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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”

#301

Post by cat199 »

oscargrouch wrote: post #277
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.

> 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. Its not bias. Im a (mostly) C/C++ dev, and very curious about some open source implementations, and the Solaris C source code is the most beautiful complex C codebase i've know. Linux is what it is now, because of the amaz…

BSD guy here - My heirarchy would be more

better bsd's > not as clean bsds > solaris > linux

with not as clean and solaris being on roughly the same footing- much like SMF requiring XML, solaris code, while very clean, seems very overengineered and not as elegant to me.

that said, i really haven't hacked enough kernel code to deserve to be commenting, so yeah..

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

#302

Post by walterbell »

tw04 wrote: post #108
Crontab wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having tried various Illumos-based operating systems, I could care less if they reopened Solaris with one exception: ZFS. I would like to see them alter the licensing terms of it so that it could be properly integrated into Linux. I believe they should consider this because Btrfs, which Oracle itself started, it going nowhere fast; and because Oracle customers who run Linux will benefit as well.

It's entirely and likely possible that part of their settlement with NetApp included NOT releasing it under GPL. https://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/09/09/oracle_netapp_zfs_d...

How is NetApp doing these days?

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

#303

Post by samoright »

jklowden wrote: post #198
ci5er wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Sorry that is not how the database market works.

> Oracle lives in a market protected by high barriers to entry and low customer expectations.

This is false. Oracle has a very tough competitor called Microsoft SQL Server. In fact, Oracle tries to catch up with many existing Microsoft SQL Server feature with its every release. Like it or not, the NoSQL database servers like MongoDB, ElasticSearch, etc. are also competitors of Oracle. That is why Oracle was forced to introduce supporting for storing, indexing and querying JSON in their database. This was a completely new feature that required Oracle to develop new querying syntax, new querying mechanisms and new constraint validation syntax. There are many such examples where Oracle is forced to improve due to competition.

> 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.

This is true. But then everyone from CTO to DBA make a lot of demand in substantially improving the product in other awys, such as providing new features regarding scalability, robustness, security and auditing. This is why Oracle Database has seen a lot of enhancements in multitenancy in the last few versions.

> Why spend money on engineering when customer and vendor are both satisfied?

Oracle does spend a lot of money on engineering. Why? Because it has a lot of development to do in their database to remain competitive. If anyone thinks that the field of RDBMS is mostly a stagnant field and no new development happens in this area, then that is a gross misunderstanding of this market. Database market is still very competitve especially when Microsoft SQL server leads the game with modern features and as open source databases and NoSQL databases are eating away the market share.

See the following two URLs for example to see how Oracle has been adding new features in the last two releases:

* https://docs.oracle.com/database/121/NEWFT/chapter12102.htm

* https://docs.oracle.com/database/122/NEWFT/new-features.htm

While all this looks good on release notes, it is only someone like me, who has had the misfortune of being an Oracle developer, that can vouch that the development process and the development pace within Oracle is hopelessly archaic and painfully slow. Oracle still follows the waterfall model of development for example. There are probably hundreds of reasons and contributing factors to this. A few of those hundreds off the top of my head.

* Management that does not care about absolutely anything apart from their own promotion.

* A culture that rewards talking out loud rather than actual work.

* Top-down heavy handed management that provides zero autonomy to engineers, thus no motivation in engineers to innovate and improve engineering practices.

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

#304

Post by SkyMarshal »

cat199 wrote: post #294
riku_iki wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sure, if you ignore the massive effort that was being invested in revamping Solaris to be more FOSS friendly and engage with the community prior to oracle's sun takeover.. I suspect if the takeover hadn't happened, the FOSS systems landscape would look a whole lot different. Like what, I don't know, but definitely different.

Sun really needed to FOSS license Solaris before Linux hit critical mass. That would have been amazing. Linux is pretty good for what it is, but imagine if it had been Solaris that won instead of Linux, and thus running on most of the servers of the world and potentially iOS and Android as well. It might have even made some desktop inroads, given it would have launched out of the FOSS gate with a more developed desktop than Linux at the time. Such a huge missed opportunity.

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

#305

Post by bigiain »

disordinary wrote: post #300
bigiain wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because Oracle do not sell to the sort of people who read Hackernews, they sell to people who read Financial Review and CIO Monthly or whatever. Same as SalesForce, Adobe, and a whole bunch of other "enterprise" software businesses that most dev's ignore or write off as pointless. I worked at a place where I saw two renewals for AdobeCQ licenses paid while I worked there at ~$600k/year, all the time we were using Alf…

Probably, although I work for a government department that uses Oracle extensively but no new projects are on the platform, eventually everything will be migrated off it (mostly to the SQL Server hosted on Azure).

And let me guess - the project timelines for "eventually everything will be migrated off it" run easily into seven figures of Oracle invoices? (And realistically the delays in those migration projects will mean double that gets paid to Oracle before they're completely out of your billing system?)

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

#306

Post by disordinary »

bigiain wrote: post #305
disordinary wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably, although I work for a government department that uses Oracle extensively but no new projects are on the platform, eventually everything will be migrated off it (mostly to the SQL Server hosted on Azure).

And let me guess - the project timelines for "eventually everything will be migrated off it" run easily into seven figures of Oracle invoices? (And realistically the delays in those migration projects will mean double that gets paid to Oracle before they're completely out of your billing system?)

I don't think there's any real timeline to get rid of Oracle just that new projects won't be using it as a DB and eventually it will no longer be in use.

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

#308

Post by hota_mazi »

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

That's pretty stupid advice since you're most likely vesting some very profitable stock options.

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

#309

Post by cyphar »

jedberg wrote: post #255
nosequel wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The original ZFS engineers now work on OpenZFS, and have for almost a decade. While the base is "owned" by Oracle, most of the innovation in ZFS (and other Solaris technologies) have been done in illumos and are owned by their respective authors. While I feel empathy for the engineers who lost their jobs, modern Solaris innovation hasn't been funded by Oracle since 2010 and the OpenSolaris debacle.

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

#310

Post by riku_iki »

cat199 wrote: post #294
riku_iki wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sure, if you ignore the massive effort that was being invested in revamping Solaris to be more FOSS friendly and engage with the community prior to oracle's sun takeover.. I suspect if the takeover hadn't happened, the FOSS systems landscape would look a whole lot different. Like what, I don't know, but definitely different.

> I suspect if the takeover hadn't happened, the FOSS systems landscape would look a whole lot different.

Sun was in bad financial situation at that point, there is a high chance all these engineers would be laid off 8 years earlier if takeover hadn't happened.

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