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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”

#181

Post by mmagin »

pkaye wrote: post #170

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…

Ha. The defaults on Sun workstations (at least mid-late 90s) weren't that bad. HPUX seemed to default to making delete the interrupt character, at least in a shell when I telneted into them remotely.

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

#182

Post by samoright »

ci5er wrote: post #73
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.

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

Oracle is lethargic from the perspective of its employees because the company is extraordinarily sluggish and apathetic.

The pace at which Oracle develops software, the flagship Oracle Database for example, is ridiculously slow. The Database team takes about 3 months to 6 months to develop tiny changes (say 10 to 20 lines of code). In other Fortune 500 companies I have worked for, I have seen such changes taking about a few days (5 days max!). I am not kidding! What takes say 3 days to develop in a normal software company may take about 3 months to develop in Oracle. And mind you, Oracle Database is one of the premier departments of Oracle; other departments are even worse!

Oracle is also remarkably apathetic to its employees. The link[1] shared by foo101, i.e. has a few anecdotes that highlights this apathy. In fact, when I read James Gosling's account of Oracle in that link, I thought, "Wow! This is so accurate. Even someone of the name and fame as James Gosling had to face the same lowly problems at Oracles that relatively unknown developers in Oracle face."

Disclaimer: I worked for Oracle for 2 years.

[1]: http://www.eweek.com/development/java-creator-james-gosling-...

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

#184

Post by al452 »

Mordak wrote: post #111
digi_owl wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And looking at the commit logs for NextBSD [0] it is dead now too. [0] https://github.com/NextBSD/NextBSD

True but in fairness NextBSD was only ever a technology demo / proof of concept.

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

#186

Post by riku_iki »

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 just kills software with no market success. All companies do that. If you like solaris, you had an opportunity to make your vote using your wallet.

I am actually surprised they invested into Solaris for so long, considering its long time half dead status on the market.

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

#187

Post by hindsightbias »

tannhaeuser wrote: post #109
DonHopkins wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always thought IBM would be the most fitting company to buy Sun.

IBM is facing the exact same problem selling AIX boxes as Sun/Oracle and HP do selling their Unix hardware and OS, so why would IBM have been a better fit to buy Sun? I think Sun was (mostly) acquired to prevent Java IP being sold to other, more nefarious parties (such as MS or patent trolls). Both Oracle and IBM were (and still are, though to a lesser extent) heavily invested into the Java ecosystem. Sun OS/Solaris…

That Oracle is moving to Linux on Sparc tells you they still think there is an enterprise business that Exadata/x86 couldn't win (after years of destroying Solaris). IBM+Sun would have been most of the E-biz and those customers would have been more comfortable with Oracle as just the DB provider.

Solaris on PPC existed at various times, IBM could have provided a convergence path for the Fortune 500, AIX/Solaris/Linux/Java all on PPC.

It was actually a close thing, but someone else will have to write that story.

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

#188

Post by astrodust »

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.…

Is Oracle the new Computer Associates?

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

#189

Post by astrodust »

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.

Nortel was an unbelievable loss. To this day you still see Nortel phones in every corner of the world. If they hadn't over-extended themselves they'd probably still be on top of that market.

Even more disappointing was that RIM/Blackberry had every opportunity to take that mantle (business/enterprise IP telephony) and didn't even try.

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

#190

Post by xenadu02 »

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: if Oracle acquires your company GET OUT. Do not wait, bail out immediately.

Oracle is expert at slowly bleeding teams while suppressing pay to milk products for all they’re worth. They are developer-hostile (including to employees). It is career death.

If Oracle acquires a partner you depend on, you have 12-24 months to find an alternative before they cut your legs out from under you and steal every last drop of profit from the relationship you have with your customers.

Don’t believe any promises to the contrary. Oracle promised ours would be different. They gave us pay raises to stick through the transition. It was all a ruse. Once we were in the jaws of the machine stack ranking took over, raises and bonuses were crap, and a lot of architecture astronaut garbage was rained down from above. They increased the price of our product by two orders of magnitude which lead to massive revenue gains. They simultaneously shrunk the team and claimed there was no money for bonuses or equipment. Developers have a 5-year laptop replacement policy.

I repeat: get out!

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