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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”

#351

Post by xgbi »

foo101 wrote: post #4
kim0 wrote: post #2

@Oracle, please do the right thing and open-source Solaris. At least that's a proper way to die!

It is very unlikely that Oracle will do the right thing. Oracle, as a company, is known to be ethically challenged. A company like Oracle that is known for its apathy towards its own developers cannot be expected to make careful consideration towards the software it is killing. For those, who have not worked in Oracle or have little understanding of Oracle's internal culture, I recommend this nice article about why J…

I like that quote in the interview:

> Also, asked whether in hindsight he would have preferred Sun having been acquired by IBM (which pursued a deal to acquire Sun and then backed out late in the game) rather than Oracle, Gosling said he and at least Sun Chairman Scott McNealy debated the prospect. And the consensus, led by McNealy, was that although they said they believed "Oracle would be more savage, IBM would make more layoffs."

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

#352

Post by zokula »

cat199 wrote: post #301
oscargrouch wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Its not bias. Im a (mostly) C/C++ dev, and very curious about some open source implementations, and the Solaris C source code is the most beautiful complex C codebase i've know. Linux is what it is now, because of the amaz…

BSD guy here - My heirarchy would be more better bsd's > not as clean bsds > solaris > linux with not as clean and solaris being on roughly the same footing- much like SMF requiring XML, solaris code, while very clean, seems very overengineered and not as elegant to me. that said, i really haven't hacked enough kernel code to deserve to be commenting, so yeah..

Meh Linux > Solaris =/= BSD

Linux have less bugs per lines of code than any major OS in use.

Linux code is the 'benchmark of quality http://www.pcworld.com/article/2038244/linux-code-is-the-ben...

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

#353

Post by jsudhams »

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.

I think Redhat or IBM with another product would have been great with software on top availble for both Linux and Solaris

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

#354

Post by davidgerard »

toyg wrote: post #347
davidgerard wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. It's possible IBM would have been a significantly better steward. Of course, it would have been hard to be a worse one.

> it would have been hard to be a worse one. That's a bit unfair. IBM would have probably canned hardware (and hence Solaris) much earlier than Oracle did, because they already had their own offering in that space and they were as invested as Oracle in Linux (ok, they don't have their own RedHat clone, but they are definitely big on supporting Linux). IBM was buying Sun because of Java, and planning to chuck the hard…

I do know in the mid-2000s IBM was one of the biggest resellers of Sun's hardware, possibly doing more volume than Sun did directly.

They were interested in OpenOffice ... just not sustainably, as it turned out.

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

#355

Post by dandare »

notacoward wrote: post #177
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 is the elephant's graveyard of software. I think that's a more apt description of CA, BMC, or Symantec. Places where tired old software goes to die a quiet death. What Oracle does is worse: kill software that still has plenty of life in it. I've seen them do it by acquisition, and I've seen them do it by stealing code or ideas from partners (personally, twice). So they're not so much a graveyard as a slaughterh…

I didn't know this when I joined CA. It took me 6 months to realize what I fell into - and I quit the next week. It felt like working in a hospice - most depressing few months of my professional life.

Oh and don't forget to tell the truth in your next job interview: "CA is a tremendously successful company and excellent employer, unfortunately, the role was not the right fit for me".

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

#356

Post by Annatar »

zokula wrote: post #350
unkown-unknowns wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ZFS lives on in OpenZFS, which is where FreeBSD, Linux and other platform developers and some companies exchange their modifications of ZFS. Solaris lives on in illumos and forks of it.

OpenZFS is a joke compared to the real ZFS in Solaris. OpenZFS is so far behind Solaris ZFS in features and stability.

Really? Post the output of a zpool upgrade -v on Solaris.

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

#357

Post by Annatar »

davidgerard wrote: post #328
acdha wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Zones were way cool. Solaris 10 was on the right path and I actually quite liked it. (Ran it in earnest on various SPARC and x64 kit.)

Zones are still cool, and they live on in illumos and especially SmartOS.

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

#358

Post by Annatar »

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???

But it is true. For a while, AMD based Acer Ferrari laptops were the primary development hardware for Solaris, SPARC or otherwise. It showed up on i86pc first, then it would be built on sparc during the night.

SmartOS for example only supports i86pc; there is no sparc port.

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

#359

Post by iso-8859-1 »

Keyframe wrote: post #137
shagie wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ahh yes... the days of the Software Wars. http://mshiltonj.com/software-wars/ (last update 2003) - it might be interesting to reimagine that in today's world. From the 2006 map, Oracle's assimilation of the lion's share of the "south" (MySQL, Sun, Java) and the battle between Apple and Google in the "north west". That said, consider the flip side of the heterogeneous aspect. You were unlikely to be able to run softwa…

Good points and I'm not arguing them. Things are now extremely more convenient then they were. What's missing is differences in approach to solving, well, everything. Everything was different from system to system (esp. mid 80's to mid 90's). People were still figuring out what to settle on. From a perspective of someone who likes to tinker with stuff, it was a blast. From a business and maybe usability perspective -…

The industry has grown. Linux was niche in 1992. E.g. Genode is niche today. UNIX beards don't see the pioneering because they just want UNIX.

Sounds like you can't see the wood for the trees. :P

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

#360

Post by parasubvert »

godzillabrennus wrote: post #321
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've met many oracle sales people claiming they make excess of $400k a year. They are also all alcoholics. Must be a horrible job even if they get paid well for it.

Sales people entertain clients, this doesn't imply they're alcoholics, only that eating/drinking is part of the job. That said there also are many customers that are led by functioning alcoholics and tend to select vendors they can drink with. It varies.

Enterprise software sales can be a lot of fun (I am in sales engineering, not at Oracle) as it is well paid and ultimately about enabling customer successes. But I have to look myself in the mirror at night, and can only sell something I believe in - things like open source, or cloud computing benefits, etc. Oracle database used to be worth believing in maybe 10 years ago: boring but valueable software. But these days the company is such a blight on the industry that it would be hard to work there.

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