Dear partners,
Solaris 8 was a great operating system and very popular. It's now time to say good bye if it comes to the release planning of your product on top of the Solaris operating system. Use the Sun Solaris EOL page to manage your own software releases.
The Solaris 8 story looks as follow
- First shipment: January 2000
- Last sale: Feb. 16, 2007
- EOL (Phase 1): March 31, 2009
- Extended End of Live: March, 31, 2012 (Service through special support contracts)
What does this mean for an end customer?
- They may use Solaris 8 as long as you want. They are not anymore able to purchase it. Normal support will end in 2009. Support through special contracts can be provided at least through 2012. The Solaris 8 Transition FAQ is a great document to read.
What does this mean for software partners and their release strategy?
- End customers haven't been been able to purchase Solaris 8 for a year
- Standard Sun support will end in a year.
- New Sun servers aren't anymore able to operate on Solaris 8
- The pool of Solaris 8 customers will shrink since there are no more systems available for new installations.
- This means that ISVs can consider to drop Solaris 8 in their support matrix for new products being shipped in future.
What does this mean for the build systems of our software partners?
- Build your software on the oldest Solaris release which you want to support. Qualify your software on younger Solaris version like 9, 10 or OpenSolaris and rely on the binary compatibility.
- Build servers for new and future products: Consider to migrate your next generation build server to Solaris 9 or 10. The official EOL process for these operating systems hasn't yet started.
- Build servers for old products and patches or escalations on Solaris 8:
- Inform your customers that the normal EOL of Solaris 8 will happen in a year and let them know that you plan to stop support as well by retiring these systems in a year.
- Plan for Extended End of service live. service contracts with Sun if your customers want to do the same.
- Consider to use the Solaris 8 container on Solaris 10. This solution has a for free evaluation license.