Oracle Has Laid Off All Solaris Tech Staff

Megalith

Megalith

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Meshed Insight’s Simon Phipps has revealed that the entire Solaris team has been gutted, suggesting that Oracle has finally killed Sun Microsystems. Rumors of the core talent of the Solaris and SPARC team being laid off began early this year, and Phipps describes this as a classic Oracle “silent EOL.”

Instead of understanding the real failures at Sun – taking too long to open Solaris and attempting a marketing-led approach in 2000-2002 instead of Sun’s traditional engineering-led approach – Ellison blamed the man who was landed with the task of rescuing whatever he could from the smoldering ruins left by McNealy, Zander, Tolliver and their clan and their complacent failure. Ellison never understood the pioneering approach Schwartz was taking, instead sneering at blogging and calling all the work-in-progress “science projects” while dismantling the partner channels and alienating the open source community.
 
The only well known computer company more elitist and a worse value for the money than Apple was Sun. I shed no tears.
 
EODetroit said:
The only well known computer company more elitist and a worse value for the money than Apple was Sun. I shed no tears.
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Did / Do you like the SPARC microprocessor? :'( I'll miss it

 
Boy I remember when they announced the new servers after they acquired Sun at Oracle open world. Pricing and maintenance was high, then competition from X86 started to become viable at much lower costs for many customers... Milked it for what they could, as they focus on pushing cloud these days.. so selling servers is not in the business plan anymore. Oracle cloud based computing staffed with Infosys, Tata, and Oracle offshore.. even less opportunities for 'muricans
 
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As a former support / admin of Solaris based Gauntlet firewalls, I shall not shed a tear. I have no idea how Sun made any money after 2004-ish, by then RHEL and open source was eating their lunch.

And their UltraSparc hardware was always obscenely overpriced.

To Sun, I say "init 0" and farewell into the eternal slumber.
 
I'm not qualified in this, but I think "Cloud" is a horrible thing for somebody sitting at her desk. Multiply that times a million for enterprise situations? I just don't see it being worthwhile. The security vulnerabilities are immense. The bad press will always cause the businesses hugely.
 
The hardware was doomed when Intel finally got a foothold in the server market. The software/OS was however my favorite (for its tune), I'll miss it. They really sold at a great time, if they waited they wouldn't of got as much.
 
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BloodyIron said:
If it wasn't for open ZFS we would still be fucked for bit rot. FYI open ZFS came from open Solaris.
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It really is shocking how few know of ZFS. My coworkers received ReFS like it was a delivery from whatever deity they prayed to and were all unaware of and shocked when I showed them comparisons of it to the LONG existing ZFS.

Incontentia Buttocks said:
Ellison is truly a giant douche canoe.
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Amen to that. Java founder James Gosling blog post about leaving Oracle three months after the acquisition summed it up for me back in 2010:

"I've spent an awful lot of time reading these [blog and other] messages and answering as many as I could. Between all this and spending quality time with my lawyer, resigning has been a full-time job (before I quit, several friends said I'd need a lawyer because 'this is Oracle we're talking about' ... sadly, they were right)."


BreezeDM said:
So Oracle paid $7.4 billion for what exactly?
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To attempt a $600 million profit by suing Google? That's about the only thing I can come up with considering they shit on everything else they got out of Sun to the benefit of many whom took their work and walked out the door (LibreOffice and MariaDB).
 
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Seems like Oracle ruins everything they touch.

They've basically killed OOo at this point too, after giving it (?) to Apache, who reportedly is going to quit releasing updates. Everyone's moved to LibreOffice.

Then there's MySQL which people are leaving for MariaDB.

The only other Oracle thing I've used is VirtualBox, and it's a buggy unreliable mess.
 
zero2dash said:
Seems like Oracle ruins everything they touch.

They've basically killed OOo at this point too, after giving it (?) to Apache, who reportedly is going to quit releasing updates. Everyone's moved to LibreOffice.

Then there's MySQL which people are leaving for MariaDB.

The only other Oracle thing I've used is VirtualBox, and it's a buggy unreliable mess.
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it's like their name is there for irony or something.
 
Trimlock said:
The hardware was doomed when Intel finally got a foothold in the server market. The software/OS was however my favorite (for its tune), I'll miss it. They really sold at a great time, if they waited they wouldn't of got as much.
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That's interesting you like the OS... I know Solaris falls outside of the Linux category, but even using BSD I don't feel as lost as I do on Solaris. There are just so many commands that are completely different and / or located in a really odd location making it quite difficult to figure out without having to resort to a manual or the internet every 5 seconds. Hardware wise I definitely have no love for SPARC, but I've been using x86 since the beginning. the IPC doesn't seem like it was there so the only thing that SPARC was winning at was core count and handling large databases or web traffic since you could scale the parallel processing to make up for it. So I can understand that if you're in that specific boat you probably had a ton of their systems, but it seems like any other software was single threaded so IPC was paramount to getting performance out of it.


zero2dash I've used VirtualBox before and I liked what it had going for it. The biggest selling point was the 3d virtualization capabilities that would allow hardware acceleration inside of a VM. I'm guessing they haven't done much with it in the past few years then which would be sad to see. OOo was never that good IMO, and I've certainly heard people complain about MySQL and how it basically has to scaling and poor performance compared to something like Oracle. According to a site I found it sounds like MariaDB still has a long ways to unseat MySQL, but I wouldn't be surprised if it does either.

This is an interesting site as they estimate that Oracle is still #1:

https://db-engines.com/en/ranking

MySQL instance rank #2, and MSSQL is #3. Hard to say if their methodology is actually sound because obviously MySQL isn't making them much money, so basically if you want to turn a profit it's really still Oracle vs MS.
 
bman212121 said:
That's interesting you like the OS... I know Solaris falls outside of the Linux category, but even using BSD I don't feel as lost as I do on Solaris. There are just so many commands that are completely different and / or located in a really odd location making it quite difficult to figure out without having to resort to a manual or the internet every 5 seconds. Hardware wise I definitely have no love for SPARC, but I've been using x86 since the beginning. the IPC doesn't seem like it was there so the only thing that SPARC was winning at was core count and handling large databases or web traffic since you could scale the parallel processing to make up for it. So I can understand that if you're in that specific boat you probably had a ton of their systems, but it seems like any other software was single threaded so IPC was paramount to getting performance out of it.
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For its time the OS was fairly powerful, in someways it was not only very powerful for current server solutions it was greate for future servers as well. After Sun sold, the OS never advanced, they kept it around for all the contracts that they had, like the DOD.

The SPARC was good, but after its initial success it didn't evolve very much. We had great plug and play systems that were easily expandable, Sun's stupid idea was to continue to sell at crazy prices even when the competition made them look silly.
 
I used to develop software for Solaris many years ago (15+?). I was kind of surprised that it was still around.
 
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