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Oracle Staff Report Big Layoffs Across Solaris, SPARC Teams (theregister.co.uk)
Simon Sharwood, reporting for the Register: Soon-to-be-former Oracle staff report that the company made hundreds of layoffs last Friday, as predicted by El Reg, with workers on teams covering the Solaris operating system, SPARC silicon, tape libraries and storage products shown the door. Oracle's media relations agency told The Register: "We decline comment." However, Big Red's staffers are having their say online, in tweets such as the one below. "For real. Oracle RIF'd most of Solaris (and others) today," an employee said. A "RIF" is a "reduction in force", Oracle-speak for making people redundant (IBM's equivalent is an "RA", or "resource action"). Tech industry observer Simon Phipps claims "~all" Solaris staff were laid off. "For those unaware, Oracle laid off ~ all Solaris tech staff yesterday in a classic silent EOL of the product."
Can the codebase be recovered? There's a lot of it.
"Don't make the mistake of anthropomorphizing Larry Ellison." -Bryan Cantrill
http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc/2017/09/04/the-sudden-death-and-eternal-life-of-solaris/
You won't be missed.
I got rid of all my Sun gear shortly after Oracle bought them a few years back. I knew when they cut off support for legacy equipment that they were not going to save the platform.
Probably a bunch of old farts who think PLCs and SCADA are hot technologies. Today, they play a vital role in the workforce by keeping hideous old jerry rigged systems written in some sad old technology barely running so hives of middle managers can put off the inevitable complete rewrite for another quarter.
Maybe be a bit more Linux friendly? Hope they don't go the way of SCO. In the meantime, Redhat keeps chugging along.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
Has there been any word about VirtualBox? That is pretty much the only former-Sun softwarevI use on a regular basis. Since the Oracle purchase of Sun I have wondered why Oracle was keeping it alive.
Need to bring that acronym back out again.
Sayonara YachtOS
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
Tech industry observer Simon Phipps claims "~all" Solaris staff were laid off. "For those unaware, Oracle laid off ~ all Solaris tech staff yesterday in a classic silent EOL of the product."
Is this the same Simon Phipps who was Chief Open Source Officer at Sun, who resigned when Oracle bought them out? In this context, he's a bit more than just a "tech industry observer".
Is virtualbox safe? Somebody make sure they have all the open source code to that in case Oracle decides to whack it.
In case anyone wants more insider info. https://www.thelayoff.com/orac...
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
"Solaris was dead a long time ago!" And "Solaris was still being developed?", etc. fuck you all.
Lets face it Sun made mistakes. These mistakes made it ripe for take over and plundering by Oracle.
The biggest mistake was Linux. When Red Hat launched no one took it seriously. Red Hat legitimised Linux in the eyes of industry. Companies faced with massive expansions of internet equipment simply could not afford the iron from SUN / HP / IBM. These small start ups went to Linux. One such startup was Google. All of a sudden massive new companies emerged on a platform that was not enterprise iron. Overnight Dell become a major player in the server room.
What did Sun do about this? Nothing. Even when faced with new unit sales that were almost zero compared to just a few years before sun still did nothing. Sun released Solaris for x86/64. But completely forgot to get 3rdparty shops and it's on internal application development teams to port to it. They only thing that ran on the x86/64 Solaris was open source software. Stuff that was already running on much cheaper x86/64 gear. Sun limped on for a few years making the occasional uplift sale for existing gear in the field.
Then Oracle pounced. Suns mistakes led to this point. They sold for far less than they were worth. Why? The market lost all faith in Sun's ability to generate a cash flow. Thus the negative impact on asset value.
Oracle saw something it liked very much. Java. Oracle instantly went on a predatory path of trying to extract money out of Java. We all know how well that went. Oracle just recently announced that they are looking to open source the Java EE specification. This predatory cash grab caused some other interesting market changes. The explosion of new languages resulted and they got market share. Ruby on rails in my opinion would have never had as much success as it once did with out Oracles legal threats over java usage.
Oracle also needed to save it's DB division. At that point Oracle DB pretty much was only ever deployed on pricey Sun gear. Also Sun owned the control of MySQL. Which was growing at an astonishing speed. This threat needed to be squashed at all costs. In my mind these were the real reasons for Oracles purchase of Sun.
There were some other assets that Oracle was looking to sell off. But in the end Oracles taint reduced their value to zero. OpenOffice comes to mind.
I still remember the day when Oracle purchased Sun. There was an audible groan in the office. Execs around the world were scrambling to find alternatives to many products. Sun certified engineers instantly saw there pricey certificates devalue in an instant.
The only reasons Oracle has kept Solaris and SPARC alive for so long are:
1. Uplift purchases still come in. But not many. These can be counted in 1000's world wide. Basically nothing.
2. The platform became part of the Exadata/Exalogic platform. ( An an holy creation in my mind. )
So what did IBM do different with their POWER machines? Someone must be buying them because they keep on making them.
Why did they wait so long. We all knew this was going to happen. Oracle wanted the intellectual property not the actual projects or the people.
Having spent years struggling with Solaris instability for java (see madness linking required kernel patches to JVM upgrades) I honestly cant think of a single aspect of it that I miss. Regarding SPARC, I remember the JavaOne conference where Intel engineers sat side-by-side with Sun JVM engineers to describe their partnership to delivery the best Java performance ever. I also remember switching a specific Java application from SPARC to Intel with no other changes and seeing at 23x performance boost while lowering hardware costs. Not missing a single thing about SPARC either. Perhaps my experience was a fluke. Are there many people out there productive and stable using SPARC and Solaris? I had always assumed the entire market segment was maintaining legacy systems in situations where there was no money to move forward with modern choices.
Solaris is dead. That's nice.
It's common Corporate-Speak.
#DeleteChrome
I'm trying to think of what proprietary UNIX systems still exist. AIX? Is HP-UX still a thing?
Obviously Oracle is clearing the decks to make room for something. The cash bleeders in the company are being sold off or shut down.
This leaves some big holes in Oracle. Things that helped prop it's DB business are now basically gone. Oracle has publicly gone all in with the cloud. Privately I think they have other plans.
So who is Oracle going to try and buy? Is it Red Hat?
RHT 19.07B
ORCL 209.399B
They could do it easily. They could buy control for 10B.
Or would they go after a global cloud provider? Like Digital Ocean?
I started on Sun SPARC and I'm sad to see it gone some time soon. But I'm also surprised it took that long.
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
In typical Oracle-style, most people, including managers losing most of their staff, were kept completely in the dark until people got calls from HR and/or severance packages via FedEx. The way that it played out was pretty bad.
But it wasn't all Solaris staff. Who knows what things will be like for those who remain.
You made me a lot of money years ago, it was a pity I blew it all on hookers and blow :)
"Oracle has committed to support Solaris until the 2030s"
So when the OS guy finds an interesting issue in a driver and goes to talk to the h/w guy to help sort it out.
Oh, wait that won't work.
Sun's run is pretty much done.
Larry Ellison wants a new boat..
...is not just "Oracle-speak". Ask any civil servant.
... but I can't fault him for this.
In the olden days, highly trained smart folks could be moved to other parts of the company. Sure, there would be a few months of getting up to speed - but isn't there anyway with a new hire?
And with moving folks you don't have the expense and bad publicity of a layoff.
In this day and age, it's use them up and throw them out. People are a commodity - including engineers and tech people.
So, you're a great C#,C++,SQL, GUI, whatever engineer? Too bad! Your skills do not transfer - you do not have the skills. Learn in the new position? Ah no. We need someone to hit the ground running.
They are canning a bunch of good people just to make numbers on a balance sheet look good. And all those people hitting the job market at once? Bad news - especially for the over 40.
"If they have the skills; they'll get a job." is a fairy tale.
It could happen to any of us and being in management and being sent to China doesn't make one immune (I've seen entire companies get wiped out with mergers and acquisitions and the management gets laid off after they can their reports.). In tech as anywhere, the rug can be pulled out from under you at anytime and recovering is getting more and more difficult.
Them computer weenies have cost many a honest man his job. Shove them into the shit pit I say. See how long they last, them la-di-da key pushers.
They should have stuck with BSD, it's dying but less quickly. :)
Those folks being laid off are gonna have a real hard time. This "if they have the skills, they'll get a job." is a fairy tale. An employer will look at their skills and consider them antiquated and therefore "lack the skills".
And the real lesson here is that people - including tech people - are a commodity to be used and disposed of at will.
We are not indispensable can be discarded at any time.
Ego?
I knew it was bad when they bought Sun. After the first tech support disaster, and that was for a nice server, with paid NBD warranty, I started referring to dealing with them as self-abuse.
Institutionally, I'd say they didn't know what to do with a hardware company, and weren't ready to compete with Intel chips, and probably didn't really realize the kind of financial investment that a hardware company, with their own non-Intel chipset, meant, and their ROI accountants had the vapors when they looked.
Damn. Sic transit gloria Sol.
Anyone who interviews regularly knows that 75% of developers can't count to 11
Huh? That's not hard:
0
1
10
11
Like, back in the 90s at least. They created the first iteration of the technology in 1972, which means it's almost as old as me. That's probably why lpars were more mature. Back when I thought the NT servers/workstations that I was replacing large Novell/Win 3.1 installs with were hot shit, the mainframe guys were yawning at what I was doing and forcing me to back up ~100 servers to Adstar Distributed Storage Manager (now part of Tivoli) on a lpar. Did HSM properly in an age where Intel-based backup utilities didn't have a clue about that. This being 1995 or so.
Maybe those SPARC engineers could develop a new processor without any sort of AMT?
Probably too big an effort to crowdfund.
You're hired.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust