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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."
"Don't make the mistake of anthropomorphizing Larry Ellison." -Bryan Cantrill
Larry can be very cold hearted, but I can't fault him for this. Sparc/Solaris was a great choice in the 1980s, a reasonable choice in the 1990s, and a bad choice ever since. There can't be much more than a handful of legacy customers left. I am surprised that it took this long to finally die.
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. )
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.
As I see it Solaris is pretty stagnant since at least a decade. Most new development of *NIX environment has been under Linux and different BSD variants.
There may be certain applications that are Solaris specific, and it's probably a few of those that could be of interest to port to other environments if they aren't ported already.
But the days when Solaris was a leading significant factor in the *NIX world ended some 20 years ago.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Then why the fuck did he buy it?
To kill MySql, which was a long term threat to Oracle's core business.
Maybe his company could have done less of a dick move
Without dick moves, Oracle wouldn't be Oracle, and Larry certainly wouldn't be Larry. Being a dick is his core competency.
MySQL? A Threat a real database? Umm. No.
PostgreSQL perhaps, but not MySQL.
Just because its popular with 'toy database' applications (where the db is really just slightly glorified read only storage) doesnt mean it is a threat or oracle - different horses for very different courses.
MySQL? A Threat a real database? Umm. No.
A threat to real database needs, no. But a threat to real database sales, yes, at least in the eyes of people who see any alternative as a lost sale. Sure, MySQL is mostly a replacement for a structured file, but that's still one replacement for a structured file that Oracle wasn't paid for.
It's not much different than the kind of mind set that would claim that a 10 year old a yearly allowance of $1200 copying a bunch of MP3s is a loss to the music industry of $12 million.
PostgreSQL is less of a threat to Oracle than MySQL. If you start building a system with PostgreSQL, you have a reliable database with a decent query optimiser and you'll end up putting a lot of logic into the database. Once you grow to a big enough size that you might be able to afford Oracle, they send along salesmen and convince your least competent C?O that your data would be a lot safer if you migrate to a proper database and they provide migration tools to do this. They can probably demonstrate some speedups from their custom filesystem and query optimiser. On the other hand, if you start with MySQL, you end up using the database as little more than a key-value store and put most of the logic outside of the database. It's much harder to demo a place where Oracle is an improvement because your bottleneck is the application logic that's doing a load of redundant database queries, not the database itself.
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