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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”

#201

Post by kuschku »

binaryapparatus wrote: post #115
merb wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You probably know about all vulnerabilities introduced by systemd? You probably know about all vulnerabilities introduced by openrc or sysvinit? Right you can't since every script itself could have a vulnerability

No need since I can choose what I start, in what order, and I can check every simple script myself. They were short and doing one thing well. Good luck doing that with 300+K lines of code with systemd. Arguments like this really don't help systemd and show either ignorance or worse.

I’ve got 1400 init scripts my systems, each over 800 lines long, before I switched to systemd

And in a language without linters or typecheckers.

It’s literally easier to read the entire systemd code than trying to debug the interactions between these init scripts, all slightly buggy, interacting in slightly unexpected ways, and working mostly, although they never should.

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

#202

Post by dboreham »

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 don't know. I left a company in 1992 that I thought at the time was imminently doomed. They had been acquired and layoffs were rolling. However, the location didn't actually close until last year. 24 years later. Not acquired by Oracle I should say. Oracle at the time was this odd thing that somehow implanted consultants into some of our business analysts' offices with better Sun workstations than we had for developing the product.

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

#203

Post by protomyth »

peoplewindow wrote: post #90
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.

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

Red Hat gets a nice check from us once a year. It isn't free by any means.

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

#204

Post by JohnTHaller »

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…

It took less than a year from Oracle acquiring Sun for OpenOffice to die. It then marched on as a zombie for years.

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

#205

Post by justin66 »

binarycrusader wrote: post #171
gaius wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really. Sun would have survived and thrived if it had thrown its weight behind Solaris x86. But they were too worried about cannibalising SPARC and when commodity kit started to beat them on price/performance they had nowhere to go. I remember when we ripped out our 3 6800s and replaced them with 9 Dells, for way more power at a fraction of the price. Would have loved to recompile on Solaris, but the hardware sav…

Not really. Sun would have survived and thrived if it had thrown its weight behind Solaris x86. Except they did; anyone working in Solaris engineering at that time or even now could tell you that x86 was just as important as SPARC. From a technological perspective, they are completely equivalent. For example, the ZFS Storage Appliance is x86-based, not SPARC-based.

From the end user point of view, Sun recommitted (and later lessened their commitment) to Solaris x86 support so many times over the years that it's hard to imagine what would convince a user that they were really "throwing their weight behind it." We really mean it this time... wait, where are you going???

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

#207

Post by Shaanie »

kstrauser wrote: post #138
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?

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.

Survivorship bias, to be precise.

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

#208

Post by achamayou »

JohnTHaller wrote: post #204
soloracle wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It took less than a year from Oracle acquiring Sun for OpenOffice to die. It then marched on as a zombie for years.

And the MySQL and Hudson debacles, respectively before and shortly after the acquisition closed...

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

#210

Post by xenadu02 »

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…

I was part of the Hyperion acquisition. A relative of mine was dependent on Micros. I am speaking from experience, at least on the software side.

I’m telling people forcefully because Oracle has been doing the acquisition game for a very long time; they’ve figured out how to string people along to get the maximum value out of the acquisition. I personally lost out on thousands in pay by sticking around for too long.

Oracle as a company does not value engineers. A software engineer is scum compared to sales. If you want to be an engineer and make the real money (and get any respect) work in Sales Engineering. You’ll be away from home for 40 weeks a year but you get decent hardware and a small commission from the deals.

For those with career ambitions or self respect my original advice applies: get out.

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