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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
Can the codebase be recovered?
Doesn't need to be. Illumos is the open fork of (not so) OpenSolaris.
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.
There's still a lot of valuable code in the closed version of Solaris. ZFS enhancements come to mind.
ZFS enhancements come to mind.
After the split with OpenSolaris, ZFS development moved to the Illumos project and OpenZFS grew out of it.
In case anyone wants more insider info. https://www.thelayoff.com/orac...
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
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.
In the early days SPARC was one of the only platforms that you could run x64 Java. Linux x64 was considered unstable and untested at the time.
So we bought massive SPARC boxes to host java apps. A lot of java apps at once. And yes the performance was garbage. A dedicated engineer at least just constantly on the lookout for performance issues.
I still remember one team going OK we built those new linux boxes for you. Only to find out they built them with 32bit linux. They simply would not build them x64. I had to remind them that the whole point of the project was to evaluate java on x64 intel. When they finally did rebuild them properly the initial performance tests were amazing. That company never looked back after that point.
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.
Proprietary ZFS also grew a number of features and enhancements. For example, OpenZFS is just growing the encryption support while the proprietary ZFS has had it for several years.
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 and instability in the same post?
YOU SIMPLY DON'T KNOW WHAT YOU'RE TALKING ABOUT
Period.
You don't.
Call me when Linux actually implements AUTH_SYS properly instead of randomly grabbing the first 16 groups it finds. Yeah, that asinine, random, now-you-can-access-your-files-now-you-can't works really well in a large enterprise environment with tens of thousands of users.
Call me when Linux fixes pwrite() - read the Linux man page, that bug has been in there for years and prevents access to a file that allows both atomic appends or atomically writes to any location.
Call me when GNU stops trying to get POSIX to remove fork() from the list of functions required to be async-signal-safe - the glibc fork() implementation is broken and not async-signal-safe because the glibc developers STUPIDLY used pthread_atfork() handlers in glibc, of all fucking places. So instead of fixing glibc, GNU is pushing for lower standards.
If Oracle buys RedHat so it can die, can we make sure to securely rope systemd to the body before it's sunk in the bay? Also the body of that festering millineal who champions it, of course. And Gnome3 wants to ride along.
They should have stuck with BSD, it's dying but less quickly. :)
Anyone who interviews regularly knows that 75% of developers can't count to 11
Huh? That's not hard:
0
1
10
11