Slashdot Mirror
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.
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!
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.
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.
It reliably dumps a longer stack trace than my scrollback can handle, anyway.
I completely agree. Solaris "was" a great OS. With some very notable monster issues. Oracle has effectively killed Solaris. I simple can't use it anymore. The licensing costs of it and the software that runs on it are more than my total IT budget. Despite it's fantastic attributes I can no longer afford to put this in my Datacenter. With on demand virtualisation I can not afford to have to worry about things like. "Am I going to violate my license conditions if I spin up X more?"
I had an Oracle sale rep try to sell my that ridiculous Oracle stack in a box Exadata/logic. I was almost crying in laughter by the end of the sales presentation. 2/3 of the way through I stood up and wrote on the white board "Tell me how this isn't vendor lock in?". I called time at the 1 hour mark. I ended the meeting with the simple statement. Everything you have shown me is all about "vendor lock in" every word out of your mouths just re-enforced this concept. I had one question for you the entire meeting and you simple could not in any way respond to it.
So I priced everything I might need on Amazon. Using free and commercial AMI's with the odd vendor SW package tossed in. My first year spend was 1/25th of the Exadata discounted opening price. Nothing on the EC2 list had anything to do with Solaris. This is how you kill something. Make it financially ridiculous.
Issues with Solaris. That should have been addressed in the Oracle years.
- Package manager was brain dead. apt, yum are far better. ( Sorry Solaris 11 was too late. Too much legacy out there. )
- Patching made no sense. You have no idea what packages are patched with a patch. Patches were just binary disk vomit that spewed crud all over the system. Impossible in the real world to build any sort of verification around them. ( Sorry Solaris 11 was too late. Too much legacy out there. )
- Zones: Are a nightmare of security and privilege. I don't care what any says a zone is just a change root jail. Which means you will only every be as up-to-date as the host system. And it means you must be compatible and tested against the host system. Which is really no different than not having zones. Zones are a horrible horrible mess.
- No dependable only repository of packages that is robust or up to date. Far to much package hunting still required to locate software for solaris. Most packages are months to years behind there linux counterparts.
- Java performs better on x64 than Solaris/SPARC. This has boggled me for years. Only recent sparc architectures let java and other highly threaded applications stacks really perform well. Why do I even have to know about processor binding for processes?