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Oracle Scraps Plans For Solaris 12 (theregister.co.uk)

Posted by BeauHD on from the what-to-expect dept.

bobthesungeek76036 writes: According to The Register, Solaris 12 has been removed from Oracle roadmaps. This pretty much signals the demise of Solaris (as if we didn't already know that...) From the report: "The new blueprint -- dated January 13, 2017 -- omits any word of Solaris 12 that Oracle included in the same document's 2014 edition, instead mentioning 'Solaris 11.next' as due to debut during this year or the next complete with 'Cloud Deployment and Integration Enhancements.' At the time of writing, search engines produce no results for 'Solaris 11.next.' The Register has asked Oracle for more information. The roadmap also mentions a new generation of SPARC silicon in 2017, dubbed SPARC Next, and then in 2020 SPARC Next+. The speeds and capabilities mentioned in the 2017 document improve slightly on those mentioned in the 2014 roadmap.

127 comments

  1. 4.1.3u1 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    is the only SunOS for me...

    Wonder what Casper D. is gonna do -
    learned so much from that man!

    CAP === 'perched'

    1. Re:4.1.3u1 by Cmdln+Daco · · Score: 1

      And I will continue to use Version 11 of the X Window System.

      I started with X11R5 back when I first ran Linux in 1993. I've upgraded to X11R6.

    2. Re:4.1.3u1 by Leroy+Brown · · Score: 1

      =(

      I'm convinced that Casper Dik was just a code-name for the entire SunOS/Solaris support team, and that there's no way any one individual can know and contribute so much.

      Decades later, and I still aspire to have even a tenth of a clue as him.

    3. Re:4.1.3u1 by arglebargle_xiv · · Score: 1

      4.1.what? 4.1.4 was the one.

    4. Re:4.1.3u1 by OffTheLip · · Score: 1

      Similar setup for me back in the day. I kept a Sun "pizzabox" SPARCstation 5 diskless client on my desk running SunOS 4,1,3 long after our development environment moved on to SYSV Solaris. I preferred the BSD environment with pure X11. I'd remote in to the new hardware and work that way.

    5. Re: 4.1.3u1 by cthulhu11 · · Score: 1

      4.1.4 was way unstable for me.

    6. Re:4.1.3u1 by segin · · Score: 1

      Does modern X.org count as X11R7?

  2. And then... by fahrbot-bot · · Score: 4, Funny

    To complete the mashing of jargon, in 2024 - "Objective SPARC Next++" (appending "On Rails" for rack systems).

    --
    It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
    1. Re:And then... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Oracle pricing is subjective in such a way that an objective product can't fit in the fold. They should have just named Solaris as Solaris and SPARC as SPARC since we are in the cloud and IaaS era. Even Microsoft renames reflect that, although they did forget number 10 behind the Windows. Such yuge mistakes can only be corrected by raising the prices nationally by 25%.

  3. World domination right on schedule by Tough+Love · · Score: 1

    Actually, Linux needs competition or it will start to run out of reasons to make it better. In future, it looks like the BSD family will be pretty much it.

    Thanks, Sun/Oracle for erecting barriers around DTrace, thus motivating even better tracing in Linux. Thanks also for doing the same to ZFS, thus saving the rest of us from that sprawling abomination.

    --
    When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
    1. Re:World domination right on schedule by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Linux needs competition or it will start to run out of reasons to make it better. In future, it looks like the BSD family will be pretty much it.

      To some extent we're already seeing this happen, although it's not quite like you describe. Systemd, which is now present in pretty much every major Linux distribution, has caused a lot of problems for a lot of users. A lot of serious Linux users, who need systems that are reliable and robust, have had to switch to FreeBSD thanks to systemd.

      Running a Linux distro that includes systemd is not an option for these people/organizations, and running an uncommon or niche Linux distro like Slackware, Devuan or Gentoo is even less viable than running a major one that uses systemd. The only thing that's even less viable than a niche distro is trying to hack a distro like Debian into not using systemd, especially when it breaks dependencies and causes other package management or update complications.

      So FreeBSD, and to a lesser extent OpenBSD, have already become "pretty much it" for a large set of former Linux users thanks to unwanted and problematic "innovations", like systemd, forced on users by the major Linux distro maintainers.

    2. Re:World domination right on schedule by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Uh, linux has both dtrace and zfs.

    3. Re:World domination right on schedule by Cmdln+Daco · · Score: 3, Interesting

      I switched to NetBSD because of Red Hat 5.0. It was such a disappointment after Red Hat 4.3.

    4. Re:World domination right on schedule by Tough+Love · · Score: 1

      Uh, linux has both dtrace and zfs.

      Indeed, but only after suitable alternatives were given the necessary window to emerge because of Sun/Oracle's antics. Arguably, the result is better all round.

      --
      When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
    5. Re:World domination right on schedule by nbritton · · Score: 1

      sprawling abomination.

      Let me guess... you hate Systemd too?

    6. Re:World domination right on schedule by unixisc · · Score: 1

      Actually, Linux needs competition or it will start to run out of reasons to make it better. In future, it looks like the BSD family will be pretty much it.

      Thanks, Sun/Oracle for erecting barriers around DTrace, thus motivating even better tracing in Linux. Thanks also for doing the same to ZFS, thus saving the rest of us from that sprawling abomination.

      Actually, Solaris was de facto a single platform OS - namely for SPARCs. Sun did have that experiment w/ OpenSolaris, but once Oracle sabotaged it, and even surviving forks like OpenIndiana were x86 only, it was a lost cause.

      I would like to see SPARC survive, though, w/ either Linux or *BSD on it. It would however be nice if it weren't something available only from Oracle

    7. Re:World domination right on schedule by dbIII · · Score: 1, Informative

      A lot of serious Linux users, who need systems that are reliable and robust, have had to switch to FreeBSD thanks to systemd

      Rubbish - although I utterly despise that flaky piece of shit of a mismanaged moving target SystemD that's not what has happened.
      We've just put up with using older versions of linux. When the experiment is over we'll upgrade.
      The move to FreeBSD is just due to ZFS being a lot more mature on that platform at the moment. If you have a lot of disks it's a massive incentive to move. If you don't it just looks like linux with less device drivers, so there's not so much incentive.

    8. Re:World domination right on schedule by Hognoxious · · Score: 1

      Yup. I'll stick with Centos 6 as long as I can.

      By the time it gets to EOLd they might have knocked most of the bugs out of it.

      --
      Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
    9. Re:World domination right on schedule by Anne+Thwacks · · Score: 1
      World domination right on schedule More like world domination has gone of the rails

      OpenBSD is the only OS apart from Solaris to support Sun/Oracle Logical Domains (LDOMs), and the OpenBSD support is extremely limited - for example I/O is restricted to the primary Domain - as there is no way to create an "I/O" domain in OpenBSD.

      If there is going to be new silicon and no new Solaris, then presumably Oracle will have to release some of their hardware documentation - and possibly fund some OSS developers!

      Currently, FreeBSD and Linux no longer support hosting LDOMs at all, and support as a guest O/S is very limited.

      Disclaimer: I have used OpenBSD on Sparc64 since the Sparc64 architecture has existed, while consistently hating Oracle's guts.

      --
      Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
    10. Re:World domination right on schedule by Christian+Smith · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Actually, Linux needs competition or it will start to run out of reasons to make it better. In future, it looks like the BSD family will be pretty much it.

      Thanks, Sun/Oracle for erecting barriers around DTrace, thus motivating even better tracing in Linux. Thanks also for doing the same to ZFS, thus saving the rest of us from that sprawling abomination.

      Actually, Solaris was de facto a single platform OS - namely for SPARCs. Sun did have that experiment w/ OpenSolaris, but once Oracle sabotaged it, and even surviving forks like OpenIndiana were x86 only, it was a lost cause.

      I would like to see SPARC survive, though, w/ either Linux or *BSD on it. It would however be nice if it weren't something available only from Oracle

      You can still get SPARC systems from Fujitsu.

      But frankly, the only thing SPARC ever had going for it was everything around it. SPARC succeeded despite SPARC, not because of it. Consider:

      - SUN produced some awesome workstations and servers.
      - Everything used to be open standards (covering SPARC, SBUS, OpenFirmware etc.)
      - Solaris stabilized into a nice enough UNIX.
      - Lots of Open Source implementations available (Linux, *BSD).

      But consider the downsides:
      - SUN was swallowed by Oracle.
      - SPARC is a nasty RISC architecture. Register windows were really a mistake, and most architectures eschew them as a result. Ditto for delay slots.
      - SPARC lagged behind all the other major RISC architectures save for perhaps ARM (which was aimed at low pwoer anyway) in performance.

      While SPARC lacked in RISC firepower, it still beasted contemporary x86 CPUs until the Pentium II era (christ, that was 20 years ago!). Since then though, it's just sucked SUN resources as they struggled to keep up with other CPU vendors. They only stayed on top while they could scale up to 64 CPUs when other vendors could not. Once Windows and Linux had caught up with that scaling, and x86 could be reasonable scaled to 16 or more CPUs economically, the writing was on the wall.

  4. What happens to ZFS? by darthsilun · · Score: 1

    Oracle only ships ZFS on Solaris. Until Ubuntu added it (in Xenial was it?) you had to get it from a third party if you wanted it for Linux.

    Does this mean Oracle will add it to Oracle Linux and support it?

    1. Re:What happens to ZFS? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Oracle ZFS != OpenZFS/ZFSonLinux

    2. Re:What happens to ZFS? by guruevi · · Score: 4, Informative

      ZFS for Linux and pretty much every other OS (OpenIndiana, Nexenta, ...) except Oracle Solaris is now being developed by OpenZFS, a fork of the Solaris ZFS code and the two are no longer compatible (version numbers and feature sets have diverged quite a bit).

      Not sure what they will do with existing customers, probably bill them a heap load of money for future support, if you're lucky, your pool is old enough or you haven't activated Oracle's proprietary features so that it is still compatible.

      --
      Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
    3. Re:What happens to ZFS? by 0100010001010011 · · Score: 1

      FreeBSD would like a word.

      FreeBSD10 allows you to install to root on ZFS with the default installer.

    4. Re:What happens to ZFS? by darthsilun · · Score: 1

      Oh, I know. I'm a FreeBSD user myself. Since 386BSD 0.1.

      But that isn't what I was asking about.

    5. Re:What happens to ZFS? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      There are now effectively two versions of ZFS.

      One is the Solaris version, maintained by Oracle, with zpool versions between 29 and 4,999 (currently at version 37).

      The other is the OpenZFS version, maintained by the community, with the major user being FreeBSD. This will accept zpool versions 28 and below; however, the standard now is to label the zpool with version 5000, and use feature flags to signal what the codebase can and can't do.

      So the short of it is, it doesn't matter what Oracle does. ZFS will continue to be used and developed. The only question is what happens to those running Solaris and post-version-28 zpools (those will probably need to keep Solaris around, set up a new zpool, migrate their data over, then blow away the Solaris zpools.)

      It's possible that Oracle might release the incompatible updates for zpools versions 29 onwards, but I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for it.

    6. Re:What happens to ZFS? by unixisc · · Score: 1

      FreeBSD now uses OpenZFS, which as Guruevi mentioned, is not the same as ZFS.

    7. Re:What happens to ZFS? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Nothing happens to ZFS.
      ZFS on Solaris/Oracle dies. Copy your data off somewhere else.
      Linux ZFS module is still a shittily performing feature lagging port and always will be.
      Leaving the only ZFS that really matters ... open-zfs.org on FreeBSD.org.

    8. Re:What happens to ZFS? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      linux and freebsd use the same zfs codebase. the only flaw it had on linux was slab fragmentation which was fixed in git head. 0.7.0 should contain the abd patches.

    9. Re:What happens to ZFS? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      So, on one hand, you state that:

      Linux ZFS module is still a shittily performing feature lagging port and always will be.

      And then, on the other, you state that:

      Leaving the only ZFS that really matters ... open-zfs.org on FreeBSD.org.

      Apparently completely ignoring (or not knowing in the first place) that it's largely the same code-base and largely the same feature-set, with some features in the FreeBSD implementation not yet available in the Linux one, and vice-versa.

      Are you playing dumb, or are you actually dumb, or is it perhaps a case of both?

    10. Re:What happens to ZFS? by jandersen · · Score: 1

      I'm only guessing, but I doubt Oracle will simply kill off Solaris - there is a lot of good stuff in there, and they do, among other things, sell a ZFS based disk appliance, as far as I remember. I wouldn't be at all surprised if that runs Solaris. But I think the market for proprietary UNIXes as general OSes is all but finished, since the open source ones are now so good.

    11. Re:What happens to ZFS? by rl117 · · Score: 1
      Same underlying codebase, yes. But it's integrated into the system much better on FreeBSD. On FreeBSD, I can use the full NFSv4 permissions model; on Linux it's restricted to standard permissions and maybe also POSIX ACLs mapped to NFSv4 ACLs (not sure if it's functional). With a suitable NFS or CIFS client, those extended ACLs are available and useful on client systems as well. On FreeBSD any user can run the zfs, zpool and other commands with proper permissions control over actions which may be performed. On Linux, these all require root. On FreeBSD, it's also possible to delegate admin permissions on a per-dataset basis, e.g. to allow a user or group to snapshot and clone, send and receive datasets. None of that works on Linux. On FreeBSD, I can set the sharenfs properly and immediately get a dataset (and all its child datasets) recursively exported. Doesn't work on Linux.

      Those are just the few I noticed. If you want to use ZFS seriously, FreeBSD gives you a much more useful environment; Linux needs to better integrate it at several levels to bring it up to the same place. Linux sorely needs NFSv4 ACL support in the VFS for starters; it would also make NFSv4 vastly more usable.

    12. Re:What happens to ZFS? by guruevi · · Score: 1

      Well, it's Oracle, they won't kill it off but you will pay through the nose for a support contract. Last I looked, it was like $60k/server/year for their quad core SPARC support contract.

      --
      Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
    13. Re:What happens to ZFS? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      ZFS allocates blocks of memory the same size as the disk(default is 128KiB). Linux seems to be the only "unix" OS that does not like allocating large blocks of memory. There have been numerous work-arounds because of the technical issues this creates or the performance issues you get if you attempt large allocations. One of those is a global lock.

      It was funny listening to one of they lead OpenZFS devs berate Linux for forgetting just an important feature for a server OS. Unix learned its lesson back in the 70s and anyone worth their salt in server kernel designs knows how important many of these painful lessons were. But it seems the Linux community at large is all about what's cool and don't appreciate corner cases as long as the happy path works.

    14. Re:What happens to ZFS? by brambus · · Score: 1

      The source bases between Oracle ZFS and OpenZFS are still probably 90% identical. The disk format has changed recently, but you can still create an old-format pool to facilitate data interchange between the two and it'll work without a hitch (if not, file a bug).

  5. Oracle drove away a lot of Sun's customers by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    So now I guess there's nobody left to buy Solaris. Too bad, because it's a great Unix and SPARC is a great architecture.

    1. Re:Oracle drove away a lot of Sun's customers by _merlin · · Score: 5, Interesting

      I'll have a soft spot for Solaris, but the writing was on the wall long before this. Solaris was stagnating even before Oracle bought Sun. It was obvious that Sun lacked the resources to maintain their compiler suite and operating as well as actively research new technologies. It was sad to watch, but such is life. Solaris was probably the most usable desktop UNIX before OSX took that crown away. Solaris tried to add much-needed things to UNIX like role-based administration, light-weight virtualisation (zones/containers), non-intrusive profiling/caching (dtrace), advanced storage pools (ZFS), and heaps of other cool stuff. Sun SPARC hardware always had cool high-availability features like being able to disable bad RAM in a running system, really wide system buses for pushing around a lot of data, and was built to survive physical abuse.

      The trouble is, they lost out to "good enough". Solaris on SPARCstation was better than WinNT on a whitebox PC, but WinNT on a whtebox PC got to the point where it was good enough, and the added expense of a Sun workstation couldn't be justified. On the server side, Linux became good enough, IBM and Dell x86 servers got to the point where they were good enough, and my 13th generation PowerEdges are definitely better build quality than the Sun V245 servers I still have sitting in a rack for nostalgia.

      This took away a lot of their revenue so they couldn't throw resources at research and development. In particular, SPARC fell behind in price/performance/power consumption trade-off, first to AMD's 64-bit Athlons, and then to Intel's post-Netburst Xeon. The UltraSPARC T gave them a bit of a reprieve on highly parallel workloads, but cancelling the Rock was the right decision as it was painfully obvious it wasn't going to compete for single-core throughput/latency performance.

      They also lost at the extreme high end to IBM who've managed to get insanely high throughput on POWER with a brute-force approach of throwing better and better cooling systems at a design that's arguably incredibly lazy compared to the E5 Xeon.

      Yes, I miss Sun, and I'll shed a tear for Solaris. But I don't miss the Sun that Oracle bought - the Sun I miss had already faded half a decade before Oracle bought the dimly glowing remains.

    2. Re:Oracle drove away a lot of Sun's customers by Cmdln+Daco · · Score: 2

      Is OSX a Desktop Unix? I thought they deprecated X11.

      Furthermore, if they had an open desktop environment like maybe KDE or even Gnome, it would be different. Opaque binary-only windowing environments don't qualify as modern Unix. That's like NeWS or any of the other old proprietary croft.

    3. Re:Oracle drove away a lot of Sun's customers by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      its still a bsd derived kernel

    4. Re:Oracle drove away a lot of Sun's customers by nbritton · · Score: 2

      I'll have a soft spot for Solaris

      You must be a sadomasochist. How can you have a soft spot for anything who's default shell is still ksh? It felt like I was stuck in the 80s every time I had to administer Solaris, AIX, and HP-UX.

    5. Re:Oracle drove away a lot of Sun's customers by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Not really.

      Apple is doing their best to turn it into a walled garden, just like iOS. With the introduction of things like SIP (ensuring you can't write to any of the system directories, even as root- this includes /usr and a whole bunch of other locations) and their moronic sandbox tech that treats everything like a glorified word processor, it's becoming more and more difficult to use the "Unix" side of OS X. Not to mention the fact that their entire lineup of hardware is pretty much a complete joke, "pro" products included.

      They just recently removed the graphical ability to disable Gatekeeper from the latest version of OS X (err, sorry, "macOS"). You can still do it from the command line though. Soon enough, they'll remove that utility, along with the one you need to disable SIP, and we'll start seeing people having to "jailbreak" their Mac to bring back any semblance of the freedom they once had under the earlier versions of Mac OS X.

      I have a feeling that if Apple had the developer talent and resources to ditch all the open aspects of OS X and write something that was 100% proprietary and locked down, they would. However, I get the distinct feeling that, despite all the accounts, translators, and lawyers they employ- the actual number of people working on software products inside Apple is exceptionally small. So they keep trucking on with what they've got, which is why we haven't seen OS 11, but they've slowly been trying to lock down OS X as hard as they can.

    6. Re:Oracle drove away a lot of Sun's customers by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Without massive influx of investor cash to support a proper closed corporate solution, Sun tried the only last
      ditch remaining right path with open source, it was almost working, then Oracle tricked them
      with candy cash by buying them, and proceeded to kill them dead. Oh well.
      Now both Oracle and Sun are dead and irrelavant. Next.

    7. Re:Oracle drove away a lot of Sun's customers by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Hmm? Whenever I got a new account on a SPARC, I had to manually change my preferred shell from the default bash to ksh (from about Solaris 8?), which I learned to prefer back in the Solaris 2.51 /bin/sh default days.

      I too will have a bit of fondness for Solaris/ksh from "back in the day", but now that I am retired I really don't have to mess with anything beyond playing with various Linux distros on various PC's (terminal sessions always have "set -o vi" in the .rc), although even that has slowed down quite a bit as I work on what's left of "getting a life" ;-}

      YMMV

    8. Re:Oracle drove away a lot of Sun's customers by Princeofcups · · Score: 1

      You must be a sadomasochist. How can you have a soft spot for anything who's default shell is still ksh? It felt like I was stuck in the 80s every time I had to administer Solaris, AIX, and HP-UX.

      Default shell for SunOS was csh. Default shell for Solaris was sh. I don't know what silly sysadmins you've had in the past, but ksh has never been the default shell.

      --
      The only thing worse than a Democrat is a Republican.
    9. Re:Oracle drove away a lot of Sun's customers by gumbi+west · · Score: 1

      The people that count say it is. All that other stuff is just junk thrown on top.

      You'd be better off criticizing how crappy their implementation of some of the commands is in terms of performance, because it is. I just opened up top totally vanilla and it was consuming 3.8% of a core. On Solaris it would be something like 1%, even with much slower cores. (Apple used to use 10% on top and this was a better example.)

    10. Re:Oracle drove away a lot of Sun's customers by gumbi+west · · Score: 2

      SIP (ensuring you can't write to any of the system directories, even as root- this includes /usr and a whole bunch of other locations)

      you can if you're an admin worth a damn. This is a very good idea in terms of malware protection and I wish Windows would do it.

      it's becoming more and more difficult to use the "Unix" side of OS X.

      It's actually exactly the same: open terminal.

      Soon enough, they'll remove that utility, along with the one you need to disable SIP, and we'll start seeing people having to "jailbreak" their Mac to bring back any semblance of the freedom they once had under the earlier versions of Mac OS X.

      yeah, the anti-mac argument has always been that it's just about to become a problem. It's like how we're always 50 years from fusion. Mac becoming a walled garden is always right around a corner that we never get to.

    11. Re:Oracle drove away a lot of Sun's customers by gumbi+west · · Score: 1

      If you care what the default shell is, you're doing *nix wrong.

    12. Re:Oracle drove away a lot of Sun's customers by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Solaris 11 default shell is bash.

    13. Re:Oracle drove away a lot of Sun's customers by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You can't even install python packages without disabling SIP. The Mac command line had a superficial resemblance to a Unix system but it is just not usable. Most developers now just SSH into an Amazon instance to do development.

      At this point the Macs are glorified chromebooks.

    14. Re:Oracle drove away a lot of Sun's customers by Wootery · · Score: 1

      Opaque binary-only windowing environments don't qualify as modern Unix.

      How does having a disagreeable front-end prevent the OS from qualifying as UNIX?

      Surely the more relevant matter is that Darwin is so unremarkable.

    15. Re:Oracle drove away a lot of Sun's customers by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Not true: /usr/local is still writable just fine, and if you're installing custom libraries they're likely to go there. Same with /opt

      Official apple docs: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204899

      It's about time Apple came out with an alternative to seliux or apparmor.

    16. Re: Oracle drove away a lot of Sun's customers by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Hey fanboy, you know you're dumb when you want apple to make a proprietary, incompatible clone of something. Sounds so much like the Windows embrace, extend, extinguish plan, doesn't it.

    17. Re:Oracle drove away a lot of Sun's customers by segedunum · · Score: 1

      I'm afraid Solaris died as soon as Linux came in, ran on x86 and ate its lunch. Sun could never come up with a response.

    18. Re: Oracle drove away a lot of Sun's customers by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      >proprietary, incompatible clone of something

      You mean the equivalent tools developed for proprietary, incompatible unix clones Solaris, AIX, HP UX and others?

      You can't reasonably call OS X incompatible either as it's posix-certified unlike Linux.

    19. Re:Oracle drove away a lot of Sun's customers by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Solaris died when the x86 distribution was killed by McNealy back in 2001. Remember the outcry? They decided to put all their eggs in the SPARC basket, back when Linux was just a hobby thing. I always wonder if they hadn't done that, what would have happened? They could have been the only enterprise x86 Unix worth a damn at that time, but the Sun/McNealy hubris won out.

    20. Re:Oracle drove away a lot of Sun's customers by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Is OSX a Desktop Unix? I thought they deprecated X11.

      A little education here... The desktop is not the operating system. X11 is a window manager. Yes they deprecated X11 but the under lying OS is still built on BSD UNIX so yes OSX is still a UNIX system.

      Furthermore, if they had an open desktop environment like maybe KDE or even Gnome,

      Gnome IS! the desktop environment for Solaris and has been since Solaris 10. You could also get KDE to run on it but it was a bitch to get working. Gnome worked great I ran it for years when I was a Solaris Admin. Yes it still came with CDE if you wanted it but Gnome was the default desktop environment.

    21. Re:Oracle drove away a lot of Sun's customers by gumbi+west · · Score: 1

      "Most developers" you took a survey?

    22. Re:Oracle drove away a lot of Sun's customers by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I don't know what silly sysadmins you've had in the past, but ksh has never been the default shell.

      ksh is technically the default in solaris 11


      $ uname -a
      SunOS nimbus01 5.11 11.3 sun4v sparc sun4v

      $ ls -al /bin/sh
      lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 13 Apr 19 2016 /bin/sh -> sparcv9/ksh93

    23. Re:Oracle drove away a lot of Sun's customers by Cmdln+Daco · · Score: 1

      No, it's a Mach kernel. That's a micro-kernel architecture. BSD is a monolithic kernel.

      MacOS has a BSD userland, but that's not a lot different than the userland you get if you install Interix on Windows NT.

    24. Re: Oracle drove away a lot of Sun's customers by Cmdln+Daco · · Score: 1

      Linux isn't posix-certified. Or has Red Hat or some other vendor paid for that in the last decade that I've not been paying that much attention to Linux in?

    25. Re:Oracle drove away a lot of Sun's customers by Cmdln+Daco · · Score: 1

      A little education here... a Desktop unix system needs to have a Desktop to be a .... Desktop unix.

      And X11 is not a window manager. X11 is a graphical subsystem on which you can run numerous Window Managers, like the Tab Window Manager (TWM) or FVWM or Motif's Window Manager or a lot of much newer alternatives. And even a Window Manager is not really a 'desktop environment.' Not that a 'desktop environment' is needed to run a Desktop Unix system. I prefer FVWM when I run a NetBSD desktop. My .fvwm2rc file is crotchety and old but it has worked for many years.

  6. Sad end to a great operating system by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    This sadly reminds me of the demise of DEC VAX/VMS. Great operating system that faded with a slowly dwindling paying community. In a taste of irony.. Digital Equipment Company which sold this OS.. tried to compete with SunOS/Solaris with the release of Digital Unix which sadly never received much praise or acceptance and all but sealed the end of DEC/Compaq/HP's involvement in this legacy set of platforms. Now the FOSS community and its 'nix variants have led to the demise of what Sun Microsystems worked so hard to create.

    To date... no operating system really provides the RBAC and auditing that VMS did.. but that overhead was one of the reasons that VMS was slower than Unix and thus less attractive for those processing high-cpu workloads. To quote my VMS instructor back then... VMS is a seasoned IT professional... careful, methodical and capable of securely maintaining a computing system. Unix is an 18 year old on spring break - it will do anything you ask of them with no regard of the outcome. Only recently has selinux and sudo started to bridge that age-old gap.

    Now One Raging A$$hole Called Larry Ellison (Oracle (TM)) has become a Greek ship captain... at the helm during the crash but after the crash went to the short to coordinate the rescue. From my perspective the obtuse way that oracle took over sun led to its demise. At my work we are spending tens of thousands of dollars looking for solutions to avoid spending more money to keep Larry's boats afloat. We've been working on this for a year but this announcement only reinforces our decision.

    1. Re:Sad end to a great operating system by guruevi · · Score: 1

      All the developers and funding for OpenSolaris went to OpenIndiana, if you're looking for the Solaris feature set and stability, use OpenIndiana. Hopefully one day Linux or BSD will catch up to the code stability (an OS that upgrades less than Debian Stable and kernel upgrades without rebooting), Fault Management Architecture, level of tracing, clustering and containers that Solaris has.

      --
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    2. Re:Sad end to a great operating system by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      This sadly reminds me of the demise of DEC VAX/VMS...

      ... To quote my VMS instructor back then... VMS is a seasoned IT professional... careful, methodical and capable of securely maintaining a computing system. Unix is an 18 year old on spring break - it will do anything you ask of them with no regard of the outcome...

      Reminds me of a reputed Ken Olson quote, something to the effect of "why would you buy Unix when VMS has everything you need already in it?"

      Fast forward some twenty years later when, during a short stint at Sun, where I sat kitty-corner to some CXO-in-a-corner-office type, and overheard him ranting along similar lines, "why would you buy Linux when Solaris has everything you need already in it?" Tthat was ~13 years ago.

      Maybe in another ten years we'll hear Linus ranting something like, "why would you buy XYZ, when Linux has everything you need already in it?

    3. Re:Sad end to a great operating system by Cmdln+Daco · · Score: 1

      Why would you buy Unix when Multics already has everything you need? Why would you use C when ADA already has everything you need?

    4. Re:Sad end to a great operating system by unixisc · · Score: 1

      One thing - why did OpenIndiana become an x86 only OS, given that its parent OS was mainly there on the SPARC?

    5. Re:Sad end to a great operating system by sk999 · · Score: 1

      Curiously, it was easier to muck with punched cards on the IBM mainframe than it was to deal with the Selectric typewriters on Multics. In both cases, you were reliant on printed output, and a line printer could spew out paper much faster than an electric typewriter.

      VMS was a well engineered OS, very robust, but exceedinglhy pedantic, making tasks that should have been simple (e.g., adding a new native command) excessively complicated. Its reliance on proprietary hardware that could not keep up with competing RISC systems did not help either.

    6. Re:Sad end to a great operating system by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Because SPARC never had a hardware path beyond Sun. Sun died, SPARC died. Oracle and the opensource market killed them both.

    7. Re:Sad end to a great operating system by unixisc · · Score: 3, Informative

      IMO, the thing that killed VMS was DEC giving more importance to OSF/1 or Digital Unix. Unfortunately for them, NT on Alpha never caught on, and they tried to make up the difference w/ OSF/1. Instead, had they focused on OpenVMS/AXP, they'd have been a lot better off. That, plus had they complemented NT/AXP w/ Linux/AXP and *BSD/AXP, Alpha might have survived, and w/ it, OpenVMS.

      Interestingly enough, Linux has killed off all corporate Unixes - AIX, HP/UX and now Solaris. Only ones left standing are the FOSS distros out there - OpenBSD, NetBSD and FreeBSD on the BSD side, and OpenIndiana, Schillix, Nexenta on the System V side. Ironically enough, it was x86 that enabled Linux to pull this off, even if Linux was cross-platform and supported on just about every CPU out there

    8. Re:Sad end to a great operating system by unixisc · · Score: 1

      Was Multics ever ported to the x86?

    9. Re:Sad end to a great operating system by guruevi · · Score: 1

      (Open)Solaris latest incarnations are/were mainly x86 since the architecture was so expensive, development lagged severely to Intel and many SPARC programs could be transitioned to much cheaper x86. SPARC was already on life support for years by the time Sun died, Oracle made it even more expensive even though eventually delivering the T7, deployments of it are rare (who plunks down 300k for a single 1U server anymore) and it ain't the same comparison as the UltraSPARC competing with the Pentium.

      --
      Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
    10. Re:Sad end to a great operating system by guruevi · · Score: 1

      OI has SPARC builds although few are maintained by the core project there are a number of derivatives that do have support. The problem is going to be finding hardware.

      --
      Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
    11. Re:Sad end to a great operating system by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      To run Multics on x86, you need a hardware emulator - https://sourceforge.net/projects/dps8m/

    12. Re:Sad end to a great operating system by Anne+Thwacks · · Score: 1
      Digital Unix which sadly never received much praise

      Ken Olsen saying "Unix is snake oil" was not the best promotional message!

      --
      Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
    13. Re:Sad end to a great operating system by TheRaven64 · · Score: 1

      No, but more importantly it was never ported to the PDP-11. The Multics process and library model required a lot more from the memory management unit than most modern commodity hardware provides, whereas UNIX ran on systems with no MMU at all. You could run UNIX on a toy computer, even if you couldn't afford something that could run Multics. That's a key lesson for tech companies: watch out for competitors eating the low end of your market because economies of scale matter.

      --
      I am TheRaven on Soylent News
    14. Re:Sad end to a great operating system by TheRaven64 · · Score: 1

      Focusing on the Alpha was also a mistake. People learned UNIX by running it on cheap machines. Even during the heyday of proprietary UNIX systems, people were learning BSD on the Amiga and then going to work on SunOS, AIX, or whatever. In the i386, Intel added the 4-ring protection model to x86 because DEC said that they needed it for VMS. Instead of porting from VAX to i386, they ported to Alpha (which only had two rings). If they'd made a cheaper uniprocessor VMS (maybe missing some of the clustering features), they'd have had an entry-level system for people to learn about the system. Instead, you had 100 people who knew UNIX for every one who knew VMS and this made it a no brainer to use UNIX.

      --
      I am TheRaven on Soylent News
    15. Re:Sad end to a great operating system by doon386 · · Score: 1

      Right, that is an understatement. The Multics CPUs were multimillion dollar systems with dedicated support staff that took up large rooms. Compared to which most DEC machines of the time were less than toys. That's why UNIX was considered an "emasculated" Multics. It's really sad that BTL bailed, but such is life. The Multics memory protection mechanisms are so much different than what was available then, or now, that porting directly to x86/x84 is not feasible. We got it working under emulation only with much effort. That said, the folks doing the VMS port to x86/64 had similar problems with the x86 architecture. They decided to implement various missing bits in software. A x64 port of Multics would be quite doable using the same techniques. The realization of which is left as a exercise for the reader. For more information see http://multicians.org/ https://sourceforge.net/projec... andhttp://ringzero.wikidot.com/ Multics Lives! "Multics rulez, UNIX droolz"

    16. Re:Sad end to a great operating system by unixisc · · Score: 1

      By the time OSF/1 had replaced Ultrix, Bob Palmer had replaced Ken Olsen

    17. Re:Sad end to a great operating system by TheRaven64 · · Score: 1

      You might be interested in the work that we're currently doing. One of the project leads was responsible for the Multics security model and we adapt several of his ideas from there and PSOS.

      --
      I am TheRaven on Soylent News
  7. New SPARC? by manu0601 · · Score: 1

    A new SPARC chip without a new OS? That looks odd, except perhaps if they just plan a minor Solaris 11 update to support it.

    1. Re:New SPARC? by unixisc · · Score: 1

      No, they can either run Linux (which still supports SPARC binaries, even if RedHat may have dropped support for it ages ago), or one of the BSDs - OpenBSD, FreeBSD or NetBSD

    2. Re:New SPARC? by Anne+Thwacks · · Score: 3, Interesting
      or one of the BSDs - OpenBSD, FreeBSD or NetBSD

      or one of the BSDs - OpenBSD

      FTFY. Only OpenBSD supports Sparc64 on modern Sparc64 - ie with T-series processors. And even that does not support the hardware crypto kit (cos Oracle wont let it).

      Oracle need to think again FAST! OpenBSD on the new hardware could be a world beater for serving secure websites (something the world actually needs AND wants). However, they are currently engaged in supporting it in the Ellison traditional manner - with multiple stabs in the back!

      --
      Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
    3. Re:New SPARC? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      There's little BSD will do for security.

      Security is a process. It's not and operating system, or a piece of hardware, or a service.

      It maters little how elegant and secure BSD-on-SPARC will be when the exploits occur many layers up the chain where the web goons 'code'

      Oracle isn't somebody you want to work with. They'll just take the code and you'll never see anything back (Which is the real failure of non-copyleft systems anyway). If you're lucky they won't sue you for your help too.

    4. Re:New SPARC? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Most remote exploits are issues with bugs. Get rid of the bugs and slash your exploits in half or more. You may not be able to stop misconfiguration, but you can make it easier to do the right thing. *BSDs do a pretty good job making good security easier to do, some better than others. Jails are but one example. So many packages out there do horrible things like giving root privs to a public facing web service. If you're forced to use this package, at least you can contain it in a jail that can be restricted. It may have full root access within the jail, but that's the limit of its control.

  8. Solaris Wat? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Do we need Solaris anyway? Linux does everything and more already. I don't see any reason for it to exist at all in 2017.

  9. illumos by BigBuckHunter · · Score: 1

    Would this mean that illumos us now the de-facto standard Solaris distribution? https://wiki.illumos.org/displ... It appears that they have quite a few of the old Solaris team members. https://wiki.illumos.org/displ...

    1. Re:illumos by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      illumos is just the kernel but try out OmniOS, OpenIndiana or SmartOS for a full OS.

  10. No Way to obtain legit Solaris by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Ordered Solaris 11 from ORACLE and got LINUX GRUB

    Fuck the system

    Capcha: WHO gives a fuck, its a fucking conspiracy , RIGHT?

    1. Re:No Way to obtain legit Solaris by unixisc · · Score: 1

      Was this for an x86 or a SPARC?

    2. Re:No Way to obtain legit Solaris by dbIII · · Score: 1

      For a while you could download Solaris for SPARC as a completely legit free for any use thing. I put it on a couple of machines I picked up at auction to run legacy software (stuff that used to run on a SparcStation5 really flies on a new SPARC) and tape libraries. Maybe it's still a download and not something to order.

    3. Re:No Way to obtain legit Solaris by gweihir · · Score: 1

      1. GRUB is not Linux
      2. GRUB boots Solaris just fine

      Your point being?

      --
      Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
    4. Re:No Way to obtain legit Solaris by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      For a while you could download Solaris for SPARC as a completely legit free for any use thing.

      Yes Sun did open the Solaris OS and you could run it for free even on SPARC hardware. Even free updates. This went out the window when they were bought.

      Maybe it's still a download and not something to order.

      Maybe you could find an old copy but no security updates for you unless you pay to play. You can still get by download a "Free" 90 day evaluation copy from Orcale. After 90 days dig deep to keep it running and secured.

      Solaris was a wonderful OS. I sure miss it.

  11. Dell Server by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Hmm, uncheck Solaris, check Redhat.

  12. Not the end of Solaris at all... Just a move to po by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    Should really read the official line from Oracle for the reasons for the changes (taken from Register post)...

    Here is what Oracle is communicating to customers:

    The multi-decade record of SPARC and Solaris platform development and delivery continues with new innovations going forward. Engineering focus on SPARC and Solaris is being continuously applied to leadership in security, scalability, and enterprise reliability for mission critical computing for key customer adoption opportunities in the Cloud and on-premises.
    Future features and functionality in Solaris will continue to be delivered through dot releases instead of more disruptive major releases. This addresses customer requirements for an agile and smooth transition path between versions, while providing incremental innovation with assured investment protection. We are amending the Support lifespan for Solaris 11, to extend it considerably beyond any reasonable expected lifetime of use, through at least 2031 and 2034 for Premier and Extended Support, respectively.
    See page 37: http://www.oracle.com/us/support/library/lifetime-support-hardware-301321.pdf
    Linked off of this page: http://www.oracle.com/us/support/lifetime-support/index.html
    "Solaris 11 follows a Continuous Delivery model, where new functionality is delivered as updates to the existing release; upgrades are not required to gain access to new features and capabilities. As a result, Support dates are evaluated for update annually, and will be provided through at least the dates above."
    If any of Oracle's customers require an email communication from an engineering executive in summary of the above, Oracle are happy to do so.

  13. Obi-Wans "great disturbance in the force" line... by Miguelito · · Score: 1

    Seems apropos. Though I doubt it'd be a million voices crying out these days.

    As a unix sysadmin, I know some hard core Solaris bigots though.

    --
    - My favorite error message: xscreensaver, running on an old Sparc 5 w/ 8bit color: bsod: Couldn't allocate color Blue
  14. Re:Great... open source ZFS. by unixisc · · Score: 1

    What license does OpenZFS have? Is it still CDDL or is it something like one of the BSD licenses?

  15. So did BSD win the Unix wars? by unixisc · · Score: 1

    So the last of the System V Unixes is dead? The only other one I can think of was SCO, but Xinuos has switched completely to a FreeBSD based Unix. So on the BSD side of things, you have NetBSD, OpenBSD, FreeBSD and its derivatives, but is there anything left on the System V side? Just OpenIndiana, Schillix, Nexenta?

    So in the System V vs BSD wars, has BSD finally emerged the victor? Not counting Linux in this, and not factoring in OS X within BSD, just considering the above distros in the picture

    1. Re:So did BSD win the Unix wars? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You're forgetting about HP-UX and most importantly AIX

    2. Re:So did BSD win the Unix wars? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You're forgetting about HP-UX and most importantly AIX

      Nobody who's used AIX can possibly forget it.

      SMIT...ugh.

    3. Re:So did BSD win the Unix wars? by unixisc · · Score: 1

      During the 2nd Unix wars - b/w Unix International and the Open Software Foundation, the former was made up of AT&T/USL and Sun, vs the latter, which was IBM, DEC and HP. So how was the latter something based on System V - something under the proxy control of Sun? It would have been BSD, right?

  16. What's in a name by Princeofcups · · Score: 1

    So Oracle decides to name their next version of Solaris 11.next instead of 12. How does a random version numbering change spell demise for Solaris? Not that I think it has much of a future, but this is as silly as security ratings based on number of bugs. This tells us nothing about what features will ship with the next version.

    --
    The only thing worse than a Democrat is a Republican.
    1. Re:What's in a name by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Historically, the lack of a new major version number restricted what they could change. For example Oracle engineers recently ported Gnome 3 to Solaris (https://blogs.oracle.com/darren/entry/gnome_3_on_solaris), but replacing Gnome 2 with Gnome 3 would not be possible in a minor release.

      Oracle may have different ideas about what's allowed in a minor release of course.

    2. Re:What's in a name by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Solaris is moving to a continuous development model. Maybe Oracle should just name it Solaris X so that people understand that.

    3. Re:What's in a name by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Try this: https://www.thelayoff.com/t/KT...

    4. Re:What's in a name by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The e-mail to customers saying that Solaris would be supported for 15 more years spells demise. Those customers are fools if they don't start to plan their exit immediately.

  17. and layoffs today by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    perhaps not a coincidence. Oracle is cutting 30% of former Sun employees today.

  18. Flash - slashdot editors can't tell new management by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    With new management comes new and stupid changes like random version numbering. Remember folks, they are trying to add value, even if actual useful work is a concept too far for most of them.

  19. Donate it to the Apache Software Foundation! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    And then call it OpenSolaris. Then a split happen and we have LibreSolaris, which'll have many more contributors. Or, uh, was it the other way around?

    Besides, we've got to get IBM into the fray too. And LotusNotes.

  20. Not surprising by DrXym · · Score: 1

    I bet Oracle thinks its easier to sell Oracle Linux (and easier to write too since they basically ripped off RHEL) than to bother developing Solaris. The gap between successive releases of Solaris has simply widened over time. They probably think of it as a legacy platform at this point.

    1. Re:Not surprising by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Oracle doesn't "rip off" RHEL any more than CentOS or Scientific Linux do.

    2. Re: Not surprising by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      CentOS is the core OS, with RHEL adding "enterprisey" features such as quarterly invoicing. CentOS is in no way a "rip off" of RHEL.

    3. Re:Not surprising by DrXym · · Score: 1

      Yes they do.

  21. Solaris 11 = IRIX 6.5 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    > Future features and functionality in Solaris will continue to be delivered through dot releases instead of more disruptive major releases

    This is what happened to IRIX - it never moved beyond IRIX 6.5. The final release of IRIX, 6.5.30, was vastly different to "6.5" and similarly, the hardware it supported circa 2005/2006 was much different to that when IRIX 6.5 came out in 1998.

    Given that Oracle has adopted this approach for Solaris, it effectively means that the ISV market has evaporated and the ISVs will not requalify their applications for Solaris 12. Without 3rd party apps qualified for Solaris 12 (and only Oracle available), who would deploy it?

    So the ISV market has left Solaris.

    The writing is on the wall.

  22. Ding dong by Zeromous · · Score: 1

    I've been administering since Solaris was a we babe.

    It used to be rock solid, but somewhere shortly after Java, it truly died and went in a direction of differentiating itself from the competition by layering trashpile over trashpile, over POSIX.

    Every time I get asked to fix or deal with a Solaris 10/11 server these days, I cringe and immediately start avoiding it. Mainly because basic tasks still aren't efficient, or even make sense in approach. It's like Oracle is determined to be stable, but different for no reason other than to sell the next version and call it an enhancement. Solaris has not seen a true enhancement since 9 and that was 10 years ago.
    https://developers.slashdot.or...
    So glad to see that witch dead.

    --
    ---Up Up Down Down Left Right Left Right B A START
    1. Re:Ding dong by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Solaris 10 had many enhancements: ZFS, dtrace, zones, logical domains. Solaris 11, I can't argue with you, nothing of significance.

    2. Re:Ding dong by Zeromous · · Score: 1

      You are correct I meant 10. and 10 is old. Zoning is great, ZFS is only really good for one or two very expensive problems.

      I still absolutely hate working in it.

      --
      ---Up Up Down Down Left Right Left Right B A START
  23. Not a big loss by gweihir · · Score: 1

    Solaris (a.k.a. Slowlaris) had its run. In particular, networking still sucks and some other things are not good at all. If Oracle hat kept the experts on and had kept investing, it could have been improved to be a real alternative, but that time is over. After years of neglect, the best is to have it die now and to push for whatever was superior be integrated into Linux instead.

    --
    Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
  24. ORA kept "Solaris" name but devs moved to Joyent. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Most of the Solaris kernel developers who worked at Sun moved to Joyent after the Oracle acquisition because Oracle can't provide the environment needed to retain a top engineer. Joyent's OS is SmartOS, but they contribute most of their kernel work to Illumos. OmniOS is the Illumos derivative closest to OpenSolaris. Nexenta is also derived from Illumos. Nothing is left similar to (non-Open)Solaris, meaning there's nothing that still uses the old Solaris 9 package manager or has the full i18n bits.

    Also proprietary bits like the C compiler and the C++ library are now dead, which means that SPARC is dead because gcc machine output doesn't perform as well as Sun's proprietary compiler did.

    But all of the stuff Sun released open source is still alive, it's definitely enough stuff to make a proper Unix base system, and it's getting modest developer attention from Joyent. I believe NetBSD pkgsrc for Solaris is also getting attention from them, but not sure.

    When Joyent switches to Linux or goes out of business, I expect Solaris will be fully dead.

  25. who gives a shit by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Opaque binary-only windowing environments don't qualify as modern Unix.

    How does having a disagreeable front-end prevent the OS from qualifying as UNIX?

    Surely the more relevant matter is that Darwin is so unremarkable.

    who gives a shit about desktops on a server? idiots, that's who

  26. Casper the friendly geek by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    It did seem that way, didn't it? He is a real person who I had some contact with in my telephone support days at Sun. Scary smart, but also ready to help out and share what he knows. Not everyone who is so talented is willing to help. There were many, many other very smart, very talented support people who were my colleagues who never got any name recognition.

  27. Re:Obi-Wans "great disturbance in the force" line. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    The voices you hear crying out are the people who have been RIF'd this past week ostensibly because of this decision, and the new cloud(y) direction of the company.

  28. Re:Great... open source ZFS. by brambus · · Score: 1

    CDDL, license changes aren't allowed (because the code base came from Sun).

  29. Re:Not the end of Solaris at all... Just a move to by robinsc · · Score: 1

    I don't see the end of Solaris at all , Oracle still sells all its high end supercluster machines with Solaris, they recently brought out a Sparc based Exadata too running Linux on Sparc. All Oracle's ZFS storage systems are running Solaris on X86. And ZFS is a strtegic storage platform for many of Oracle's curent initiatives including the Oracle Public Cloud machine.

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