It is true, just because you laid off doesn't mean solaris development has stopped.
The proofs:
https://blogs.oracle.com/solaris/continuous-delivery%2c-really
20 replies (most recent on top)
Most of what was listed in that blog about what shipped in 2017 was either done before the September layoffs or just passing through new versions of open source software. Doesn’t really prove anything about life after they layoffs except that they kept at least one marketing person around to blog.
There is no RPE or NPE any more. All the engineers left work on escalations now, and any one of them may be called off hours to work on a down system. Attrition among the survivors is accelerating...
"As there's no-one left around to write fixes for either of these vulnerabilities, Oracle customers are on their own."
Certainly nobody who understands the VMM code. RPE will be utterly lost without NPE guidance.
Oracle hasn't even MENTIONED Solaris x64 yet.
Yes, they have. Solaris x64 is affected Meltdown AND Spectre.
As there's no-one left around to write fixes for either of these vulnerabilities, Oracle customers are on their own.
Yes, Solaris is abandonware. Move to Linux.
"Why would customers trust us "
Are you an Oracle employee on the Solaris team, or do you just portray one on TV?
Don't forget Solaris x64. Our ZFS engineered system is based on that. We also have a surprising number of customers using it for all sorts of other stuff. Word is it is vulnerable to both Meltdown and Spectre.
Oracle hasn't even MENTIONED Solaris x64 yet. This is what abandonware looks like.
Why would customers trust us to be their cloud provider when we treat our on-prem customers so poorly? Despite what LE must think, not all of them are dumb.
SPARC on Solaris might not be at risk for Meltdown, but what about Spectre?
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/01/16/oracle_quarterly_patches_jan_2018/
Oracle support documents confirm that SPARC IS vulnerable to Spectre.
Yes, Oracle got Linux patches out. Pretty easy to do when all that is needed is to rebrand Red Hat's work as our own. But zero Solaris fixes. Our poor Solaris customers are having kittens right about now.
Solaris, the only major OS in the industry to not be patched at all yet.
In a way, it's hard to feel bad for Solaris customers. They've had 7 years to escape. Maybe anyone dumb enough to believe what LE says deserves to be parted from their money. Survival of the fittest and all...
From reuters:
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-cyber-security-oracle/oracle-issues-security-patches-for-chip-flaws-idUSKBN1F606E
still fighting the good fight, Bill. Good on you.
... but it has a new binary for Firefox. Bravo.
Solaris is only being sustained now so there is no new development. Get over it, gang. It's as relevant as Windows 95 nowadays.
You have to realize that this area of development at Oracle is over.
I was working on a great application and I kept trying to showcase the features and enhancements, but nobody in the management cared. It went to India with no information and no support of any kind, even though there were customers using it. You can be so involved in the development aspects of an area that you don't notice that it just isn't relevant anymore.
You need to get a job somewhere else. This is over with.
.... And most of the companies have moved off Solaris, The rest are moving out in a year or two. There are few morons left to consolidate the development work done by very intelligent workforce out of which 90% are no more with Oracle. The days are not far when the OP and the insider who is throwing the list of updates have either been fired or taken flight....
Oracle weren't considered a tier-1 vendor.
I love the Oracle fanboi's claiming Solaris is still alive and well with claims they have copied in new versions of some public domain packages. The larger question is "how much original IP are they generating?"
I know there are a small number number of engineers still working on Solaris, but they are working on sustaining and trying to get the final development release (S12 rebadged as 11.4 to stop customers worrying) out the door. 50% of Solaris development was wiped out 1 year ago with another 50% going late last year. 95% of SPARC went. Numbers have also declined with natural attrition.
Solaris will continue to exist the same way AIX, HP/UX and others continue to exist. Minimal sustaining to satisfy contractual requirements and sell whatever hardware is left.
As I type this, Solaris is the ONLY major OS to have no fix for the Meltdown / Spectre issues. SPARC on Solaris might not be at risk for Meltdown, but what about Spectre? What about both bugs for Solaris x86?
Even if we release fixes as part of tomorrow's CPU release, we will be the last major OS to protect our customers by far. WAY too late for a supposed "teir 1" vendor. CIOs/CTOs the world over are seeing this on the nightly news and screening for answers. IT departments unlucky enough to be still running on Solaris STILL have no answers for their bosses. Intel / Microsoft / RH / HPE / IBM / ARM / AMD customers all had answers a while ago. Only our customers are still left out in the cold.
If we are no longer even shipping security fixes in a remotely timely fassion, or even make a public statement, how can anyone doubt Solaris is not dead?
But, way to go on that Firefox update... Bravo...
This continuous delivery model is a joke.
It seems that the continuous delivery model of Oracle is the model of some of Linux distributions: They only package new versions of third-party software (I think mainly security issues), and near 0 modifications to the core of Solaris.
Linux or any of the BSD (FreeBSD,DragonFly,OpenBSD or NetBSD) has more commits that Solaris.
Solaris continuous Delivery =Irrelevance model of delivery
@Rgz5hNX-rnx : jeez... I know you are just doing your job here, but at least a little embarrassment in saying those b---s---s... ok, wanna talk seriously, let's talk seriously. what about Openstack? you of course know we have abandoned the project, and starting from 11.4 there will be no more any openstack package in solaris, and no support. which means that for example a very big customer in Germany that unfortunately was convinced to use openstack on solaris for their private iaas will be left alone, no support, no migration path, nothing. what about Docker and Ksplice? you know that we have abandoned the projects, no integration at all with solaris and so all customers convinced to continue investing because of the "continuous development" are left alone. what about any interesting feature? and I mean interesting for the customers, not for the remaining soalris engineers. what about ISV support? Murex has decided to stop all development on solaris, like almost all other ISVs, also some new Oracle sw are not supported on solaris.
..... and I can go on and on .... I know you need to maintain your job, but unfortunately the reality is that solaris is dead.
Can’t wait for y’all to update Firefox again. Bravo. That team deserves a nobel prize.
Last January, Oracle Solaris moved from a "Big Bang" release model to a continuous delivery model. We also extended our promise of Oracle Solaris active development and innovation through at least 2034. Many of our customers don't seem to believe it because nothing seems to have changed from an update perspective. Well, that's because we already had a built in model for delivering new capabilities and functionality as well as new FOSS and updates to you in our Service Repository Updates (SRU) model.
However, if you go back and look at what we've delivered in those SRUs, I think you'll be pleasantly surprised in the amount of new software we've delivered to you without any hiccups. In fact, we have had some customers complain that we're now delivering too much in the SRUs, and they just want them to contain bug fixes!
We thought it might be helpful to highlight some of the new functionality and FOSS that we've delivered in SRUs so that you can see just how our new continuous delivery model is working.
Below is a list of just some of what's been released/updated:
It is now possible to access Oracle Databases from Python using the cx_Oracle python module. This is now included as the package: library/python/cx_oracle . For more information, see cx_Oracle documentation.
The Java 8, Java 7, and Java 6 packages have been updated 9 times.
Timezone has been updated 7 times.
Wireshark has been updated 15 times.
Explorer has been updated 4 times.
BIND has been updated 7 times.
OpenSSL has been updated 9 times.
curl has been updated.
DHCP has been updated twice.
OpenSSH has been updated 5 times.
Apache Tomcat has been updated 12 times.
NTP has been updated 3 times.
Enhancements and fixes to VLAN:
Kernel Zones are now VLAN-aware.
VLANs now support Dynamic MAC Addresses and VLAN IDs.
New VLAN resource type has been added to make anet a trunk port.
Added support for MPxIO Enabled to HBA cards being used by the vHBA.
MySQL 5.5 has been updated 4 times.
MySQL 5.6 has been updated 5 times.
MySQL 5.7 was added and updated twice.
Oracle VM Server for SPARC has been updated 5 times.
Firefox has been updated 9 times.
Python bindings for the Oracle Database ( cx_Oracle ) has been updated to 5.2.1.
tcsh has been updated.
Added support for Large Pages for Kernel Zones.
Added support for 32G Emulex FC adapters.
ksh93 has been updated to the latest community version
ImageMagick has been updated 7 times. (Wow! you've read this far!)
The following components of the InfiniBand (IB) OS-bypass framework from the Open:
Fabrics Enterprise Distribution (OFED) have been updated to version 3.18:
Library for userspace use of RDMA
Userspace driver for Mellanox ConnectX InfiniBand HCAs
InfiniBand management datagram (MAD) library
InfiniBand userspace management datagram (uMAD) library
InfiniBand subnet manager libraries
InfiniBand diagnostic programs
InfiniBand fabric management and diagnostic tool set qperf command
General RDMA communication manager
Two-Factor Authentication CAC/PIV Smart Card support has been added.
Virtual Ethernet datalink (veth) support has been added.
ADI support for named pages has been added.
PHP has been updated to 5.6.22.
Apache Web Server has been updated 5 times.
Thunderbird has been updated 6 times.
Samba has been updated 5 times.
Performance improvements on the x86 platform with a reduction in cross calls while unmapping large contiguous virtual address ranges in the kernel.
Exclusive-IP zones under the same Global Zone can now communicate with each other.
Performance enhancements in the KOM (Kernel Object Manager) layer of the VM (Virtual Memory) subsystem.
The Time Slider can now take ZFS snapshots for all file systems.
bash has been updated once.
Includes the pflog daemon that allows for the capture and examination of Packet Filter (PF) network packets using wireshark .
getent(1M) has been updated to support the databases rpc(4) , shadow(4) , netgroups and initgroups.
zsh has been updated once.
Pixman has been updated once
LDAP support has been added to the Standalone LDAP Daemon, slapd.
tcpdump has been updated 4 times. (It just keeps going...)
Perl 5.22 has been added. With the addition of Perl 5.22, the following modules are
updated:
CGI.pm has been updated.
DBI has been updated.
Net-SSLeay has been updated.
xml-parser has been updated.
A new command line interface (CLI) to view DAX utilization.
Mercurial has been updated.
glib has been updated.
zlib has been updated.
libsndfile has been updated.
screen has been updated.
libarchive has been updated.
HMP has been updated 3 times.
Kerberos has been updated.
libmicrohttpd has been updated.
dnsmasq has been updated to 2.76.
S.M.A.R.T. Monitoring Tools (smartmontools) support has been added to Oracle Solaris.
Improvements to SCSI DTrace script. (... And going...)
RabbitMQ has been updated.
cryptography has been updated to 1.7.2.
vim has been updated.
gtar has been updated.
NVIDIA driver has been updated 3 times.
gcc 5.4.0 has been added.
xz has been updated.
libpng has been updated.
php has been updated.
unrar has been updated.
pixz has been updated.
irssi has been updated.
SunVTS 8.2.1 is now available.
Puppet has been updated.
Facter has been updated.
SQLite has been updated.
Django has been updated.
ruby 2.3 has been added.
PHP 7.1 has been added.
The Cairo graphics library has been updated.
GnuTLS has been updated.
Mailman has been updated.
postfix has been updated.
erlang has been updated.
pcre has been updated.
nmap has been updated.
autoconf has been updated. (OK. I bet you're just skimming.)
DAX and VA Masking is now supported on Oracle Solaris Kernel Zones.
The eXtended Reliable Connected (XRC) Transport Service is now supported on Oracle Solaris.
snort has been updated twice.
FreeType has been updated.
Expat has been updated.
libgcrypt has been updated.
libgpg-error has been updated.
harfbuzz library is now available.
gnupg has been updated.
gpgme has been updated.
libksba has been updated.
libassuan has been updated.
Oracle Instant Client 12.2 is now available.
ICU has been updated. (Whew! Reached the end!)
That's a massive amount of change over the life of Oracle Solaris 11.3. We're not stopping either. Oracle Solaris 11.3 will have more SRU updates with new software and enhancements, and coming in 2018, we are bringing you Oracle Solaris 11.4! So, keep an eye out, there's more coming your way.