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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”

#241

Post by wahern »

hindsightbias wrote: post #187
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…

That Oracle is moving to Linux on Sparc tells you they still think there is an enterprise business that Exadata/x86 couldn't win (after years of destroying Solaris). IBM+Sun would have been most of the E-biz and those customers would have been more comfortable with Oracle as just the DB provider. Solaris on PPC existed at various times, IBM could have provided a convergence path for the Fortune 500, AIX/Solaris/Linux…

Sparc is also effectively dead. Solaris and Sparc exist as ongoing projects only to the extent Oracle is contractually required to maintain them--e.g. to Fujitsu. If you accept that Solaris is dead, then by the same evidence Sparc is dead. If you believe Sparc is still viable, then by the same evidence Solaris is still viable.

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

#242

Post by majewsky »

pjmlp wrote: post #219
SwellJoe wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, inst…

> instead of actually supporting POSIX

What do you mean? Using Linux kernel syscalls is just one of many ways to "actually support POSIX".

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

#243

Post by SwellJoe »

protomyth wrote: post #229
pjmlp wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is why many people use CentOS instead.

Do you know the ratio of Red Hat to CentOS?

In our market, it's at least 1:10 (CentOS is ten times as popular as RHEL). We don't actually record a difference between them in our license system (they both register as generic "redhat" with a major version), but we distinguish between them in our ticket tracker.

We had a bug in our installer recently where it wouldn't work at all on RHEL (I stopped testing on RHEL a few years ago because compatibility was so reliable that it never behaved any differently from CentOS). It took almost 24 hours to get a bug report about it (we see about a hundred new installations a day). So...it may be even less than 1/10th.

That said, we mostly operate in the low-end web hosting market: solo web developers, small design shops, web hosts selling to solo web developers, small businesses, etc. Our software rarely ends up in huge enterprise deployments. Even for our customers that are big businesses that use RHEL on the backend, they might have CentOS on their web server, because it's just a rental and that's what their web host installed for them. So, our numbers are certainly skewed toward CentOS because margins in web hosting are razor thin.

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

#244

Post by boubiyeah »

camus2 wrote: post #196
soreasan wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At this rate Oracle is going to be the next Yahoo.

No. Oracle is mainly B2B, and executives love Oracle solutions.

Never understood why they loved it.

Is it just so they can say "not my fault, our project is only using big name frameworks, DBs, etc so I did all I could?"

Or is it because they don't even begin to understand what's going on in the tech scene and just buy what appears to be the most shiny, expensive solutions?

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

#245

Post by jedberg »

peoplewindow wrote: post #214
coredog64 wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Maybe, but the main lament is that some great IP is lost (ZFS, etc.)

If Google had bought them for the IP, then at least that IP would live on, which is what everyone really wants.

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

#246

Post by rbanffy »

boubiyeah wrote: post #244
camus2 wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. Oracle is mainly B2B, and executives love Oracle solutions.

Never understood why they loved it. Is it just so they can say "not my fault, our project is only using big name frameworks, DBs, etc so I did all I could?" Or is it because they don't even begin to understand what's going on in the tech scene and just buy what appears to be the most shiny, expensive solutions?

> Never understood why they loved it.

Expensive parties, gifts etc

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

#248

Post by rbanffy »

noir_lord wrote: post #150
tannhaeuser wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Considering the differences under the hood, that wouldn't be easy.

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

#249

Post by nosequel »

jedberg wrote: post #245
peoplewindow wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Maybe, but the main lament is that some great IP is lost (ZFS, etc.) If Google had bought them for the IP, then at least that IP would live on, which is what everyone really wants.

ZFS isn't lost. ZFS on Illumos (Smartos) and FreeBSD is alive and well.
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