This is sad... They used to be a damned good company with good techies.
...but absolutely terrible leadership that couldn't figure out where they wanted to go, or how to get there and ended up going nowhere.
The same applies to Commodore.
Today Was The Last Day of Sun Microsystems
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Re: Today Was The Last Day of Sun Microsystems
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
And don't forget to mention MySQL. I just hope they'll keep it all alive or my apps are screwed!
Yes but they didn't build it. They bought it. Maybe to sweeten the deal for a buyer. MySql might not have sold to Oracle directly?
Correction, Sun might not have sold to Oracle directly if they didn't have MySQL on board...
Like this Oracle gets a very large number of extra contacts in the corporate database world.
Re: Today Was The Last Day of Sun Microsystems
#43So long and thanks for all the fish
Re: Today Was The Last Day of Sun Microsystems
#44Sun is gone, but they left behind an amazing collection of Open Source Software: Java, OpenSolaris, OpenSPARC, VirtualBox. I'll miss Sun and the amazing people I knew there.
And don't forget to mention MySQL. I just hope they'll keep it all alive or my apps are screwed!
So the world's third most popular database system acquires the second. So much for competition!
http://www.mysql.com/why-mysql/marketshare/
Re: Today Was The Last Day of Sun Microsystems
#45What will become of SPARC?
Re: Today Was The Last Day of Sun Microsystems
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
You think Java will be discontinued?
I doubt it because IBM has too much skin in the game. Few people are aware, but IBM produces its own JDK: https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/java/jdk/
BEA has its own JVM as well, and guess who bought BEA?
http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/jrockit/index.html
By the way, I think JRockIt is the best JVM out there for server-side deployments. I've used both JRockIt and Sun's JVM on EC2, and JRockIt has much better memory management.
Re: Today Was The Last Day of Sun Microsystems
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
I doubt it because IBM has too much skin in the game. Few people are aware, but IBM produces its own JDK: https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/java/jdk/
For that matter, the Apache Software Foundation has a Java implementation called 'Harmony', although I'm not sure they're allowed to call it Java.
That is a sadly long and storied history, which Stephen Colebourne describes best:
http://www.jroller.com/scolebourne/entry/sun_apache_ip_in_pi...
There is some hope that the legal shenanigans will stop once ORCL finishes taking ownership of JAVA.
Re: Today Was The Last Day of Sun Microsystems
#48Sun is gone, but they left behind an amazing collection of Open Source Software: Java, OpenSolaris, OpenSPARC, VirtualBox. I'll miss Sun and the amazing people I knew there.
You forgot Open Office which they bought and opened up and which has changed the competitive landscape in many ways. I'm struck by the number of non-geeks I know who use it daily. SPARC was a great architecture, and the Sun workstations of yesteryear were where a lot of cutting edge research was done... It'll be interesting to see how many more OpenSolaris features Darwin picks up (ZFS?). It has dtrace already.
I use Open Office EVERY DAY. Let me say this.... succinctly:
OpenOffice the single worst piece of open source software available in any official repository. It is buggy, unfriendly, bloated, unreliable, and generally behaves in manners that do not make any sense. Crash and burn one boot, load fine the next.
Re: Today Was The Last Day of Sun Microsystems
#49Sun is gone, but they left behind an amazing collection of Open Source Software: Java, OpenSolaris, OpenSPARC, VirtualBox. I'll miss Sun and the amazing people I knew there.
Java never felt "new" to me: rather unnecessarily bloated and slow and not offering enough high-level language features to justify the performance penalty over C. Managing memory in C never felt "hard" and when I needed something for quick hacking I could use VB and/or Delphi. Funny, but in many ways Visual Basic has been far superior RAD tool for enterprise SQL pushing. Yes, it was garbage-collected, ran in its own…
In mid/late 90s I was working at MIT's university network (Athena) and my memory is similar, but different from yours. Perhaps because we weren't a Windows shop. I did actually work on a dual-boot x86 box sometimes, but the dual OSes were Linux and BSD.
We were still doing everything in C, but the cool kids I listened too were saying skip C++ if you want something OO but C-like and go straight to Java. So when I saw Per Bothner's Scheme-to-JVM compiler (Kawa) I knew my next implementation of BRL should use it.
What surprised me was the number of people at MIT who said, "Yuck, Scheme" when I was pushing it as the best syntax for web development (this after 12 years of me ignoring it in favor of C). I think a lot of people did not have a good experience going through 6.001 (SICP), even though other people, like me, loved it. I hate to say it, but what really suppressed the widespread adoption of Lisps may have been SICP.
Re: Today Was The Last Day of Sun Microsystems
#50can't help but feel down. i really enjoy developing in java :(
Java was the reason for Oracle to take over Sun (OK, also the hardware). Since Oracles commitment to open source is, "yeah, sure, Oracle will run on Linux. ONE version of ONE distro, but, yeah, Linux", this is more likely than ever to trigger a community-fork of Java, backed by IBM.
Oracle runs on both RHEL (and Oracle's crappy respin) and SLES. Albeit the installer is broken and packages are only provided for Express.