The letter of the OpenSolaris Governing Board to Oracle exploded like a bomb in the OSol community, outside of it, and in Oracle itself (or, at least, this is the impression I had from the blogs I read). I would like to report on the most interesting articles I've read so far in the blogosphere (whatever that is). …An interesting point of view is the one of Joerg Moellenkamp on his blog c0t0d0s0.org, a great place for everything Solaris. He is an Oracle (ex Sun) employee, so he can't actually say nothing more than his opinion, and without going out of Oracle's rails, but it provides good food for thought nonetheless:

"It's like holding a gun at your head and cry 'I will pull the trigger, if you don't talk to me". Sorry, if you you tell me something like that, i would just wait for you to pull the trigger, even if i planed or plan to something that's in your direction. […] Between "Just wait." and "We press the red button! Yes, that red button labled "Doomsday machine"!" are a lot of shades and i would have liked to see the OGB to use this shades.

From my perspective the OGB will reach nothing more than that as a direct result. In my humble opinion the current OGB should step back on August 23rd in any case. At least because of a single reason: The atmosphere will be too poisoned after this kind of threat.

However … to see the positive in the situation: As i wrote before, I tend to see it as a wake up call for all parties. Not only for Oracle, but for the OGB to review, what they can do to get relevant and how to represent the current state of the community, and for the community that they have to get independent from the stuff Oracles does.

A bit funny that Joerg used the same words as me: "wake up call". So, it probably was 😉

And today, following his announcement of Opensolaris build 142, we got a pointer to another interesting blog article from Garrett D'Amore, Senior Director of Engineering at Nexenta Systems and former Sun employee, who says:

Without giving any details, let me say that a few of us are quietly but diligently working on solutions to the critical problems, and I expect we'll be able to talk much more freely about the solutions we will be offering in early August, which is coming up very soon now.

and, in a comment:

I'm not an Oracle employee, but I am Nexenta employee. However, in this particular case, I'm talking as a group of individuals (some of whom are Nexenta employees working with Nexenta sponsorship, but not all) who are working on a solution. More about this will become clear next month.

So, neither unofficial nor official statements from Oracle yet. Just the same old litany of "hold on guys, hold on". Not too difficult for me, since I stumbled into OpenSolaris by accident (more or less…) and loved it, but I it's easy to understand the feelings of those that put their trust on it and are hearing nothing than that since a long time.

And, to say it all, I tried Nexenta core a couple of times on a VirtualBox VM -at least, when I succeeded in booting one- and I must say I am not impressed. Maybe I should hope these guys are about to grab something good out of their hat but, after all, I actually find myself hoping that, after all, Oracle will still push on OpenSolaris.