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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”

#221

Post by kuschku »

binaryapparatus wrote: post #212
kuschku wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

> 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.

All of them, it was over several servers, running different distros, with similar services, all with similar but slightly different init scripts for the same packages, and all having to interoperate. All scripts from the distro’s packages.

All of them were running daily, and many of them were constantly causing issues.

In fact, I have a single sysvinit script left on my systems, and it’s exactly that one that doesn’t work reliably.

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

#222

Post by toyg »

tannhaeuser wrote: post #109
DonHopkins wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

No, Oracle at the time was big on the "fullstack" play, and thought Sun hardware could provide the last piece of the puzzle: selling absolutely everything to a business, from metal to apps and services, in one neat box. Java would have been safe with IBM too, that wasn't much of a worry - although I'm sure Ellison hoped they could leverage it against competitors invested in it, like they tried to do with Google.

The enemy #1 for Oracle at the time was SAP, which they couldn't force out because it's another cancer (the lock-in is huge); so they developed a strategy of buying loads of ecosystem apps to "surround" it. At that point, they could sell the database and apps in one package, and then slowly erode sap away. Hardware was a natural addition to that strategy.

Unfortunately they borked execution. They didn't invest properly in making solutions ready-made, so after you bought a (very expensive) box, you still had to pay tons to consultants to set it up, making it uncompetitive on the whole. The industry shift to cloud did the rest. Now they're way too busy turning into "bigger Salesforce" to care about metal.

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

#225

Post by pmiller2 »

DonHopkins wrote: post #116
tannhaeuser wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I meant it more in the sense of how an old friend/rival could respectfully carry their casket to the grave, as opposed to the way Oracle desecrated and devoured the flesh of the corpse.

Where's the profit in that?

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

#226

Post by sergers »

xenadu02 wrote: post #190

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: if Oracle acquires your company GET OUT. Do not wait, bail out immediately. Oracle is expert at slowly bleeding teams while suppressing pay to milk products for all they’re worth. They are developer-hostile (including to employees). It is career death. If Oracle acquires a partner you depend on, you have 12-24 months to find an alternative before they cut your legs out from…

My company was using big machines cpq... While I personally think there are better options, the support under now "Oracle CPQ" has been considerably better, and have seen some improvements under Oracle.

We are planning to move to another CPQ in the next few months, but that's not cause oracle at all or the product got worse under Oracle.

But then we also use oracle DBMS part of our product, and we are moving away cause we hate oracle licensing/ support costs and while oracle can do alot, we are only using limited subset of functionality.

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

#227

Post by gardnr »

achamayou wrote: post #208
JohnTHaller wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It took less than a year from Oracle acquiring Sun for OpenOffice to die. It then marched on as a zombie for years.

And the MySQL and Hudson debacles, respectively before and shortly after the acquisition closed...

You mean MariaDB and Jenkins? I kid! I kid!

I wish it were more funny but it's not. Oracle has a special way of decimating open source projects.

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

#228

Post by binarycrusader »

justin66 wrote: post #205
binarycrusader wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really. Sun would have survived and thrived if it had thrown its weight behind Solaris x86. Except they did; anyone working in Solaris engineering at that time or even now could tell you that x86 was just as important as SPARC. From a technological perspective, they are completely equivalent. For example, the ZFS Storage Appliance is x86-based, not SPARC-based.

From the end user point of view, Sun recommitted (and later lessened their commitment) to Solaris x86 support so many times over the years that it's hard to imagine what would convince a user that they were really "throwing their weight behind it." We really mean it this time... wait, where are you going???

The hardest software to change is in people's heads.

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

#229

Post by protomyth »

pjmlp wrote: post #218
protomyth wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Do you know the ratio of Red Hat to CentOS?

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

#230

Post by TazeTSchnitzel »

soloracle wrote: post #194
xenadu02 wrote: post #190

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: if Oracle acquires your company GET OUT. Do not wait, bail out immediately. Oracle is expert at slowly bleeding teams while suppressing pay to milk products for all they’re worth. They are developer-hostile (including to employees). It is career death. If Oracle acquires a partner you depend on, you have 12-24 months to find an alternative before they cut your legs out from…

I call FUD. Oracle acquired Sun in 2010 - that's seven years, and it wasn't until this past January and August that major project changes were made and large number of staff laid off. "Get out now" seems unnecessarily alarming. Also, this may vary from org to org, but our (sparc/solaris dev) laptop replacement was every three years. I'll admit that the way they've handled the recent layoffs is atrocious, with most em…

> it wasn't until this past January and August that major project changes were made and large number of staff laid off.

Haha, what? Oracle (silently!) closed-sourced Solaris again seven months after its acquisition and much of the core talent walked.

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