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

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

#261

Post by emmelaich » Sun, Sep 03, 2017, 10:11 PM UTC

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…

> ... why would IBM have been a better fit to buy Sun?

IBM Services do a lot of support work for Solaris around the world.

But yeah, other than that it doesn't make a lot of sense.

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

#262

Post by kingmanaz » Sun, Sep 03, 2017, 10:12 PM UTC

I was present for training at Informix headquarters in Menlo Park when it was announced that IBM purchased the company (I believe around 1999 and 2000). I can still recall the deathly pallor of the trainer as well as the shocked silence of the employees. A couple months later I barely located the new Informix webpage on IBM.com; it advertised for DB2.

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

#263

Post by emmelaich » Sun, Sep 03, 2017, 10:15 PM UTC

rbanffy wrote: post #253

hindsightbias wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

What accelerated it even further was when Linux went 64 bit and hardware improved to the point where it was a suitable replacement for big iron Solaris (the SunFire 6900 for example). That was around 2005 from memory.

And the 6900's features with regard to HA in the field fell well short of advertised.

Now you can get a Linux box with 4Tb of RAM so no-one should buy Solaris over Linux.

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

#264

Post by nailer » Sun, Sep 03, 2017, 10:16 PM UTC

rbanffy wrote: post #246

boubiyeah wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Never understood why they loved it. Is it just so they can say "not my fault, our project is only using big name frameworks, DBs, etc so I did all I could?" Or is it because they don't even begin to understand what's going on in the tech scene and just buy what appears to be the most shiny, expensive solutions?

> Never understood why they loved it. Expensive parties, gifts etc

I've had an enterprise vendor offer to drop money into my personal account to make sales. Not naming them, but the sad thing is they actually did have the best product in their space by a long shot. The ones who sucked were probably even better at bribes.

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

#265

Post by 0x4a42 » Sun, Sep 03, 2017, 10:22 PM UTC

pjmlp wrote: post #224

bradleyjg wrote: post #206

I think that just leaves AIX and HP-UX of the old commercial unicies.

There is still macOS as NeXTSTEP derivative.

Mac OS X wasn't there at this time - the classic Mac OS wasn't an Unix like/derivative during the nineties.

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

#266

Post by TazeTSchnitzel » Sun, Sep 03, 2017, 10:22 PM UTC

kim0 wrote: post #2

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

Oracle silently closed-sourced Solaris 7 months after acquiring it, I wouldn't hold my breath.

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

#267

Post by 0x4a42 » Sun, Sep 03, 2017, 10:25 PM UTC

sunstone wrote: post #193

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

MySQL

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

#268

Post by ausjke » Sun, Sep 03, 2017, 10:36 PM UTC

All Ultrasparc silicon engineers were already laid off, this is seldom a big news per se.

I just wish google bought Sun for its Java and mysql, personally I do not want to have anything to do with Oracle as much as tech goes.

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

#269

Post by mwcampbell » Sun, Sep 03, 2017, 10:37 PM UTC

pjmlp wrote: post #219

SwellJoe wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 happe…

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

POSIX support is in the API, not the syscalls. musl libc places great emphasis on POSIX conformance. So if you ran a musl-based distro atop WSL, that should give you what you want, or at least something closer.

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

#270

Post by ternaryoperator » Sun, Sep 03, 2017, 10:38 PM UTC

boubiyeah wrote: post #244

camus2 wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Never understood why they loved it. Is it just so they can say "not my fault, our project is only using big name frameworks, DBs, etc so I did all I could?" Or is it because they don't even begin to understand what's going on in the tech scene and just buy what appears to be the most shiny, expensive solutions?

Support is one reason. If your database goes down, they'll send a team of engineers to figure out what's wrong. If they have to, they'll bring in hardware to duplicate your systems, and have engineers working on it 7x24 until they find out what's wrong. Not many vendors can provide that level of service, and if your business requires it, you're willing to pay for it.