[OpenIndiana-discuss] So is Solaris officially supported till 2034?

[Nikola M]

On 09/ 5/17 01:37 PM, Udo Grabowski (IMK) wrote:
> On 05/09/2017 12:45, Gabriele Bulfon wrote:
>> The real concern is...in the short or long period, how much support 
>> for Solaris kernels can we expect from third parties such VMware?
>> They may completely remove the "Oracle Solaris 11 64bit" from the 
>> list of supported VMs.
>> This may happen elsewhere, as happened recently at MongoDB.
>> This may hurt the illumos ecosystem in the short/long term.
>> What do you think?
>> Sonicle S.r.l.
>>
>
> I think we will this see very quickly, all third-party vendors
> will cease Solaris SPARC and x86 support on short notice, especially
> NVIDIA, which will practically end the possibility to use any illumos
> derivative on the desktop on a midterm timescale.

It is always related how much effort and money one is pouring toward 
solutions he/she use.
If only looking in customer/provider relationship, but without paying 
for the effort or doing the effort in the process , then yes.

On the other hand, maintaining Solaris and illumos drivers require much 
less effort.
Look how strong and long-term Nvidia driver support is, exactly because 
of stable environment, not needing to recompile your drivers to work all 
the time, but add new support on top of the old one.

It is exactly long term stability with working environment with illumos 
and the ability to innovate in a compatible way, what is main platform 
benefit of illumos.

How fast  illumos innovates and how much driver support has advanced,  
depends at the most part on effort and money invested in people and 
companies doing it.
On the track of investment, both effort and money needed to maintain and 
innovate are much lower with illumos , while still having solid 
production platform, then on Linux or any other platform.

Everything depending on proprietary, closed, vendor-locked products or 
depending on the fact if vendors themselves are even still existing, 
will soon or later die (like the support for older versions of 
proprietary OSes dies over time).

Only open, free software and publicly supported , developed and 
available products tend to exist, work and survive over a very long 
periods of time.
After all, Sun was big, but Sun Open sourced Opensolaris. Sun is not 
there, but illumos is here.

That said, if wanting to surely have GUI support for modern graphics 
hardware, without relying on anyone, effort could be put in also 
supporting modern AMD graphics with open source drivers, being 
relatively recently almost fully open sourced for other platforms.