Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Creator of ZFS, Jeff Bonwick, leaves Oracle

blogs.sun.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–69 of 69 posts

Re: Creator of ZFS, Jeff Bonwick, leaves Oracle

#61

Post by Goladus »

rbanffy wrote: post #56
Goladus wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Charging more for Solaris support and providing less of it, for starters.

And thus making it compete with a product that's freely available. I don't think that will work. It would work if Solaris was something people really desired. Right now, it's not. People are very happy with Linux and need some incentive to move to Solaris. Paying more is not a good one.

There are existing businesses who bet on Solaris and have it widely deployed. Moving to Linux may not be trivial. That is, it may not be beyond the FYO point. [1]

The IBM AS400 isn't something that people really desire, but there are a lot of businesses that rely on it and IBM still gets paid to support mainframes.

[1] http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc/2004/08/28/the-economics-of-soft...

Re: Creator of ZFS, Jeff Bonwick, leaves Oracle

#62

Post by iuyfgtrghjk »

rbanffy wrote: post #57
earl wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even G often seems to perform quite poorly. Viz Dodgeball / 4square. Thoroughly alienating Dennis Crowley seems like an enormous mistake. Or Paul Buchheit. Or the Delicious guy who worked at G but didn't find it a welcoming environment. If they were serious about social, they'd do whatever it takes to keep people like Joshua who've built successful social products. I'm coming around to Zuckerberg's opinion that socia…

> Or the Delicious guy who worked at G This comes across very weird... I know... Wrong website for jokes like these. Couldn't help.

There's a Joel Spolsky podcast about Qt (pronounced cute) where he talks about the cute guy giving the talk - to the confused embarrassment of the other speakers.

Re: Creator of ZFS, Jeff Bonwick, leaves Oracle

#63

Post by etherael »

etherael wrote: post #5

Did 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.

So from the thread below it sounds like Oracle actually acquired Sun primarily for their customer base alone, a large pool of cashed up blue chips for Oracle's sales force to feast on. The engineering culture and aptitude at Sun would from this strategy just be considered overhead, thus the mass exodus of talent. So perishes a once mighty titan.

Still, will be interesting to see what happens with the seeds flung off from this tempest.

Re: Creator of ZFS, Jeff Bonwick, leaves Oracle

#64

Post by rbanffy »

Goladus wrote: post #61
rbanffy wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And thus making it compete with a product that's freely available. I don't think that will work. It would work if Solaris was something people really desired. Right now, it's not. People are very happy with Linux and need some incentive to move to Solaris. Paying more is not a good one.

There are existing businesses who bet on Solaris and have it widely deployed. Moving to Linux may not be trivial. That is, it may not be beyond the FYO point. [1] The IBM AS400 isn't something that people really desire, but there are a lot of businesses that rely on it and IBM still gets paid to support mainframes. [1] http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc/2004/08/28/the-economics-of-soft...

> The IBM AS400 isn't something that people really desire

I liked OS/400, you insensitive clod. If I come across a 5250, I'll buy it immediately.

Not sure what I'll connect it to.

But, going back to Solaris and OpenSolaris, it's easy to switch a deployment to "legacy mode". Unix machines are Unix machines and it's not nearly as difficult to move from AIX/HP-UX/Solaris/IRIX to Linux as it would be to move from MVS, unless your binaries insist on running only under Solaris. Legacy mode means no new deployments and no expansion unless justified. It's slow death.

True, in the case of very proprietary platforms (like z and iSeries boxes) it takes very long, but it's death nevertheless.

In order to be kept alive, the Solaris boxes have to be able to perform tricks Linux boxes can't and, to a large extent, this is not the case.

Re: Creator of ZFS, Jeff Bonwick, leaves Oracle

#65

Post by [deleted] »

hga wrote: post #59
rbanffy wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And thus making it compete with a product that's freely available. I don't think that will work. It would work if Solaris was something people really desired. Right now, it's not. People are very happy with Linux and need some incentive to move to Solaris. Paying more is not a good one.

And don't forget that no-longer-OpenSolaris is still freely available ... and might even become something now that it's free of the dead hand of Sun (at least for it being a truly "open" project). I for one am not happy with Linux and would love to run Open/whateverSolaris ... if it has serious driver support. That's been the Achilles heal of x86 Solaris for more than a decade (e.g. something I directly experienced i…

[deleted]

Re: Creator of ZFS, Jeff Bonwick, leaves Oracle

#66

Post by wrs »

rbanffy wrote: post #56
Goladus wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Charging more for Solaris support and providing less of it, for starters.

And thus making it compete with a product that's freely available. I don't think that will work. It would work if Solaris was something people really desired. Right now, it's not. People are very happy with Linux and need some incentive to move to Solaris. Paying more is not a good one.

You are overgeneralizing. Sun's (and Oracle's) main customer base are "people" who use Solaris/Oracle to manage their millions of customers and billions of dollars. They don't want to mess with it, they want support, and will pay for it. The question is, "how much?" -- and Oracle is very good at getting a profitable answer to that question.

Re: Creator of ZFS, Jeff Bonwick, leaves Oracle

#67

Post by Goladus »

rbanffy wrote: post #64
Goladus wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are existing businesses who bet on Solaris and have it widely deployed. Moving to Linux may not be trivial. That is, it may not be beyond the FYO point. [1] The IBM AS400 isn't something that people really desire, but there are a lot of businesses that rely on it and IBM still gets paid to support mainframes. [1] http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc/2004/08/28/the-economics-of-soft...

> The IBM AS400 isn't something that people really desire I liked OS/400, you insensitive clod. If I come across a 5250, I'll buy it immediately. Not sure what I'll connect it to. But, going back to Solaris and OpenSolaris, it's easy to switch a deployment to "legacy mode". Unix machines are Unix machines and it's not nearly as difficult to move from AIX/HP-UX/Solaris/IRIX to Linux as it would be to move from MVS, un…

I'm sure that moving off iSeries, etc. is a much more significant proposition than moving off of Solaris. But the barrier isn't zero. For an installation of any significant size it's almost certainly not going to be as simple as switching a deployment to legacy mode. You've got shell scripts to port, different configurations for core features like kickstart, firewalls, different package management. If you made an "environment standardization" bet on Solaris 10, you've got barriers to overcome.

But I'm not saying that Solaris is going to live. Just that, as someone who uses Solaris 10, Oracle seems to be tightening up. I think that they don't really care that much about Solaris and are just going to squeeze it dry. I'm far more worried what they're going to do with Java.

> In order to be kept alive, the Solaris boxes have to be able to perform tricks Linux boxes can't and, to a large extent, this is not the case.

True, but keep in mind that their competitors are often limited to "enterprise" distributions like RHEL and Ubuntu Server.

Re: Creator of ZFS, Jeff Bonwick, leaves Oracle

#68

Post by loewenskind »

etherael wrote: post #19
melling wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Of that I have no doubt, but what I originally thought they would do; use their business resources mixed with Sun's engineering resources, does not appear to be their plan at all. They seem to be losing all of the best Sun engineering talent and do not seem at all concerned about about that fact. That leads me not to conclude they are failing at what I originally thought they were doing, but succeeding at something e…

Sun had more copyrights than anyone except IBM. I suspect that's the reason. And it could have even been a defensive thing. Sun was obviously failing badly. If they didn't buy Sun someone else eventually would and then that company could almost certainly start suing oracle over something.

Re: Creator of ZFS, Jeff Bonwick, leaves Oracle

#69

Post by robin_reala »

gizmomagico wrote: post #27
robin_reala wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every corporation thinks of its employees in a dollars and cents kind of way. Reminds me of my brother’s old company ( http://www.freud.com/ ). Their website says: We employ humans, not resources. Job opportunities, contact the HR manager.

Was the fun part that they suggested contacting the Human Resources manager?

Well yes, that was the point I was making :)
Post reply on HN