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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”

#291

Post by dredmorbius »

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).

Cost out Oracle v. Google and get back to me.

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

#292

Post by dredmorbius »

nitrogen wrote: post #239
kstrauser wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Be careful of the large selection bias there: you're looking at the 20-30 year old code good enough not to have been replaced 18-28 years ago.

So what's a good example of the code of today that will survive the next 30 years?

Get back to me ... in 30 years.

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

#293

Post by sbinthree »

shadowtree wrote: post #119
xroche wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but what had happened since Oracle bought them has been nothing but depressing Oracle is nothing but a cancer. Everything they touch turn into goo. This is not the first company to be killed by Oracle acquisition. And not the last. And don't let me started on the ridiculous range-check trial: this sums up the disgusting state this company has fallen into.

ORA is the elephant's graveyard of software. Once something gets bought by them, you know it is done. Slowly, but surely. They perform a function akin to the maggots that destroy cadavers in nature. Part of the overall ecosystem. ORA stopped being a tech co a while ago, now it is a finance play. Use cash to buy a business for its locked in customers, gut it to squeeze max money out of it until last customer is gone.…

Same as OpenText, Consolation, etc.

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

#294

Post by cat199 »

riku_iki wrote: post #186
shadowtree wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ORA is the elephant's graveyard of software. Once something gets bought by them, you know it is done. Slowly, but surely. They perform a function akin to the maggots that destroy cadavers in nature. Part of the overall ecosystem. ORA stopped being a tech co a while ago, now it is a finance play. Use cash to buy a business for its locked in customers, gut it to squeeze max money out of it until last customer is gone.…

ORA just kills software with no market success. All companies do that. If you like solaris, you had an opportunity to make your vote using your wallet. I am actually surprised they invested into Solaris for so long, considering its long time half dead status on the market.

Sure, if you ignore the massive effort that was being invested in revamping Solaris to be more FOSS friendly and engage with the community prior to oracle's sun takeover..

I suspect if the takeover hadn't happened, the FOSS systems landscape would look a whole lot different. Like what, I don't know, but definitely different.

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

#295

Post by walterbell »

stephengillie wrote: post #251
shadowtree wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ORA is the elephant's graveyard of software. Once something gets bought by them, you know it is done. Slowly, but surely. They perform a function akin to the maggots that destroy cadavers in nature. Part of the overall ecosystem. ORA stopped being a tech co a while ago, now it is a finance play. Use cash to buy a business for its locked in customers, gut it to squeeze max money out of it until last customer is gone.…

CenturyLink does this too - they're a tech holding company who buys and sells companies (Level3, Tier3, Savvis, Cyxtera, Electricbox, etc) in order to reap M&A tax benefits while squeezing the engineers. Of course, these businesses don't make enough money to cover the massive shareholder draw, so it's all a stage play to convince Wells Fargo to loan them enough to pay those dividends. It's an untenable and irrational…

What's the M&A tax benefit? Do you mean tax-deductible interest payments on loans used to finance the purchase, as used by private equity?

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

#296

Post by protomyth »

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.

Amazon would have been interesting. It sure would of made for very interesting cloud services.

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

#297

Post by karlkatzke »

acdha wrote: post #125
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 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 i…

> It's interesting to imagine ZFS and zones bringing containerization a decade earlier

I have a legacy production environment that is Debian based OpenVZ and Nexenta. Containers and ZFS were in heavy use a decade ago, the marketing just wasn't there to make it "cool" like Docker.

Sun was great at many things, but they were never great at marketing.

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

#298

Post by bigiain »

disordinary wrote: post #290
bigiain wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With the _big_ difference that Oracle are _really_ good at writing invoices and cashing big cheques... All of the really talented Oracle people I know are enterprise sales people, and they're _really_ good. All the good tech people I know "joined" via acquisition and jumped ship as soon as financially sensible.

I'm surprised companies still buy Oracle software, I figured that they were only in business because of Vendor lock in from governments and large corporations.

Because Oracle do not sell to the sort of people who read Hackernews, they sell to people who read Financial Review and CIO Monthly or whatever. Same as SalesForce, Adobe, and a whole bunch of other "enterprise" software businesses that most dev's ignore or write off as pointless.

I worked at a place where I saw two renewals for AdobeCQ licenses paid while I worked there at ~$600k/year, all the time we were using Alfresco underneath (and I see now that site is running on Sitecore...)

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

#299

Post by fma »

rl3 wrote: post #283
pm90 wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds like the definition of a bribe, which is a crime. I would advise you to not make this information public or at least public under an account that can be traced back to you.

Why should he care? He didn't say he accepted the bribe, merely that it was offered.

My company requires we need to report that stuff. Also need to take a training every year on what you can accept and what you can't.

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

#300

Post by disordinary »

bigiain wrote: post #298
disordinary wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm surprised companies still buy Oracle software, I figured that they were only in business because of Vendor lock in from governments and large corporations.

Because Oracle do not sell to the sort of people who read Hackernews, they sell to people who read Financial Review and CIO Monthly or whatever. Same as SalesForce, Adobe, and a whole bunch of other "enterprise" software businesses that most dev's ignore or write off as pointless. I worked at a place where I saw two renewals for AdobeCQ licenses paid while I worked there at ~$600k/year, all the time we were using Alf…

Probably, although I work for a government department that uses Oracle extensively but no new projects are on the platform, eventually everything will be migrated off it (mostly to the SQL Server hosted on Azure).
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