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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”

#141

Post by heybrother »

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 don't know if it would've been any different for Solaris, but I can imagine Google would've been a whole lot better off owning Java. They probably would've been far better stewards too.

Even if they win Oracle v Google, it's been a huge distraction, a huge cost in lawyers (who knows how much they'll recoup), a big unknown and the search for an alternative has to be costly and time-consuming.

$8.3 billion almost seems like a bargain in hindsight.

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

#143

Post by bachmeier »

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.

> Solaris was competing against free

Is that true? Don't companies interested in Solaris pay for their OS? Weren't they competing against companies like Red Hat?

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

#144

Post by digi_owl »

bitwize wrote: post #106
spydum wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

http://www.commitstrip.com/en/2015/07/08/true-story-fixing-a...

Mooo...

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

#145

Post by digi_owl »

kuschku wrote: post #71
jacquesm wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As an application developer and hobby sysadmin, systemd is a godsend over the misconfigured and broken stuff distributions have delivered for years. And that is roughly the size of the problem. If you're an application developer or a hobby sysadmin then probably systemd is good for you, but if you're an experienced sysadmin it spells 'fixed what wasn't broken' and it re-introduces many issues that were already thou…

But that’s exactly the issue, isn’t it? We need a system that people can install at home, and that never needs someone to configure or maintain it. We need a system that people can throw on a VPS, and that needs no maintenance or configuration. We need a system that a company can deploy over clusters of tenthousands of systems, and just works. If you need a human to manually configure this stuff, it’s broken. The onl…

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/The_Hitchhiker's_Guide_to_the_...

>The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair.

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

#146

Post by ghaff »

et2o wrote: post #139

For a curious novice, can anyone point out why one would use Solaris/Illumos over Linux?

There's an argument that Solaris/Illumos have features for which the equivalent doesn't exist in Linux (native ZFS, dtrace, some zone/container features). But for most people those are outweighed by using an operating system that is actively being developed by a large community including many large companies.

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

#147

Post by hedora »

et2o wrote: post #139

For a curious novice, can anyone point out why one would use Solaris/Illumos over Linux?

After evaluating various Linux solutions, then FreeNAS, I went with SmartOS (an Illumnos variant) at home because it was the only one with rock solid secure containers, virtualization and zfs.

Unfortunately, I never managed to get single node docker compatibility to work, and then there was a design flaw in the inexpensive atom server processors that it runs well on that leads to failure after a year or so.

Faced with a >>$1000 hardware expenditure to get a reliable replacement NAS that's compatible with SmartOS, I jumped ship to Synology and haven't looked back.

My Synology box is way more available than my ISP or Amazon Cloud Drive, and I reproduced months of setup work from SmartOS in an afternoon with the Synology.

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

#148

Post by tannhaeuser »

noir_lord wrote: post #121
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.

> 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.

That would have been terrible (and pointless for RedHat anyway). RedHat already owns the entire enterprise Linux market.

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

#149

Post by hedora »

chx wrote: post #12
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…

> MariaDB is forked at the last moment. What is this about?

It should read "MariaDB forked from Oracle MySQL at the last moment".

(And I think Oracle MySQL is still alive/supported)

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

#150

Post by noir_lord »

tannhaeuser wrote: post #148
noir_lord wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

That would have been terrible (and pointless for RedHat anyway). RedHat already owns the entire enterprise Linux market.

I dont' see why, they'd have been able to integrate the various buts of Solaris that where ahead of the Linux curve and since RH has been good about open sourcing stuff the rest of the ecosystem would have benefited.
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