It's reasonably safe to assume that 'next' is a placeholder for .4, .5, .6 and so on. This seems to me more like a project management issue than a technical iss

It's reasonably safe to assume that 'next' is a placeholder for .4, .5, .6 and so on. This seems to me more like a project management issue than a technical issue. I.e. the scope of Solaris 12 was too ambitious and individual teams were finishing their work on different schedules. Rather than have everything sit idle, they are releasing it piecemeal under the Solaris 11.x umbrella. To the extent that there are commercial ISVs supporting Solaris it also makes their jobs a little easier since they can deal with change in smaller increments.