
Solaris 12 removed from Oracle roadmap, Solaris 11.next planned as next release - hunterjrj
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/01/18/solaris_12_disappears_from_oracles_roadmap/
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tominous
I can think of four reasons for Oracle staying at Solaris 11.x instead of
planning a new Solaris 12 release:

1\. Some enterprises have a general policy of only running versions N and N-1
of software. The release of Solaris 12 would trigger a review of Solaris 10 in
those environments, which would accelerate the trend away from Solaris. (The
Solaris 10 to Solaris 11 upgrade is particularly disruptive due to the switch
to IPS packaging and the networking changes, so migration to Linux is of
comparable complexity.) Immediate loss of legacy support revenue for both
Solaris and SPARC hardware.

2\. Solaris 11 support is promised until at least 2031, or 2034 if customers
pay for extended support [1]. A new release would just add another stream to
support with at least 15 years of overlap.

3\. The old SVR4 packaging was so slow and Live Upgrade so unreliable that new
releases were required to stop patch bundles from getting too unwieldy. IPS is
much faster and safer so it is more technically feasible to stick with the
same major release.

4\. I'd tend to agree with Adrian Cockcroft that the interesting things are
happening elsewhere now [2]. There may not be enough reason for customers to
upgrade. Oracle can avoid the story of a failed release by not doing the
release in the first place.

[1] [http://www.oracle.com/us/support/library/lifetime-support-
ha...](http://www.oracle.com/us/support/library/lifetime-support-
hardware-301321.pdf)

[2] [http://perfcap.blogspot.com.au/2010/08/open-letter-to-my-
sun...](http://perfcap.blogspot.com.au/2010/08/open-letter-to-my-sun-friends-
at-oracle.html)

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ComputerGuru
We actually used to run OpenSolaris in production for quite a while. It took
some time, but it's safe to say that FreeBSD has properly come forward and
filled in those shoes quite readily.

I doubt they exist, but if there are any Solaris fans that haven't tried
FreeBSD yet, you really should.

~~~
ComputerGuru
Oh, there is one thing I _do_ miss: Solaris was ABI compatible between the x86
and x86_64 kernels. You could run code (or kernel modules, even) compiled for
one platform against the other. FreeBSD is not yet ABI-compatible between the
two; it's been a todo list item going back to FreeBSD 8 or 9, I think.

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kogepathic
Seems like the rumours [0] [1] were true.

[0]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13079370](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13079370)

[1] [https://www.thelayoff.com/t/KTCW4qz](https://www.thelayoff.com/t/KTCW4qz)

~~~
e40
Regarding [1]. !@#@#!@# it pisses me off when people post stuff without a
date. Even the comments don't have dates!!

However, thanks for the link.

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cpeterso
Even if Oracle plans to reduce the scope of Solaris 12 or moving to a rolling
release like Windows 10, they could have avoided this scrutiny by keeping the
Solaris 12 name instead of inventing Solaris "11.next". Perhaps they thought
existing Solaris 11.x customers would be more likely to upgrade to 11.next
than 12.

~~~
wang_li
It's reasonably safe to assume that 'next' is a placeholder for .4, .5, .6 and
so on. This seems to me more like a project management issue than a technical
issue. I.e. the scope of Solaris 12 was too ambitious and individual teams
were finishing their work on different schedules. Rather than have everything
sit idle, they are releasing it piecemeal under the Solaris 11.x umbrella.

To the extent that there are commercial ISVs supporting Solaris it also makes
their jobs a little easier since they can deal with change in smaller
increments.

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shams93
Back in the 90s Solaris ruled the world and you could be fired for bringing a
Linux system into the building, everyone assumed open source was insecure in
the 90s. It was immature so it was scary for the suits back then. Things have
changed a lot lol.

~~~
JudasGoat
As a sysadmin from the 90"s. I was told by the CTO of a fortune 500 company,
"You will never run Linux on my network". So yeah, what you said.

~~~
trentnelson
That was a pretty sensible position in the 90s. Linux was in its infancy, and
the commercial UNIX vendors all had very robust offerings
(Solaris/Tru64/AIX/HP-UX/IRIX; all _very_ good systems at the time).

------
mrweasel
It's incredible hard to figure out what Oracle is planning and they really
need to make their intentions more clear. If they don't, Solaris and SPARC
will just die off, and to be fair, that might be the plan.

Right now we don't know if Solaris 11.Next is a maintenance release or if they
are just moving to something more akin to a rolling release, as some people
have suggested. Unless all the question currently floating around are
addressed by Oracle, no sane person would base new infrastructure on neither
Solaris, nor SPARC.

Perhaps Oracle want to move all Solaris and SPARC deployments in-house, but
what sense would that make?

~~~
lallysingh
AFAICT, Oracle bought Sun to get at their (really x86_64) hardware business,
to compete with HP/IBM. One quick ref that kinda shows this angle:
[https://www.quora.com/Why-did-Oracle-buy-Sun](https://www.quora.com/Why-did-
Oracle-buy-Sun)

The rest of Sun was just extra. So Oracle's seeing if they can use them. If
they find that they can't they'll just dump them. As they're doing now.

~~~
pjc50
I thought they bought Sun for Java, especially the (then-ongoing) lawsuit
against Microsoft?

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diegocg
Solaris died a long time ago, regardless of what roadmaps say. It died the day
Oracle acquired it. Even if Oracle invested heavily in Solaris, it's hard to
imagine how they could match Linux long term.

Solaris had opportunity to compete with Linux, by becoming a real open source
project. Not in the Android sense ("we let you see and modify it, but we don't
let you participate in the development), but in the Linux sense. Do all your
development in the open, kill the bureaucracy, make other companies trust that
they aren't being taken advantage of if they contribute to it. Sun attempted
to go in this direction, but Oracle killed it.

~~~
raverbashing
But why would people develop for Solaris if there is Linux and the BSDs?
Sincere question

~~~
lallysingh
Solaris had a lot of useful and unique features, and was backed with a
substantial support apparatus. If you developed a feature for Solaris that got
in, it'd be documented and supported to quite a high degree.

If you wanted support from the primary vendor of your OS, and wanted a pretty
high-quality Unix, Solaris would fill that niche for you. There's definitely a
market for that, but not nearly enough to keep Sun or Solaris alive.

~~~
tossedaway334
OpenSolaris did not accept contributions.

