Add to del.icio.us     Digg this

Jul. 21, 2010

For the past year, the OpenSolaris Project has been pretty much up in the air so to speak, and that has more than one worried in the open source community.

As some would say: the worst thing is nothing happening at all.

Ever since Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems in 2009, the future of the Solaris and OpenSolaris operating systems have been called into question especially as the OpenSolaris 2010-1H release was missing and has been that way for the past few months and with no official communication from nobody at Oracle.

A new OpenSolaris release hasn't come in more than a year and users still are left wondering if or when it will arrive. Even the OpenSolaris Governing Board is out of the loop and they may abandon the cause next month if Oracle doesn't make their OpenSolaris intentions clearer and name a spokesperson asap.

Today though is one of the first signs that Oracle may let the OpenSolaris operating system live on with its official support and blessing.

Not only has the OpenSolaris 2010 stable release been missing for months, but so has the OpenSolaris development snapshots as well. While under Sun Microsystems' control, there were bi-weekly snapshots of Solaris Nevada, the codename for the next-generation Solaris OS to eventually succeed Solaris 10.

That new code was then pulled into new OpenSolaris preview snapshots available at Genunix.org. The stable releases of OpenSolaris are based off of these Nevada builds.

But there haven't been any new bi-weekly builds since build 134 on March 7, 2010, and that arrived about a month late, after build 133.

OpenSolaris 2010-03 and 2010-04 was supposed to be based off of a later revision to either build 133 or 134. Now, OpenSolaris might live under Oracle as the company is working on Nevada Build 145.

Some are now hoping that Oracle will issue an official statement shortly, which would ideally be backed by the long-awaited Oracle OpenSolaris 2010 release.

Alan Coopersmith, who is a known X.Org contributor and longtime Sun Microsystems employee now working for Oracle, has written a new email entitled "IPS distro-import changes needed for X packages for nv_145.

Coopersmith immediately began his public email by saying "Just when you thought you'd never see another one of these bi-weekly emails, well think twice..."

The news was refreshing, to say the least, and has been acclaimed by many in the open source community.

The rest of Coopersmith's email goes on to talk about the X.Org packages in Nevada build 145 that need to be updated.

Beyond the various technical details for the X IPS package changes needed, no details were given about when we may actually see an OpenSolaris Nevada Build 145 released publicly or the stable release of OpenSolaris 2010.XX.

Unless Oracle is simply misguiding its own employees about the future of Sun's OS or letting them waste more resources on the operating system while knowing it will be killed later, it looks like we may see Oracle continue to support OpenSolaris for the near future.

In other Oracle news, two months ago, Oracle acquired database firewall vendor Secerno. The move is designed to help its enterprise customers better secure their own databases and related mission-critical applications.

With its focus and long-term dedication on strong firewall security in the enterprise segment, in the past few years, Secerno has competed headon in the marketplace with such vendors as Imperva and Guardium, which was acquired last December by IBM.

For its part, Oracle sees this acquisition as a method to combine its own database security products with Secerno's "DataWall Appliance" in an effort to better help its customers make sure their data is absolutely secure and well protected.

Designed specifically for both Oracle and non-Oracle relational databases, Secerno's DataWall firewall appliance analyzes how databases are accessed to allow database administrators to set up policies to control that access.

Overall, using active monitoring, the firewall can detect and block any suspicious attempts to attack the database, according to Secerno.

The database firewall vendor also offers specialized, complex admin auditing features to help enterprises make certain they're in full compliance with Sarbanes-Oxley and other mandatory government regulatory standards.

Andrew Mendelsohn, senior v.p. of Oracle Database Server Technologies says "Oracle's Secerno acquisition today is in direct response to increasingly growing customer challenges around mitigating database security risk. Secerno's database firewall product acts as a real first line of defense against external threats and unauthorized internal access with a protective perimeter around both Oracle and non-Oracle databases."

Add to del.icio.us     Digg this

Source: Oracle.

All logos, trade marks or service marks on this website are the property of their respective companies or owners.

ADVERTISERS:
Linux News Today.org is read by over 450,000 people involved in the field of Linux application development, professional Web hosting services, Linux security, Linux Web development, etc. Inquire about our reasonable advertising rates on our news website. One of our advertising representatives will be in touch with you. Simply email us to learn about our ad rates and how we can help drive relevant traffic to your website. Advertising space is limited.