Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

“Oracle laid off all Solaris tech staff in a classic silent EOL of the product”

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 402 posts

Re: “Oracle laid off all Solaris tech staff in a classic silent EOL of the product”

#21

Post by notalaser »

nailer wrote: post #9
binaryapparatus wrote: post #7

Sad news all over industry. Red Hat creating huge mess throughout linux with systemd for years. Solaris killed. Thankfully zfs continues living trough FreeBSD. MariaDB is forked at the last moment. Some of my work depends on VirtualBox. Quote from American Gods: “A single product manufactured by a single company for a single global market. Spicy, medium, or chunky! They get a choice, of course! OF COURSE! But they ar…

Every major Linux distro uses systemd. I know its opponents are vocal but a bunch of us are silently enjoying the simplicity of .service files and systemd timers.

In the meantime, a bunch of us developers are desperately trying to figure out what the fsck broke this time, drinking our sorrows about this new life where we can't debug anything that happens at boot, and frantically setting up BSDs on our laptops at home, so that we can at least get a break from this mess when we're at home.

I (thankfully only) used to do Linux BSPs in a former life. In the last year or so of doing that, I think we spent about 15-20% of a project's time debugging systemd problems and working around it being too smart for its own good. 20% for the bloody init system sounds fine until you realize the rest of the time included stuff like writing or expanding device drivers.

Re: “Oracle laid off all Solaris tech staff in a classic silent EOL of the product”

#22

Post by holydude »

AsyncAwait wrote: post #19
binaryapparatus wrote: post #7

Sad news all over industry. Red Hat creating huge mess throughout linux with systemd for years. Solaris killed. Thankfully zfs continues living trough FreeBSD. MariaDB is forked at the last moment. Some of my work depends on VirtualBox. Quote from American Gods: “A single product manufactured by a single company for a single global market. Spicy, medium, or chunky! They get a choice, of course! OF COURSE! But they ar…

> Red Hat creating huge mess throughout linux with systemd for years Care to elaborate on the 'mess' created? I highly doubt you even used it yourself, sounds like something you've heard and are repeating for some cheap karma. The init scripts used before were the real mess, if you ask me. It's getting really tiring to hear these systemd rants with no good reasons to back them up. I guess ranting against systemd is t…

Systemd is / was inspired by solaris smf to some extent. It is not that bad but the execution was rather poor.

Re: “Oracle laid off all Solaris tech staff in a classic silent EOL of the product”

#23

Post by kuschku »

binaryapparatus wrote: post #16
nailer wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every major Linux distro uses systemd. I know its opponents are vocal but a bunch of us are silently enjoying the simplicity of .service files and systemd timers.

Simplicity of systemd timers? Right.

Compared to the alternatives? Definitely.

As an application developer and hobby sysadmin, systemd is a godsend over the misconfigured and broken stuff distributions have delivered for years.

systemd has made my work a lot more effective, and I’ve gained massive productivity.

Re: “Oracle laid off all Solaris tech staff in a classic silent EOL of the product”

#24

Post by isatty »

nailer wrote: post #9
binaryapparatus wrote: post #7

Sad news all over industry. Red Hat creating huge mess throughout linux with systemd for years. Solaris killed. Thankfully zfs continues living trough FreeBSD. MariaDB is forked at the last moment. Some of my work depends on VirtualBox. Quote from American Gods: “A single product manufactured by a single company for a single global market. Spicy, medium, or chunky! They get a choice, of course! OF COURSE! But they ar…

Every major Linux distro uses systemd. I know its opponents are vocal but a bunch of us are silently enjoying the simplicity of .service files and systemd timers.

I'm using FreeBSD for servers and thankfully Gentoo remains on OpenRC. If they switch I'll move my home computers to FreeBSD too.

Re: “Oracle laid off all Solaris tech staff in a classic silent EOL of the product”

#25

Post by [deleted] »

AsyncAwait wrote: post #19
binaryapparatus wrote: post #7

Sad news all over industry. Red Hat creating huge mess throughout linux with systemd for years. Solaris killed. Thankfully zfs continues living trough FreeBSD. MariaDB is forked at the last moment. Some of my work depends on VirtualBox. Quote from American Gods: “A single product manufactured by a single company for a single global market. Spicy, medium, or chunky! They get a choice, of course! OF COURSE! But they ar…

> Red Hat creating huge mess throughout linux with systemd for years Care to elaborate on the 'mess' created? I highly doubt you even used it yourself, sounds like something you've heard and are repeating for some cheap karma. The init scripts used before were the real mess, if you ask me. It's getting really tiring to hear these systemd rants with no good reasons to back them up. I guess ranting against systemd is t…

[deleted]

Re: “Oracle laid off all Solaris tech staff in a classic silent EOL of the product”

#26

Post by enraged_camel »

binaryapparatus wrote: post #20
AsyncAwait wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Red Hat creating huge mess throughout linux with systemd for years Care to elaborate on the 'mess' created? I highly doubt you even used it yourself, sounds like something you've heard and are repeating for some cheap karma. The init scripts used before were the real mess, if you ask me. It's getting really tiring to hear these systemd rants with no good reasons to back them up. I guess ranting against systemd is t…

I am 46 years old, with over 25 years of programming and system administration experience. I've been here before internet existed. You better believe I know what I am talking about. I couldn't care less about karma kid.

Maybe you could explain it for us mere mortals.

Re: “Oracle laid off all Solaris tech staff in a classic silent EOL of the product”

#27

Post by Someone »

johan_larson wrote: post #18
foo101 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is very unlikely that Oracle will do the right thing. Oracle, as a company, is known to be ethically challenged. A company like Oracle that is known for its apathy towards its own developers cannot be expected to make careful consideration towards the software it is killing. For those, who have not worked in Oracle or have little understanding of Oracle's internal culture, I recommend this nice article about why J…

Is open-sourcing a codebase for an abandoned product somehow expensive or complicated? Are there legal or accounting issues? If not, it seems like buying a bit of good-will for the price of a bit of paperwork would be a useful investment.

Legal concerns: do we really own this code?

If there is code in there that turns out to be copy-pasted from somewhere else, open sourcing makes it more likely that people will find it. That could be expensive (e.g. when some BigCo owns the copyright on code they have been selling for decades) and/or have even more serious consequences (e.g. when there's a GPL-licensed code fragment in there, and they linked it with a part they want to keep commercial)

Answering that question conclusively can be very expensive. They may not have a full history of the code, and if they have, it may not contain all metadata needed.k

Re: “Oracle laid off all Solaris tech staff in a classic silent EOL of the product”

#28

Post by holydude »

You need billions and billions of dollars to keep such project alive. And even then if you cant attract the right amount of interest you are doomed. It is bloody expensive to keep these people employed and i guess oracle is not competent enough to manage these resources. It is sad to see solaris go but this is what was about to happen with any proprietary technology with a limited stream of revenue. I mean i do not think customers cared that much about what they run on as long as their apps and dbs were fine. Since windows and linux are way cheaper it was a matter of time.

Re: “Oracle laid off all Solaris tech staff in a classic silent EOL of the product”

#29

Post by Fnoord »

binaryapparatus wrote: post #20
AsyncAwait wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Red Hat creating huge mess throughout linux with systemd for years Care to elaborate on the 'mess' created? I highly doubt you even used it yourself, sounds like something you've heard and are repeating for some cheap karma. The init scripts used before were the real mess, if you ask me. It's getting really tiring to hear these systemd rants with no good reasons to back them up. I guess ranting against systemd is t…

I am 46 years old, with over 25 years of programming and system administration experience. I've been here before internet existed. You better believe I know what I am talking about. I couldn't care less about karma kid.

You couldn't care less about karma? If you're downvoted it is because your post is downright rude, and full with fallacies: argumentum ad verecundiam (stating your irrelevant age and experience, stating you lived before the internet existed), argumentum ad hominem (calling a random person on the internet whom you don't know a kid), non sequitur (none of what you wrote directly supports your claim).

My explanation about the systemd hate is that it isn't for technical reasons; its cultural ones. Specifically, people dislike change. Especially older people don't want to relearn fundaments which have been reliably stable throughout the years. Young people, OTOH, lack that connection and are more open to change provided they agree with the rationale.

Re: “Oracle laid off all Solaris tech staff in a classic silent EOL of the product”

#30

Post by justincormack »

Someone wrote: post #27
johan_larson wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is open-sourcing a codebase for an abandoned product somehow expensive or complicated? Are there legal or accounting issues? If not, it seems like buying a bit of good-will for the price of a bit of paperwork would be a useful investment.

Legal concerns: do we really own this code? If there is code in there that turns out to be copy-pasted from somewhere else, open sourcing makes it more likely that people will find it. That could be expensive (e.g. when some BigCo owns the copyright on code they have been selling for decades) and/or have even more serious consequences (e.g. when there's a GPL-licensed code fragment in there, and they linked it with a…

But it was already open sourced once before, so much of that work was done already.
Post reply on HN