There’s nothing in GPL that prevents or prohibits closing later versions. This is also true for the CDDL. The reason Oracle was able to close Solaris after it had been open is that Sun had required a contributor license agreement that assigned the copyright for your code to Sun before they would accept your changes. This would work even for the GPL.
The CLA is actually what initially prompted the illumos fork even before Oracle closed the gate.
Joyent initially had a CLA on Node.js for business reasons that (as far as I know) everyone in engineering disagreed with. When we were finally able to make Triton (née SmartDataCenter) open source we also eliminated the CLA for node.
We now have contributions from many people under the MPLv2 in Triton, and we are no longer the exclusive copyright holder which means that it is pretty much impossible\* for Samsung to close it again.
* We would have to either rip out all those commits or get every contributor to either relicense or assign copyright to Joyent.
Most of the application specific images have stopped receiving updates. This is because they were time consuming to create/validate, and were mostly just the base-64 image with whatever package pre-installed via pkgin. This was also happened around the time of the rise of Docker, so most people were opting for docker images produced by upstream maintainers.
In most cases, you can just make a base-64 image and `pkgin in` whatever package you wanted and it's pretty much the same thing.
The Prometheus stuff is heavily used by us internally, and while it's usable, it's pretty experimental (i.e., changing quickly). I don't see any pull requests or issues that are obviously from you, so if you point me at something I can take a look at it.
1. CDDL is fully BSD compatible. The license is file based, so it's non-infecting, and binaries can be re-licensed. Win/win.
2. Most already do. Some even believe that 1 makes CDDL compatible with GPL as well and so ship binaries.
3. Patent protection in CDDL is extremely strong. Rumor has it that Oracle wanted to kill illumos via litigation, but never went ahead with it because they knew they'd never win because of the CDDL.
I don't see how it could. Except that maybe we'll see some more Solaris refugees coming in.
illumos has been a thriving project for over six years, fully independent from Oracle. There has been zero code sharing, and little interaction of any kind.
The CLA is actually what initially prompted the illumos fork even before Oracle closed the gate.
Joyent initially had a CLA on Node.js for business reasons that (as far as I know) everyone in engineering disagreed with. When we were finally able to make Triton (née SmartDataCenter) open source we also eliminated the CLA for node.
We now have contributions from many people under the MPLv2 in Triton, and we are no longer the exclusive copyright holder which means that it is pretty much impossible\* for Samsung to close it again.
* We would have to either rip out all those commits or get every contributor to either relicense or assign copyright to Joyent.