The OpenSolaris governing board fell on its collective sword Monday and resigned en masse after Oracle continued to ignore its ultimatum to appoint a liaison guy to work with it on the future of the open source project.

The move was anticlimactic to say the least. Oracle last week leaked an internal e-mail into the wild effectively saying OpenSolaris is dead.

The news of the mass resignation, coupled with Oracle suing Google claiming Android infringes on its Java patents, had Adobe's director of open source and standards David McAllister casting Oracle as the New Microsoft and saying "the axis of evil has shifted south about 850 miles or so."

The motion dissolving the OpenSolaris governing board reads:

Whereas Oracle has continued to ignore requests to appoint a liaison to work with the OGB concerning the future of OpenSolaris development and our community, and

Whereas Oracle distributed an email to its employees on Aug 13 2010 that set forth Oracle's decision to unilaterally terminate the development partnership between Oracle and the OpenSolaris Community, and

Whereas, without the continued support and participation of Oracle in the open development of OpenSolaris, the OGB and the community Sun/Oracle created to support the open Solaris development partnership have no meaning, and

Whereas the desire and enthusiasm for continuing open development of the OpenSolaris code base has clearly passed out of Oracle's (and thus this community's) hands into other communities,

Be it Resolved that the OpenSolaris Governing Board hereby collectively resigns, noting that under the terms of the OpenSolaris Charter section 1.1 (and Constitution 1.3.5) the responsibility to appoint an OGB passes to Oracle.

OpenSolaris users have two choices. They can wait for Oracle to deliver a free Solaris binary called Solaris 11 Express, available with optional support, by the end of the year, ahead of the full release of the next-generation commercial Solaris 11 rev next year or they can hope that Illumos, the new Nextenta-led OpenSolaris fork, turns into something.

See http://wiki.genunix.org:8080/wiki/index.php/2010_08_23_OGB_Agenda#Minutes and http://blogs.adobe.com/open/2010/08/oracle-closed-minds-and-open-source.html.