After the news that Oracle has laid off the core team at Solaris, do you think the open source community will work to keep the OS alive? I know there are a number of derivatives already out there.

It seems sad that Oracle took on a relatively popular OS, made it closed source, then just let it crumble away. I have worked a little with Solaris systems in the past and it was always a pretty decent OS for running servers.

Has anybody had any experience with Solaris? and how do people feel about what Oracle have done to it?

(05-09-2017, 05:51 AM)pyratebeard Wrote: Has anybody had any experience with Solaris? and how do people feel about what Oracle have done to it?

I've had some experiences at work, it's the main OS that many customers use.
I have no idea who's going to support them now, maybe there's a long term release.

(05-09-2017, 06:36 AM)venam Wrote: I have no idea who's going to support them now, maybe there's a long term release.

According to Wikipedia version 11.3 is supported until November 2034. Although I don't know if Oracle will honour that.

Now may be a good time to get into Solaris support, some companies would pay a lot to have good engineers. Either that or it would be a good time to help people update their infrastructure and workflows. It depends on what they're running. All the places I've worked with Solaris are also running AIX and HP-UX, so they could switch to one of them. I even had a few Tru-64 servers with one customer.

The amount of skilled engineers on the market has just grown by a considerable percentage right now.

That's quite the beefy support period. Surely they can't honour that without a team working on it?

Oracle is not exactly what I would call a smart company. Sun was ahead of its time (except Java) and Oracle still stomped everything they had - for what reason? To promote Oracle Linux? Oh my.

If this is true, it leaves IBM in charge of Unix. Not sure if wanted.
The major layoff is SPARC though.

(05-09-2017, 08:19 PM)Foggalong Wrote: That's quite the beefy support period. Surely they can't honour that without a team working on it?

I'm not sure they have laid everybody off. I can't find any definitive information but from what I understand it was mainly the development team that were shown the door. There may still be a number of employees to cover the support, although who knows how long they will stay around for.

I talked to an Oracle dev on #openindiana the other day. Seems like there are still a few hundred Solaris developers left, surely more than needed for more than just passive support.