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

161–170 of 402 posts

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

#161

Post by Retric »

sacheendra wrote: post #134
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…

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…

I think there is plenty of data to start drawing conclusions.

In the short term it can often work really well. Somewhat more rarely it can also work long term.

The trick IMO is to be hands on. Apple's approach to manufacturing is to be aware of what's going on even if they are not actually doing it.

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

#162

Post by acdha »

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…

> if you're an experienced sysadmin it spells 'fixed what wasn't broken' and it re-introduces many issues that were already thought about, taken care of and laid to rest

As an experienced sysadmin that's a really sweeping claim to toss out without details or supporting evidence — the latter being especially important given the amount of hyperbole bandied about.

The next largest SysV replacement was Upstart, which solved many problems but had curious oversights (e.g. restart with a delay or backoff, needing many releases before adding stdout/ stderr logging or launching as a user other than root), and SMF/launchd which weren't compelling enough to overcome their respective platforms’ drawbacks. Yes, you can install alternate init systems or run things under something like supervisord but supporting that was quite tedious compared to a solid standard init.

As a software developer, being able to target one init system which has all of the features I need and no real drawbacks is similarly a very nice change from the past needing to support variants for each major Linux distribution while wishing they'd hit feature-parity with Windows NT 3.1 (1993!).

The fact that every major Linux distribution has adopted systemd suggests that whatever reintroduced issues aren't gross exaggerations aren't as important as claimed; similarly, the features commonly dismissed as unnecessary inevitably turn out to be useful to part of the larger Linux community even if a particular detractor doesn't share those needs.

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

#163

Post by SwellJoe »

bachmeier wrote: post #143
peoplewindow wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would it have been different if any other company had bought Sun? Solaris was competing against free, without much to justify the large added cost. It's been a very long time since I heard of anyone buying new Solaris installations.

> Solaris was competing against free Is that true? Don't companies interested in Solaris pay for their OS? Weren't they competing against companies like Red Hat?

Decisions like that trickle up from what developers and IT guys want. There was a generation that was raised on Solaris, and those folks built the first generation web on Solaris-on-SPARC with Oracle databases. But, then the next generation came along, and they hadn't learned UNIX in college on Solaris boxes. They'd learned on Linux in their parent's basement.

I came up during that middle era when the shift was happening. I was an early adopter of Linux, but all of the real training I got (my employer at the time paid for it) was Solaris-based. But, even with the training and access to Solaris, I prefered Linux. I just had more comfort with it because it was my daily driver. When people I worked for were making decisions about OS, the recommendation they nearly always got from me was "Linux". And, I believe that played out millions of times to get us to the world we're in today.

So, yeah, Solaris was competing with free, but not always at the business level...the part that mattered was "how many people with influence are using this OS as their daily driver?" And, Linux was/is a phenomenon. People love Linux. People loved Solaris, too, but it was a much lower number due to lack of access...early days of Linux, you couldn't even get Solaris without a SPARC box to run it on. Later, they made x86 Solaris free, but it was too little too late, and by that time Linux was better than Solaris on a number of extremely important metrics (package management and package selection, for example, but also in terms of just plain fun).

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

#164

Post by binaryapparatus »

hedora wrote: post #149
chx wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> MariaDB is forked at the last moment. What is this about?

It should read "MariaDB forked from Oracle MySQL at the last moment". (And I think Oracle MySQL is still alive/supported)

You are right, sorry, non-native English speaker here. While most of the time I get it right sometimes I don't. That's what I wanted to say.

Supported yes. Having history of Oracle handling of projects, Solaris being last example, I am very glad that we have active MariaDB.

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

#165

Post by whipoodle »

znpy wrote: post #156

Just FOUR DAYS AGO, someone posted: >>... most of the recent innovations in Solaris's core technologies (DTrace, ZFS, Zones, etc) have all happened in illumos. > As a core Solaris dev at Oracle, I can tell you that's not true. I just can't prove it to you. :-( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15125355

Yeah, but it wasn't clear what that is supposed to imply.

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

#166

Post by digi_owl »

hedora wrote: post #159
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…

This is the CADT development model, and has been working (sort of) for at least a decade: https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html

Yep, "working"...

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

#167

Post by jacquesm »

acdha wrote: post #162
jacquesm wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> if you're an experienced sysadmin it spells 'fixed what wasn't broken' and it re-introduces many issues that were already thought about, taken care of and laid to rest As an experienced sysadmin that's a really sweeping claim to toss out without details or supporting evidence — the latter being especially important given the amount of hyperbole bandied about. The next largest SysV replacement was Upstart, which sol…

> As an experienced sysadmin

> As a software developer

So which will it be?

No true Scotsman fallacy creeping in here but it seems to me that anybody that has time enough to be a developer likely isn't a full time sysadmin. Now of course there are some miracle workers out there but I've met enough syadmins to know I'm not one of them even though I can probably hold my own on the UNIX command line and manage to get through a working day without having a feeling I've wasted my time.

> The fact that every major Linux distribution has adopted systemd suggests that whatever reintroduced issues aren't gross exaggerations aren't as important as claimed

It might simply mean that when RedHat moves the crowd follows because it is impossible to sustain the parallel development of two init systems.

And I'm all for that, I'd rather have one system than yet another fragmentation but it feels as if in this particular case that decision was not arrived at in a way that takes into account all the criticisms leveled against the 'upstart' new init system. (Pun intended.)

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

#168

Post by acdha »

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…

One other big concern is the incentive structure. A contractor will do whatever their contract incentivizes, and any as complex as software has plenty of areas where that can be gamed or will encourage bad outcomes. Charging for defects encourages litigating each bug; not charging encourages skimping on QA, etc.

Not having in-house expertise has the really big problem you mentioned because the only way to avoid these problems is if you have experienced oversight and that's almost inevitably the first “expensive” staff cut.

Off-shoring takes all of those problems and amplifies them with a big communications latency hit. I've never seen that go well except when an entire product can be handed over, including the management.

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

#169

Post by whipoodle »

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.

When I was in undergrad it used to drive me nuts when I sat down at a terminal and the switches to `ls` or `ps` didn't work how I expected, and then I had to look them up. Things didn't seem appreciably different in a way that was interesting or useful, just different for the sake of difference.

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

#170

Post by pkaye »

I remember my college days having to use various Sun/Unix machines and the delete key was invariably misconfigured particularly with vi or some other editor. I had to figure it out myself how to fix this. I thought it was part of some hazing ritual until I saw the same shit on a machine at my new job. Thankfully with the advent of free software distributions, these little details things started working out of the box.
Post reply on HN