Guilty SPARC: Oracle euthanizes Solaris 12, expunging it from roadmap

"Solaris 11.next" projected to arrive in late 2018, is last version through 2021.

Rumors have been circulating since late last year that Oracle was planning to kill development of the Solaris operating system, with major layoffs coming to the operating system's development team. Others speculated that future versions of the Unix platform Oracle acquired with Sun Microsystems would be designed for the cloud and built for the Intel platform only and that the SPARC processor line would meet its demise. The good news, based on a recently released Oracle roadmap for the SPARC platform, is that both Solaris and SPARC appear to have a future.

The bad news is that the next major version of Solaris—Solaris 12— has apparently been canceled, as it has disappeared from the roadmap. Instead, it's been replaced with "Solaris 11.next"—and that version is apparently the only update planned for the operating system through 2021.

With its on-premises software and hardware sales in decline, Oracle has been undergoing a major reorganization over the past two years as it attempts to pivot toward the cloud. Those changes led to a major speed bump in the development cycle for Java Enterprise Edition, a slowdown significant enough that it spurred something of a Java community revolt. Oracle later announced a new roadmap for Java EE that recalibrated expectations, focusing on cloud services features for the next version of the software platform.

An Oracle spokesperson promised to Ars that he would provide a statement on the roadmap and the future of Solaris this afternoon. We'll update this story when that information becomes available.