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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”

#61

Post by jacquesm »

holydude wrote: post #48
jacquesm wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You need billions and billions of dollars to keep such project alive. Makes you wonder where Linus stores his old socks.

Oh you seriously believe linux is not where it is due to huge sums from intel,samsung,red hat and countless of others ? Please...

> Oh you seriously believe linux is not where it is due to huge sums from intel,samsung,red hat and countless of others ?

With the exception of Red Hat I totally concur that Linux has moved very far because of financial infusions from industry. But at the same time that 'toy operating system' was already quite usable before any of that happened.

As for Red Hat, they exist because of Linux, not the other way around.

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

#62

Post by floatboth »

erikb wrote: post #51
Joeri wrote: post #6

That's a lot of very highly skilled staff which they won't be able to reassemble for another product or project for years. Those people will scatter to the winds now. It's a shame they lacked the imagination to make them do something new. But then Oracle doesn't seem to have the organizational capability to start major new successful product lines anymore. They grow through acquisition.

It may also be that the truly talentented already left a few years ago.

Of course. Everyone who cared about Solaris immediately started a fork called illumos!

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

#63

Post by sacheendra »

pjmlp wrote: post #58
samoright wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sure, not all of them are the same. However those with heavy use of external consulting and off-shoring, seem to come pretty close.

I don't understand the negativity towards using consultants and off-shoring.

Using consultants is a business decision which helps the company hire people for the short term of the project and also offload risk. Not all companies have the capability to handle all kinds of risk. For example, software companies don't specialise in financial models and investing. So they don't take on financial risks by investing in derivatives and other instruments to make profit. Whenever possible, risk outside core competencies is outsourced. This is good for the company as then it can focus on the core business and make money.

Off-shoring is bad in the sense that jobs are lost in the local economy. But, this is again similar to having a factory in China as opposed to San Francisco. It brings in more expertise at a reduced cost. Off-shoring helps make things cheaper in the end. For example, as your insurance company uses off-shore consultants to make their software, it is cheaper directly translating to lower insurance premiums. the same for many other products.

While I understand that software is a different beast to build unlike toys or other products. Once built, the normal theories of economics still apply.

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

#64

Post by johannes1234321 »

hu88 wrote: post #31
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.

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, tradema…

Sun did that a few years back, Oracle only has to reevaluate what was added since they acquired Sun ...

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

#65

Post by mtmail »

binaryapparatus wrote: post #41
enraged_camel wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe you could explain it for us mere mortals.

As AnonymousPlanet said, scope of systemd and number of bad decisions (or good decisions with horrible implementation) is way too big to discuss here. Linux is no longer secure or reliable system it used to be. Engineering results and outcomes are bad from just about any angle you can take. If you belong to the silent but great majority (lol) of users that enjoy and cherish systemd -- just carry on by all means. If a…

> is way too big to discuss here.

Can you point to an article or blog post pointing out the bad decisions?

> If anything there is A LOT of aggression any time somebody says anything 'unwelcome' about systemd.

The downvotes came when you stated your age, "believe I know what I am talking about" instead of listing arguments and calling the parent poster 'kid'.

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

#67

Post by [deleted] »

jacquesm wrote: post #46
kuschku wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> As an application developer and hobby sysadmin, systemd is a godsend over the misconfigured and broken stuff distributions have delivered for years. And that is roughly the size of the problem. If you're an application developer or a hobby sysadmin then probably systemd is good for you, but if you're an experienced sysadmin it spells 'fixed what wasn't broken' and it re-introduces many issues that were already thou…

[deleted]

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

#68

Post by spydum »

jacquesm wrote: post #60
digi_owl wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bingo. Way way too much of Linux these days is by devs for devs, and screw everyone else. Note the rise of "devops" that is basically about getting a straight line from devs to management so devs can sideline ops and their naysaying of the latest shinies devs wnats to sprinkle the projects with. Another thing is that there is less and less interest in maintenance, because maintenance is not fun. The GNU generation i…

There are two jobs that were rolled into the developer role that we will sorely miss in the longer term, the first was 'analyst', the second 'sysadmin/sysop'. Dumbing these down to make it possible to run these highly skilled and specialized jobs as part-time job without relevant training is one of the main reasons the state of software is what it is.

Exactly this. I have seen hundreds of systems built by experienced gray beard Unix admins, which have been steady as rocks, some lasting 15+ years without ever a peep of trouble. however I have seen many "new" boxes built by "devops", which can't survive a single upgrade cycle. If left alone for more than a few weeks, usually eat themselves and cause an outage. On one hand, am a little thankful of the devops box, it will be crashed long before it gets compromised due to neglect.

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

#69

Post by mbesto »

samoright wrote: post #39
pjmlp wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Having worked for and worked with the major licensed software vendors (Oracle, SAP, MS, etc), I echo that Oracle is by far the worst of the bunch.

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

#70

Post by Retric »

sacheendra wrote: post #63
pjmlp wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, not all of them are the same. However those with heavy use of external consulting and off-shoring, seem to come pretty close.

I don't understand the negativity towards using consultants and off-shoring. Using consultants is a business decision which helps the company hire people for the short term of the project and also offload risk. Not all companies have the capability to handle all kinds of risk. For example, software companies don't specialise in financial models and investing. So they don't take on financial risks by investing in deri…

They both reduce institutional knowlage. This tends to be extremely detrimental in the long term.

Outsourcing software is like burning all the design documentation for hardware your having someone else build. Even something as well known as injection molding tends to work vastly better if you have experienced staff as part of the design process. And software is worse than that because the design process is part of development, so outsourcing means you don't even understand the problem space.

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