Creator of ZFS, Jeff Bonwick, leaves Oracle

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.

That's too bad. ZFS (along with crossbow) is one of the best things in Solaris/OpenSolaris.<p>I was about to say Oracle has a serious human resources problem, but I noticed that, maybe, the problem is in calling humans "resources".

"Your ideas will go further if you don't insist on going with them."<p>Good luck Jeff Bonwick.

It's good to see something positive coming out of the Sun acquisition: a whole crop of very interesting startups are probably being founded right now.

I'm really uncertain now of the future of Illumos and ZFS. I hope there's more push behind these projects as well as BTRFS. Will be interesting to see where this goes.

His Nov.2009 blog entry on ZFS data deduplication is a pretty good primer:<p><a href="http://blogs.sun.com/bonwick/en_US/entry/zfs_dedup" rel="nofollow">http://blogs.sun.com/bonwick/en_US/entry/zfs_dedup</a><p>P.S. also, the 2008 pics with Linus. I suppose there is no further story to go with those ...

Wow, major talent leakage. Whoever running a startup right now, if there's a need for low-level programming talents, better snatch these guys.

Hmm I was hoping he would go work for Apple on a new filesystem to replace HFS+... oh well.<p>Will be interesting to see what his startup is working on when they come out of stealth mode.

Oracle's strategy seems to be:<p>(1) Don't bother investing too much in R&#38;D or figuring out the next big technology, just buy companies that are alread profitable (to name a few: Sun, BEA, Hyperion, Sieble, Innobase, PeopleSoft...).<p>(2) Immediately execute massive layoffs to increase profits even more. And suck every dollar possible out of the business for a couple years.<p>(3) After a while, the profits will start decreasing, but slowly enough (due to market inertia) that they have time to rinse and repeat. Go back to step 1.<p>Sometimes, Oracle will get lucky and be able to keep running a business good enough that the profits will somewhat be stable enough for years.

during recent years Sun was like an aircraft carrier steered by (actually with all the systems controlled by) a bunch of monkeys - a lot of noise and jerking right an left. When finally it was grounded and started to sink, its crew was saved by another ship.<p>Why it so surprising that ones who grounded the carrier didn't get to steer the rescuing ship?

I don't know how much of the oracle's academic initiative was a success. From the likes of what is being happening to Sun's Academic Initiative to promote university grad students to take the certification exams such as SCJP now called Oracle certified java programmer. Sun has offered its student members the certification exam for 40 $ which has been recently dropped by oracle making it 40% of the voucher fee which implies 40% of 150 around 90$. The 40% discount voucher is also for a limited period which will be done for good this December. I seriously doubt oracle's contribution towards opensource too.