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.<p>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.
Seems like the rumours [0] [1] were true.<p>[0] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13079370" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13079370</a><p>[1] <a href="https://www.thelayoff.com/t/KTCW4qz" rel="nofollow">https://www.thelayoff.com/t/KTCW4qz</a>
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.<p>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.<p>Perhaps Oracle want to move all Solaris and SPARC deployments in-house, but what sense would that make?
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.<p>I doubt they exist, but if there are any Solaris fans that haven't tried FreeBSD yet, you really should.
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.
I can think of four reasons for Oracle staying at Solaris 11.x instead of planning a new Solaris 12 release:<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.oracle.com/us/support/library/lifetime-support-hardware-301321.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://www.oracle.com/us/support/library/lifetime-support-ha...</a><p>[2] <a href="http://perfcap.blogspot.com.au/2010/08/open-letter-to-my-sun-friends-at-oracle.html" rel="nofollow">http://perfcap.blogspot.com.au/2010/08/open-letter-to-my-sun...</a>
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.