Oracle Corp. has rekindled its Solaris love. Sun's Solaris operating system will underlie new high-end data center appliances running the Oracle software stack. And Oracle EnterpriseLinux now becomes the preferred OS for lower-end commodity hardware.

Hot on the heals of Oracle's revamp of Solaris support, the licensing agreement for free downloads of Solaris 10 have changed.

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.

Recent changes to Solaris licensing could further encourage Solaris 10 users to consider Linux -- and result in fewer new users considering Solaris at all. If you're a Solaris customer, don't overlook this license change.

If you want to know what Oracle's roadmap is for Linux, just watch what Red Hat does. Oracle Enterprise Linux is just a clone of RHEL. Getting a sense of what Oracle really has planned for Solaris - aside from deploying it in SMP systems and clusters - is going to take some time. Oracle's plans for virtualization and system management are more clear.

During a conference call yesterday after his $7.4 billion acquisition deal was announced, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison said one of the primary reasons Oracle is interested in Sun is because of its Solaris operating system, a widely distributed version of Unix that has a large installed base and has long been the dependable platform for Oracle's popular database.

Hot on the heels of JavaFX, taking on the likes of Microsoft Silverlight and Adobe Flash, Sun looks set to formally unveil its plans for Project Indiana this week and attack the Linux developer heartlands. Solaris has long been known as the really secure Unix variant that sucks when it comes to user friendliness.

Sun Microsystems has purchased MySQL and released Java under the GPL. Chief executive Jonathan Schwartz has also speculated that there could be a future release of Solaris under the GPL, but what would be the implications of such a move?

Under its new owner, Sun Microsystems, MySQL will remain true to its Linux roots and won’t be pulled towards Solaris or become overshadowed by the Solaris-distributed Postgres.