Wednesday, June 30, 2010

Solaris Next not OpenSolaris?

Many of us have patiently been awaiting the 2010.xx release of OpenSolaris frustrated by the lack of communication from Oracle. After some digging I realized that something quite interesting has been going on for a while. Oracle themselves are not building OpenSolaris anymore, not since build 135. They are building "Solaris Next Development", this is from /etc/release:

Solaris Next Development snv_140 X86
Copyright (c) 2010, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Assembled 29 April 2010


This kind of makes sense, since OpenSolaris always have been the development branch for the Solaris.next, but the distributions have been named OpenSolaris for a while. I also found some tags like "osol_2010.05u4" which seems to be related to build 140. So have there been a change in plan for OpenSolaris 2010.xx release or is this just something for the future, "Solaris 11". But since build 134[a|b] which once should have been the release build for the next release still has the old names in them there might sill be a "OpenSolaris" release.

This is also makes sense since Oracle is mostly talking about Solaris, not OpenSolaris, Solaris seems to be the way forward, time will tell (since Oracle doesn't) in which form. It looks like it will become more like a single distribution, Solaris, with some development releases, OpenSolaris had it's own life and even support side by side with Solaris while still being the bed for development.

No comments: