Oracle Pushes Out Another Solaris 11.4 Update To End Out 2019

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Oracle Pushes Out Another Solaris 11.4 Update To End Out 2019

There's still nothing on Solaris past the v11.4 series, but Oracle is ending out 2019 with a last stable release update for the year...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Oracle-Solaris-11.4-SRU16

[valici]

Why did Oracle buy Sun? Just to kill everything it had? Java looks to be next.
They should've just focused on they're database business.

[starshipeleven]

Why did Oracle buy Sun?

To leech off Sun's locked-in customer base for as long as possible. They have some experience in this field.

[kgardas]

To leech off Sun's locked-in customer base for as long as possible. They have some experience in this field.

Indeed, noone is able to get SRUx updates without support contract. Not even developers/registered developers using Solaris for development. The reason I needed to migrate from Solaris to Linux...

[CommunityMember]

Why did Oracle buy Sun? .... They should've just focused on they're database business.

The general consensus is they wanted control of Java. They did not want Sun's hardware business, but it came in the package. Oracle management correctly saw database technology was going to be commoditized, and saw they needed to move up the stack into services and into IP licensing (such as ERP solutions and Java and support) to support their future market share and valuation. The cynics have also suggested that by acquiring multi-billion dollar companies Oracle was able to hide some of the underlying weakness in their existing businesses by having multiple years of acquisition cost write downs and promises of future synergy savings.

[tsundoku]

What's with the thinly-disguised condescension that accompanies all of these Phoronix announcements of Solaris updates? "Still nothing on Solaris past the v11.4 series," "largely mundane," etc. It's a routine monthly service update. Is it supposed to be exciting? The original 11.4 was a major update in its own right, bigger than anything since 11.0, and it is just over a year old. What is the glaringly absent feature that didn't make it into 11.4.0 that everyone is waiting for? Would Phoronix cover similarly unremarkable Linux distribution updates in a similar fashion, with nose upturned as if they fell short of some unexplained but obviously lofty expectations?

Meeting every monthly SRU with feigned disappointment that it's not actually a whole new OS release in disguise makes no sense to me, unless the entire purpose of this exercise is to take advantage of an opportunity to jeer Solaris because it happens to be owned by Oracle.

[CommunityMember]

... take advantage of an opportunity to jeer Solaris because it happens to be owned by Oracle.

Might it not also be a of touch of sadness, lamenting as to what Solaris could have been if the excellent engineers from Sun had been supported to continue their innovations such as ZFS, Dtrace, Zones, that at one point were considered at the leading edge of the field. If you are not aware, there was a reunion of around 1000 ex-Sun employees just a few months ago, and like any good wake (for Sun in this case), there was a mixture of happiness (for what was), and sadness (for what will never be).

[kgardas]

What's with the thinly-disguised condescension that accompanies all of these Phoronix announcements of Solaris updates? "Still nothing on Solaris past the v11.4 series," "largely mundane," etc. It's a routine monthly service update. Is it supposed to be exciting? The original 11.4 was a major update in its own right, bigger than anything since 11.0, and it is just over a year old. What is the glaringly absent feature that didn't make it into 11.4.0 that everyone is waiting for? Would Phoronix cover similarly unremarkable Linux distribution updates in a similar fashion, with nose upturned as if they fell short of some unexplained but obviously lofty expectations?

Meeting every monthly SRU with feigned disappointment that it's not actually a whole new OS release in disguise makes no sense to me, unless the entire purpose of this exercise is to take advantage of an opportunity to jeer Solaris because it happens to be owned by Oracle.

For ordinary user this is easy. Since this is still 11.4 release, they will never ever see it (considering they don't have support contract). On the other hand Oracle is pushing new features/apps down in SRUx quite reguraly -- E.g. try to find rust on 11.4. You will not. But it's in 11.4 SRUx and of course more. Rust is just for my most ring bell example. On the other hand, if this would be 11.5, then normal people will be able to install it and then they will see all the new features. Hence perhaps kind of sadness about yet another 11.4 SRUx....

[tsundoku]

Might it not also be a of touch of sadness, lamenting as to what Solaris could have been if the excellent engineers from Sun had been supported to continue their innovations such as ZFS, Dtrace, Zones, that at one point were considered at the leading edge of the field.

It's reasonable to be sad about how things could have been different, but phrasing it like this makes it sound like everything stopped after Oracle took over. It's not like all of the engineers quit or got fired in 2010. Back then Solaris 11 itself was still "Solaris.Next" and only existed as development builds, which eventually saw commercial release and a series of major updates under Oracle's watch. There is of course the infamous downsizing more recently, but it remains to be seen what will come of that in the long term. If ZFS, Dtrace, and Zones aren't the leading edge of their field anymore, what is?

The other unavoidable factor when talking about "what could have been" is Sun. Everybody knows what Oracle is like. Is the current state of affairs Oracle's fault, or is it Sun's fault for getting themselves in a position where they had to sell? Either way the reality we live in today is much better than the speculation I was hearing ten years ago, when people openly assumed Oracle would immediately discard everything in the Sun catalog except for Java.

For ordinary user this is easy. Since this is still 11.4 release, they will never ever see it (considering they don't have support contract). On the other hand Oracle is pushing new features/apps down in SRUx quite reguraly -- E.g. try to find rust on 11.4. You will not. But it's in 11.4 SRUx and of course more. Rust is just for my most ring bell example. On the other hand, if this would be 11.5, then normal people will be able to install it and then they will see all the new features. Hence perhaps kind of sadness about yet another 11.4 SRUx....

That is a fair point, although it was never exactly reasonable to run Solaris 11.x.0 without patches even when they were coming out once a year. It's also worth remembering that there were almost three years between 11.3 and 11.4, and more updates have come out in the year since 11.4 than during that entire time, due to the 11.4 continuous release policy. It's unfortunate that Solaris updates are not free to the public, but criticizing a commercial Unix for that is odd, as it is odd to open every announcement of a Solaris update with "still no news of post-11.4" when the current continuous release policy is public knowledge.

Maybe Solaris just gets all of this lament heaped on it because Sun's brief foray into open-sourcing the entire OS raised expectations so high, but that ended with them running out of money and having to sell out, and before that they were doing pretty much what Oracle is doing now. It's complicated. I haven't seen anybody wailing at IBM for not giving away AIX patches for free.