Sun

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=n ... ise-Rumors

Rumors are circulating that Oracle is ending Solaris development at Solaris 11.4 with no major releases to follow. A tip on TheLayoff.com says in part:
Solaris being canned, at least 50% of teams to be RIF'd in short term

All hands meetings being cancelled on orders from legal to prevent news from spreading.

Hardware teams being told to cease development.

There will be no Solaris 12, final release will be 11.4.

Not too surprising I guess...

Can't say I didn't see that coming. But it's still a crying shame. Solaris 8 was the first UNIX I ever touched. Another quality operating system and architecture abandoned for the X86 monoculture.

I wonder which one will be the next to go... AIX or HP-UX? Any others still left?

The rumor seems to originate here: https://www.thelayoff.com/t/KBEVoB1

I thought of posting this yesterday, but at the same time El Reg says Oracle is in denial .

I guess we'll see. I lost all interest in Solaris the moment Oracle got involved.

Well, there'll always be the BSDs. But yeah, huzzah, another step in the creeping assimilation of all alternative platforms into the x86/Lunix monoculture.

Not a surprise. Oracle closed Solaris for small workshops and companies with its high price rates and now they have found that there are not enough big companies to support Unix. Microsoft -not only linux- is being a big competitor in the big iron and ERP so it seems that old Unixes are going to be dead in a few years.

Bad. I started with Solaris before Irix and I loved all small web servers and workstations but they are building bad specs systems from 10 years ago.

jan-jaap wrote: I lost all interest in Solaris the moment Oracle got involved.

The same here and I think this happened to a lot of people. The decision to close Solaris 10 to fairly new systems (at the moment of the Oracle adquisition) angered enough people, especially since the pre-release could be installed on those computers.

Solaris ended with version 10 as far as I am concerned.

At least Fujitsu still has SPARC, and there are still SPARC things around.

I don't see AIX going anywhere because Power is still a very viable alternative architecture, but HP-UX might be the next one to drop. It's lost its relevance because HP tied it too tightly to Itanic, the fate of which they were unable to fully control. If PA-RISC were still a thing it might live longer.

What about what was remaining of OpenSolaris?
I know Oracle took it back, but I guess once it's out, it is out? Is there any fork?

Sun was a cool company...

ClassicHasClass wrote: At least Fujitsu still has SPARC, and there are still SPARC things around.

Fujitsu seems to be moving from SPARC to ARM .

Shiunbird wrote: What about what was remaining of OpenSolaris?
I know Oracle took it back, but I guess once it's out, it is out? Is there any fork?

There's still OpenSXCE both for x86 and SPARC (sun4u, sun4v).

Shiunbird wrote: Sun was a cool company...

Yes.

Wouldn't surprise me - Linux is the buzzwords, so it is by definition buzzword compliant. Add on that, while somewhat mediocre and less committed to standards and long-term interoperability than Apple is, it's cheap and you have a "winner" as far as MBAs are concerned.

Yeah, Oracle should have priced it more in line with an equivalent Windows installation. I remember being dumbfounded when my university "replaced" their almost-new Sun Enterprise setup with a Winfarm in the NT4 days (evidently someone from MS gave lunch and licenses to someone high up in admin with little actual tech experience). It was supposed to be "more reliable", but it seemed to break more often and they had to keep up the Suns anyway for the CS department. Since then Windows, while not my favorite, has become functional, and at least at first glance competitive or cheaper than Solaris (though the whole CAL muddle still is a mess, but profitable to MS).

I've never used Sol11, because the licenses are too expensive, but it still has some technical merits.

Be nice if at least ZFS made it out in a easily-used (say BSD) license status, but I'm not counting on it.

SAQ wrote: Be nice if at least ZFS made it out in a easily-used (say BSD) license status, but I'm not counting on it.

FreeBSD currently integrates ZFS quite well, even for the root volume. It gets used in FreeNAS as well as their commercial offering through iX Systems. Much better than the Linux implementation of it.

I think it is licensed under CDDL though.

Elf wrote:

SAQ wrote: Be nice if at least ZFS made it out in a easily-used (say BSD) license status, but I'm not counting on it.

FreeBSD currently integrates ZFS quite well, even for the root volume. It gets used in FreeNAS as well as their commercial offering through iX Systems. Much better than the Linux implementation of it.

I think it is licensed under CDDL though.

The one key thing missing from BSD ZFS is the native ZFS encryption. Everyone waited and hoped Oracle would release the updated code, but they never did, despite claiming they would. Although a mysterious, illegal, complete source code dump for Solaris 11 appeared in cyberspace soon after.

Base subscription for 3 years with Sun only € 830 (1 socket).
After Oracle bought Sun the prices had near tripled. Nice pricing policy, isn't?
I would be not surprised if Oracle planning to cancel further development of Solaris.
But then I like to see Larry in a commercial similiar to this for confusing (Open-) and Solaris enterprises and community - LOL

First experiences with Solaris 8 on x86 desktop with Pentium III, FSC D1107-B mainboard, 512 MB SDR-RAM, Matrox Millennium G200 AGP 8MB, SCSI, SoundBlaster 16 ISA. Went all fine.

Back in 2008 I registerd my FSC Primergy TX120S1 after successful completion of Sun Hardware Certification Test Suite for Solaris 10. The server was added to the Sun HCL starting from 5/08. Without support by Sun because the OS didn't support the network chipset in 5/08, not so for OpenSolaris 2008.05.
Looking at the HCL for Solaris 11, there seems to be less systems certfied or maybe nobody wants to certify systems for Oracle. Shame and blessing.

Krokodil wrote: The one key thing missing from BSD ZFS is the native ZFS encryption. Everyone waited and hoped Oracle would release the updated code, but they never did, despite claiming they would. Although a mysterious, illegal, complete source code dump for Solaris 11 appeared in cyberspace soon after.

I sort of hope that the majority of new ZFS development will continue under FreeBSD's ZFS. Perhaps with continued development, FreeBSD's ZFS will overtake a now stagnant Solaris?

I've never really trusted FreeBSD - there's something wrong about a BSD that doesn't support any DEC architectures, but that's just on a gut level as technically it seems pretty good.
That said, even I realize that ZFS on a VAX would be ... painful. Even NetBSD can get slow if you aren't careful what you load your box up with.
Anybody know if Oracle really took on Sun in good faith or was this a HP-style "we promised to continue development for X years and by golly we had the day we could drop it circled on our calendar before we even signed the deal"

Elf wrote:

Krokodil wrote: The one key thing missing from BSD ZFS is the native ZFS encryption. Everyone waited and hoped Oracle would release the updated code, but they never did, despite claiming they would. Although a mysterious, illegal, complete source code dump for Solaris 11 appeared in cyberspace soon after.

I sort of hope that the majority of new ZFS development will continue under FreeBSD's ZFS. Perhaps with continued development, FreeBSD's ZFS will overtake a now stagnant Solaris?

You do realize that there is an OpenZFS project right? FreeBSD, Linux, and Illumos use the same "ZFS" - it's under the CDDL license and is separate from Oracle's ZFS which is proprietary.

Also encryption is being merged into OpenZFS thanks to Datto.

maybe they just meant they are ending solaris 11 support with solaris 12 to follow

ClassicHasClass wrote: At least Fujitsu still has SPARC, and there are still SPARC things around.

Fujitsu is getting out of the SPARC game, at least they're getting rid of a big chunk of their architecture people.

Honestly, most of the action is moving into the cloud, or towards very distributed systems. Big iron is becoming more and more niche, and with design costs increasing exponentially, SPARC is becoming a harder proposition to justify within Oracle I assume.