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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”

#191

Post by JdeBP »

X86BSD wrote: post #172
hedora wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SMF runs circles around systemd. I used it recently, and realized it is what systemd is trying to clone. It was kind of like learning Unix after coming from a DOS background. If FreeBSD switches to systemd, I'll stick with OpenBSD. OpenBSD is as likely to switch as they are to rewrite the kernel in rust and go.

FreeBSD will never, ever adopt systemd. That I am certain of. Even if the license wasn't an issue, and you could easily yank out all the non portable Linux code, and adopt it into BSD, the code quality, and the engineering of it would not meet BSD standards for adoption. TrueOS just started using OpenRC and seem happy with it so far.

The TrueOS people still need to add proper service management and a decent service management toolset.

I suggested to them back in January 2017 that since OpenRC has s6 integration, they might do well to add s6 to that to gain full service management. I never received a reply. I haven't heard that Laurent Bercot was contacted, either.

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13458186

* http://www.mail-archive.com/supervision@list.skarnet.org/msg...

I personally use the nosh system and service managers on FreeBSD and TrueOS, of course. I just wrote up a more detailed account of how I used them on TrueOS to run the PC-BSD desktop login and chooser utility under proper service management, and to improve several parts of that subsystem.

* https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/390089/5132

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

#192

Post by Friedduck »

@xenadu02,

I feel the same way as a client. Everything I've used that they've purchased has turned out for the worse. Be it neglect or price increases the promises always exceed what's actually delivered.

Moreover they're transparent about their desire to lock you in and then press that to their advantage.

I actively avoid few companies but they're at the top of the list.

I came her to reminisce about the beauty of Solaris from a long time ago and your comment struck a nerve.

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

#194

Post by soloracle »

xenadu02 wrote: post #190

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…

I call FUD. Oracle acquired Sun in 2010 - that's seven years, and it wasn't until this past January and August that major project changes were made and large number of staff laid off. "Get out now" seems unnecessarily alarming. Also, this may vary from org to org, but our (sparc/solaris dev) laptop replacement was every three years.

I'll admit that the way they've handled the recent layoffs is atrocious, with most employees finding out via FedEx notification and a pre-recorded concall message. Rumors of this major cut have been circulating for months. I've lost many good friends with 10,20,30+ years in Sun/Oracle. But I think Oracle gave hardware a fair shake.

Full disclosure: I worked in a Solaris dev/sustaining group until this past week.

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

#195

Post by soreasan »

xroche wrote: post #113
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.

> 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.

At this rate Oracle is going to be the next Yahoo.

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

#196

Post by camus2 »

soreasan wrote: post #195
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.

At this rate Oracle is going to be the next Yahoo.

No. Oracle is mainly B2B, and executives love Oracle solutions.

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

#197

Post by VonGuard »

soloracle wrote: post #194
xenadu02 wrote: post #190

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…

I call FUD. Oracle acquired Sun in 2010 - that's seven years, and it wasn't until this past January and August that major project changes were made and large number of staff laid off. "Get out now" seems unnecessarily alarming. Also, this may vary from org to org, but our (sparc/solaris dev) laptop replacement was every three years. I'll admit that the way they've handled the recent layoffs is atrocious, with most em…

Agreed. Oracle does kill products and end teams, but no more so than other large acquireres. Hell, it is NOTHING compared to Yahoo! or HP. HP is the absolute kings of ruining products and teams long term, while Yahoo! has killed more acquired products than any other company I can think of. Oracle has good benefits, takes pretty good care of their employees, but they'er old school so people don't get to work at home and have to drive to Redwood City every day. Not the worst, but not the best either.

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

#198

Post by jklowden »

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 lives in a market protected by high barriers to entry and low customer expectations. Protecting corporate databases from corruption and unauthorized access is crucial to any IT department. Incentive to change the DBMS vendor is nil compared to the expense and risks of converting. And no one, from CTO to DBA, makes any demand to substantially improve the product, such as by rectifying theoretical problems with SQL that have been recognized for decades.

It's no different with SQL Server or DB2. Each vendor has its captured market, with very little power to enlarge its share and commensurately little need to innovate. Customer demands amount to operational window dressing. Why spend money on engineering when customer and vendor are both satisfied?

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

#199

Post by zaphar »

quickben wrote: post #151
AndyMcConachie wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

No incentive beyond personal satisfaction these days. Most people write and jump ship, which is so sad.

Many people don't have the luxury of write and jump ship. The vast majority of my career was not greenfield development. It has almost all been maintaining pre-existing software. Some of which is more than a decade old.

The challenging part of us in the software maintenance job is to balance a need to refactor with a need to add features. It colors your opinion about a lot of things. You start to evaluate methodologies, technologies, frameworks, and even library choices by their impact on long term maintainability.

I frequently find myself at odds with a primarily greenfield developer in tool choice because I'm looking forward into the future and it doesn't look pretty.

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

#200

Post by kuschku »

digi_owl wrote: post #145
kuschku wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 onl…

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/The_Hitchhiker's_Guide_to_the_... >The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair.

You can make all these quotes, and comments, but they don’t help in the real world.

If you want that every child can run linux, that you can run linux on physical Internet of Things devices that are supposed to run for decades without maintenance (because you cannot access them), then you either have to build something so this can work,

or you end up with Windows 10 IoT and Windows 10 Cloud running everything.

No one’s gonna hire a sysadmin so they can manually upgrade every lightbulb and fire alarm on the planet, and so they can upgrade all of the servers running your containers manually.

Do you think Google has sysadmins manually pulling every update for every server, writing every config? Do you think they will just because you eliminate automation?

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