This link purports to be a leaked internal memo to the Solaris Engineering team detailing Oracle’s plans for the Solaris operating system.

Some highlights:

Next release of Solaris will be Solaris 11 in 2011.

Solaris 11 Express binary release available later this year; with free Developer RTU and optional support plan

No more “OpenSolaris” distribution releases.

No more nightly source code drops. New features will be shown to the outside world in full yearly Solaris releases.

Source code to Solaris will be released under the CDDL *after* binary releases

CDDL will still be used; all new source will be CDDL-licensed

Committed to delivery of binary releases, APIs in source or binary form, open source code, technical documentation, and engineering of upstream contributions to common industry technologies

“All of Oracle’s efforts on binary distributions of Solaris technology will be focused on Solaris 11. We will not release any other binary distributions, such as nightly or bi-weekly builds of Solaris binaries, or an OpenSolaris 2010.05 or later distribution. We will determine a simple, cost-effective means of getting enterprise users of prior OpenSolaris binary releases to migrate to S11 Express.”

Personally, I think this is a good thing. It eliminates the confusion that had grown around “OpenSolaris”. Was it a binary operating system distribution? Was it the collected source code bundles that made up Solaris? Was it the source and/or binary blobs that could be installed over an existing Solaris installation to make an “OpenSolaris” install? And so forth.

Oracle is suing Google, claiming patent infringement related to the implementation of Java used in the Android smartphone operating system.

I received the following note from a contact at Oracle:

“Oracle Solaris is available with a free development and evaluation license. Production deployment requires a commercial license which comes bundled for free with the purchase of Oracle Sun HW, or you can purchase the new Oracle Premier Solaris Subscription for non-Oracle HW which comes with a license and support. The media pack only includes the development and evaluational use license.”

The Illumos Project has launched. It aspires to be the community built and maintained version of Oracle’s OpenSolaris code.