Doubts had already surfaced about Oracle's commitment to OpenSolaris, an open-source version of the Solaris OS that Sun released in a bid to attract more developers -- and eventually, it hoped, more paying customers -- to its products.

Last month The OpenSolaris Governing Board unless Oracle appointed a liaison to discuss its future plans for the OS.

Not surprisingly, developers who contributed to the project were dismayed at the latest development.

"This is a terrible send-off for countless hours of work -- for quality software which will now ship as an Oracle product that we (the original authors) can no longer obtain on an unrestricted basis," wrote Steven Stallion, a software engineer in Atlanta who contributed to the project, .

"I can only maintain that the software we worked on was for the betterment of all, not for any one company's bottom line. This is truly a perversion of the open source spirit," he wrote.