Oracle Switching Solaris To A Continuous Delivery Model

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Oracle Switching Solaris To A Continuous Delivery Model

Last week talk of Solaris heated up again with Solaris 12 being removed from the Oracle road-map, after rumors of Oracle canning Solaris occurred in early December, meanwhile there are also more layoffs happening at Oracle. Oracle finally issued a blog post this week with a bit more clarification on the matter...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Solaris-Continuous-Delivery

[speculatrix]

I don't think people really care if Solaris survives. It's outlived its usefulness.
The uncertainty Oracle caused was probably a good thing, causing people "sitting on the fence" to make their mind up about dropping it.

Sure, it's kind of sad, as it was the first *nix I used, but things have moved on, and we all hate Oracle.

It's a bit like that old faded film star you once liked announcing their retirement, and you realise they haven't actually done anything worthwhile in years, and their early stuff wasn't as good as you remembered.

[torsionbar28]

I don't think people really care if Solaris survives. It's outlived its usefulness.
The uncertainty Oracle caused was probably a good thing, causing people "sitting on the fence" to make their mind up about dropping it.

Compaq/HP did the same thing when they killed the DEC Alpha in favor of the ill-fated intel Itanium. Compaq axed the unreleased EV8 and EV9 chips on the roadmap, then later "clarified" their statement by adding an EV7z chip back to the roadmap that would have "some" of the features of EV8. Then launched a program called RetainTrust that was designed to instill confidence in current Alpha customers, but really all it did is provide conflicting information to confuse and discourage customers. Of course this entire time they were heavily hyping Itanium, telling everyone it was the future. The OS, Tru64 UNIX followed the same pattern, with v5.1 released in 2000 (about the same time as all this RetainTrust nonsense and Itanium hype) and when they finally flipped the switch and stopped support in 2012, it was still v5.1 with some absurd patch level.

If I were a Sun customer right now, history tells us this is a good time to start planning a migration to some other platform.

[bug77]

torsionbar28 Itanium was a novel thing when HP/Compaq did all that. In this case, the alternative to Solaris is damn well proven.

[Auzy]

The advantage of this model is that they can basically upgrade nothing and then claim the upgrade is coming soon (which is less obvious than the lack of regular major upgrades) . Solaris died the moment Oracle took it over.

Its a damned shame. Expect Dyndns to get more and more expensive too thanks to them

[noname_coward]

Solaris 12 must have been very near its release when all these rumors started. What would have kept Oracle from keeping S12 around forever instead of S11?

It's silly to believe this new versioning choice represents a change in Oracle's commitment to Solaris, that's totally orthogonal to this matter. Software functionality gets abandoned all the time and Oracle could have released Solaris 12 as if all went to plan. Apple kept 10 as their major version number for more than 15 years, Windows was at version 5 for almost a decade. During all that time, so much changed, got introduced, got abandoned and it will be the same for Solaris.

What's more likely is that Oracle could not get either most of their customers or other software vendors to get on board with S12. There was some talk of IBM getting free from any commitments to Solaris releases of DB2 for example. I believe someone, somewhere made a raw deal with Oracle and Oracle realized they can keep banking as long as Solaris stays at 11.

Another possibility is that too many customers are happy running unpatched versions of major Solaris releases and will not pay Oracle for support. Remove major versions altogether by going to a continuous development model and their customers have the choice between running not old, but very old software and paying Oracle its tax.

Oracle will extract whatever it can, because that's the Oracle way.

[SystemCrasher]

Granted Oracle about to fire 1000 employes related to Solaris (at least Zdnet wrote so)... well, at the end of day, Oracle got most valuable part: the customers. Now it probably makes no sense to them to develop 2 competing products, one of which they have to develop themselves and another one is Linux, mostly developed by others. So most companies in their shoes would do the very same thing I guess. I guess they're going to put Solaris in deep maintenance mode. So while it isn't "dead" in sense Oracle not going to kill it with fire, immediately stopping all support, etc, I guess it means "there will be no development". So it looks pretty much like shutdown. Lack of major milestones probably means they're going to shut development down, so it would not see major features whatsoever.

p.s. on side note it is quite funny all these arrogant high-profile solaris admins suddenly turned into just a bunch of losers by few simple actions of single company. That's how vendor lock works.

[jollyd]

p.s. on side note it is quite funny all these arrogant high-profile solaris admins suddenly turned into just a bunch of losers by few simple actions of single company. That's how vendor lock works.

As it turned out the Linux is a proud successor of UNIX systems, and even in the arrogance department

[wizard69]

Actually I don't see the big deal here. For many of Suns/Oracles customers massive disruptive updates aren't wanted anyways. Simply put Oracle isn't selling into the cellar hacker community. As for what happens ten years down the road, why get excited, In ten years China might have attacked the silicon valley, a giant asteroid might have hit the planet or the arrival of intelligent life from another solar system far from us might have happened. Oh and lets be honest Linux isn't much better off if any of these things happen.

[starshipeleven]

As it turned out the Linux is a proud successor of UNIX systems, and even in the arrogance department

Is your Unix Linux-compatible?