Not even Java supports Solaris anymore.
https://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/downloads/jdk12-downloads-5295953.html
11 replies (most recent on top)
"RIP Solaris, it started when ponytail killed what was Sun and it was never going to be better after Oracle"
As much as I disklike the job Pony Tail did while he was in charge, he did not start the downfall. That was all on McNealy and gang. Pony Tail only rode Sun down with the flames.
McNealy was sitting on an era of unbridled expansion during the tech boom and he failed to put Solaris on the throne that Linux holds today. He failed to monetize lots of stuff that the smart folks at Sun came up with. And that's that.
It was the 1U server than started the downslide for Solaris, simple as that. Customers were looking for cheap boxes to put their Apache 1 webservers, DNS servers, etc. and Sun didn't have a competitive answer. Sun was too nice, paid too much attention to standards and compatibility, and didn't have any customer lock-in technology, so it was pretty easy for customers to switch to RHEL. By the time Sun reacted with the Cobalt acquisition, it was much too late. On the larger server side, nothing came close to Solaris. Oracle classic employee weenies doing their development on their c-appy underpowered Windows laptops with their silly SSH sessions to Linux VMs on those horrible internal server farms would never admit that Oracle RDBMS performed best on Solaris even though the facts proved it throughout the years.
A better Linux than Linux, as Scott once said.
Stop drinking the cool aid. The cult is DEAD! Where are Scott and Pony tail now?
It was open source,
Yeah, but too little too late on this one.
and had established partnerships with all the key x86 vendors.
A day late and a $ short on this one too.
Wasn't it McNealy that pulled out of X86 development in the late 1990s early 2000s because he declared Sun had to "beat Intel"? Why don't you talk about that aspect of Scott's visionary leadership?
long time solaris user. i have sunos 4.1.4 media to this day. what killed solaris was two fold - one - solaris 11 was a piece of garbage. i still like using solaris 10 but solaris 11 is annoying to deal with. a lot of good ideas and great potential but it never got hashed out - why? - item two - when oracle took solaris back to closed source there were 50 projects including smartos/joyent that could have united rather than fragment. they didnt. now we have 50 flavors of not-quite-solaris-next in various stages of neglect. solaris 11 once it closed up and the "free downloads" and free patches stopped it became frozen in time.
i still use patch check advanced on solaris 10 installs and get up to the month patches for kernel etc - its quite sad to see this all continue to rot on the vine. but solaris - even with its hot-cpu/hot-memory/great live debugging/dtrace/zfs/amazing stability - all of this is being parted out and reimplemented (often in an inferior way) by others. with no investment the greatest os (which effectively gave birth to linux distros except the BSD-ish ones like slackware) will just die on the vine.
solaris 12 would have been a joy to see but count on big red to do nothing but destroy what they acquire.
Let's not fool ourselves, Solaris was already in the midst of its death throes when Oracle picked it up. Sun wasn't exactly tearing it up with the profits, and IBM and HP were already going all in on Linux.
"It was folly to think that Oracle would really put up Solaris against their own Linux. "
Stupidest mindset in the world. Oracle continues to struggle to find a differentiator with "their" Linux, other than "it's got our name on it, and oh looky, some kernel tweaks".
With Solaris, they had a fiercely loyal installed base, a product with a significant set of differentiators. It was open source, and had established partnerships with all the key x86 vendors. A better Linux than Linux, as Scott once said. PLUS, Sun was ahead of the curve on cloud.
Larry pulled the plug on all that. Just brilliant.
RIP Solaris, it started when ponytail killed what was Sun and it was never going to be better after Oracle
good riddance, should have been done from day 1 of sun acquisition.
It was folly to think that Oracle would really put up Solaris against their own Linux. Slow death was always the plan, if they could not immediately sell or monetize the thing.
Too bad they didn't kill off Java instead.
It was long past time to kill it.