Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sun used to sell Toshiba laptops with Solaris x86 pre-installed.
And Sparc laptops too
The SPARCbooks (and the SPARCstation Voyager) were all made by Tadpole
“Oracle laid off all Solaris tech staff in a classic silent EOL of the product”
211–220 of 402 posts
Re: “Oracle laid off all Solaris tech staff in a classic silent EOL of the product”
#212Earlier quoted context omitted.
No need since I can choose what I start, in what order, and I can check every simple script myself. They were short and doing one thing well. Good luck doing that with 300+K lines of code with systemd. Arguments like this really don't help systemd and show either ignorance or worse.
I’ve got 1400 init scripts my systems, each over 800 lines long, before I switched to systemd And in a language without linters or typecheckers. It’s literally easier to read the entire systemd code than trying to debug the interactions between these init scripts, all slightly buggy, interacting in slightly unexpected ways, and working mostly, although they never should.
> I’ve got 1400 init scripts my systems, each over 800 lines long, before I switched to systemd
There is something wrong with those numbers. Can you upload them somewhere or let me know what distro it was? I am curious to take a look.
If there is 1400 of them, each over 800 lines long then you have 1.1M lines of init script code, which doesn't seem right.
How many of them did you use daily? All 1400? 5? 10? Because checking sanity of ten of them, even if they are whooping 800+ lines of code (I'll have to see that) can't be compared to over 300K lines of monolithic systemd.
Re: “Oracle laid off all Solaris tech staff in a classic silent EOL of the product”
#213I'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.
Someone who (at the time) was senior enough in an IBM/Red Hat joint role told me the plan was that IBM would buy Sun, essentially for their Telco and a few other key market segments. To avoid any anti-trust risks (which IBM was still institutionally paranoid about) that might come from owning AIX, Solaris, WebSphere, Java, and various other overlapping properties, they would spin much of the software division (including Java and Solaris) off to Red Hat.
Unfortunately for the free software world, IBM's lawyers got cold feet when it turned out that Sun were mired in bribery claims. Oracle didn't care. Pity, because actually having Java properly open sourced, and likewise with various other Sun technologies (e.g. an OpenSolaris that didn't rely on a couple of binary-only libraries, for example) would have been quite a net win.
Re: “Oracle laid off all Solaris tech staff in a classic silent EOL of the product”
#214Earlier 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.
ISTR rumors that Google was interested in Sun for their IP. I think that would have worked out well. No stupid Java API trial, Solaris truly open source, ZFS in more places. Fujitsu probably would have wound up with the hardware side of SPARC, and I could imagine that Dell or IBM would have taken the server/storage stuff for close to what Sun sold for.
Google, really? Please.
Google is a Linux shop that doesn't care at all about product continuity. Why would they have cared about Solaris? I'm sure it'd have got the chop instantly if Google had bought Sun. Sure, the engineers might have been able to find other opportunities within the firm, but Solaris would have been scrapped instantly (maybe open sourced, maybe not).
Re: “Oracle laid off all Solaris tech staff in a classic silent EOL of the product”
#215Earlier 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.
Someone who (at the time) was senior enough in an IBM/Red Hat joint role told me the plan was that IBM would buy Sun, essentially for their Telco and a few other key market segments. To avoid any anti-trust risks (which IBM was still institutionally paranoid about) that might come from owning AIX, Solaris, WebSphere, Java, and various other overlapping properties, they would spin much of the software division (includ…
By "properly" open sourced you mean no proprietary builds at all? Because virtually all of Java is available in OpenJDK and Oracle has continued to fund and open source major new Java upgrades.
Re: “Oracle laid off all Solaris tech staff in a classic silent EOL of the product”
#216Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have worked in Oracle for 2 years and I have worked at other Fortune 500 companies. Oracle, by far, is the most soulless and lethargic company among all of them.
Lethargic? How so? How did they become so - because they live off of the support portion of the Enterprise Oracle licenses?
You buy an Oracle DB because (a) you have a fleet of Oracle DBAs who agitate for you to keep Oracle, (b) plenty of software you want to buy only works with Oracle (or only has Oracle as the top-tier option) and once you've bought Oracle and hired Oracle DBAs it's hard to justify having other things, and (c) Oracle are very good at selling their product up the management chain; their enterprise sales teams speak the language people who run companies do, and IT departments don't.
(And I don't mean golf.)
Re: “Oracle laid off all Solaris tech staff in a classic silent EOL of the product”
#217Just FOUR DAYS AGO, someone posted: >>... most of the recent innovations in Solaris's core technologies (DTrace, ZFS, Zones, etc) have all happened in illumos. > As a core Solaris dev at Oracle, I can tell you that's not true. I just can't prove it to you. :-( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15125355
Roch Bourbonnais managed to write a few detailed technical blog postings about the evolution of closed-source ZFS in the past couple of years. If you read those it will be clear that Oracle's version of ZFS continued to improve after Oracle ceased developing it in the open.
Among the more interesting topics Roch wrote about were some enormous changes to arc and l2arc, the zil, encryption, spa_sync, sequential scrub & resilver, which LBAs to choose when writing, and scalability of rw locks. OpenZFS is still reinventing several of these (e.g. sequential resilver and persistent l2arc are in github PRs now) albeit in generally very different ways.
If he is able and willing to participate in OpenZFS development, the whole project and its close relatives (e.g. ZFS on Linux, OpenZFS on OS X aka macOS) will benefit from his having explored the invention and development of similar wheels.
I do not know if he is still with Oracle. Either way, if you move quickly, the blog is likely to survive until after Labour Day.
(Someone should archive it for posterity!)
Re: “Oracle laid off all Solaris tech staff in a classic silent EOL of the product”
#218Earlier 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.
> Solaris was competing against free Red Hat gets a nice check from us once a year. It isn't free by any means.
Which is why many people use CentOS instead.
Re: “Oracle laid off all Solaris tech staff in a classic silent EOL of the product”
#219Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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?
Decisions like that trickle up from what developers and IT guys want. There was a generation that was raised on Solaris, and those folks built the first generation web on Solaris-on-SPARC with Oracle databases. But, then the next generation came along, and they hadn't learned UNIX in college on Solaris boxes. They'd learned on Linux in their parent's basement. I came up during that middle era when the shift was happe…
I can easily relate to this, started with Xenix, moved into DG-UX at university, we moved into GNU/Linux after that server eventually died, so it was mostly used of OS related classes.
At work GNU/Linux was just an internal server, all real work was being done in Solaris, HP-UX and Aix servers.
So fast forward to modern times and even Microsoft uses Linux kernel syscalls on their new POSIX personality subsystem, instead of actually supporting POSIX.
Re: “Oracle laid off all Solaris tech staff in a classic silent EOL of the product”
#220Does this mean VirtualBox is dead soon as well?