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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”

#331

Post by digi_owl »

kuschku wrote: post #200
digi_owl wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/The_Hitchhiker's_Guide_to_the_... >The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair.

You can make all these quotes, and comments, but they don’t help in the real world. If you want that every child can run linux, that you can run linux on physical Internet of Things devices that are supposed to run for decades without maintenance (because you cannot access them), then you either have to build something so this can work, or you end up with Windows 10 IoT and Windows 10 Cloud running everything. No one…

And i take it you side with John Deere...

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

#332

Post by [deleted] »

SkyMarshal wrote: post #304
cat199 wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sun really needed to FOSS license Solaris before Linux hit critical mass. That would have been amazing. Linux is pretty good for what it is, but imagine if it had been Solaris that won instead of Linux, and thus running on most of the servers of the world and potentially iOS and Android as well. It might have even made some desktop inroads, given it would have launched out of the FOSS gate with a more developed deskt…

[deleted]

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

#333

Post by seabrookmx »

nosequel wrote: post #250
gigatexal wrote: post #247

Crap. What does this mean for the fate of ZFS?!?

Nothing, ZFS is alive and strong in Illumos and FreeBSD.

And Linux. OpenZFS shares code across them all which is pretty swell.

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

#334

Post by dom0 »

pjmlp wrote: post #316
mwcampbell wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> instead of actually supporting POSIX POSIX support is in the API, not the syscalls. musl libc places great emphasis on POSIX conformance. So if you ran a musl-based distro atop WSL, that should give you what you want, or at least something closer.

Currently only Ubuntu, OpenSUSE and SLES are supported. None of them is muslc based, right?

Doesn't matter, the stable interface in Linux is the syscalls, not the libc. Same goes for WSL.

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

#335

Post by wowtip »

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…

> A coworker who used to work at Sun maintains that they really needed to go private to avoid years of chaos from waves of layoffs when they were profitable but not enough to satisfy Wall Street.

Short sighted capitalism is imho a threat to society. But finding an acceptable solution is not going to be easy.

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

#336

Post by hyperpallium »

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.

The real answer is for Sun to have remained profitable. Unfortunately, due to their workstation focus, it probably wasn't possible. e.g. Digital was an excellent company, but also went down with (in their case) mini-computers. Christensen's frustration at how such a great company could get killed was part inspiration for developing his "disruption" theory.

I'd hate to think Sun's demise, in the alternative, was due to their hippy open-standards approach, which is very appealing to engineers...

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

#337

Post by jwilk »

the_why_of_y wrote: post #75
nottorp wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The way I read systemd news, it's not worth analyzing it because Poettering will say 'won't fix' or 'working as intended'.

This query returns 701 fixed bugs: https://bugs.freedesktop.org/buglist.cgi?bug_status=RESOLVED...

FWIW, systemd uses GitHub for bug tracking these days:

https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues

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

#338

Post by pjmlp »

dom0 wrote: post #334
pjmlp wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Currently only Ubuntu, OpenSUSE and SLES are supported. None of them is muslc based, right?

Doesn't matter, the stable interface in Linux is the syscalls, not the libc. Same goes for WSL.

Syscalls are not POSIX APIs.

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

#339

Post by rbanffy »

nailer wrote: post #264
rbanffy wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Never understood why they loved it. Expensive parties, gifts etc

I've had an enterprise vendor offer to drop money into my personal account to make sales. Not naming them, but the sad thing is they actually did have the best product in their space by a long shot. The ones who sucked were probably even better at bribes.

I have seen a high-profile CTO dismissed for just cause because he accepted an invitation to speak at a vendor conference in Paris. When hired, we signed a very strict code of conduct document that prevented us from accepting any valuable gifts from vendors.

A vendor once sent me a mug. I had to open the box in front of a witness.

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

#340

Post by rbanffy »

emmelaich wrote: post #263
rbanffy wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SPARC died the moment every developer had a good enough x86 desktop running a Unix flavor (and Sun decided it'd be happy not to build desktops anymore). At that point, we cease to imagine deploying our stuff in SPARC. We test on x86 and make it run well on x86 before it gets compiled for SPARC. At that point, unless the SPARC hardware has some definitive cost/performance advantage, we'll buy x86. SPARC is for legacy.…

What accelerated it even further was when Linux went 64 bit and hardware improved to the point where it was a suitable replacement for big iron Solaris (the SunFire 6900 for example). That was around 2005 from memory. And the 6900's features with regard to HA in the field fell well short of advertised. Now you can get a Linux box with 4Tb of RAM so no-one should buy Solaris over Linux.

Now you can get a 24TB, 192-core beast that fits within 7U rack. That same chassis will probably go way beyond that with newer Scalable Xeons.

And you could cram even more x86 cores with up to five Xeon Phi coprocessor cards, while Intel's supplies last.

https://www.supermicro.com/products/system/7U/7088/SYS-7088B...

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