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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”

#121

Post by noir_lord »

peoplewindow wrote: post #90
lokedhs wrote: post #81

I'm very saddened by what happens with what is left of Sun. I used to work at Sun, and the Solaris codebase is the most amazing C code I've ever worked with. I'm probably going to be accused of bias, but the Linux code is really messy compared to Solaris. Sun was already on the way down by the time I left many years ago, but what had happened since Oracle bought them has been nothing but depressing.

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.

> Would it have been different if any other company had bought Sun?

Red Hat (if they could have afforded it) would have been an awesome home for Solaris/Sun.

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

#122

Post by shagie »

johan_larson wrote: post #18
foo101 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is very unlikely that Oracle will do the right thing. Oracle, as a company, is known to be ethically challenged. A company like Oracle that is known for its apathy towards its own developers cannot be expected to make careful consideration towards the software it is killing. For those, who have not worked in Oracle or have little understanding of Oracle's internal culture, I recommend this nice article about why J…

Is open-sourcing a codebase for an abandoned product somehow expensive or complicated? Are there legal or accounting issues? If not, it seems like buying a bit of good-will for the price of a bit of paperwork would be a useful investment.

Sanitization. Remove all things that shouldn't be there. I recall the cleaning of the code - things where developers got a bit... salty - for the Mozilla open source project. Stuff that people really didn't want others to see.

Copyright. That intern who worked at SGI or NetApp who (un)knowingly reused some of a project they had on their laptop at their new place of employment that was actually software owned by their old place of employment. Scrubbing that or getting proper (open source) licensing for that bit, along with all the legal headaches that entails. Remember that we're talking about code that has been around since effectively 1982 with Sun UNIX 0.7 (or SunOS 4 as Solaris 1.x in 1991).

Licensed from other. I recall that various parts of non-Sun operating systems had licensing for parts of NFS. It wouldn't be surprising to find that parts of Solaris had licensing from other companies too. Including code directly licensed likely wouldn't be compatible with the license from the other company. Removing the licensed code to make it linkable is an option, but a time consuming one that diminishes the value of the overall project ("what do you mean I need a license from HP for something that DEC wrote?")

Your patents. Some open source projects have patent clauses with them. Sure, you can do the stuff to license those patents under the terms of the open source license... or chose one that doesn't have them. The former isn't at all in the interest of Oracle; the later is "Here's some BSD code... we don't know what patents are in there, but if you use them we will sue you."

Other patents (part 1). Surprise! In open sourcing the software, it is discovered that some intern reused the methods learned at another company in part of the product that has made its way to today. Now you've got the lawyers looking for blood for a decade of royalties.

Other patents (part 2) Recognizing that NetApp didn't want ZFS to be open source and there were some cross licensing aspects with Oracle with the ZFS settlement... they'd probably have something to say about it. There's probably some WAFL patents in it now.

Competitors. There are things in Solaris that would help competitors to Oracle products. Yes, open sourcing with a copy left license would mean that those competitors would be more challenged to use the software, but its out there.

Parteners. There are things in Solaris that help partners. Open sourcing Solaris, while providing good will to the community reduces the leveraging power with the partners for good deals. Some of those partners may also be interested in parts of Solaris not being open source.

So... nope. There are lots of legal issues and many business reasons to keep it closed source.

Consider also that this is development from March 2010 (first release under Oracle closed source - prior to that it was CDDL) until October 2015 (the last release) and the amount of value that has been added compared to the amount of effort for the above.

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

#123

Post by peatmoss »

isatty wrote: post #24
nailer wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every major Linux distro uses systemd. I know its opponents are vocal but a bunch of us are silently enjoying the simplicity of .service files and systemd timers.

I'm using FreeBSD for servers and thankfully Gentoo remains on OpenRC. If they switch I'll move my home computers to FreeBSD too.

I hope systemd doesn't taint us all for more intelligent init systems. RC scripts do have their drawbacks.

If I were choosing a "most interesting alternative to systemd and classic init" award, it'd go to GNU Shepherd which is the init system of GUIX as well: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guix_System_Distribution

All the talk about BSD and launchd has me thinking Shepherd might be on to something. Launchd is XMLed up from here to Sunday, whereas Shepherd can have all the benefits of Scheme's S-EXPRs being tree structures while also having a great scripting language (Scheme) at your disposal.

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

#124

Post by rootbear »

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.

Agreed. I think IBM would have fixed the licensing issues that kept ZFS off Linux and would have kept Solaris Open Source, perhaps with a better license. It's tragic that Sun went to Oracle and not IBM.

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

#125

Post by acdha »

peoplewindow wrote: post #90
lokedhs wrote: post #81

I'm very saddened by what happens with what is left of Sun. I used to work at Sun, and the Solaris codebase is the most amazing C code I've ever worked with. I'm probably going to be accused of bias, but the Linux code is really messy compared to Solaris. Sun was already on the way down by the time I left many years ago, but what had happened since Oracle bought them has been nothing but depressing.

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 think that would very much depend on when: Sun's primary problem was bad management so an early 2000s change might have enabled them to compete against Red Hat — treat usability as a concern, wrap all of those cool kernel features in a non-joke userland, sell support, etc. Sitting out package management for a couple decades really hurt them and that's a relatively cheap engineering commitment. It's interesting to imagine ZFS and zones bringing containerization a decade earlier, but every time they came up the reaction from most of the sysadmins I knew was roughly “call me back when they have apt/yum”.

A coworker who used to work at Sun maintains that they really needed to go private to avoid years of chaos from waves of layoffs when they were profitable but not enough to satisfy Wall Street.

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

#126

Post by doozy »

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.

s/IBM/SAP/

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

#127

Post by shagie »

Keyframe wrote: post #86

SGI, Sun, DEC... I really miss those days a lot. Sure, they were daylight robbery (SGI especially so), but computing was far more heterogeneous.

Ahh yes... the days of the Software Wars. http://mshiltonj.com/software-wars/ (last update 2003) - it might be interesting to reimagine that in today's world. From the 2006 map, Oracle's assimilation of the lion's share of the "south" (MySQL, Sun, Java) and the battle between Apple and Google in the "north west".

That said, consider the flip side of the heterogeneous aspect. You were unlikely to be able to run software on two different platforms that could communicate in a meaningful way. It was duct tape everywhere. There was no "cloud" that one could get significant computing resources on. You could pay (much more) for time on a shell at uunet or another isp... or buy your own for $$$.

A 250MHz Octane MXE with 128MB RAM and 4GB disk has a US list price of $47,995 in 1998. That's $72k in 2017 money. Making consistent technology stacks has reduced the cost to the point were we think very little about the hardware anymore - and by making those decisions unnecessary it has allowed for improved portability of skills and not worrying about the abstraction of the hardware (until it leaks).

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

#128

Post by quickben »

lokedhs wrote: post #81

I'm very saddened by what happens with what is left of Sun. I used to work at Sun, and the Solaris codebase is the most amazing C code I've ever worked with. I'm probably going to be accused of bias, but the Linux code is really messy compared to Solaris. Sun was already on the way down by the time I left many years ago, but what had happened since Oracle bought them has been nothing but depressing.

Nature of things unfortunately.

I did my internship at Nortel. A decade later and having worked from small shops to IBM and beyond, nothing comes close to the quality of people/code that I saw at Nortel.

From another perspective:

It is up to you to carry the torch now.

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

#129

Post by Spooky23 »

peoplewindow wrote: post #90
lokedhs wrote: post #81

I'm very saddened by what happens with what is left of Sun. I used to work at Sun, and the Solaris codebase is the most amazing C code I've ever worked with. I'm probably going to be accused of bias, but the Linux code is really messy compared to Solaris. Sun was already on the way down by the time I left many years ago, but what had happened since Oracle bought them has been nothing but depressing.

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.

Sure. Red Hat is very successful with selling a product that is free!

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

#130

Post by gaius »

peoplewindow wrote: post #90
lokedhs wrote: post #81

I'm very saddened by what happens with what is left of Sun. I used to work at Sun, and the Solaris codebase is the most amazing C code I've ever worked with. I'm probably going to be accused of bias, but the Linux code is really messy compared to Solaris. Sun was already on the way down by the time I left many years ago, but what had happened since Oracle bought them has been nothing but depressing.

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.

Not really. Sun would have survived and thrived if it had thrown its weight behind Solaris x86. But they were too worried about cannibalising SPARC and when commodity kit started to beat them on price/performance they had nowhere to go.

I remember when we ripped out our 3 6800s and replaced them with 9 Dells, for way more power at a fraction of the price. Would have loved to recompile on Solaris, but the hardware savings easily covered the cost of a port...

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