Oracle said Thursday that Dell and HP will sell Oracle Solaris, Oracle Enterprise Linux and Oracle VM on their x86 platforms, which will presumably come as some relief to customers uncertain of Oracle's intentions. HP said in a canned statement that many users "have hardwired stacks of applications and infrastructure that can't rapidly change." Oracle will do the support.

Meanwhile, things on the OpenSolaris side of the house are in a tizzy with the widgetry's governing board issuing ultimatums and threatening to disband if Oracle doesn't pay it some mind while a breakaway movement is believed to be in progress because Oracle, while committed to Solaris, has reduced its support for OpenSolaris as a distribution.

Supposedly Oracle hasn't made up its mind what to do with OpenSolaris, which came to the open source party way too late to mount an effective riposte to Linux, although it seems pretty clear it's not going to be the stewpot out of which Solaris revs get served up.

The governing board complains of having no liaison with Oracle, no Oracle employees on the governing board, no Oracle web site support and no updated community-driven distro as promised, just radio silence.

It wants a liaison appointed by August 16 with "the authority to talk about the future of OpenSolaris and its interaction with the OpenSolaris community" or it will put on its collective hat and go home, returning control of the community to Oracle.

The Register adds that Solaris' top developer Greg Lavender left Oracle for Cisco in mid-June. He was VP of engineering for Solaris.