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Creator of ZFS, Jeff Bonwick, leaves Oracle

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Re: Creator of ZFS, Jeff Bonwick, leaves Oracle

#11

Post by robin_reala »

lsc wrote: post #7
rbanffy wrote: post #4

That's too bad. ZFS (along with crossbow) is one of the best things in Solaris/OpenSolaris. I was about to say Oracle has a serious human resources problem, but I noticed that, maybe, the problem is in calling humans "resources".

I don't think that's it. Every corporation thinks of its employees in a dollars and cents kind of way. The operative problem here seems to be that Oracle doesn't value senior technical resources as much as some other companies might, or as much as those resources are used to being valued (and really, few people react well to a cut in autonomy, pay or respect.) They aren't willing to invest what is required, probably…

Every corporation thinks of its employees in a dollars and cents kind of way.

Reminds me of my brother’s old company ( http://www.freud.com/ ). Their website says:

We employ humans, not resources. Job opportunities, contact the HR manager.

Re: Creator of ZFS, Jeff Bonwick, leaves Oracle

#12

Post by alecco »

ableal wrote: post #3

His Nov.2009 blog entry on ZFS data deduplication is a pretty good primer: http://blogs.sun.com/bonwick/en_US/entry/zfs_dedup P.S. also, the 2008 pics with Linus. I suppose there is no further story to go with those ...

IMHO, with my little work in compression, all that dedup stuff was a bit hyped. And BTW it is older than ZFS, at least Plan 9's network storage had the same feature. But alignment kills looking for matching chunks of data. And "generally best left to the application" sounds like a cop-out.

Re: Creator of ZFS, Jeff Bonwick, leaves Oracle

#13

Post by krschultz »

sgt wrote: post #6
rbanffy wrote: post #4

That's too bad. ZFS (along with crossbow) is one of the best things in Solaris/OpenSolaris. I was about to say Oracle has a serious human resources problem, but I noticed that, maybe, the problem is in calling humans "resources".

Agreed. To Oracle, these are just pawns in a game. The winner of the game (which is always Oracle) gets to fund Larry's next yacht.

The alternative option was that Sun just went bankrupt and everyone lost their job, so choose between some leaving and all losing.

Re: Creator of ZFS, Jeff Bonwick, leaves Oracle

#14

Post by hopeless »

nailer wrote: post #10
lsc wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that's it. Every corporation thinks of its employees in a dollars and cents kind of way. The operative problem here seems to be that Oracle doesn't value senior technical resources as much as some other companies might, or as much as those resources are used to being valued (and really, few people react well to a cut in autonomy, pay or respect.) They aren't willing to invest what is required, probably…

I agree re: your second point, but when I worked at IBM it was explicitly discouraged to use the term 'resources' to refer to people. Personally I find the people that use this outdated term stop doing so when continually referred to as 'Outlook resources'.

Really? IBM refers to layoffs/redundancies as "Resource Actions", which is surely one of the most mealy-mouthed corporate expressions

Re: Creator of ZFS, Jeff Bonwick, leaves Oracle

#16

Post by nailer »

hopeless wrote: post #14
nailer wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree re: your second point, but when I worked at IBM it was explicitly discouraged to use the term 'resources' to refer to people. Personally I find the people that use this outdated term stop doing so when continually referred to as 'Outlook resources'.

Really? IBM refers to layoffs/redundancies as "Resource Actions", which is surely one of the most mealy-mouthed corporate expressions

Yes, really. PMs would publicly mock new-to-IBM PMs who used mid-90s business speak. When I was there they also referred to layoffs as 'getting rid of people'. It was a pretty good environment - honest and respectful. Perhaps your office was different.

Re: Creator of ZFS, Jeff Bonwick, leaves Oracle

#17

Post by mhd »

melling wrote: post #9
etherael wrote: post #5

Did Oracle buy Sun to strip it and liquidate the intellectual assets? What's their plan here? It seems like they have zero interest in building the products.

Oracle is a consistently profitable company. They know how to run a business. They know what they're doing. If the old Sun and their culture wanted to survive, they needed to run a better business.

They certainly know how to sell their database. Whether this translates into an equal success with their Sun IP has to be shown. The good thing for them is that they acquired pretty mature products, so they can probably "coast" along and still make a reasonable profit. It's still open whether they can foster enough innovation to keep things going with Java, Solaris… Their track record isn't very good in that respect.

Of course, it all boils down to whether they need to innovate in the first place. By now, Java is well established enough in the enterprise sector, just as BEA and Oracle DB are.

Re: Creator of ZFS, Jeff Bonwick, leaves Oracle

#18

Post by mhd »

krschultz wrote: post #13
sgt wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. To Oracle, these are just pawns in a game. The winner of the game (which is always Oracle) gets to fund Larry's next yacht.

The alternative option was that Sun just went bankrupt and everyone lost their job, so choose between some leaving and all losing.

Aut Larry aut nihil? As James Gosling pointed out just recently, IBM was the second option, not bankruptcy. IBM was thought as worse when it came to laying off people and outsourcing their jobs, but they tend to respect their IP and engineers more -- which is a pretty sad revelation, considering that we're talking about big ol' Inferior But Marketable[1] here.

[1]: http://www.etypewriters.com/hailto.html

Re: Creator of ZFS, Jeff Bonwick, leaves Oracle

#19

Post by etherael »

melling wrote: post #9
etherael wrote: post #5

Did Oracle buy Sun to strip it and liquidate the intellectual assets? What's their plan here? It seems like they have zero interest in building the products.

Oracle is a consistently profitable company. They know how to run a business. They know what they're doing. If the old Sun and their culture wanted to survive, they needed to run a better business.

Of that I have no doubt, but what I originally thought they would do; use their business resources mixed with Sun's engineering resources, does not appear to be their plan at all. They seem to be losing all of the best Sun engineering talent and do not seem at all concerned about about that fact.

That leads me not to conclude they are failing at what I originally thought they were doing, but succeeding at something else and I am curious as to what that is.

Re: Creator of ZFS, Jeff Bonwick, leaves Oracle

#20

Post by rbanffy »

nailer wrote: post #10
lsc wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that's it. Every corporation thinks of its employees in a dollars and cents kind of way. The operative problem here seems to be that Oracle doesn't value senior technical resources as much as some other companies might, or as much as those resources are used to being valued (and really, few people react well to a cut in autonomy, pay or respect.) They aren't willing to invest what is required, probably…

I agree re: your second point, but when I worked at IBM it was explicitly discouraged to use the term 'resources' to refer to people. Personally I find the people that use this outdated term stop doing so when continually referred to as 'Outlook resources'.

> Personally I find the people that use this outdated term stop doing so when continually referred to as 'Outlook resources'.

I use to call them "Powerpoint resources", but I think I'll adopt your designation.

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