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Without Oracle support, OpenSolaris group breaks up

An end has come to a major part of Sun Microsystems' attempt to transform Solaris from a proprietary version of Unix to an open-source operating system built by others, too.
Written by Stephen Shankland, Contributor

An end has come to a major part of Sun Microsystems' attempt to transform Solaris from a proprietary version of Unix to an open-source operating system built by others, too.

Instead of becoming a rival to the broadly developed Linux operating system, control over the OpenSolaris project essentially on Monday reverted to its new corporate master, Oracle, which acquired Sun and its assets in January. After Oracle gave the group the cold shoulder, the OpenSolaris Governing Board voted unanimously to disband, according to meeting minutes.

Some of the initiative to build an open-source version of Solaris remains at a new project called Illumos, but it will operate under very different rules: instead of releasing the underlying source code daily as it's created, Oracle apparently will issue it only when its finished versions of Solaris are complete.

For more of this story, read Lacking Oracle help, OpenSolaris group disbands on CNET News.

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