I've been seeing articles implying that Sun may have trouble, now that it has been determined that the Unix copyrights belong to Novell. Here's one example, Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols' "Is OpenSolaris in hot water?" -- where a number of interviewees opine more or less yes. I disagree, and I'll show you why I disagree.

I have come across Solaris a few times. Sun makes its own Unix operating system, called Solaris. I have heard and read many good things about Solaris, especially on Sun hardware and in big enterprise environments.

Lines are beginning to blur between the open source and commercial versions of the Sun Microsystems Solaris Unix operating system.

Bordeaux 1.6 is now running on current Solaris and OpenSolaris systems.

I have been working with a couple friends over the past two weeks to get Bordeaux running on Solaris and OpenSolaris 2008.11. We now have everything compiling and running but like always more testing needs to be done before it's ready for final release.

I've given up on predicting when the zombie movie series staring the undead SCO monster is finally going to stay quietly in its grave Still, this week a jury is deciding whether SCO or Novell owns Unix's intellectual property rights.

A posting on the company Web site implied that OpenSolaris may soon be "end-of-lifed." However, there's no need for app developers and IT managers to worry: Oracle says it is not killing off the freely down-loadable community version of Sun's Unix-based Solaris enterprise operating system anytime soon.

Sun Microsystems’ OpenSolaris 2008.11 includes improvements around software package management and incorporating community packaging efforts. The updates to the free Solaris-based OS shows that Sun will not follow IBM and HP in letting Linux take over the platform space once dominated by Unix.

Sometimes, Google's search engine does a better job of telling us about IT vendors than the vendors' own public relations and marketing machines. So it is with the next commercial and development iterations of Oracle's Solaris Unix operating system.

An internal Oracle memo that was released last week provides a detailed summary of the company's plans for the Solaris operating system, which Oracle obtained when it acquired Sun. The memo offers a mix of good and bad news for Solaris enthusiasts.