Wither Solaris x86 (again)?
So, there's a message to Sun's customer's in the Wall Street Journal, highlighting some of Oracle's plans should their acquisition of Sun be approved (at this writing, the deal is pending EU approval). The ad states that Oracle plans to:
1. Spend more money developing SPARC than Sun does now;
2. Spend more money developing Solaris than Sun does now;
3. Have more than twice as many hardware specialists selling and servicing SPARC/Solaris systems than Sun does now;
4. Dramatically improve Sun’s hardware performance by tightly integrating Oracle software with Sun hardware.
Notice that mention of Sun's AMD and Intel x86 systems is suspiciously absent (and has been absent from all public words I've seen from Oracle). Does this mean anything? Sun tried to can Solaris x86 (concentrating on big SPARC systems) a few years ago which resulted in a massive backlash which forced them to reverse their decision, so one would hope that Sun's new owners wouldn't duplicate that mistake...
Rhetorical questions are fine, but let me ask a direct question to those in the know: What are Oracle's plans for Sun's x86 hardware support if/when they take over? Given their silence on this issue (as far as I've seen, anyway), I don't think it's an unfair question.
If Oracle has no plans to drop support for x86 (hardware or software), perhaps they should be a bit more vociferous about it.