Oracle cancels Solaris 12

jeremy · 01-18-2017, 12:01 PM

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Rumors have been circulating since late last year that Oracle was planning to kill development of the Solaris operating system, with major layoffs coming to the operating system's development team. Others speculated that future versions of the Unix platform Oracle acquired with Sun Microsystems would be designed for the cloud and built for the Intel platform only and that the SPARC processor line would meet its demise. The good news, based on a recently released Oracle roadmap for the SPARC platform, is that both Solaris and SPARC appear to have a future.

The bad news is that the next major version of Solaris—Solaris 12— has apparently been canceled, as it has disappeared from the roadmap. Instead, it's been replaced with "Solaris 11.next"—and that version is apparently the only update planned for the operating system through 2021.

With its on-premises software and hardware sales in decline, Oracle has been undergoing a major reorganization over the past two years as it attempts to pivot toward the cloud. Those changes led to a major speed bump in the development cycle for Java Enterprise Edition, a slowdown significant enough that it spurred something of a Java community revolt. Oracle later announced a new roadmap for Java EE that recalibrated expectations, focusing on cloud services features for the next version of the software platform.

More at Ars...

--jeremy

John VV · 01-18-2017, 01:50 PM

i am surprised that it took this long

Jeebizz · 02-28-2017, 01:16 PM

I can't even get Solaris11.3 to boot after installing it, this is just on the Virtualbox VM too, yet downloading an appliance works *shrug*. So I guess anyone that still likes Solaris at this point must look towards any available forks that may still be alive.

jefro · 02-28-2017, 09:00 PM

Shame. Sun was one of the innovators back when.

frankbell · 02-28-2017, 10:19 PM

I had a neighbor many years ago who worked at the Sun Oil refinery in Pennsylvania. They used Solaris. (In those days, I was still new to DOS.)

Nevertheless, I can't say I'm surprised. It seems to me that Solaris has become legacy software, barely clinging to life. The Unix (and I mean "Unix," not "Unix-like," torch has been passed the BSDs, which seem to be alive and well.

Jeebizz · 02-28-2017, 10:37 PM

Well I don't know what Oracle plans to do with any of their acquisitions from Sun. I think they just wanted to sell everything piece by piece or something. They have been rather lax with keeping Java properly patched and secure, not a whole lot of emphasis on the SPARC servers even though they claim it will be given a more priority. I do not think Oracle really thought through what they will do after buying out Sun at all.

notKlaatu · 03-01-2017, 12:16 AM

This certainly validates (not that they needed it) the work of all the folk over at Ilumos and OpenIndiana. Solaris is way too good to lose completely.

cynwulf · 03-10-2017, 07:31 AM

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Originally Posted by Jeebizz

Well I don't know what Oracle plans to do with any of their acquisitions from Sun.

For Oracle it was about taking out a major competitor (and killing/hindering MySQL if possible). The whole thing stank at the time and only happened through the right people pulling the right strings.

After the takeover, many former Sun devs left, opensolaris was killed and lawsuits started flying. LibreOffice also emerged as a result.

Rather than being dead, solaris/opensolaris was a SVR4 UNIX descendant with a bright future.

Oracle are quite simply a bunch of bastards.

hydrurga · 03-10-2017, 07:43 AM

I remember when I saw my first Sun workstation at a company in the early 1990s. Colour me jealous (I was developing in QNX on a bog-standard PC at the time). It's just a shame how the company ended up. It promised (and delivered) so much.

As regards cynwulf's comment, Oracle are not my favourite company either, except for one little product... VirtualBox. I know there are alternatives, but I've grown quite fond of it.

cynwulf · 03-13-2017, 08:44 AM

Well Innotek, the developers of Virtualbox, were acquired by Sun and the rest, as they say, is history.

I suppose, if you value x86 emulation, VirtualBox is good, but personally, from reading about it only, QEMU looks much more useful.

jlliagre · 04-10-2017, 06:07 PM

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Originally Posted by cynwulf

Rather than being dead, solaris/opensolaris was a SVR4 UNIX descendant with a bright future.

In this period of "alternative facts", do not blindly trust hearsay and speculations.

Rumors of Solaris death are quite exaggerated given the fact it had its long term support officially extended by Oracle to 2034.

Publicly available files (Solaris-userland) show that Solaris 12 builds, even if this specific version number is doomed as far as Solaris is concerned, are still being regularly produced (last one is build 122 closed 3 days ago).

Some of the current changes are instructive: s/SunOS 5.12/SunOS 5.11/, s/S12/S11.4 and later/.

Randicus Draco Albus · 09-05-2017, 08:18 AM

https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/62320/

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To be honest this was to be expected the very moment these guys took over. One of the first things they did was triple the subscription support costs while seriously axing the services you got in return.

Either the wanted to kill it or their business model is flawed.