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