Open Source Software Comes to a Fork in the Code

“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…”

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