s expected, Yesterday afternoon OpenIndiana project was publicly announced.openindiana
"OpenIndiana “is a brand new distribution of OpenSolaris, constructed by the community, for the community. The primary goal is to be a binary and package compatible drop in replacement for the official OpenSolaris and forthcoming Solaris 11 and Solaris 11 Express releases.”

OpenIndiana is a distribution of illumos, which is a community fork of OpenSolaris. And OpenSolaris itself was the open source version of Solaris, before it was discontinued by Oracle, after Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems, Inc., in January 2010.

Since Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems last year, 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 months now with no official communication from Oracle. A new OpenSolaris release hasn't come in more than a year and we still are left wondering if or when it will arrive.

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.

One of the open-source projects that Oracle hasn't been too open about their intentions with has been OpenSolaris. Solaris Express Community Edition (SXCE) already closed up last month and there hasn't been too much information flowing out about the next OpenSolaris release.

In what is supposedly a leaked internal memo to Oracle staff, the adoptive parent company of Sun’s OpenSolaris had announced the fate the project’s (and binary release’s) future. That is, they will support it no more outside of CDDL’d package updates for future Solaris (i.e. Solaris 11) releases.

A former Sun Microsystems' executive has re-assured worried OpenSolaris users the open-source operating system has a future under new owner Oracle. Dan Roberts, Oracle director of product management, has said the database giant will continue to invest in OpenSolaris and will deliver the operating system's next incarnation: OpenSolaris 2010.03.

The OpenSolaris community is concerned by the silence from Oracle over its future plans for the open source operating system. In a blog posting, OpenSolaris developer Peter Tribble complained that Oracle has not mentioned OpenSolaris.

While Sun Microsystems may have struggled with making money from its OpenSolaris operating system prior to Sun's acquisition by Oracle, that doesn't mean that others haven't had better success.