openSolaris - Dead and Buried?

We are well into the current burst in the release cycle now, with Slackware 13.1 released over the weekend, Fedora 13 due out today, and Mandriva 2010.1 and openSuSE 11.3 coming soon. All of this activity makes it even more obvious that openSolaris is falling seriously behind, with no clear information about the next release available.

The release was originally called "2010.02", and was due out in February. Until the end of last year, it seemed to be moving along pretty well. With the Oracle takeover of Sun, and the ensuing activity and uncertainty, it wasn't too surprising that it was changed to "2010.03", and the date pushed back to March. But March came and went without a release, and no new release date was announced. April came and went... and still nothing. Now May is almost over, and there have been a few (very few) rumors about a "2010.05" release, but still no release, and no information. Perhaps it is time to just give up on it...

This is of more than passing interest to me, because my new employer (well, not so new now) is a mostly Solaris shop, and I came here with high hopes of helping in a transition to openSolaris at least on our desktop workstations, and perhaps even on some of the servers. That is looking rather unlikely now, and those here who have been pushing all along for Windows on both the desktop and servers are looking rather smug.

jw 25/5/2010