The company is saying nothing about the lay-offs or what they mean for the different product lines, but staff have been turning to Twitter.

Tech industry observer Simon Phipps thinks that “all” Solaris staff were laid off although it is clear that a small Solaris team remains in place.

Other comments mention hundreds of workers recently moved from dedicated Solaris teams to Oracle's Linux development efforts. This could be a “sort of” restructuring as it is possible that the teams could work on Solaris and Oracle Linux code under the same umbrella without killing off any products.

Oracle's plan has been to deliver continuous updates to Solaris 11.3 instead of a full 12.0 upgrade.

One clear result is that development work on the ZFS Storage Appliance has been abandoned and the fate of Solaris and SPARC silicon remains unclear which is what we have been saying that for years.