In news that is shocking to exactly no one, Oracle just published its new products roadmap that pushes Solaris 11.next to next year. In all honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if it was scraped altogether after the latest layoffs. Who exactly is left to work on it?
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/09/08/oracle_pushes_solaris11_plans_out/
@2vcr perhaps you knew those in development roles more than sustaining then, since the cuts were much deeper in core development than in platform support & sustaining - there's still a few hundred people left in Solaris org overall, but that's less than half there were at the start of the year.
"reality is that last SR I've opened took 3 months to have a closing, and the final answer was "sorry, cannot solve because I cannot understand the problem". "
I just can't wrap my head around that. The day I was forced to provide such lame horrid "support", I would put down my headset and walk out. I guess it is the norm these days.
Those of us that are left are totally unable to keep up with anything but the most critical security fixes. There are only a handful of us. Support will continue to file bug reports on behalf of customers, but we have no engineers to assign. Fortunately for Oracle, it does not have any type of SLA for resolving issues, so Solaris bug reports from customers can be "file and forget". Support will tell the customers that "development is working on it", but in reality, none of these new issues will get any attention from us.
@PcwZgCj-2qim : say what? just checked around for my old Solaris colleagues... 7 out of 10 told me they've been toasted. not sure about precise number, but for sure less than 50 are still in Oracle trying to maintain at least the perception that Solaris is still alive. yeah, continuous delivery, sure, I've been already presented this by a couple of my former colleagues. reality is that last SR I've opened took 3 months to have a closing, and the final answer was "sorry, cannot solve because I cannot understand the problem". I have suggested my management to get rid of the remaining SPARC Solaris boxes as soon as possible. basically every other choice is better than this.
Some people mention Illumos... yes, the comunity around Illumos made great progress, but to put it in a perspective, Oracle still has more enginners, support, etc. people left working on Solaris than entire Illumos community. Yes, the recent cuts were severe, but please try to keep things in perspective.
After all these product cancelation news, any customers with brain will switch to Linux as soon as they can.
Moved to illumos? Wasn't living through the death of one OS enough?
We didn't even get a build out to the beta testers this week, no one was around to to actually get it built! Move to Illuminos folks, I have.
Who is left? Not many. At best all they can do is release patches.
This was expected...