Obituary: OpenSolaris

The corporation killed the community spirit again. James Gosling has compared Larry Ellison to Chengiz Khan ("we must not only ensure that we win but also everyone else loose"). They killed OpenSolaris and will only release a Developer MTU. Erstwhile Sun built, contributed and nourished a community that thrives and continues to grow on the principles of open source. The world (including Oracle) has savored the fruits of sun's philosophy and today they are taking away what belongs really to the solaris developers (both inside and outside of sun). Based on patents files by Gosling and his colleagues they have already sued Google for alleged violating of rights (re Android and Dalvik vm). These attacks go beyond the issues between corporations. The open source java community and everything else that was born of that works everyday to make life a better experience. Oracle cannot just take this away. I don't care if Google looses a lawsuit or two (they did try to screw up Java by building this Dalvik anyway) but if Oracle wins and continues to do what it has started, many years of community work done by smart people will just be wasted (I fear). At the moment I am drawing hope from the fact that java is so deep seated in almost all of oracle products that they will not dare to screw with java.