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

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251–260 of 402 posts

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

#251
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.…

CenturyLink does this too - they're a tech holding company who buys and sells companies (Level3, Tier3, Savvis, Cyxtera, Electricbox, etc) in order to reap M&A tax benefits while squeezing the engineers.

Of course, these businesses don't make enough money to cover the massive shareholder draw, so it's all a stage play to convince Wells Fargo to loan them enough to pay those dividends.

It's an untenable and irrational position in the long run, but markets can remain irrational longer than individuals can remain solvent. And many businesses are in this same situation, needing bank loans to pay never-reducing dividends.

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

#252
Will some illumos related projects be interested in those people?

And on related note, I suppose Oracle won't open their diverged Solaris even if they plan to shut it down? In the past, Sun also planned to open their Sun studio and C/C++ compiler. That never happened because of Oracle.

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

#253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

SPARC died the moment every developer had a good enough x86 desktop running a Unix flavor (and Sun decided it'd be happy not to build desktops anymore). At that point, we cease to imagine deploying our stuff in SPARC. We test on x86 and make it run well on x86 before it gets compiled for SPARC.

At that point, unless the SPARC hardware has some definitive cost/performance advantage, we'll buy x86. SPARC is for legacy.

Same applies to POWER, BTW. How many new apps have you seen in the past 10 years that were designed for POWER?

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

#254
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

Roch Bourbonnais managed to write a few detailed technical blog postings about the evolution of closed-source ZFS in the past couple of years. If you read those it will be clear that Oracle's version of ZFS continued to improve after Oracle ceased developing it in the open. Among the more interesting topics Roch wrote about were some enormous changes to arc and l2arc, the zil, encryption, spa_sync, sequential scrub &…

Won't it actually pose some problem in regards to clean room implementation and etc.? Oracle are known to be nasty.

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

#255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe, but the main lament is that some great IP is lost (ZFS, etc.) If Google had bought them for the IP, then at least that IP would live on, which is what everyone really wants.

ZFS isn't lost. ZFS on Illumos (Smartos) and FreeBSD is alive and well.

Sure but who owns the rights to it? That's what we mean by lost. It's locked up in a way to make it less usable.

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

#256
post #2

@Oracle, please do the right thing and open-source Solaris. At least that's a proper way to die!

Oracle won't do it because they are Oracle. They actually had zero valid reasons to close OpenSolaris to begin with, so I suspect they'll care even less about their dead project.

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

#257

I can recall a list of things Oracle killed/lost since it bought Sun, but is there anything left of it at this point?

Java and the JDK are the main ex-Sun products that're still being actively developed, I think.

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

#258
post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can easily relate to this, started with Xenix, moved into DG-UX at university, we moved into GNU/Linux after that server eventually died, so it was mostly used of OS related classes. At work GNU/Linux was just an internal server, all real work was being done in Solaris, HP-UX and Aix servers. So fast forward to modern times and even Microsoft uses Linux kernel syscalls on their new POSIX personality subsystem, inst…

> instead of actually supporting POSIX What do you mean? Using Linux kernel syscalls is just one of many ways to "actually support POSIX".

Syscalls are not POSIX APIs.

Do you know that by default GNU tools don't respect all POSIX expected behaviours and it needs to be explictly enabled?

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

#259
post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

No, Oracle at the time was big on the "fullstack" play, and thought Sun hardware could provide the last piece of the puzzle: selling absolutely everything to a business, from metal to apps and services, in one neat box. Java would have been safe with IBM too, that wasn't much of a worry - although I'm sure Ellison hoped they could leverage it against competitors invested in it, like they tried to do with Google. The…

Exactly. Oracle+Sun allowed 'vertically integrated' solutions with their Engineered Systems. You could literally buy your entire rack, software, storage, infiniband, even the network portion (Oracle has copper ethernet switches believe it or not) straight from them. It would be under one contract for support etc.

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

#260
post #252

Will some illumos related projects be interested in those people? And on related note, I suppose Oracle won't open their diverged Solaris even if they plan to shut it down? In the past, Sun also planned to open their Sun studio and C/C++ compiler. That never happened because of Oracle.

Yes, absolutely. Based on the number of conversations I have had in the last 72 hours, I can assure you that the illumos community will be gaining some terrific talent over the coming weeks and months!
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