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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”

#71
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…

But that’s exactly the issue, isn’t it?

We need a system that people can install at home, and that never needs someone to configure or maintain it.

We need a system that people can throw on a VPS, and that needs no maintenance or configuration.

We need a system that a company can deploy over clusters of tenthousands of systems, and just works.

If you need a human to manually configure this stuff, it’s broken. The only situation where systemd isn’t useful is when you’re a small company, but large enough to be able to afford an ops guy for every issue there is. Generally, if you need ops to configure the base OS, you’re doing stuff wrong.

This whole point about devops and system is about automating sysadmins away, and this is a very necessary and worthy step.

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

#72
post #24
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'm using FreeBSD for servers and thankfully Gentoo remains on OpenRC. If they switch I'll move my home computers to FreeBSD too.

Except FreeBSD is considering moving to something like launchd or systemd itself, because honestly a SMF isn't a bad idea compared to init scripts, which are rather bare bones.

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

#73
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.

Lethargic? How so? How did they become so - because they live off of the support portion of the Enterprise Oracle licenses?

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

#74
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.

> 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…

Had a hard time not to downvote this post. Yes, it is. But just use systemd and you'll see that it's actually quite good.

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

#75
post #49
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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." It would be great to see in-depth experience reports for systemd, good and bad. The overwhelming majority of anti-systemd commentary has just been noise for so long, and as somebody who i…

The way I read systemd news, it's not worth analyzing it because Poettering will say 'won't fix' or 'working as intended'.

This query returns 701 fixed bugs:

https://bugs.freedesktop.org/buglist.cgi?bug_status=RESOLVED...

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

#76
post #55
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

How was that not already a liability?

From (my) GP:

> some telecom stuff they wanted to get out off.

I'm guessing that it might well have been?

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

#77
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Except FreeBSD is considering moving to something like launchd or systemd itself, because honestly a SMF isn't a bad idea compared to init scripts, which are rather bare bones.

No they are not. The former head of Launchd development at Apple was pushing to have FreeBSD adopt Launchd, but got rebuffed. So instead he has forked FreeBSD into NextBSD.

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

#78
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Had a hard time not to downvote this post. Yes, it is. But just use systemd and you'll see that it's actually quite good.

I have been using systemd on Arch since (I think) 2012. As soon as it was available anyway. Is that enough of systemd experience? No, it is sadly not quite good.

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

#79
post #2

@Oracle, please do the right thing and open-source Solaris. At least that's a proper way to die!

Having tried various Illumos-based operating systems, I could care less if they reopened Solaris with one exception: ZFS. I would like to see them alter the licensing terms of it so that it could be properly integrated into Linux.

I believe they should consider this because Btrfs, which Oracle itself started, it going nowhere fast; and because Oracle customers who run Linux will benefit as well.

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

#80
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.

All we need is the trademark for Solaris, so that illumos can use its historical name. This should be much easier.
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