361–370 of 402 posts
That's a lot of very highly skilled staff which they won't be able to reassemble for another product or project for years. Those people will scatter to the winds now. It's a shame they lacked the imagination to make them do something new. But then Oracle doesn't seem to have the organizational capability to start major new successful product lines anymore. They grow through acquisition.
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Many people don't have the luxury of write and jump ship. The vast majority of my career was not greenfield development. It has almost all been maintaining pre-existing software. Some of which is more than a decade old. The challenging part of us in the software maintenance job is to balance a need to refactor with a need to add features. It colors your opinion about a lot of things. You start to evaluate methodologi…
Greenfield developers look at me funny when I say we should just use Spring or .net for new projects. I actually have to maintain my projects for years, and I've been burnt many times before.
I came to the same conclusion and for most projects there's not really a lot of good choices there outside of those two.
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> 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.
That is going to be the case for very few people. Most people won't really have the kind of stock.
Retaining the employees of the acquired company that you want to retain is a very important part of the process.
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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 deskt…
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Ha, that's funny. I had almost forgotten about the SunOS-vs-Solaris wars. Everybody wanted to hang onto SunOS as long as possible. Seems ironic that (many) people feel this way about Solaris now.
Remember the poster they were giving out at Usenix with a picture of the BSD Tie Fighter blowing up the AT&T Death Star, and the mathematical formulation "4.x > V for all values of x from zero to infinity"? It just didn't make sense that Sun kicked AT&T's ass with BSD Unix, and then capitulated to them by switching over to SVR4. Yeah, yeah, I'm sure there was some business reason, but it was a bitter pill to swallow.…
Good times, good times...
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At this rate Oracle is going to be the next Yahoo.
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.
My stodgiest, most risk averse (Oracle using) clients are beginning to migrate to Postgres. I'm so shocked by this it still sounds like a lie as I type it. For most of my career it's been "nobody got fired for picking Oracle". Now that nobody gets fired for picking AWS the penny pinchers are looking at the RDS pricing delta between Postgres and Oracle and all of the sudden it's a no brainer. Maybe because the only sales person involved is from Amazon? IDK but Oracle will slowly die by it's own worms.
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I'm surprised companies still buy Oracle software, I figured that they were only in business because of Vendor lock in from governments and large corporations.
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…
Yes, bean counters. When the only sales person involved is now the AWS Architect the bean counters put Postgres and Oracle side by side and it becomes a no brainer. You're going to see lots of enterprise development moving away from Oracle as they move to AWS.
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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.
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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'm surprised companies still buy Oracle software, I figured that they were only in business because of Vendor lock in from governments and large corporations.
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I was at Intel once upon a time when they open sourced some telecom stuff they wanted to get out off. The issues were crazy because of the size of the code base that had accumulated from multiple acquisitions spanning many different divisions in different countries over many years. We couldn't even find people who could tell us what large chunks of the code did or whether they contained anything under patent, tradema…
Out of curiosity, what was the (presumably now open-sourced and discussable) "telecom stuff"?