Oracle Finally Confirms It's Canning Solaris 12

[torsionbar28]

I think that the world would be better without this corporate hell OS, HP UX is dying too, i hope that AIX would die too.

On Solaris, I agree with you, I've never been a fan for a variety of reasons.

HP-UX is pretty entrenched in some industries like pharma and telecom, but HP made the strategic error of hitching their wagon to Itanium, which will guarantee its eventual death. After all, 11iv3 was released in 2007 and there hasn't been much new since then. They've even reduced their quarterly patch bundles to once annually now, so development of HP-UX has been on the decline for years. There will be no new major HP-UX OS version, and Itanium chips haven't been refreshed since 2012. This is effectively a dead-end platform.

I disagree with you on AIX however. It's the most robust of the 3 operating systems you mentioned, and I actually enjoy using it. It's modern, it's fast, and it's competitive. The POWER processors it runs on are under active development, and they really kick ass. The new POWER9 chips come out this year, with 12 or 24 cores, 4 Ghz clock, and 120 MB of on-die L3 cache, all built on a modern 14 nm process node. AIX and POWER are not only alive and well, they are thriving! Add to this, that IBM is very open source and Linux friendly, so I think the continued success of AIX/POWER is a Very Good Thing(tm).

[ldo17]

I disagree with you on AIX however. It's the most robust of the 3 operating systems you mentioned, and I actually enjoy using it. It's modern, it's fast, and it's competitive.

Does it still use that awful SMIT crap? The inability to edit text-based config files is uncomfortably ... Windows-like ...

[wizard69]

Basically, everything that gets to call itself “Unix” deserves to die.

Why would you say something like that? If it wasn't for UNIX I highly doubt Linux would have happened.

[Delgarde]

I disagree with you on AIX however. It's the most robust of the 3 operating systems you mentioned, and I actually enjoy using it. It's modern, it's fast, and it's competitive. The POWER processors it runs on are under active development, and they really kick ass. The new POWER9 chips come out this year, with 12 or 24 cores, 4 Ghz clock, and 120 MB of on-die L3 cache, all built on a modern 14 nm process node. AIX and POWER are not only alive and well, they are thriving! Add to this, that IBM is very open source and Linux friendly, so I think the continued success of AIX/POWER is a Very Good Thing(tm).

Agreed... of all the big UNIX systems, AIX is by far the healthiest... a solid hardware platform, and (unlike HP-UX or Solaris), a userspace that doesn't make me want to visit the server room with a hammer.

[jacob]

OEL is 99% RHEL, so no.

That's the point. Is there a risk that Oracle may push to close OEL down and make it proprietary, with repercussions on RHEL and beyond, including possibly taking over Red Hat? Remember this is Oracle we are talking about, the company that makes Microsoft look like the good guys.

[torsionbar28]

Actually, the language itself has done fairly well under Oracle... Java 7 and 8 both included some very useful improvements,

That's subjective. A lot of developers and sys admins alike loathe Java 8. It touts "enhanced security" and in the process it complete broke everything that Java started out as. Developers flocked to Java for ease of use and portability. It's now become such a PITA to work with, and consumes so many system resources, I wonder how much steam is left in this Java fad.

As to where the money is - I don't think they make much off Java itself... maybe something off support contracts, but nothing of significance. But the Java ecosystem is the key to the enterprise... the language, the JavaEE spec, etc. And that's where the money is coming from - enterprise apps built on a Java stack are probably running on Weblogic and talking to an Oracle database.

Bingo, Java apps running on Weblogic and Oracle DB are huge. We've got a bunch of them, running on HP-UX and on RHEL. Slowly phasing out the HP-UX in favor of RHEL, thankfully.

I think long term however, we'll be taking a serious look at JBoss and Postgress. Oracle's pricing model on modern multi-core processors is downright obtuse. If you have a 64 core hypervisor running a bunch of non-Oracle VM's, and you have a single Oracle VM with just 2 cores allocated to it, Oracle charges you for 64 cores! You're only using 2, but you must pay for 64. They charge based on the physical hardware only. It's absolutely stupid.

[ldo17]

If it wasn't for UNIX I highly doubt Linux would have happened.

If it wasn’t for MINIX being under a restrictive licence, Linux wouldn’t have happened.

[Delgarde]

That's subjective. A lot of developers and sys admins alike loathe Java 8. It touts "enhanced security" and in the process it complete broke everything that Java started out as. Developers flocked to Java for ease of use and portability. It's now become such a PITA to work with, and consumes so many system resources, I wonder how much steam is left in this Java fad.

I've not seen any problems with Java 8 server-side. For client use, I'd agree - all the extra security checks they've added have made things considerably slower.

I think long term however, we'll be taking a serious look at JBoss and Postgress. Oracle's pricing model on modern multi-core processors is downright obtuse. If you have a 64 core hypervisor running a bunch of non-Oracle VM's, and you have a single Oracle VM with just 2 cores allocated to it, Oracle charges you for 64 cores! You're only using 2, but you must pay for 64. They charge based on the physical hardware only. It's absolutely stupid.

You're not the only one. The system I work on is currently only able to deploy against Weblogic + OracleDB, but we've had a number of inquiries about supporting cheaper options. Our established clients are mostly large enough to need something like OracleDB - they'd use a 64-core system just to run the database - but many prospective clients are small players or startups, and are discouraged by licensing costs for Oracle products...

[numasan]

That's the point. Is there a risk that Oracle may push to close OEL down and make it proprietary, with repercussions on RHEL and beyond, including possibly taking over Red Hat? Remember this is Oracle we are talking about, the company that makes Microsoft look like the good guys.

That is a good reason to be thankful for the GPL, as nobody can close it down. Taking over Red Hat, possibly, but the current software will forever be FLOSS, and SuSE would most likely see an influx of new customers.

[TeamBlackFox]

I disagree with you on AIX however. It's the most robust of the 3 operating systems you mentioned, and I actually enjoy using it. It's modern, it's fast, and it's competitive. The POWER processors it runs on are under active development, and they really kick ass. The new POWER9 chips come out this year, with 12 or 24 cores, 4 Ghz clock, and 120 MB of on-die L3 cache, all built on a modern 14 nm process node. AIX and POWER are not only alive and well, they are thriving! Add to this, that IBM is very open source and Linux friendly, so I think the continued success of AIX/POWER is a Very Good Thing(tm).

AIX is indeed a nice system for a UNIX. Wpars (its form of containers/jails), ProbeVue, JFS2 etc. are all well designed systems.

Does it still use that awful SMIT crap? The inability to edit text-based config files is uncomfortably ... Windows-like ...

Smit/smitty is much more well designed than windows. I can understand the skepticism about using it instead of text file editing but I find both methods equally useful - especially considering the AIX database configuration is better than Windows registry. It's a good OS, but it's not one for a Linux user.