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

131–140 of 402 posts

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

#131

Post by jokr004 »

lokedhs wrote: post #117
unkown-unknowns wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ZFS lives on in OpenZFS, which is where FreeBSD, Linux and other platform developers and some companies exchange their modifications of ZFS. Solaris lives on in illumos and forks of it.

Illumos is a great project and doesn't get nearly as much attention as it should. I'm also glad that ZFS has managed to find its way to other operating systems. I've been a huge fan of it ever since it first arrived in Solaris.

I discovered the Illumos project about a year ago and was extatic to see that Open Solaris had come back to life. I've been using OpenIndiana as my daily driver at work for a while now.

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

#132

Post by jjtheblunt »

lokedhs wrote: post #81

I'm very saddened by what happens with what is left of Sun. I used to work at Sun, and the Solaris codebase is the most amazing C code I've ever worked with. I'm probably going to be accused of bias, but the Linux code is really messy compared to Solaris. Sun was already on the way down by the time I left many years ago, but what had happened since Oracle bought them has been nothing but depressing.

agreed totally (worked at Sun years ago, Solaris internals : amazing engineering with minimal nonsense )

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

#133

Post by Fnoord »

kator wrote: post #40
binaryapparatus wrote: post #20

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.

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 sta…

Glad to read there's people with such long experience who still have an open mind and are willing to unlearn and relearn. It isn't easy as you age to keep that spirit alive.

The unix core philosophy of "do one thing really well" is such a cliche though. "Do one thing really well", yet using a monolithic kernel (Linux, Solaris, *BSD). Microkernels like OpenVMS and GNU Hurd allow one to restart (including hot patching) a part of the kernel. The same is true for running something like Qubes. Apart from the kernel debate there's tons of monolithic software. Software statically linked on a commercial UNIX? You bet. Plus you use a full-blown DE, a web browser, Emacs. Vi? Sure, Vi. Yet people use Vim with all kind of plugins.

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

#134

Post by sacheendra »

Retric wrote: post #70
sacheendra wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 de…

I agree with your point. Its just that not all consulting or outsourcing is bad.

A decade ago, at least in my experience, Chinese products were synonymous with bad quality and were not considered reliable. Nowadays, while those kinds of products do exist there also exist very good products designed and made in China (eg: DJI, OnePlus, etc.).

I reckon its still early days for software and going forward, we will learn how to build higher quality standard stuff and even high quality novel products. Generating this stigma against against consulting and off-shoring before we have had time to properly analyse the cost-benefit tradeoff doesn't help anyone.

They might be and are probably bad in many cases, and cases where they did not work should be publicised and studied. But making broad statements and correlating them with bad work environment is not helpful.

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

#135

Post by AndyMcConachie »

quickben wrote: post #128
lokedhs wrote: post #81

I'm very saddened by what happens with what is left of Sun. I used to work at Sun, and the Solaris codebase is the most amazing C code I've ever worked with. I'm probably going to be accused of bias, but the Linux code is really messy compared to Solaris. Sun was already on the way down by the time I left many years ago, but what had happened since Oracle bought them has been nothing but depressing.

Nature of things unfortunately. I did my internship at Nortel. A decade later and having worked from small shops to IBM and beyond, nothing comes close to the quality of people/code that I saw at Nortel. From another perspective: It is up to you to carry the torch now.

Software gets shittier because speed of development and time to market continues to outweigh any reason for quality. Code written 20-30 years ago almost always looks cleaner to me than the code I'm working on today :(

What is the incentive for quality?

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

#136

Post by xroche »

shadowtree wrote: post #119
xroche wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but what had happened since Oracle bought them has been nothing but depressing Oracle is nothing but a cancer. Everything they touch turn into goo. This is not the first company to be killed by Oracle acquisition. And not the last. And don't let me started on the ridiculous range-check trial: this sums up the disgusting state this company has fallen into.

ORA is the elephant's graveyard of software. Once something gets bought by them, you know it is done. Slowly, but surely. They perform a function akin to the maggots that destroy cadavers in nature. Part of the overall ecosystem. ORA stopped being a tech co a while ago, now it is a finance play. Use cash to buy a business for its locked in customers, gut it to squeeze max money out of it until last customer is gone.…

> ORA stopped being a tech co a while ago, now it is a finance play. Use cash to buy a business for its locked in customers, gut it to squeeze max money out of it until last customer is gone. Rinse, repeat.

Yup. Precisely what happened to Stellent, a company that used to produce great document filters. After ORA buyout, employees fled like there was a plague epidemic and prices spiked at such a level that you'd either cut your veins or consider migrating to another technology.

> ORA is the elephant's graveyard of software.

Well, except that some of the elephants were still alive and perfectly fine, and ora worms started eating them before they were dead.

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

#137

Post by Keyframe »

shagie wrote: post #127
Keyframe wrote: post #86

SGI, Sun, DEC... I really miss those days a lot. Sure, they were daylight robbery (SGI especially so), but computing was far more heterogeneous.

Ahh yes... the days of the Software Wars. http://mshiltonj.com/software-wars/ (last update 2003) - it might be interesting to reimagine that in today's world. From the 2006 map, Oracle's assimilation of the lion's share of the "south" (MySQL, Sun, Java) and the battle between Apple and Google in the "north west". That said, consider the flip side of the heterogeneous aspect. You were unlikely to be able to run softwa…

Good points and I'm not arguing them. Things are now extremely more convenient then they were. What's missing is differences in approach to solving, well, everything. Everything was different from system to system (esp. mid 80's to mid 90's). People were still figuring out what to settle on. From a perspective of someone who likes to tinker with stuff, it was a blast. From a business and maybe usability perspective - it was a nightmare.

Now, when most stuff is settled-upon, it's like cars. There are differences, but not really. Turn lights to your left, wipers to your right, wheel turns left and right, there's a manual stick or automatic, pedals... it's all there, where you expect them to be. And that's good! Times were a bit more pioneering back then, naturally.

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

#138

Post by kstrauser »

AndyMcConachie wrote: post #135
quickben wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nature of things unfortunately. I did my internship at Nortel. A decade later and having worked from small shops to IBM and beyond, nothing comes close to the quality of people/code that I saw at Nortel. From another perspective: It is up to you to carry the torch now.

Software gets shittier because speed of development and time to market continues to outweigh any reason for quality. Code written 20-30 years ago almost always looks cleaner to me than the code I'm working on today :( What is the incentive for quality?

Be careful of the large selection bias there: you're looking at the 20-30 year old code good enough not to have been replaced 18-28 years ago.

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

#140

Post by paulddraper »

specialist wrote: post #102
Retric wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 de…

Ya. If I wouldn't pay the consultants in the office across the street to work on my core IT (outsourcing), why would I pay someone separated by oceans, timezones, language, culture... (offshoring)? While working in healthcare, our corporate overlords repeatedly rammed the "blended shore" model down our throats. Which never worked. (Got to know some nice people, though. So there's that.) The easiest part of our job wa…

Exactly. It's a good short-term, bad long-term strategy.

Just like any other short-term strategy, could be appropriate sometimes, but very rarely is.

Post reply on HN