I can think of four reasons for Oracle staying at Solaris 11.x instead of planning a new Solaris 12 release: 1. Some enterprises have a general policy of only

I can think of four reasons for Oracle staying at Solaris 11.x instead of planning a new Solaris 12 release: 1. Some enterprises have a general policy of only running versions N and N-1 of software. The release of Solaris 12 would trigger a review of Solaris 10 in those environments, which would accelerate the trend away from Solaris. (The Solaris 10 to Solaris 11 upgrade is particularly disruptive due to the switch to IPS packaging and the networking changes, so migration to Linux is of comparable complexity.) Immediate loss of legacy support revenue for both Solaris and SPARC hardware. 2. Solaris 11 support is promised until at least 2031, or 2034 if customers pay for extended support [1]. A new release would just add another stream to support with at least 15 years of overlap. 3. The old SVR4 packaging was so slow and Live Upgrade so unreliable that new releases were required to stop patch bundles from getting too unwieldy. IPS is much faster and safer so it is more technically feasible to stick with the same major release. 4. I'd tend to agree with Adrian Cockcroft that the interesting things are happening elsewhere now [2]. There may not be enough reason for customers to upgrade. Oracle can avoid the story of a failed release by not doing the release in the first place. [1] http://www.oracle.com/us/support/library/lifetime-support-hardware-301321.pdf http://www.oracle.com/us/support/library/lifetime-support-ha... [2] http://perfcap.blogspot.com.au/2010/08/open-letter-to-my-sun-friends-at-oracle.html http://perfcap.blogspot.com.au/2010/08/open-letter-to-my-sun...