Thoughts on the future direction of Solaris

As a response in a discussion weather Oracle will invest more in Solaris 10 maybe to also use as base for Fishworks or what they doing I wrote something similiar to this in the opensolaris-discuss list:

Solaris 10 Update 9 will indeed contain some new features including a refresh of ZFS, but it will not replace the OpenSolaris kernel in Fishworks, backporting both the CIFS server and COMSTAR is far to much work.

I think Solaris 10 9/10 will be released at OpenWorld together with at least a preview of "Solaris Next", "Solaris 11" or whatever name it will get. Solaris 10 is too old to be doing major development work in, it is time to release a major version soon, some things can't be done without a new major release. This would look good for Oracle and their commitment to Solaris (not OpenSolaris), that they have a new major Solaris release where Sun just keep developing it for year after year (I'm not saying that was bad, but Oracle may put it like that, look at what Larry said about Rock).

What happens with OpenSolaris as a distribution is unclear, my opinion is that they should have released the second respin on 134 without support at least, now they just get bad will from the community, at least until something is released or they decide to spread some light on the situation.

Solaris next not OpenSolaris
Solaris 10 9/10 and second zfs refresh

Larry regarding Rock:
"At the start, ellison shut down one of schwartz’s pet projects -- development of the “rock” microprocessor for sun’s high-end sparc server line, a semiconductor that had struggled in development for five years as engineers sought to overcome a string of technical problems. “this processor had two incredible virtues: it was incredibly slow and it consumed vast amounts of energy. it was so hot that they had to put about 12 inches of cooling fans on top of it to cool the processor,” said ellison. “it was just madness to continue that project.”