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Oracle Layoffs Hit Longtime Solaris Developers Hard

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Re: Oracle Layoffs Hit Longtime Solaris Developers Hard

#11

Post by cturner »

veidr wrote: post #4

It was a truly sad day when Oracle bought Sun, because we knew right then that ZFS wouldn't improve nearly as many people's lives as it should have, and that Solaris would die. The ZFS thing still bums me out to this day, but I think I got over the demise of Solaris when OpenSolaris fizzled out.

What was cool about Solaris for old-timers? In particular, are there things that compare well against modern BSDs?

My vague memories of it are that the userland showed signs of legacy (/usr/ucb), and I could never get the tools I needed installed. But that was a consequence of the setting I was working in, not Solaris.

It would be particularly interesting to hear from fans of STREAMS or other kernel features.

Re: Oracle Layoffs Hit Longtime Solaris Developers Hard

#12

Post by pjmlp »

stingraycharles wrote: post #9
pjmlp wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe on top of that we should consider that almost no one else would cared, there was hopes that IBM or Google would do it, but they didn't. So if it wasn't for Oracle, maybe Sun's heritage would already have been lost much sooner. Not that it excuses what happened afterwards, this is just the typical Fortune 500 attitude that only cares about Excel sheet reports.

I thought that IBM wanted to acquire Sun as well, but it was Oracle who simply outbid them ?

Usually on a sales process one bids more than once if there is really interest in getting the product.

Re: Oracle Layoffs Hit Longtime Solaris Developers Hard

#13

Post by yalogin »

This is natural and to be expected. Whether we like it or not Solaris went the way of Novell Netware. They have a lot of customers but no new orders. So the staff needs to be kept around simply to serve existing customers out of which lot of them would move tofuture proof systems every quarter. So every quarter they will see loss of revenue and attrition in their customer base. How long can they continue to support such a group?

Re: Oracle Layoffs Hit Longtime Solaris Developers Hard

#14

Post by pron »

veidr wrote: post #4

It was a truly sad day when Oracle bought Sun, because we knew right then that ZFS wouldn't improve nearly as many people's lives as it should have, and that Solaris would die. The ZFS thing still bums me out to this day, but I think I got over the demise of Solaris when OpenSolaris fizzled out.

It was indeed sad when it became clear that the market is not interested in Solaris, nor in many other Sun products that could no longer be sustained.

Re: Oracle Layoffs Hit Longtime Solaris Developers Hard

#15

Post by pron »

stingraycharles wrote: post #2

There's a wealth of knowledge getting lost here in the process. I wonder if some enterprises are willing to hire these devs to ensure continuity of systems running on Solaris ? Either way, I've always had a soft spot for Solaris, and think they're on of the best examples of enterprises being able to produce quality software. It's incredibly sad to see this happen to the Sun legacy, and it makes me wonder why Oracle a…

Because some of dying Sun's products could yet be made profitable though others couldn't?

Re: Oracle Layoffs Hit Longtime Solaris Developers Hard

#16

Post by pron »

snarfy wrote: post #7
johansch wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> makes me wonder why Oracle acquired Sun in the first place. Java and MySQL were probably important reasons.

Yep. I thought the first thing they did was sue google over java usage in android.

Sun wanted to sue as well but didn't have the resources as it was, unfortunately, dying.

Re: Oracle Layoffs Hit Longtime Solaris Developers Hard

#17

Post by veidr »

pron wrote: post #14
veidr wrote: post #4

It was a truly sad day when Oracle bought Sun, because we knew right then that ZFS wouldn't improve nearly as many people's lives as it should have, and that Solaris would die. The ZFS thing still bums me out to this day, but I think I got over the demise of Solaris when OpenSolaris fizzled out.

It was indeed sad when it became clear that the market is not interested in Solaris, nor in many other Sun products that could no longer be sustained.

Well "sad" is, of course, entirely subjective.

I personally don't give a shit about Java or MySQL, so I wouldn't have been sad if those products died, but I know lots of people who would be.

For me, it was ZFS that I was really excited about. Back then, I thought I might have ZFS (or some ZFS-derived or -inspired equivalent bitrot-resistant checksumming filesystem) on all my computers and phones by, say, 2017.

But I don't. My Linux box can finally have ZFS (with some caveats), but my Macs and phones can't and won't; it was another sad day (for me) when we learned Apple's "modern" new filesystem, APFS, does not do checksumming for user data[1][2].

[1]: http://dtrace.org/blogs/ahl/2016/06/19/apfs-part5/

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14129601

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