OpenSolaris, opensource-centric distribution of Solaris operating system, originally distributed by Sun, now purchased by Oracle will in my personal opinion fail by the long-term. Why? OpenSolaris is free to install, distribute and share. But, the fallowing fact is more important – it’s security updates are not. They can only be bought separately by the support agreement from Sun (now Oracle). Sun had SXCE – Solaris Express Community Edition, that stopped it’s existence in January 2010. OpenSolaris is supposed to be SXCE successor. Users of this OS now have only two distributions – first is Solaris 10, an enterprise level OS, the other is OpenSolaris, a community distribution. I personally believe that Solaris 10 is suitable for large enterprise users, who are capable of purchase Solaris 10 support licenses. However OpenSolaris is not suitable for enterprise use and is community-oriented. Why offering security updates commercially for that kind of opensource, community software? Is community not worth to have a secure environment? There is a possibility to update to “development repository” of OpenSolaris, but this is below the level of quality that ordinary user should expect from community distribution of operating system. There are other community oriented distributions of Linux and FreeBSD that offer free updates, while offering comparable technologies to OpenSolaris. We just have to realize that OpenSolaris is not UNIX(tm) anymore – it’s just based on it. Future Solaris 11 (based on OpenSolaris) probably will be. Sun (Oracle) should realize that this kind of licensing ultimately harm OpenSolaris and indirectly Solaris product. Security updates should be free, while there is a market in feature software updates (additional products). This however is not just my personal opinion – it’s opinion of many “community” users who are abandoning OpenSolaris because of this. Oracle, do something about it!