"(1) We can't do everything. The limiting factor is our engineering bandwidth measured in people and time. So we have to ensure our top priority is driving delivery of the #1 Enterprise Operating System, Solaris 11, to grow our systems business; and (2) We want the adoption of our technology and intellectual property to accelerate our overall goals, yet not permit competitors to derive business advantage (or FUD) from our innovations before we do."

If the first reason seems a little odd, given the global resources of Oracle and whatever Sun Microsystems staff would have remained onboard after Oracle acquired Sun last year, the second reason seems to completely misread the intent of open source development. When code is developed in the open, it is true that competitors can see it, but you can usually see their contributions, too.

And, if indeed resources are a problem, what sense does it make to cut off an entire community of volunteer workers who have been working on OpenSolaris? If anything, it seems that Oracle just made Solaris development that much .

The memo takes care to emphasize that all code under any open source license will still be made available, and Oracle plans to continue to provide upstream contributions to projects it uses for the Solaris 11 (and beyond) operating system. It will be interesting to see what, if anything, people will make with this code.

For my part, as a long-time member of the Linux community, I can only express dismay at this ignominious end for OpenSolaris. Competitor it may have been, but projects like this lend to the overall health of the open source, and watching one die by corporate apathy is just nauseating.