, he edits and writes for a portfolio of tech industry news and analysis websites including webopedia.com, and DatabaseJournal.com.
LinuxToday is a trusted, contributor-driven news resource supporting all types of Linux users. Our thriving international community engages with us through social media and frequent content contributions aimed at solving problems ranging from personal computing to enterprise-level IT operations. LinuxToday serves as a home for a community that struggles to find comparable information elsewhere on the web.
Property of TechnologyAdvice. © 2025 TechnologyAdvice. All Rights Reserved
Advertiser Disclosure: Some of the products that appear on this site are from companies from which TechnologyAdvice receives compensation. This compensation may impact how and where products appear on this site including, for example, the order in which they appear. TechnologyAdvice does not include all companies or all types of products available in the marketplace.