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

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Sep 04, 2017, 6:50 AM UTC

linuxhansl wrote: post #317

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…

That. I was at PeopleSoft when we got acquired by Oracle. Went to a bunch of architecture meetings, and saw that nobody had a hint of a clue. "Project Fusion" was supposed to fix everything... As far as I know they're still working on that, some 12 years later. Then I tried to get myself laid off; there was supposedly a list you could yourself on to be laid off with severance. After one month waiting I had enough and…

Post by moomin » Mon, Sep 04, 2017, 7:19 AM UTC

godzillabrennus wrote: post #321

bigiain wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With the _big_ difference that Oracle are _really_ good at writing invoices and cashing big cheques... All of the really talented Oracle people I know are enterprise sales people, and they're _really_ good. All the good tech people I know "joined" via acquisition and jumped ship as soon as financially sensible.

I've met many oracle sales people claiming they make excess of $400k a year. They are also all alcoholics. Must be a horrible job even if they get paid well for it.

Post by davidgerard » Mon, Sep 04, 2017, 7:50 AM UTC

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.

Post by davidgerard » Mon, Sep 04, 2017, 7:55 AM UTC

acdha wrote: post #125

peoplewindow wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think that would very much depend on when: Sun's primary problem was bad management so an early 2000s change might have enabled them to compete against Red Hat — treat usability as a concern, wrap all of those cool kernel features in a non-joke userland, sell support, etc. Sitting out package management for a couple decades really hurt them and that's a relatively cheap engineering commitment. It's interesting to i…

Post by davidgerard » Mon, Sep 04, 2017, 8:04 AM UTC

bcantrill wrote: post #238

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…

I think that Solaris and SPARC had different fates in this regard: Solaris was dead the moment they (re)closed it in 2010 -- there was simply no way that Solaris was going to survive as a proprietary operating system (the era for which had passed half a decade before). As for SPARC, Oracle does seem to have invested heavily, in part because of the elaborate self-delusion that Ellison seemed to have that he could deve…