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James Gosling Grades Oracle's Handling of Sun's Tech
snydeq writes "With the four-year anniversary of Oracle's Sun Microsystems acquisition looming, InfoWorld reached out to Java founder James Gosling to rate how Oracle has done in shepherding Sun technology. Gosling gives Oracle eyebrow-raising grades, lauding Oracle's handling of Java, despite his past acrimony toward Oracle over Java (remember those T-shirts?), and giving Oracle a flat-out failing grade on what has become of Solaris OS."
Even though it's since transitioned to Apache, Oracle still deserves to be graded on their handling of OO.o.
While I applaud James for his contribution to Java, I am afraid he's of no consequence to its direction now.
It would have been better if he proposed some kind of direction Oracle should have taken with Java.
To know Oracle is to hate Oracle.
An Oracle Field Engineer shared the secret meaning for the name, "oracle".
One
Rich
Arse
Called
Larry
Ellison
Google probably would have made a better offer initially if they had reason to suspect how things were going to play out with oracle. Although I'm sure that everybody realized as soon as Oracle had made an offer for Sun that Google would have been a far better choice than Oracle for Sun's IP, I don't think anyone else expected just how colossally bad Oracle was going to be with it.
I have mixed feelings about the idea of MS being a better choice.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Are three very different things. Java in the server and in the client is alive and very very much healthy. Ugly and slow applets in the browser thankfully are almost dead — Because HTML5 delivered way better. But applets dying off does not in any way mean Java is any less healthy!
I think it's too early to tell, as James Gosling just lacks the experience most people are used to from those like him — there's still a lot left for him to learn from his father, industry veteran Jim Goose. Once his father retires, though, I think James will get to chance to really spread his wings, and we'll probably see some very good ideas of his take flight. For now, though, I think he's just a bit green around the beak.
Thank you, Edward Snowden.
"Arguments from authority are worthless." —Carl Sagan
That MySQL's space was/is being transferred to MariaDB, instead of just dying a relatively quick death.
Why bother with MySQL if you can just migrate over to PostgreSQL? Yes, of course, some of the weirdest bits won't work, and errors will now (for a change!) actually interrupt your work instead of silently losing information. But it seemed like a good way to kill that ugly beast!
Dhu, The main usage of Java is on the server side, where it's fairly popular. Java skils is still the most sought after skill when it comes to developers. There are a few popular desktop applications written in Java, Minecraft comes to mind :) And of course we have the slightly modified version of Java that powers every Android application. So Java is still around and kicking.....
As to the big Reds handling of Java, out of the gate it was pretty bad in it's interactions with the Java community. Not surprising as they axed most of the folks that where doing that part back at Sun...... But they actually got better with interacting with the Java community lately, could improve more but still kinda on the right track.
SPARC has seen more advances in the 4 years under ORACLE then in the previous 15 years under Sun. I actually enjoy reading about their tech every now and then. But unless they open up Solaris again to attract the open source community the only thing that keeps it alive is backwards compatibility of legacy software.
is totally merited. Solaris was and still is brilliant, one of the best operating systems ever made. The scalability and reliability are legendary. I do not know of any OS that can run on a tiny PC AND on a big-mama cluster with exactly the same code. Solaris is another example of how mergers and corporate acquisitions boil down, most of the time, to sheer destruction of capital. Observed that with tiny companies and start-ups as well as with mega-mergers & acquisitions. Solaris is dead, and I concur with Gosling: I weep.
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
ZFS is on the right path but it still isn't quite where it needs to be. For example I can't tell it not to reallocate blocks on write so I can't force overwrites of sensitive data -- which is required in several industries that Sun used to be strong in. Someone in ZFS land needs to create an ioctl/fctl to fix that. The boot system also needs to be clear if it is trying to mount a ZFS or UFS disk since that is a bit tricky when the disk looks like both. They should also fix the fsck stub so it knows about ZFS and have a /usr/lib/zfs/fsck even if it is just a link to zfs status.
How is SMF better than init? They even bothered to break init so you can't pull SMF out the system if you don't want it. They now link init and smf to a number of libraries that have horrible security records. Do you want the main process in your system linking in libraries that need security updates on a monthly basis?
I know how SMF is worse, it is slower to start up, it is indeterminate in its start up state and order, it keeps its data in unauditable binary files an it takes far longer to shut down. It also isn't very good at what init was, which was making sure programs always ran. Solaris 11.1 turns off auditing, then syslog before killing off all user processes which means you have no idea what a rogue process did when it was told the system is shutting down. That appears to be a result of someone at Oracle deciding all the disks need to be mounted before starting syslog, which requires lots of extra crud to be running like NFS, RPC and whatever YP is called this decade and it appears that stuff is all trusted to shut down cleanly without the need of logging. At least with init, you could have two different syslog entries for the different run levels so you could make sure everything was logged and audited.
The number of bugs in Solaris 10 is far worse than Solaris 9. You can't build a light weight Solaris 10 or 11 system. Under 10, you could build a Solaris 9 container which would only run a bare number of processes but not any more since that feature was pulled out of 11. I have a number of Solaris 9 systems that are running less than a dozen packages but I'm one of the people who feel that if there isn't any unneeded software on a system, hackers can't use it hack the system.
Solaris 11 also has managed to break decades of sanity of using ifconfig to build network stacks. Now there are other tools that do part of the job and then can allow ificonfig to finish the job.
At least with Solaris 11.1 they created a tool to create smf xml files which means they are now no longer hand crafted which means a tool can be written to turn them back into rc.X scripts and they can be put back where they belong. Now if I could just remove svc.* without installing a fake to keep the contract open, I would be back up to the integrity level of a Solaris 9 system.
Where is the grade for VirtualBox. As opposed to the others on the list, I would give them an A+ for their stewardship of VirtualBox so far. They have released regular updates and bugfixes. I have run into zero problems running Linux, FreeBSD, and Windows in VMs. The UI has gradually improved. The project is still open source, and they actually provide binaries for every major OS.
While Solaris itself is no longer relevant outside of some enterprise niches, it has an actively-developed OSS fork named "illumos", developed by former-Sun hackers working at several different private companies. There are several distributions -- I use SmartOS in particular, and OmniTI's OmniOS is also excellent.
It is still there as an optional item in the installer, not selected by default (because that is the way it should be).
Prediction for end of Universe #42: Fencepost error in Quantum_bogosort.cpp
I have had to convert all my Solaris systems to Linux. I weep'.
What has he done - gone w/ Debian? Since Red Hat seems to have stopped supporting the SPARC ages ago, and I'm assuming that Gosling's Solaris systems are SPARCstations or similar. Which makes me wonder - couldn't he have gone w/ OpenIndiana or Schillix? Especially since it seems to have been more recent? I'm assuming that the BSDs were not an option, since he probably wants an SVR4 based Unix.
Sometimes reliability is more important then having a pretty UI.
And that's where Java really shines... ah no, wait...
It reliably dumps a longer stack trace than my scrollback can handle, anyway.
I know that you have such requirements forced on you by others, but with respect that one is quite ridiculous and appears to be a rule from tape or other removable storage or disk disposal that has been badly misapplied to filesystems possibly by accident or teenager writing Quality Assurance rules. If someone gets to your drives at a block level via root on your system or by physical access to the server you are pretty well fucked for a dozen reasons anyway.
IMHO overwrites are something to be done when media is about to leave a "secure" area so not something a filesystem, even one like ZFS, should be bothered about.
This comment, and the other 3 that replied to it before me, show a huge lack of knowledge or care. Oracle isn't very transparent, but it only takes a small amount of effort to see that neither MySQL or VirtualBox are in danger of perishing. There are many people who left Oracle/Sun/MySQL for Percona and MariaDB/SkySQL, but most of those people left for their own reasons and *many* left before and Sun or Oracle influence was upon them.
I get to see it from the inside, and MySQL is growing and has more market share than either of the other competitors. The newest developments are really spectacular improvements. I get to see the walled garden from the inside, and it's anything but dying, it is in better shape as a product than it has ever been. Oracle is anything but stupid and doesn't have a track record of making stupid decisions with their products, which can't be said for some companies. Oracle is putting a lot of resources into MySQL to make it even better.
VirtualBox is a fairly decent team and they are not just working on VirtualBox, there is a reason it continues to be developed and the technology doesn't have a dead end to it.
I think that most of the comments I've read are uneducated and purely people spouting off uninformed opinions mixed with conjecture and hyperbole. The people I work with are the brightest group of people I've ever had the privilege of working with, there are some really notable folks that work on MySQL and you wouldn't know it unless you paid attention to the blogosphere.
AFAIK authors had to fork and rename it to "Jenkins" after Oracle filed for trademark for original name "Hudson".
I hate Oracle with passion, although they seem to be doing OK job with Java.
--Coder
Maybe the guts of it aren't. To a developer though, Dalvik is 95% Java.
An outdated hack? That sounds mean... SWT was great at the time when it was needed. It is the reason why Eclipse never felt like a bloated, slow memory hog, in comparison to other Java applications of similar scope, like Netbeans. With SWT you had native, memory efficient UI components, whereas AWT/Swing duplicated everything into inefficient Java heap memory with slow Java2D rendering. It is true that now, with all the performance improvements Java and Swing have received, you barely notice a difference, so SWT isn't as essential as it used to be, but I still think it has the nicer API. Today I would probably use JavaFX
as many people do - get a copy of an app inspector - I recommend Addons Detector - and use it to see what dev tools were used for build the apps on your phone. You'll be surprised to see just how many were built with the NDK. All the fast and responsive games are at least.
> If your server handles anything worth actual money, OpenBSD on Sparc64 is the way to go.
You're funny.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Personal opinion of course.
We have SPARC gear along with Solaris 10. When we wanted to upgrade the hardware from the T2000's, the cost for Oracle licenses went through the roof. So we stuck with T2000's (still have them). It kept us from purchasing new Sun hardware. No new hardware, no new business for Sun.
After much investigation, we went with Dell hardware and Redhat and have been spinning up Redhat VM's right and left. For the mission critical stuff we're using HP gear and HP-UX. We've been spinning up Informix, MySQL, and PostGreSQL in place of Oracle as well.
[John]
Shit better not happen!
You're absolutely correct. We are a Solaris shop transitioning out to Linux on VMs. Solaris is wonderfully stable and reliable and Sun supported it well. We liked it a lot. But it was already becoming unaffordable before Oracle took them over and now you simply can't afford it, no matter how pretty it is. We won't be buying any more SPARC hardware, ever.
So what can you program in that those execs will give you a green light for? I mean they really don't make good decisions off of their choices. They really just pick what they think they like.
PHP/Python/Ruby etc... It is those nasty open source freeware programs that may be out of style in a few year, we don't want to use those. (and they don't seem to have those mythical enterprise features that they want, but yet never tell us what they are)
C/C++ Too cumbersome to code in, doesn't allow for Rapid Development
C#/VB.NET Well they are fine for little apps, we want something a little more heavy duty. Sometimes you will get a better debate about needing a more scailable servers then what Microsoft can provide.
COBOL/FORTRAN/FoxPro etc... These old languages.
Unfortunately Java, even with its security problems is seen as the best enterprise choice, because Companies thinks for some ungodly stupid reason that Enterprise software is some how good.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Solaris was made in a time when there were almost hundreds of flavors of UNIX. Everyone had their own different variant.
When SunOS 1.x to 4.x were out, those were extremely BSD. It wasn't until the renaming to Solaris and Solaris 2.x when Sun moved to a SVR4 base.
I do miss Sun though. SPARC hardware was extremely well built. Now, Oracle hardware just looks like any other machine sitting in a rack. Plus, it was nice having another CPU architecture than x86 that was commonly available.
Considering they've ground-up rewrote Minecraft 3 times for iOS, Android, and XBox, I have a feeling that Minecraft may not always be in Java.
wha? .net? me?
I think you have me confused with someone else.....
I do serious software, where my skill with the tools mean I don't have such a productivity hit as others who need java or .net to keep up. I prefer C/C++ but I do turn my hand to quite a few different technologies as appropriate.
Server side programming in C/C++ can be done and many do, but I would question why? Since most server side work is to serve up various web pages, they tend to be constrained by IO not memory or cpu. Not only is there the initial development time, which seems not to be an issue for you, given your sill level, but there is also maintenance work, where the next person might not have your level of expertise in C/C++.
Just like Java can be used for client side programming, although it isn't optimum, it would seem that C/C++ would not be the first choice on server side. As for Anything.Net, I only use it if a client or project requires it. I find that it is good at doing many things, but not great at any of them. The one thing it has going for it is that it is a Microsoft technology, so decision makers who don't necessarily know any better tend to specify it in the requirements. That keeps it alive and kicking. In the 60s and 70s, the old adage was "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM." Today, the old adage still rings true if you substitute "Microsoft" for "IBM" at least at the enterprise level.