I'm very saddened by what happens with what is left of Sun.<p>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.<p>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.
That's a lot of very highly skilled staff which they won't be able to reassemble for another product or project for years. Those people will scatter to the winds now. It's a shame they lacked the imagination to make them do something new.<p>But then Oracle doesn't seem to have the organizational capability to start major new successful product lines anymore. They grow through acquisition.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: if Oracle acquires your company GET OUT. Do not wait, bail out immediately.<p>Oracle is expert at slowly bleeding teams while suppressing pay to milk products for all they’re worth. They are developer-hostile (including to employees). It is career death.<p>If Oracle acquires a partner you depend on, you have 12-24 months to find an alternative before they cut your legs out from under you and steal every last drop of profit from the relationship you have with your customers.<p>Don’t believe any promises to the contrary. Oracle promised ours would be different. They gave us pay raises to stick through the transition. It was all a ruse. Once we were in the jaws of the machine stack ranking took over, raises and bonuses were crap, and a lot of architecture astronaut garbage was rained down from above. They increased the price of our product by two orders of magnitude which lead to massive revenue gains. They simultaneously shrunk the team and claimed there was no money for bonuses or equipment. Developers have a 5-year laptop replacement policy.<p>I repeat: get out!
Just FOUR DAYS AGO, someone posted:<p>>>... most of the recent innovations in Solaris's core technologies (DTrace, ZFS, Zones, etc) have all happened in illumos.<p>> As a core Solaris dev at Oracle, I can tell you that's not true. I just can't prove it to you. :-(<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15125355" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15125355</a>
<i>sigh</i><p>Sad to see the loss of diversity in the operating system space. Thank you SunOS & Solaris for all the goodies over the years - Zones, ZFS, NFS, AutoFS, dtrace, etc.
I wonder if the poor guy from Sun with the Worst Job in the World was hired by Oracle and still has his terrible job?<p><a href="http://eng.umd.edu/~blj/funny/worst-job.html" rel="nofollow">http://eng.umd.edu/~blj/funny/worst-job.html</a>
Will some illumos related projects be interested in those people?<p>And on related note, I suppose Oracle won't open their diverged Solaris even if they plan to shut it down? In the past, Sun also planned to open their Sun studio and C/C++ compiler. That never happened because of Oracle.
I remember my college days having to use various Sun/Unix machines and the delete key was invariably misconfigured particularly with vi or some other editor. I had to figure it out myself how to fix this. I thought it was part of some hazing ritual until I saw the same shit on a machine at my new job. Thankfully with the advent of free software distributions, these little details things started working out of the box.
You need billions and billions of dollars to keep such project alive. And even then if you cant attract the right amount of interest you are doomed. It is bloody expensive to keep these people employed and i guess oracle is not competent enough to manage these resources. It is sad to see solaris go but this is what was about to happen with any proprietary technology with a limited stream of revenue. I mean i do not think customers cared that much about what they run on as long as their apps and dbs were fine. Since windows and linux are way cheaper it was a matter of time.
Honestly the fact that this can happen seems like a better reason to stay away from proprietary software than any other reason. Even software that is open source but owned by some company.<p>On a not completely unrelated note, there was something I read in the Kubernetes Steering Committee bootstrapping process that sounds really logical in the context of this news.<p>In Kubernetes Steering Committee, there will be no more than 33% membership from any given company. So if Docker, and CoreOS, and Weave, and Google, and Microsoft, and Amazon all come to the table and somehow get equal representation, which seems possible given how I understand the voting process, ... that's great, and no one company can "silent EOL" the product of Kubernetes.<p>And even if one of those companies is significantly over-represented within the list of members of standing that will vote for the Steering Committee members, and the second of those companies significantly eclipses any of the remaining nominees, the steering committee will <i>still</i> probably be in the hands of at least 4 companies.<p>I'm really quite miffed about a few well-liked community driven things, suddenly getting shut down by ownership lately. Not going to name any names, but in meetings to determine our organization's future direction in software, it's going to have to come to everyone's attention that in general overall momentum is a whole lot more important than corporate backing.
When will Oracle turn off the marketing for Solaris.[1]<p>[1] <a href="https://www.oracle.com/solaris/solaris11/index.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.oracle.com/solaris/solaris11/index.html</a>
RIP Solaris.<p>We shall remember Solaris for all the good things that came out of it!<p>Highlights
ZFS one of the best file systems including copy on write snapshot functionality.<p>Solaris zones. Proper containers before Linux and LXC/Docker existed.<p>Dtrace for application and kernel performance.<p>And the SUN hardware workstations and servers that Solaris powered. Still remembers watching 4th of July fireworks being live streamed remotely on a Sun workstation using Solaris.
@xenadu02,<p>I feel the same way as a client. Everything I've used that they've purchased has turned out for the worse. Be it neglect or price increases the promises always exceed what's actually delivered.<p>Moreover they're transparent about their desire to lock you in and then press that to their advantage.<p>I actively avoid few companies but they're at the top of the list.<p>I came her to reminisce about the beauty of Solaris from a long time ago and your comment struck a nerve.
Sad news all over industry. Red Hat creating huge mess throughout linux with systemd for years. Solaris killed. Thankfully zfs continues living trough FreeBSD. MariaDB is forked at the last moment. Some of my work depends on VirtualBox.<p>Quote from American Gods:
“A single product manufactured by a single company for a single global market. Spicy, medium, or chunky! They get a choice, of course! OF COURSE! But they are buying salsa.”
I have been thinking of a server vendor for startups company like Sun was trying to do with Schwartz as CEO. Ideally it would use local server manufacturing instead of Chinese ODMs. Of course, not every startup is interested, but 1TB+ RAM and fast SSDs might be attractive to some of them like GitLab.
I was present for training at Informix headquarters in Menlo Park when it was announced that IBM purchased the company (I believe around 1999 and 2000). I can still recall the deathly pallor of the trainer as well as the shocked silence of the employees. A couple months later I barely located the new Informix webpage on IBM.com; it advertised for DB2.
More details on this here:
<a href="https://www.infoq.com/news/2017/09/solaris-sunsets" rel="nofollow">https://www.infoq.com/news/2017/09/solaris-sunsets</a>
All Ultrasparc silicon engineers were already laid off, this is seldom a big news per se.<p>I just wish google bought Sun for its Java and mysql, personally I do not want to have anything to do with Oracle as much as tech goes.
I used to love working with E10k/E15k boxes back in the day. X86 just couldn’t compete with 128 CPU SPARC systems. It was amazing! Sad to see Solaris go.<p><3 ZFS
<3 dtrace
Does anybody know how many people were laid off? I am interested to know to figure out how many people you need to make a modern operating system these days.