“In order to ensure a consistently high quality browser across our most popular desktop platforms we have reluctantly decided to drop support for Solaris. This will allow our UNIX development team to focus all of their attention on bringing Opera for Linux and FreeBSD up to final release quality, meaning that a 10.5x release for these platforms will happen as soon as feasibly possible”. Opera assure us that this will have no effect on the existing Linux and UNIX ports.
Opera on Solaris – the fat lady is singing.
but completely understandable.
Yeah, Solaris is nice but Oracle will probably just kill it’s potentional even more.
What a pity! For me, as an opensolaris and opera user, this are bad news. But actually, the depressing news from the solaris corner never stop at the moment. This decision is totally understandable, because of the new license to solaris and the uncertain situation of OpenSolaris…
By the way: Does anybody know, when OpenSolaris 10.03 will be released? Eh, I mean, OpenSolaris 10.04 … no … 10.05 … err … wait…
Umm, why don’t you check out the OpenSolaris mailing lists; the question has already be answered many times.
He rather reads hhtp://depressingSolarisNews.org/blog
That’s far more convenient than to get actual facts via mailing lists.
I have to wonder if this is possibly because of Oracle. It seems that with Solaris, the bad news just keeps creeping in. First, Oracle buys Sun and re-closes (and charges for) Solaris. Now Opera discontinues support. Really, I hope Oracle gets f***ed over good; at this point, it looks like Linux and the BSDs are once again on their own as corporations piss all over Solaris.
I think there is more to it than that – I’m not sure what problem the developers had in porting to Solaris, but I’ve tried to use opera on opensolaris for a while now, and it has been clear that not much effort was spent. It was very unstable and I could not get flash to work in it for a very long time.
This is indeed unfortunate news, but I think the recent uncertainty about the future directions of OpenSolaris was only a convenient excuse. They were clearly already having development issues or not enough manpower to justify the release (as they somewhat hinted). Either way, it does suck, but lets move on to better things: future releases of firefox and chrome both look very promising.
Oh well, atleast we got ZFS before they died ;D
And Dtrace ;^)
This is untrue, Solaris was never open source, all that has changed is that it is no longer free of cost.
OpenSolaris which was and is open source is still open source.
Actually I think the future will be bright for Solaris under Oracle, just not on the desktop. It is pretty common knowledge that Larry Ellison has wanted a “top to bottom” solution to really compete with old big blue for awhile now, and Sun+Solaris+SPARC gives him that.
So what I think is gonna happen, and why he re-closed it, is this-Ellison is gonna push the heck out of the SPARC and Solaris developers to make SPARC+Solaris THE platform for Oracle DB. it will be the fastest, most reliable, most rock solid Oracle DB platform yet, and it will allow Larry to charge a serious premium for it, and they WILL pay, as those hooked on Oracle products will pay a serious premium for serious performance gains.
Say what you will about old Larry, but the man knows how to make money on his product. he knows that the money in Sun isn’t in SPARC or Solaris desktops, it is in DB servers, and THAT is where he will focus. Mark my words but in less than 36 months I’d be surprised if any Oracle shop wasn’t running Oracle DB on a Solaris+SPARC combination.
I think about the same about future of Sun/Solaris, that it’s usage will be increasingly linked to Larry’s DB.
However I don’t think it will be really bright, just reflecting some shines from the Oracle world.
Some years ago I remember the set of CDs to install Solaris was coming with some bonus & extras, and one of them was a CD for a limited version of Oracle.
In a few years time I won’t be surprised to see the opposite, if you buy (for an outrageous amount of money) the DB application, you’ll get an OS for free.
Edited 2010-04-30 10:50 UTC
I hope that Opera gives us a little more detail as to what particularly about Solaris made it so much more difficult to code for. don’t get me wrong, i understand dropping a platform for the sake of quality for more commonly used platforms (hence I don’t port all my .NET apps to WinCE on x86 since me and a whopping 4 other people use it like a desktop os), but i am very curious as to the technical challenges the opera dev team encountered.
Ditto that, I would also like to know what made supporting Solaris so difficult when they are already supporting Linux, FreeBSD and OS X
Also Kroc’s article said “this will have no effect on the existing Linux and UNIX ports”. I take it he meant ‘remaining’ rather than ‘existing’.
The OS X port is different, since it doesn’t use X11. The latest Mac version also has a native Cocoa UI.
IMHO, it is not the issue of coding per se, but essentially the fact that OpenSolaris is not viable as a desktop platform. Why Opera or any other company should waste their resources for writing/maintaining software where only the very limited usage is expected?
Yeah. That was a good idea. But OpenSolaris *still* depends on Solaris, which is now a part of Oracle. Do you really expect them contribute to Open Solaris? Why should they? Solaris is a server platform for Oracle. End of discussion.
(Just in case: I spent enough time with Solaris, starting with early “pizza boxes” and SunOS 4.1.3 all way up to Solaris 6 or 7, don’t remember which one. That was a wonderful system (well, it had some hick ups when Sun moved from SunOS to Solaris, but eventually everything got stabilized, Solaris 5 or 6 I believe. I had its chance as a desktop. It didn’t work out that way.)
1) The compiler
2) The libraries versions
It is indeed a lot of bad news. If only Oracle could somehow at least gain some confidence in Solaris’ as well as OpenSolaris’ availability or continuation of development in the future. A lot of people are uncertain about the future of Solaris’ and OpenSolaris’ future as was stated above, and various applications as well as developers which means things like this are happening. Some might speculate that Oracle has an interest in the continuation of Solaris due to the fact that Solaris in general as well as SPARC are the main platforms for their RDBMS solutions. Some have also said that they might have a vested interest in ZFS but you could look at btrfs as well as the increasing amount of commits from Oracle into the Linux kernel. I’m not sure but I’d like to see Solaris continue. Who knows? They could very well plan on keeping Solaris around for turnkey type solutions for their database application, Oracle UNIX or something of that nature.
Edited 2010-04-29 20:53 UTC
Oracle DB runs on Solaris, more than any other OS. Solaris is the OS used for development of Oracle DB, this is official. Oracle DB and Solaris runs well together,
Regarding OpenSolaris 2010.04, there are some bugs in ZFS deduplication that needs to be ironed out first. After that, it will be released.
Sun always had an open and public roadmap. Oracle has not – just like Apple. Oracle is quiet until released. Not like Sun. Oracle has officially said that OpenSolaris is under development and it will not get killed.
OpenSolaris is a testing ground for Solaris 11. Oracle expects to deliver Solaris 11, soon. OpenSolaris is needed for that.
At least they haven’t given up on BeOS yet, right guys?
…right?
Current Opera version is 10.5x (Windows and Mac).
Latest Opera for OS/2 Warp was 5.12!
Latest Opera for BeOS was 3.62 (circa 2000)!
It looks like Opera support for BeOS was dropped well before that of OS/2 Warp.
It is understandable that less common/popular platforms get dropped. It is unfortunate that in a closed-source model it is not possible for talented coder(s) with a passion for a given OS to improve on the code and keep it current/relevant.
While this is a bit off topic from the original conversation, I’ve noticed a few bits in the licensing agreement. (c) Individual Use. You may use Software internally for personal, individual use.
Is this still pertinent to the 90 day evaluation or is Oracle going to allow individual (hobbyist) use of Solaris?
Actually, I didnt even knew that Opera was available for OpenSolaris and I am an avid OpenSolaris user since long. Had I known, I would have tried it. But Opera failed to advertise it. I use FireFox.
I’m sure there will be a vocal minority to the opposite, but… Solaris is hardass core infrastructure (running application servers, email servers, dns servers, oracle servers). Opera is the browser for nintendo products and mobile phones. I believe this is no loss.
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