Hmm I was hoping he would go work for Apple on a new filesystem to replace HFS+... oh well.
Will be interesting to see what his startup is working on when they come out of stealth mode.
Creator of ZFS, Jeff Bonwick, leaves Oracle
31–40 of 69 posts
Re: Creator of ZFS, Jeff Bonwick, leaves Oracle
#32It's good to see something positive coming out of the Sun acquisition: a whole crop of very interesting startups are probably being founded right now.
Re: Creator of ZFS, Jeff Bonwick, leaves Oracle
#33I'm really uncertain now of the future of Illumos and ZFS. I hope there's more push behind these projects as well as BTRFS. Will be interesting to see where this goes.
I think the future of Illumos is safe. They've already got a lot of heavy-weighters behind it, ex-Sun/Oracle and others.
Re: Creator of ZFS, Jeff Bonwick, leaves Oracle
#34Wow, major talent leakage. Whoever running a startup right now, if there's a need for low-level programming talents, better snatch these guys.
Re: Creator of ZFS, Jeff Bonwick, leaves Oracle
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
Really? IBM refers to layoffs/redundancies as "Resource Actions", which is surely one of the most mealy-mouthed corporate expressions
Yes, really. PMs would publicly mock new-to-IBM PMs who used mid-90s business speak. When I was there they also referred to layoffs as 'getting rid of people'. It was a pretty good environment - honest and respectful. Perhaps your office was different.
That's extraordinary and not at all what I would have expected from IBM. I wish there were more places where people ditched corporate doublespeak. Especially that vile phrase "human resources". Soylent Green is human resources.
Re: Creator of ZFS, Jeff Bonwick, leaves Oracle
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree re: your second point, but when I worked at IBM it was explicitly discouraged to use the term 'resources' to refer to people. Personally I find the people that use this outdated term stop doing so when continually referred to as 'Outlook resources'.
> Personally I find the people that use this outdated term stop doing so when continually referred to as 'Outlook resources'. I use to call them "Powerpoint resources", but I think I'll adopt your designation.
I think you're being unfair - some of them are "Visio resources". Tho' they call themselves "architects".
Re: Creator of ZFS, Jeff Bonwick, leaves Oracle
#37I'm really uncertain now of the future of Illumos and ZFS. I hope there's more push behind these projects as well as BTRFS. Will be interesting to see where this goes.
Since btrfs is an Oracle funded project, I'm real interested to see what happens to both of these filesystems going forward.
As someone who has actually used OCFS2 on a real production system, I will never voluntarily touch another Oracle-written filesystem.
Re: Creator of ZFS, Jeff Bonwick, leaves Oracle
#38Did Oracle buy Sun to strip it and liquidate the intellectual assets? What's their plan here? It seems like they have zero interest in building the products.
Oracle is a consistently profitable company. They know how to run a business. They know what they're doing. If the old Sun and their culture wanted to survive, they needed to run a better business.
The question was "what is their plan" not "is Oracle a competent company".
Re: Creator of ZFS, Jeff Bonwick, leaves Oracle
#39I don't know how much of the oracle's academic initiative was a success. From the likes of what is being happening to Sun's Academic Initiative to promote university grad students to take the certification exams such as SCJP now called Oracle certified java programmer. Sun has offered its student members the certification exam for 40 $ which has been recently dropped by oracle making it 40% of the voucher fee which implies 40% of 150 around 90$. The 40% discount voucher is also for a limited period which will be done for good this December. I seriously doubt oracle's contribution towards opensource too.
Re: Creator of ZFS, Jeff Bonwick, leaves Oracle
#40Oracle's strategy seems to be:
(1) Don't bother investing too much in R&D or figuring out the next big technology, just buy companies that are alread profitable (to name a few: Sun, BEA, Hyperion, Sieble, Innobase, PeopleSoft...).
(2) Immediately execute massive layoffs to increase profits even more. And suck every dollar possible out of the business for a couple years.
(3) After a while, the profits will start decreasing, but slowly enough (due to market inertia) that they have time to rinse and repeat. Go back to step 1.
Sometimes, Oracle will get lucky and be able to keep running a business good enough that the profits will somewhat be stable enough for years.