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

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

#101

Post by DonHopkins »

justincormack wrote: post #32
pjmlp wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sun used to sell Toshiba laptops with Solaris x86 pre-installed.

And Sparc laptops too

SPARCstation SLC: the "Silly Little Computer", with the computer built into the monitor cabinet.

http://www.shrubbery.net/~heas/sun-feh-2_1/Systems/Sun4c/SYS...

And the bizarre quazi-portable-but-definitely-not-laptop SPARCstation Voyager:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z2CprTGEIS8

http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/SPARC-HOWTO-5.html

http://www.kevra.org/TheBestOfNext/ThirdPartyProducts/ThirdP...

http://www.ebay.com/itm/WORKING-Rare-SUN-Voyager-SPARCstatio...

http://www.shrubbery.net/~heas/sun-feh-2_1/Systems/SSVygr/4m...

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

#102

Post by specialist »

Retric wrote: post #70
sacheendra wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand the negativity towards using consultants and off-shoring. Using consultants is a business decision which helps the company hire people for the short term of the project and also offload risk. Not all companies have the capability to handle all kinds of risk. For example, software companies don't specialise in financial models and investing. So they don't take on financial risks by investing in deri…

They both reduce institutional knowlage. This tends to be extremely detrimental in the long term. Outsourcing software is like burning all the design documentation for hardware your having someone else build. Even something as well known as injection molding tends to work vastly better if you have experienced staff as part of the design process. And software is worse than that because the design process is part of de…

Ya.

If I wouldn't pay the consultants in the office across the street to work on my core IT (outsourcing), why would I pay someone separated by oceans, timezones, language, culture... (offshoring)?

While working in healthcare, our corporate overlords repeatedly rammed the "blended shore" model down our throats. Which never worked. (Got to know some nice people, though. So there's that.)

The easiest part of our job was the coding. Requirements gathering, analysis, project management, customer relations, QA/Test, etc. Working shoulder to shoulder with our clients, it was hard enough. No way our work could be further delegated while still delivering something useful.

Preaching to the choir, I know, apologies.

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

#103

Post by dom0 »

protomyth wrote: post #100
dom0 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As far as I know Oracle stopped developing SPARC systems, it is all Fujitsu now, including the chips.

Fujitsu went with ARM for their latest performance machine.

So far they only announced to go with a heavily modified ARM ISA for their next-gen supercomputer (forgot the name), while saying yadda yadda remain committed to SPARC yadda yadda. At least as far as I know. Probably still means life-support-only for SPARC.

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

#104

Post by JdeBP »

AsyncAwait wrote: post #19
binaryapparatus wrote: post #7

Sad news all over industry. Red Hat creating huge mess throughout linux with systemd for years. Solaris killed. Thankfully zfs continues living trough FreeBSD. MariaDB is forked at the last moment. Some of my work depends on VirtualBox. Quote from American Gods: “A single product manufactured by a single company for a single global market. Spicy, medium, or chunky! They get a choice, of course! OF COURSE! But they ar…

> Red Hat creating huge mess throughout linux with systemd for years Care to elaborate on the 'mess' created? I highly doubt you even used it yourself, sounds like something you've heard and are repeating for some cheap karma. The init scripts used before were the real mess, if you ask me. It's getting really tiring to hear these systemd rants with no good reasons to back them up. I guess ranting against systemd is t…

It's probably equally as tiring for the people reading this to see you drag up the old false dichotomy of "init scripts used before". The world was not van Smoorenburg rc before systemd came along. (This especially ironic given that we are on a page discussing Solaris, for goodness sake!) If you want other people to try avoiding tired old fallacies, set a good example and avoid them yourself too.

* http://uselessd.darknedgy.net/ProSystemdAntiSystemd/

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

#105

Post by tw04 »

johannes1234321 wrote: post #64
hu88 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Sun did that a few years back, Oracle only has to reevaluate what was added since they acquired Sun ...

It's entirely possible everything added since it was acquired by Sun is STILL under an open source license. Just because they haven't released the code or provided it to end-users under that license says nothing about how it's structured internally.

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

#106

Post by bitwize »

spydum wrote: post #68
jacquesm wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are two jobs that were rolled into the developer role that we will sorely miss in the longer term, the first was 'analyst', the second 'sysadmin/sysop'. Dumbing these down to make it possible to run these highly skilled and specialized jobs as part-time job without relevant training is one of the main reasons the state of software is what it is.

Exactly this. I have seen hundreds of systems built by experienced gray beard Unix admins, which have been steady as rocks, some lasting 15+ years without ever a peep of trouble. however I have seen many "new" boxes built by "devops", which can't survive a single upgrade cycle. If left alone for more than a few weeks, usually eat themselves and cause an outage. On one hand, am a little thankful of the devops box, it…

Devops is doing their job. No one really cares about the uptime of a single box anymore at cloud scale. Servers are cattle, not pets. If one instance goes down, spin up a new one to take the load.

P.S. this is why, contrary to graybeard whinging, boot time matters and sysvinit cannot possibly keep up with systemd in the cloud. The faster your instances boot, the less capacity you lose while they're down.

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

#107

Post by JdeBP »

holydude wrote: post #22
AsyncAwait wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Red Hat creating huge mess throughout linux with systemd for years Care to elaborate on the 'mess' created? I highly doubt you even used it yourself, sounds like something you've heard and are repeating for some cheap karma. The init scripts used before were the real mess, if you ask me. It's getting really tiring to hear these systemd rants with no good reasons to back them up. I guess ranting against systemd is t…

Systemd is / was inspired by solaris smf to some extent. It is not that bad but the execution was rather poor.

Actually, it was SystemXVI that was inspired by the SMF.

* https://github.com/ServiceManager/ServiceManager/ (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10212770)

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

#108

Post by tw04 »

Crontab wrote: post #79
kim0 wrote: post #2

@Oracle, please do the right thing and open-source Solaris. At least that's a proper way to die!

Having tried various Illumos-based operating systems, I could care less if they reopened Solaris with one exception: ZFS. I would like to see them alter the licensing terms of it so that it could be properly integrated into Linux. I believe they should consider this because Btrfs, which Oracle itself started, it going nowhere fast; and because Oracle customers who run Linux will benefit as well.

It's entirely and likely possible that part of their settlement with NetApp included NOT releasing it under GPL.

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/09/09/oracle_netapp_zfs_d...

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

#109

Post by tannhaeuser »

DonHopkins wrote: post #93
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 always thought IBM would be the most fitting company to buy Sun.

IBM is facing the exact same problem selling AIX boxes as Sun/Oracle and HP do selling their Unix hardware and OS, so why would IBM have been a better fit to buy Sun?

I think Sun was (mostly) acquired to prevent Java IP being sold to other, more nefarious parties (such as MS or patent trolls). Both Oracle and IBM were (and still are, though to a lesser extent) heavily invested into the Java ecosystem. Sun OS/Solaris has historically also been the reference O/S and platform for big-time installations of the Oracle RDBMS.

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