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

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

#31
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.

I was at Intel once upon a time when they open sourced some telecom stuff they wanted to get out off. The issues were crazy because of the size of the code base that had accumulated from multiple acquisitions spanning many different divisions in different countries over many years. We couldn't even find people who could tell us what large chunks of the code did or whether they contained anything under patent, trademark etc. It's can be quite expensive and the only reason we did it was there were customers who were willing to pay for the effort.

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

#32
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine if Solaris could be used as a kernel for a mobile OS...

Sun used to sell Toshiba laptops with Solaris x86 pre-installed.

And Sparc laptops too

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

#34
post #13
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.

I guess many that are against it, would rather have a pure UNIX V installation, eventually running twm.

I don't. I just want the core components of Linux to be 1.) done by people who have enough experience to know the perils of overengineering and have done some serious software maintenance and debugging themselves 2.) done by project leads who don't think that changes that break things in a major way can be buried somewhere down in the changelogs 3.) done by people who don't react in a jaded way to every piece of criticism, regardless of the tone.

I don't think Linux would have gotten this far if its core wouldn't be influenced by the design principles of Unix and the kernel project wouldn't be run by a person who takes care regarding incompatible changes. Look at ReactOS or Wine. I'm worried that systemd might prove to be a major headache in the future.

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

#36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think what he is alluding to are basically two things: experience with software design (how to avoid overengineering to make maintenance and debugging easier) and experience wrt. dealing with dependent projects. The systemd team's track record on both has been quite abysmal.

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

#37
post #9

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.

> opponents are vocal

> bunch of us are silently enjoying

Sorry to have to address this. It very much looks like underhand systemd forum/post control I have seen on a lot of other places. I wouldn't bother to respond but I lived in a former communist country and formulations like this kind of make me twitch.

So number of opponents is very minor but they make lots of noise. While the 'normal' people, those who really enjoy dictate are great majority, alas, not very vocal. This is communist lingo bro.

I am not saying you have anything to do with systemd directly, but this kind of crowd control and logic can be traced all over the internet wherever anybody questions systemd sanity.

Oh my karma points! I must admit I care more about FOSS and Linux health than what I care about my points. Things have to be said.

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

#38

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.

> I've been here before internet existed. You better believe I know what I am talking about.

So all you have is using your age as an appeal to authority? Pretty sad. All that's telling me is that you're used to doing things a certain way and are now upset that your knowledge is being uprooted and you need to learn something new. Otherwise you'll use facts instead of insults to push your argument.

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

#39
post #10
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…

Not defending Oracle here, however I have learned working all these years in the context of Fortune 500 company cultures, that they are not alone. The way Oracle as company behaves, is quite common in that universe. I will miss having Solaris around.

I have worked in Oracle for 2 years and I have worked at other Fortune 500 companies. Oracle, by far, is the most soulless and lethargic company among all of them.

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

#40

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.

LOL I'm older and have 35 years of experience in the technology.

Doesn't mean for one hot second I think I can just puff my chest up about a topic and blow people off when they ask a perfectly good question.

For me the jury is still out on systemd. My biggest concern is it seems to be slowly taking over everything and thus violating the core unix philosophy of "do one thing really well". It feels like systemd was started to "improve startup times" for desktop users so they'd be happy. Meanwhile servers were sort of forgotten about and many of the complexities added by systemd make getting things done harder for day-to-day system admins. I've made some unit's myself and I like the many options I have but honestly it's not a daily job. Writing three lines of bash in /etc/init.d was way quicker and easier to rationalize about in the heat of "getting shit done".

All this said I have been using systemd on my machines for a while now, at first I would back it out the second I created a new install image but now I'm trying hard to learn it and understand.

Again... the Jury is still out in my mind.

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