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The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris

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Re: The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris

#181

Post by appleflaxen »

magnawave wrote: post #112

At the end of the day, Sun/Oracle has to be able to make revenue from Solaris for them to keep paying those peoples' salaries. Is your startup / company deploying on Solaris? Nope of course you aren't - who is?! Pretty much nobody nowadays - w3techs.com shows Solaris at 0.0005% for webservers for example. Everyone talks about how great it is(to be sure there are some small bits that are pretty dang amazing) - yet for…

nobody disputes the capitalist imperative; but it's still worth having the discussion of how messed up the Oracle playbook is.

Re: The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris

#182

Post by Tostino »

pjmlp wrote: post #142
tatersolid wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The product that built Oracle the company, their RDBMS, is frankly one of the worst pieces of "enterprise" software I've ever encountered. Oracle's only redeeming quality seems to be free golf at nice country clubs paid for by Oracle salespeople.

Open source databases still don't have a developer environment that matches what Oracle or SQL Server offer. Same applies to their stored procedures languages and deployment options.

See, once I actually started using pl/pgsql, I found it really powerful and a match for T-SQL. Never used PL/SQL though, so can't compare.

Re: The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris

#183

Post by appleflaxen »

bcantrill wrote: post #62
xeeeeeeeeeeenu wrote: post #33

I wouldn't call illumos "thriving". Commit activity[1] is low for a project of this size (compared to e.g. BSDs) and its hardware support is poor. Probably the biggest problem is the fact that all existing distributions are undermaintained and unpolished. SmartOS is the only exception, but it's not a replacement for Solaris which was a general-purpose server OS. SmartOS is merely a bare-metal hypervisor. I really hop…

While I'm obviously biased, I think you are succumbing to a kind of cargo culting with respect to both commit activity and hardware support. On commit activity, we in illumos don't necessarily have the same values as other projects: we really want to get it correct the first time -- a trait inherited from Solaris that we call "FCS quality all the time."[1] As such, commits have to be tested, thoroughly reviewed (four…

what is FCS? flight control system is the best candidate from reading the link (which doesn't use the acronym) and google.

Re: The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris

#184

Post by samdoidge »

digitalzombie wrote: post #134
magnawave wrote: post #112

At the end of the day, Sun/Oracle has to be able to make revenue from Solaris for them to keep paying those peoples' salaries. Is your startup / company deploying on Solaris? Nope of course you aren't - who is?! Pretty much nobody nowadays - w3techs.com shows Solaris at 0.0005% for webservers for example. Everyone talks about how great it is(to be sure there are some small bits that are pretty dang amazing) - yet for…

> At the end of the day, Sun/Oracle has to be able to make revenue from Solaris for them to keep paying those peoples' salaries. This is a crop out that you're giving on behalf of Oracle. Oracle does this all the time. It's their modus operandi. They buy companies/technologies out, milk them for license fees and let it trudge along until it stops making money anymore and either close shop or abandon it to Apache Foun…

> This is a crop out

cop out :)

Re: The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris

#185

Post by ptero »

frou_dh wrote: post #174
ptero wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IIRC, Oracle got a huge boost from US government as it was the semi-official database engine developed (for the Navy?) with taxpayer funds, then deployed (again with taxpayer funds). I'm not complaining, the US probably needed a better DB engine, but it was partly luck, partly backroom agreements that launched and supported Oracle for years. That said, maybe I got my facts badly mixed up.

I think it's SQLite that had Navy origins.

You are probably right. I recall reading that Oracle development was funded by a DARPA-style mechanism, but I may have confused it with something. As MrMorden says in another comment it was likely the CIA who funded the development.

Re: The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris

#186

Post by mr_overalls »

paulmd wrote: post #60
wiremine wrote: post #24

> ..employees who had given their careers to the company were told of their termination via a pre-recorded call — “robo-RIF’d” Every single first person or second hand account I've heard about Oracle makes like a terrible place to work... is this just people being hyperbolic, or is is truly that terrible?

> is this just people being hyperbolic, or is is truly that terrible? I'm on the outside looking in and don't have any special internal insight, but they didn't just pull this robo-RIF idea out of their ass spur-of-the-moment. Oracle is the kind of place that maintains a robo-layoff system , which pretty much says all you need to know. "What you think of Oracle is even truer than you think it is. There has been no en…

There's a fascinating book by Joel Bakan called The Corporation, which applies the DSM criteria for diagnosis of mental illness to the modern corporation. It concludes that the modern corporation is functionally equivalent to a psychopath (even created that way by law) - an entity whose destructive behavior, if unchecked, leads to scandal and ruin.

Based on the stories I've heard about Oracle and Elison, I've often thought that Bakan might have had an inside informant at the company.

https://www.amazon.com/Corporation-Pathological-Pursuit-Prof...

Re: The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris

#187

Post by cyphar »

artursapek wrote: post #177
cyphar wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To paraphrase Bryan Cantrill, don't fall into the trap of anthropomorphising Larry Ellison. Your lawnmower doesn't care about community goodwill either.

What? I'm saying it matters in the community of developers - and it does.

My point is that "showing goodwill" is not something that makes sense within Oracle (at least that's what I've heard). I agree that acting correctly to a community is the right thing to do, but that doesn't mean it's something that Oracle will do.

Re: The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris

#188

Post by samoright »

snw wrote: post #169

There seems to be a lot of odd nostalgia for Solaris in the comments here and on twitter. I think that's missing the point of the article. Yes, Oracle Solaris is dead. But illumos is better, open source, alive and here to stay. You can use illumos today, right now, and have your ZFS, mdb, DTrace and zones. It really is open source and we're a community using and improving it. For 7 years now already. As illumos is on…

How does running a different OS than most people can give a company an advantage? Can you elaborate this?

Re: The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris

#189

Post by pjmlp »

Tostino wrote: post #182
pjmlp wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Open source databases still don't have a developer environment that matches what Oracle or SQL Server offer. Same applies to their stored procedures languages and deployment options.

See, once I actually started using pl/pgsql, I found it really powerful and a match for T-SQL. Never used PL/SQL though, so can't compare.

And which PostgreSQL developer editor can match SQL Server Management Studio?

Because pgAdmin isn't it, specially after it became an Electron app.

Re: The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris

#190

Post by _asummers »

fasquoika wrote: post #63
paulmd wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> is this just people being hyperbolic, or is is truly that terrible? I'm on the outside looking in and don't have any special internal insight, but they didn't just pull this robo-RIF idea out of their ass spur-of-the-moment. Oracle is the kind of place that maintains a robo-layoff system , which pretty much says all you need to know. "What you think of Oracle is even truer than you think it is. There has been no en…

Oh man, so many good quotes in that talk. "Do not fall into the trap of anthropomorphizing Larry Ellison"

"There is no need to have an open mind about Oracle. That wastes the openness of your mind."
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