29 ms·

“Oracle laid off all Solaris tech staff in a classic silent EOL of the product”

753 points by sengork 9y ago

kim0 9y ago
@Oracle, please do the right thing and open-source Solaris. At least that's a proper way to die!
- exBarrelSpoiler 9y ago
  Imagine if Solaris could be used as a kernel for a mobile OS...
  - pjmlp 9y ago
    Sun used to sell Toshiba laptops with Solaris x86 pre-installed.
    - justincormack 9y ago
      And Sparc laptops too
      - DonHopkins 9y ago
        SPARCstation SLC: the "Silly Little Computer", with the computer built into the monitor cabinet. http://www.shrubbery.net/~heas/sun-feh-2_1/Systems/Sun4c/SYSTEM_Sun4c_SLC.html http://www.shrubbery.net/~heas/sun-feh-2_1/Systems/Sun4c/SYS... And the bizarre quazi-portable-but-definitely-not-laptop SPARCstation Voyager: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z2CprTGEIS8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z2CprTGEIS8 http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/SPARC-HOWTO-5.html http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/SPARC-HOWTO-5.html http://www.kevra.org/TheBestOfNext/ThirdPartyProducts/ThirdPartyHardware/NeXTSTEPonNonNeXTComputers/SunHardwareForNeXTStep/SPARCstationVoyager/SPARCstationVoyager.html http://www.kevra.org/TheBestOfNext/ThirdPartyProducts/ThirdP... http://www.ebay.com/itm/WORKING-Rare-SUN-Voyager-SPARCstation-Model-146-/131537725894 http://www.ebay.com/itm/WORKING-Rare-SUN-Voyager-SPARCstatio... http://www.shrubbery.net/~heas/sun-feh-2_1/Systems/SSVygr/4mSYSTEM_Sstation_Voyager.html http://www.shrubbery.net/~heas/sun-feh-2_1/Systems/SSVygr/4m...
      - spilk 9y ago
        The SPARCbooks (and the SPARCstation Voyager) were all made by Tadpole
    - vram22 9y ago
      Sun also bought Cobalt Networks (for $2 billion), the company behind the Cobalt Qube, soon after their successful IPO. The Qube was a cool Unix server appliance, targeted at ISPs, etc. [1] I worked for a short while at a startup that used one of them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobalt_Qube https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobalt_Qube https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobalt_Networks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobalt_Networks [1] Sun's buy of Cobalt had bad timing, since the dot-com bust happened soon after.
  - ori_b 9y ago
    > Imagine if Solaris could be used as a kernel for a mobile OS... I'm imagining, and as things stand, my imagination is hinting at crappy battery life due to lack of tuning. But if you want to try, Solaris was forked long ago -- Illumos is out there.
- foo101 9y ago
  It is very unlikely that Oracle will do the right thing. Oracle, as a company, is known to be ethically challenged. A company like Oracle that is known for its apathy towards its own developers cannot be expected to make careful consideration towards the software it is killing. For those, who have not worked in Oracle or have little understanding of Oracle's internal culture, I recommend this nice article about why James Gosling, the creator of Java, quit Oracle: http://www.eweek.com/development/java-creator-james-gosling-why-i-quit-oracle http://www.eweek.com/development/java-creator-james-gosling-...
  - beefhash 9y ago
    On the topic of Oracle and its corporate culture, you may also want to see part of the talk "Fork Yeah! The Rise and Development of illumos" by Byran Cantrill[1]. The language he uses to talk about Oracle is rather colorful. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&t=33m https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&t=33m
    - digi_owl 9y ago
      Cantrill seems to have a flair for using colorful language in general...
  - pjmlp 9y ago
    Not defending Oracle here, however I have learned working all these years in the context of Fortune 500 company cultures, that they are not alone. The way Oracle as company behaves, is quite common in that universe. I will miss having Solaris around.
    - samoright 9y ago
      I have worked in Oracle for 2 years and I have worked at other Fortune 500 companies. Oracle, by far, is the most soulless and lethargic company among all of them.
      - pjmlp 9y ago
- davidgerard 9y ago
  Perhaps they could donate it to the Apache Foundation.
  - kingmanaz 9y ago
    IMHO, Just apply a BSD license and let the community handle everything else. Wish AmigaOS 3.1 would have done the same several decades ago.
- frik 9y ago
  There was OpenSolaris OpenSolaris is a discontinued, open source computer operating system based on Solaris created by Sun Microsystems. It was also the name of the project initiated by Sun to build a developer and user community around the software. After the acquisition of Sun Microsystems in 2010, Oracle decided to discontinue open development. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenSolaris https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenSolaris
  - floatboth 9y ago
    And it's been forked into illumos. That's where the old community went. Oracle Solaris was a dead end from the start. illumos is the true Solaris.
- mirekrusin 9y ago
  Oracle is filled up with developers' tears, it's goal is to never dry out, they won't do it.
- Crontab 9y ago
  Having tried various Illumos-based operating systems, I could care less if they reopened Solaris with one exception: ZFS. I would like to see them alter the licensing terms of it so that it could be properly integrated into Linux. I believe they should consider this because Btrfs, which Oracle itself started, it going nowhere fast; and because Oracle customers who run Linux will benefit as well.
  - tw04 9y ago
    It's entirely and likely possible that part of their settlement with NetApp included NOT releasing it under GPL. https://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/09/09/oracle_netapp_zfs_dismiss/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/09/09/oracle_netapp_zfs_d...
    - Crontab 9y ago
      I forgot about the whole NetApp thing. Good point.
    - walterbell 9y ago
      How is NetApp doing these days?
- severino 9y ago
  Well... it is already.
- shmerl 9y ago
  Oracle won't do it because they are Oracle. They actually had zero valid reasons to close OpenSolaris to begin with, so I suspect they'll care even less about their dead project.
- TazeTSchnitzel 9y ago
  Oracle silently closed-sourced Solaris 7 months after acquiring it, I wouldn't hold my breath.
Joeri 9y ago
That's a lot of very highly skilled staff which they won't be able to reassemble for another product or project for years. Those people will scatter to the winds now. It's a shame they lacked the imagination to make them do something new. But then Oracle doesn't seem to have the organizational capability to start major new successful product lines anymore. They grow through acquisition.
- devwastaken 9y ago
  It is a shame for the Solaris project, but I feel anyone who would stay with Oracle for so long knew it wasn't about the tech and all about the money.
- erikb 9y ago
  It may also be that the truly talentented already left a few years ago.
  - floatboth 9y ago
    Of course. Everyone who cared about Solaris immediately started a fork called illumos!
- ptero 9y ago
  I think most of the folks able to work on something different left a while ago. I am sure working on Solaris support at Oracle they saw the writing on the wall. Also, some of those "firings" come with a decent chunk of money; maybe some of the folks who stayed made a rational choice of waiting until fired, then will move to a prearranged job somewhere else.
  - fred_is_fred 9y ago
    Anyone still left is likely far too comfortable working on Solaris, not really interested in working on something different or like you said they would have left.
- NelsonMinar 9y ago
binaryapparatus 9y ago
Sad news all over industry. Red Hat creating huge mess throughout linux with systemd for years. Solaris killed. Thankfully zfs continues living trough FreeBSD. MariaDB is forked at the last moment. Some of my work depends on VirtualBox. Quote from American Gods: “A single product manufactured by a single company for a single global market. Spicy, medium, or chunky! They get a choice, of course! OF COURSE! But they are buying salsa.”
- nailer 9y ago
  Every major Linux distro uses systemd. I know its opponents are vocal but a bunch of us are silently enjoying the simplicity of .service files and systemd timers.
  - isatty 9y ago
    I'm using FreeBSD for servers and thankfully Gentoo remains on OpenRC. If they switch I'll move my home computers to FreeBSD too.
    - xenophonf 9y ago
      Except FreeBSD is considering moving to something like launchd or systemd itself, because honestly a SMF isn't a bad idea compared to init scripts, which are rather bare bones.
      - digi_owl 9y ago
        No they are not. The former head of Launchd development at Apple was pushing to have FreeBSD adopt Launchd, but got rebuffed. So instead he has forked FreeBSD into NextBSD.
        Mordak 9y ago
        And looking at the commit logs for NextBSD [0] it is dead now too. [0] https://github.com/NextBSD/NextBSD https://github.com/NextBSD/NextBSD
holydude 9y ago
You need billions and billions of dollars to keep such project alive. And even then if you cant attract the right amount of interest you are doomed. It is bloody expensive to keep these people employed and i guess oracle is not competent enough to manage these resources. It is sad to see solaris go but this is what was about to happen with any proprietary technology with a limited stream of revenue. I mean i do not think customers cared that much about what they run on as long as their apps and dbs were fine. Since windows and linux are way cheaper it was a matter of time.
- jacquesm 9y ago
  > You need billions and billions of dollars to keep such project alive. Makes you wonder where Linus stores his old socks.
  - holydude 9y ago
    Oh you seriously believe linux is not where it is due to huge sums from intel,samsung,red hat and countless of others ? Please...
    - jacquesm 9y ago
      > Oh you seriously believe linux is not where it is due to huge sums from intel,samsung,red hat and countless of others ? With the exception of Red Hat I totally concur that Linux has moved very far because of financial infusions from industry. But at the same time that 'toy operating system' was already quite usable before any of that happened. As for Red Hat, they exist because of Linux, not the other way around.
      - tw04 9y ago
        We can agree to disagree on that point. Redhat is basically the universally supported platform in the enterprise. You want to call inf or a support case on that SAS HBA? You need to be running Redhat. You have a flaky NIC? Redhat. New Fibre Channel HBA? Redhat. And rightly so, the vendor on the other end needs to know they've got an actual live person to work with on troubleshooting. Without Redhat I have no doubt Linux would still be alive and well, but it would NEVER have gotten the foothold it has in the enterprise today (coming from someone who worked at one of those hardware vendors back in the day and tried to push for support of other distributions).
technofiend 9y ago
As the only other major vendor of Sparc-based systems, I wonder if Fujitsu is picking up anyone out of this. I certainly hope so.
- dom0 9y ago
  As far as I know Oracle stopped developing SPARC systems, it is all Fujitsu now, including the chips.
  - protomyth 9y ago
    Fujitsu went with ARM for their latest performance machine.
    - dom0 9y ago
      So far they only announced to go with a heavily modified ARM ISA for their next-gen supercomputer (forgot the name), while saying yadda yadda remain committed to SPARC yadda yadda. At least as far as I know. Probably still means life-support-only for SPARC.
lokedhs 9y ago
I'm very saddened by what happens with what is left of Sun. I used to work at Sun, and the Solaris codebase is the most amazing C code I've ever worked with. I'm probably going to be accused of bias, but the Linux code is really messy compared to Solaris. Sun was already on the way down by the time I left many years ago, but what had happened since Oracle bought them has been nothing but depressing.
- unkown-unknowns 9y ago
  ZFS lives on in OpenZFS, which is where FreeBSD, Linux and other platform developers and some companies exchange their modifications of ZFS. Solaris lives on in illumos and forks of it.
  - lokedhs 9y ago
    Illumos is a great project and doesn't get nearly as much attention as it should. I'm also glad that ZFS has managed to find its way to other operating systems. I've been a huge fan of it ever since it first arrived in Solaris.
    - jokr004 9y ago
      I discovered the Illumos project about a year ago and was extatic to see that Open Solaris had come back to life. I've been using OpenIndiana as my daily driver at work for a while now.
      - deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
  - zokula 9y ago
    OpenZFS is a joke compared to the real ZFS in Solaris. OpenZFS is so far behind Solaris ZFS in features and stability.
    - Annatar 9y ago
Keyframe 9y ago
SGI, Sun, DEC... I really miss those days a lot. Sure, they were daylight robbery (SGI especially so), but computing was far more heterogeneous.
- shagie 9y ago
  Ahh yes... the days of the Software Wars. http://mshiltonj.com/software-wars/ http://mshiltonj.com/software-wars/ (last update 2003) - it might be interesting to reimagine that in today's world. From the 2006 map, Oracle's assimilation of the lion's share of the "south" (MySQL, Sun, Java) and the battle between Apple and Google in the "north west". That said, consider the flip side of the heterogeneous aspect. You were unlikely to be able to run software on two different platforms that could communicate in a meaningful way. It was duct tape everywhere. There was no "cloud" that one could get significant computing resources on. You could pay (much more) for time on a shell at uunet or another isp... or buy your own for $$$. A 250MHz Octane MXE with 128MB RAM and 4GB disk has a US list price of $47,995 in 1998. That's $72k in 2017 money. Making consistent technology stacks has reduced the cost to the point were we think very little about the hardware anymore - and by making those decisions unnecessary it has allowed for improved portability of skills and not worrying about the abstraction of the hardware (until it leaks).
  - Keyframe 9y ago
    Good points and I'm not arguing them. Things are now extremely more convenient then they were. What's missing is differences in approach to solving, well, everything. Everything was different from system to system (esp. mid 80's to mid 90's). People were still figuring out what to settle on. From a perspective of someone who likes to tinker with stuff, it was a blast. From a business and maybe usability perspective - it was a nightmare. Now, when most stuff is settled-upon, it's like cars. There are differences, but not really. Turn lights to your left, wipers to your right, wheel turns left and right, there's a manual stick or automatic, pedals... it's all there, where you expect them to be. And that's good! Times were a bit more pioneering back then, naturally.
    - 9y ago
ryanqian 9y ago
Sad to see that happen, what a great OS.
aquamo 9y ago
sigh Sad to see the loss of diversity in the operating system space. Thank you SunOS & Solaris for all the goodies over the years - Zones, ZFS, NFS, AutoFS, dtrace, etc.
- Jach 9y ago
  All of that lives on with Illumos and SmartOS and companies like Joyent. You can even run Ubuntu inside a zone. But such reactions happening now seem to indicate that people missed the attempted reproprietarization of OpenSolaris or at least missed out on marketing for the successors? Well here's what I see as kind of the canonical video detailing everything up to that drama point: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc As far as I understand it Oracle has been pretty irrelevant for things to do with Solaris since then.
known 9y ago
Oracle ignored/underestimated China's role in hardware business before buying Sun
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
et2o 9y ago
For a curious novice, can anyone point out why one would use Solaris/Illumos over Linux?
- ghaff 9y ago
  There's an argument that Solaris/Illumos have features for which the equivalent doesn't exist in Linux (native ZFS, dtrace, some zone/container features). But for most people those are outweighed by using an operating system that is actively being developed by a large community including many large companies.
- hedora 9y ago
  After evaluating various Linux solutions, then FreeNAS, I went with SmartOS (an Illumnos variant) at home because it was the only one with rock solid secure containers, virtualization and zfs. Unfortunately, I never managed to get single node docker compatibility to work, and then there was a design flaw in the inexpensive atom server processors that it runs well on that leads to failure after a year or so. Faced with a >>$1000 hardware expenditure to get a reliable replacement NAS that's compatible with SmartOS, I jumped ship to Synology and haven't looked back. My Synology box is way more available than my ISP or Amazon Cloud Drive, and I reproduced months of setup work from SmartOS in an afternoon with the Synology.
DonHopkins 9y ago
I wonder if the poor guy from Sun with the Worst Job in the World was hired by Oracle and still has his terrible job? http://eng.umd.edu/~blj/funny/worst-job.html http://eng.umd.edu/~blj/funny/worst-job.html
- smarks 9y ago
  Ha, that's funny. I had almost forgotten about the SunOS-vs-Solaris wars. Everybody wanted to hang onto SunOS as long as possible. Seems ironic that (many) people feel this way about Solaris now.
  - DonHopkins 9y ago
    Remember the poster they were giving out at Usenix with a picture of the BSD Tie Fighter blowing up the AT&T Death Star, and the mathematical formulation "4.x > V for all values of x from zero to infinity"? It just didn't make sense that Sun kicked AT&T's ass with BSD Unix, and then capitulated to them by switching over to SVR4. Yeah, yeah, I'm sure there was some business reason, but it was a bitter pill to swallow. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_wars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_wars
    - amacbride 9y ago
      Remember when you had to boot it into kadb and fiddle around with symbols to get it to run at all? (IDR3.2 or so) Good times, good times...
znpy 9y ago
Just FOUR DAYS AGO, someone posted: >>... most of the recent innovations in Solaris's core technologies (DTrace, ZFS, Zones, etc) have all happened in illumos. > As a core Solaris dev at Oracle, I can tell you that's not true. I just can't prove it to you. :-( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15125355 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15125355
- whipoodle 9y ago
  Yeah, but it wasn't clear what that is supposed to imply.
  - spankweasel 9y ago
    that the Solaris code is closed source and I can't point you at a github repo to show you all the cool things in Solaris.
- raattgift 9y ago
  Roch Bourbonnais managed to write a few detailed technical blog postings about the evolution of closed-source ZFS in the past couple of years. If you read those it will be clear that Oracle's version of ZFS continued to improve after Oracle ceased developing it in the open. Among the more interesting topics Roch wrote about were some enormous changes to arc and l2arc, the zil, encryption, spa_sync, sequential scrub & resilver, which LBAs to choose when writing, and scalability of rw locks. OpenZFS is still reinventing several of these (e.g. sequential resilver and persistent l2arc are in github PRs now) albeit in generally very different ways. If he is able and willing to participate in OpenZFS development, the whole project and its close relatives (e.g. ZFS on Linux, OpenZFS on OS X aka macOS) will benefit from his having explored the invention and development of similar wheels. I do not know if he is still with Oracle. Either way, if you move quickly, the blog is likely to survive until after Labour Day. (Someone should archive it for posterity!) https://blogs.oracle.com/roch/ https://blogs.oracle.com/roch/
  - shmerl 9y ago
    Won't it actually pose some problem in regards to clean room implementation and etc.? Oracle are known to be nasty.
pkaye 9y ago
I remember my college days having to use various Sun/Unix machines and the delete key was invariably misconfigured particularly with vi or some other editor. I had to figure it out myself how to fix this. I thought it was part of some hazing ritual until I saw the same shit on a machine at my new job. Thankfully with the advent of free software distributions, these little details things started working out of the box.
- mmagin 9y ago
  Ha. The defaults on Sun workstations (at least mid-late 90s) weren't that bad. HPUX seemed to default to making delete the interrupt character, at least in a shell when I telneted into them remotely.
benhacker127001 9y ago
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pgaddict 9y ago
Take this as a positive thing. A large number of talented engineers are no longer trapped in Oracle.
xenadu02 9y ago
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: if Oracle acquires your company GET OUT. Do not wait, bail out immediately. Oracle is expert at slowly bleeding teams while suppressing pay to milk products for all they’re worth. They are developer-hostile (including to employees). It is career death. If Oracle acquires a partner you depend on, you have 12-24 months to find an alternative before they cut your legs out from under you and steal every last drop of profit from the relationship you have with your customers. Don’t believe any promises to the contrary. Oracle promised ours would be different. They gave us pay raises to stick through the transition. It was all a ruse. Once we were in the jaws of the machine stack ranking took over, raises and bonuses were crap, and a lot of architecture astronaut garbage was rained down from above. They increased the price of our product by two orders of magnitude which lead to massive revenue gains. They simultaneously shrunk the team and claimed there was no money for bonuses or equipment. Developers have a 5-year laptop replacement policy. I repeat: get out!
- soloracle 9y ago
  I call FUD. Oracle acquired Sun in 2010 - that's seven years, and it wasn't until this past January and August that major project changes were made and large number of staff laid off. "Get out now" seems unnecessarily alarming. Also, this may vary from org to org, but our (sparc/solaris dev) laptop replacement was every three years. I'll admit that the way they've handled the recent layoffs is atrocious, with most employees finding out via FedEx notification and a pre-recorded concall message. Rumors of this major cut have been circulating for months. I've lost many good friends with 10,20,30+ years in Sun/Oracle. But I think Oracle gave hardware a fair shake. Full disclosure: I worked in a Solaris dev/sustaining group until this past week.
  - VonGuard 9y ago
    Agreed. Oracle does kill products and end teams, but no more so than other large acquireres. Hell, it is NOTHING compared to Yahoo! or HP. HP is the absolute kings of ruining products and teams long term, while Yahoo! has killed more acquired products than any other company I can think of. Oracle has good benefits, takes pretty good care of their employees, but they'er old school so people don't get to work at home and have to drive to Redwood City every day. Not the worst, but not the best either.
Friedduck 9y ago
@xenadu02, I feel the same way as a client. Everything I've used that they've purchased has turned out for the worse. Be it neglect or price increases the promises always exceed what's actually delivered. Moreover they're transparent about their desire to lock you in and then press that to their advantage. I actively avoid few companies but they're at the top of the list. I came her to reminisce about the beauty of Solaris from a long time ago and your comment struck a nerve.
sunstone 9y ago
I can recall a list of things Oracle killed/lost since it bought Sun, but is there anything left of it at this point?
- hawski 9y ago
  VirtualBox?
- _delirium 9y ago
  Java and the JDK are the main ex-Sun products that're still being actively developed, I think.
- 0x4a42 9y ago
  MySQL
bradleyjg 9y ago
I think that just leaves AIX and HP-UX of the old commercial unicies.
- pjmlp 9y ago
  There is still macOS as NeXTSTEP derivative.
  - 0x4a42 9y ago
    Mac OS X wasn't there at this time - the classic Mac OS wasn't an Unix like/derivative during the nineties.
    - pjmlp 9y ago
      I wrote NeXTSTEP.
- xeeeeeeeeeeenu 9y ago
  Itanium is dead and there are no plans to port HP-UX to x86. Only AIX is still alive.
trollied 9y ago
I used to love working with E10k/E15k boxes back in the day. X86 just couldn’t compete with 128 CPU SPARC systems. It was amazing! Sad to see Solaris go. <3 ZFS <3 dtrace
sunsu 9y ago
Does this mean VirtualBox is dead soon as well?
auvi 9y ago
Does anybody know how many people were laid off? I am interested to know to figure out how many people you need to make a modern operating system these days.
agumonkey 9y ago
Anyone looking for a bunch of quality employees ?
gigatexal 9y ago
Crap. What does this mean for the fate of ZFS?!?
- nosequel 9y ago
  Nothing, ZFS is alive and strong in Illumos and FreeBSD.
  - seabrookmx 9y ago
    And Linux. OpenZFS shares code across them all which is pretty swell.
shmerl 9y ago
Will some illumos related projects be interested in those people? And on related note, I suppose Oracle won't open their diverged Solaris even if they plan to shut it down? In the past, Sun also planned to open their Sun studio and C/C++ compiler. That never happened because of Oracle.
- bcantrill 9y ago
  Yes, absolutely. Based on the number of conversations I have had in the last 72 hours, I can assure you that the illumos community will be gaining some terrific talent over the coming weeks and months!
kingmanaz 9y ago
I was present for training at Informix headquarters in Menlo Park when it was announced that IBM purchased the company (I believe around 1999 and 2000). I can still recall the deathly pallor of the trainer as well as the shocked silence of the employees. A couple months later I barely located the new Informix webpage on IBM.com; it advertised for DB2.
ausjke 9y ago
All Ultrasparc silicon engineers were already laid off, this is seldom a big news per se. I just wish google bought Sun for its Java and mysql, personally I do not want to have anything to do with Oracle as much as tech goes.
Animats 9y ago
When will Oracle turn off the marketing for Solaris.[1] [1] https://www.oracle.com/solaris/solaris11/index.html https://www.oracle.com/solaris/solaris11/index.html
yeukhon 9y ago
Anyone run Solaris on recent projects? Why? There are other options. Very curious.
yebyen 9y ago
Honestly the fact that this can happen seems like a better reason to stay away from proprietary software than any other reason. Even software that is open source but owned by some company. On a not completely unrelated note, there was something I read in the Kubernetes Steering Committee bootstrapping process that sounds really logical in the context of this news. In Kubernetes Steering Committee, there will be no more than 33% membership from any given company. So if Docker, and CoreOS, and Weave, and Google, and Microsoft, and Amazon all come to the table and somehow get equal representation, which seems possible given how I understand the voting process, ... that's great, and no one company can "silent EOL" the product of Kubernetes. And even if one of those companies is significantly over-represented within the list of members of standing that will vote for the Steering Committee members, and the second of those companies significantly eclipses any of the remaining nominees, the steering committee will still probably be in the hands of at least 4 companies. I'm really quite miffed about a few well-liked community driven things, suddenly getting shut down by ownership lately. Not going to name any names, but in meetings to determine our organization's future direction in software, it's going to have to come to everyone's attention that in general overall momentum is a whole lot more important than corporate backing.
consultSKI 9y ago
Sad.
skyde 9y ago
This is very sad, I really hope open Solaris can keep alive without Oracle.
acd 9y ago
RIP Solaris. We shall remember Solaris for all the good things that came out of it! Highlights ZFS one of the best file systems including copy on write snapshot functionality. Solaris zones. Proper containers before Linux and LXC/Docker existed. Dtrace for application and kernel performance. And the SUN hardware workstations and servers that Solaris powered. Still remembers watching 4th of July fireworks being live streamed remotely on a Sun workstation using Solaris.
chhum 9y ago
More details on this here: https://www.infoq.com/news/2017/09/solaris-sunsets https://www.infoq.com/news/2017/09/solaris-sunsets
yuhong 9y ago
I have been thinking of a server vendor for startups company like Sun was trying to do with Schwartz as CEO. Ideally it would use local server manufacturing instead of Chinese ODMs. Of course, not every startup is interested, but 1TB+ RAM and fast SSDs might be attractive to some of them like GitLab.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

753 points by sengork 9y ago

kim0 9y ago

@Oracle, please do the right thing and open-source Solaris. At least that's a proper way to die!

exBarrelSpoiler 9y ago
Imagine if Solaris could be used as a kernel for a mobile OS...
- pjmlp 9y ago
  Sun used to sell Toshiba laptops with Solaris x86 pre-installed.
  - justincormack 9y ago
    And Sparc laptops too
    - DonHopkins 9y ago
      SPARCstation SLC: the "Silly Little Computer", with the computer built into the monitor cabinet. http://www.shrubbery.net/~heas/sun-feh-2_1/Systems/Sun4c/SYSTEM_Sun4c_SLC.html http://www.shrubbery.net/~heas/sun-feh-2_1/Systems/Sun4c/SYS... And the bizarre quazi-portable-but-definitely-not-laptop SPARCstation Voyager: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z2CprTGEIS8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z2CprTGEIS8 http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/SPARC-HOWTO-5.html http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/SPARC-HOWTO-5.html http://www.kevra.org/TheBestOfNext/ThirdPartyProducts/ThirdPartyHardware/NeXTSTEPonNonNeXTComputers/SunHardwareForNeXTStep/SPARCstationVoyager/SPARCstationVoyager.html http://www.kevra.org/TheBestOfNext/ThirdPartyProducts/ThirdP... http://www.ebay.com/itm/WORKING-Rare-SUN-Voyager-SPARCstation-Model-146-/131537725894 http://www.ebay.com/itm/WORKING-Rare-SUN-Voyager-SPARCstatio... http://www.shrubbery.net/~heas/sun-feh-2_1/Systems/SSVygr/4mSYSTEM_Sstation_Voyager.html http://www.shrubbery.net/~heas/sun-feh-2_1/Systems/SSVygr/4m...
    - spilk 9y ago
      The SPARCbooks (and the SPARCstation Voyager) were all made by Tadpole
  - vram22 9y ago
    Sun also bought Cobalt Networks (for $2 billion), the company behind the Cobalt Qube, soon after their successful IPO. The Qube was a cool Unix server appliance, targeted at ISPs, etc. [1] I worked for a short while at a startup that used one of them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobalt_Qube https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobalt_Qube https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobalt_Networks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobalt_Networks [1] Sun's buy of Cobalt had bad timing, since the dot-com bust happened soon after.
- ori_b 9y ago
  > Imagine if Solaris could be used as a kernel for a mobile OS... I'm imagining, and as things stand, my imagination is hinting at crappy battery life due to lack of tuning. But if you want to try, Solaris was forked long ago -- Illumos is out there.
foo101 9y ago
It is very unlikely that Oracle will do the right thing. Oracle, as a company, is known to be ethically challenged. A company like Oracle that is known for its apathy towards its own developers cannot be expected to make careful consideration towards the software it is killing. For those, who have not worked in Oracle or have little understanding of Oracle's internal culture, I recommend this nice article about why James Gosling, the creator of Java, quit Oracle: http://www.eweek.com/development/java-creator-james-gosling-why-i-quit-oracle http://www.eweek.com/development/java-creator-james-gosling-...
- beefhash 9y ago
  On the topic of Oracle and its corporate culture, you may also want to see part of the talk "Fork Yeah! The Rise and Development of illumos" by Byran Cantrill[1]. The language he uses to talk about Oracle is rather colorful. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&t=33m https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&t=33m
  - digi_owl 9y ago
    Cantrill seems to have a flair for using colorful language in general...
- pjmlp 9y ago
  Not defending Oracle here, however I have learned working all these years in the context of Fortune 500 company cultures, that they are not alone. The way Oracle as company behaves, is quite common in that universe. I will miss having Solaris around.
  - samoright 9y ago
    I have worked in Oracle for 2 years and I have worked at other Fortune 500 companies. Oracle, by far, is the most soulless and lethargic company among all of them.
    - pjmlp 9y ago
davidgerard 9y ago
Perhaps they could donate it to the Apache Foundation.
- kingmanaz 9y ago
  IMHO, Just apply a BSD license and let the community handle everything else. Wish AmigaOS 3.1 would have done the same several decades ago.
frik 9y ago
There was OpenSolaris OpenSolaris is a discontinued, open source computer operating system based on Solaris created by Sun Microsystems. It was also the name of the project initiated by Sun to build a developer and user community around the software. After the acquisition of Sun Microsystems in 2010, Oracle decided to discontinue open development. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenSolaris https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenSolaris
- floatboth 9y ago
  And it's been forked into illumos. That's where the old community went. Oracle Solaris was a dead end from the start. illumos is the true Solaris.
mirekrusin 9y ago
Oracle is filled up with developers' tears, it's goal is to never dry out, they won't do it.
Crontab 9y ago
Having tried various Illumos-based operating systems, I could care less if they reopened Solaris with one exception: ZFS. I would like to see them alter the licensing terms of it so that it could be properly integrated into Linux. I believe they should consider this because Btrfs, which Oracle itself started, it going nowhere fast; and because Oracle customers who run Linux will benefit as well.
- tw04 9y ago
  It's entirely and likely possible that part of their settlement with NetApp included NOT releasing it under GPL. https://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/09/09/oracle_netapp_zfs_dismiss/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/09/09/oracle_netapp_zfs_d...
  - Crontab 9y ago
    I forgot about the whole NetApp thing. Good point.
  - walterbell 9y ago
    How is NetApp doing these days?
severino 9y ago
Well... it is already.
shmerl 9y ago
Oracle won't do it because they are Oracle. They actually had zero valid reasons to close OpenSolaris to begin with, so I suspect they'll care even less about their dead project.
TazeTSchnitzel 9y ago
Oracle silently closed-sourced Solaris 7 months after acquiring it, I wouldn't hold my breath.

Joeri 9y ago

That's a lot of very highly skilled staff which they won't be able to reassemble for another product or project for years. Those people will scatter to the winds now. It's a shame they lacked the imagination to make them do something new. But then Oracle doesn't seem to have the organizational capability to start major new successful product lines anymore. They grow through acquisition.

devwastaken 9y ago
It is a shame for the Solaris project, but I feel anyone who would stay with Oracle for so long knew it wasn't about the tech and all about the money.
erikb 9y ago
It may also be that the truly talentented already left a few years ago.
- floatboth 9y ago
  Of course. Everyone who cared about Solaris immediately started a fork called illumos!
ptero 9y ago
I think most of the folks able to work on something different left a while ago. I am sure working on Solaris support at Oracle they saw the writing on the wall. Also, some of those "firings" come with a decent chunk of money; maybe some of the folks who stayed made a rational choice of waiting until fired, then will move to a prearranged job somewhere else.
- fred_is_fred 9y ago
  Anyone still left is likely far too comfortable working on Solaris, not really interested in working on something different or like you said they would have left.
NelsonMinar 9y ago

binaryapparatus 9y ago

Sad news all over industry. Red Hat creating huge mess throughout linux with systemd for years. Solaris killed. Thankfully zfs continues living trough FreeBSD. MariaDB is forked at the last moment. Some of my work depends on VirtualBox. Quote from American Gods: “A single product manufactured by a single company for a single global market. Spicy, medium, or chunky! They get a choice, of course! OF COURSE! But they are buying salsa.”

nailer 9y ago
Every major Linux distro uses systemd. I know its opponents are vocal but a bunch of us are silently enjoying the simplicity of .service files and systemd timers.
- isatty 9y ago
  I'm using FreeBSD for servers and thankfully Gentoo remains on OpenRC. If they switch I'll move my home computers to FreeBSD too.
  - xenophonf 9y ago
    Except FreeBSD is considering moving to something like launchd or systemd itself, because honestly a SMF isn't a bad idea compared to init scripts, which are rather bare bones.
    - digi_owl 9y ago
      No they are not. The former head of Launchd development at Apple was pushing to have FreeBSD adopt Launchd, but got rebuffed. So instead he has forked FreeBSD into NextBSD.
      - Mordak 9y ago
        And looking at the commit logs for NextBSD [0] it is dead now too. [0] https://github.com/NextBSD/NextBSD https://github.com/NextBSD/NextBSD

holydude 9y ago

You need billions and billions of dollars to keep such project alive. And even then if you cant attract the right amount of interest you are doomed. It is bloody expensive to keep these people employed and i guess oracle is not competent enough to manage these resources. It is sad to see solaris go but this is what was about to happen with any proprietary technology with a limited stream of revenue. I mean i do not think customers cared that much about what they run on as long as their apps and dbs were fine. Since windows and linux are way cheaper it was a matter of time.

jacquesm 9y ago
> You need billions and billions of dollars to keep such project alive. Makes you wonder where Linus stores his old socks.
- holydude 9y ago
  Oh you seriously believe linux is not where it is due to huge sums from intel,samsung,red hat and countless of others ? Please...
  - jacquesm 9y ago
    > Oh you seriously believe linux is not where it is due to huge sums from intel,samsung,red hat and countless of others ? With the exception of Red Hat I totally concur that Linux has moved very far because of financial infusions from industry. But at the same time that 'toy operating system' was already quite usable before any of that happened. As for Red Hat, they exist because of Linux, not the other way around.
    - tw04 9y ago
      We can agree to disagree on that point. Redhat is basically the universally supported platform in the enterprise. You want to call inf or a support case on that SAS HBA? You need to be running Redhat. You have a flaky NIC? Redhat. New Fibre Channel HBA? Redhat. And rightly so, the vendor on the other end needs to know they've got an actual live person to work with on troubleshooting. Without Redhat I have no doubt Linux would still be alive and well, but it would NEVER have gotten the foothold it has in the enterprise today (coming from someone who worked at one of those hardware vendors back in the day and tried to push for support of other distributions).

technofiend 9y ago

As the only other major vendor of Sparc-based systems, I wonder if Fujitsu is picking up anyone out of this. I certainly hope so.

dom0 9y ago
As far as I know Oracle stopped developing SPARC systems, it is all Fujitsu now, including the chips.
- protomyth 9y ago
  Fujitsu went with ARM for their latest performance machine.
  - dom0 9y ago
    So far they only announced to go with a heavily modified ARM ISA for their next-gen supercomputer (forgot the name), while saying yadda yadda remain committed to SPARC yadda yadda. At least as far as I know. Probably still means life-support-only for SPARC.

lokedhs 9y ago

I'm very saddened by what happens with what is left of Sun. I used to work at Sun, and the Solaris codebase is the most amazing C code I've ever worked with. I'm probably going to be accused of bias, but the Linux code is really messy compared to Solaris. Sun was already on the way down by the time I left many years ago, but what had happened since Oracle bought them has been nothing but depressing.

unkown-unknowns 9y ago
ZFS lives on in OpenZFS, which is where FreeBSD, Linux and other platform developers and some companies exchange their modifications of ZFS. Solaris lives on in illumos and forks of it.
- lokedhs 9y ago
  Illumos is a great project and doesn't get nearly as much attention as it should. I'm also glad that ZFS has managed to find its way to other operating systems. I've been a huge fan of it ever since it first arrived in Solaris.
  - jokr004 9y ago
    I discovered the Illumos project about a year ago and was extatic to see that Open Solaris had come back to life. I've been using OpenIndiana as my daily driver at work for a while now.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
- zokula 9y ago
  OpenZFS is a joke compared to the real ZFS in Solaris. OpenZFS is so far behind Solaris ZFS in features and stability.
  - Annatar 9y ago

Keyframe 9y ago

SGI, Sun, DEC... I really miss those days a lot. Sure, they were daylight robbery (SGI especially so), but computing was far more heterogeneous.

shagie 9y ago
Ahh yes... the days of the Software Wars. http://mshiltonj.com/software-wars/ http://mshiltonj.com/software-wars/ (last update 2003) - it might be interesting to reimagine that in today's world. From the 2006 map, Oracle's assimilation of the lion's share of the "south" (MySQL, Sun, Java) and the battle between Apple and Google in the "north west". That said, consider the flip side of the heterogeneous aspect. You were unlikely to be able to run software on two different platforms that could communicate in a meaningful way. It was duct tape everywhere. There was no "cloud" that one could get significant computing resources on. You could pay (much more) for time on a shell at uunet or another isp... or buy your own for $$$. A 250MHz Octane MXE with 128MB RAM and 4GB disk has a US list price of $47,995 in 1998. That's $72k in 2017 money. Making consistent technology stacks has reduced the cost to the point were we think very little about the hardware anymore - and by making those decisions unnecessary it has allowed for improved portability of skills and not worrying about the abstraction of the hardware (until it leaks).
- Keyframe 9y ago
  Good points and I'm not arguing them. Things are now extremely more convenient then they were. What's missing is differences in approach to solving, well, everything. Everything was different from system to system (esp. mid 80's to mid 90's). People were still figuring out what to settle on. From a perspective of someone who likes to tinker with stuff, it was a blast. From a business and maybe usability perspective - it was a nightmare. Now, when most stuff is settled-upon, it's like cars. There are differences, but not really. Turn lights to your left, wipers to your right, wheel turns left and right, there's a manual stick or automatic, pedals... it's all there, where you expect them to be. And that's good! Times were a bit more pioneering back then, naturally.
  - 9y ago

ryanqian 9y ago

Sad to see that happen, what a great OS.

aquamo 9y ago

sigh Sad to see the loss of diversity in the operating system space. Thank you SunOS & Solaris for all the goodies over the years - Zones, ZFS, NFS, AutoFS, dtrace, etc.

Jach 9y ago
All of that lives on with Illumos and SmartOS and companies like Joyent. You can even run Ubuntu inside a zone. But such reactions happening now seem to indicate that people missed the attempted reproprietarization of OpenSolaris or at least missed out on marketing for the successors? Well here's what I see as kind of the canonical video detailing everything up to that drama point: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc As far as I understand it Oracle has been pretty irrelevant for things to do with Solaris since then.

known 9y ago

Oracle ignored/underestimated China's role in hardware business before buying Sun

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

et2o 9y ago

For a curious novice, can anyone point out why one would use Solaris/Illumos over Linux?

ghaff 9y ago
There's an argument that Solaris/Illumos have features for which the equivalent doesn't exist in Linux (native ZFS, dtrace, some zone/container features). But for most people those are outweighed by using an operating system that is actively being developed by a large community including many large companies.
hedora 9y ago
After evaluating various Linux solutions, then FreeNAS, I went with SmartOS (an Illumnos variant) at home because it was the only one with rock solid secure containers, virtualization and zfs. Unfortunately, I never managed to get single node docker compatibility to work, and then there was a design flaw in the inexpensive atom server processors that it runs well on that leads to failure after a year or so. Faced with a >>$1000 hardware expenditure to get a reliable replacement NAS that's compatible with SmartOS, I jumped ship to Synology and haven't looked back. My Synology box is way more available than my ISP or Amazon Cloud Drive, and I reproduced months of setup work from SmartOS in an afternoon with the Synology.

DonHopkins 9y ago

I wonder if the poor guy from Sun with the Worst Job in the World was hired by Oracle and still has his terrible job? http://eng.umd.edu/~blj/funny/worst-job.html http://eng.umd.edu/~blj/funny/worst-job.html

smarks 9y ago
Ha, that's funny. I had almost forgotten about the SunOS-vs-Solaris wars. Everybody wanted to hang onto SunOS as long as possible. Seems ironic that (many) people feel this way about Solaris now.
- DonHopkins 9y ago
  Remember the poster they were giving out at Usenix with a picture of the BSD Tie Fighter blowing up the AT&T Death Star, and the mathematical formulation "4.x > V for all values of x from zero to infinity"? It just didn't make sense that Sun kicked AT&T's ass with BSD Unix, and then capitulated to them by switching over to SVR4. Yeah, yeah, I'm sure there was some business reason, but it was a bitter pill to swallow. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_wars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_wars
  - amacbride 9y ago
    Remember when you had to boot it into kadb and fiddle around with symbols to get it to run at all? (IDR3.2 or so) Good times, good times...

znpy 9y ago

Just FOUR DAYS AGO, someone posted: >>... most of the recent innovations in Solaris's core technologies (DTrace, ZFS, Zones, etc) have all happened in illumos. > As a core Solaris dev at Oracle, I can tell you that's not true. I just can't prove it to you. :-( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15125355 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15125355

whipoodle 9y ago
Yeah, but it wasn't clear what that is supposed to imply.
- spankweasel 9y ago
  that the Solaris code is closed source and I can't point you at a github repo to show you all the cool things in Solaris.
raattgift 9y ago
Roch Bourbonnais managed to write a few detailed technical blog postings about the evolution of closed-source ZFS in the past couple of years. If you read those it will be clear that Oracle's version of ZFS continued to improve after Oracle ceased developing it in the open. Among the more interesting topics Roch wrote about were some enormous changes to arc and l2arc, the zil, encryption, spa_sync, sequential scrub & resilver, which LBAs to choose when writing, and scalability of rw locks. OpenZFS is still reinventing several of these (e.g. sequential resilver and persistent l2arc are in github PRs now) albeit in generally very different ways. If he is able and willing to participate in OpenZFS development, the whole project and its close relatives (e.g. ZFS on Linux, OpenZFS on OS X aka macOS) will benefit from his having explored the invention and development of similar wheels. I do not know if he is still with Oracle. Either way, if you move quickly, the blog is likely to survive until after Labour Day. (Someone should archive it for posterity!) https://blogs.oracle.com/roch/ https://blogs.oracle.com/roch/
- shmerl 9y ago
  Won't it actually pose some problem in regards to clean room implementation and etc.? Oracle are known to be nasty.

pkaye 9y ago

I remember my college days having to use various Sun/Unix machines and the delete key was invariably misconfigured particularly with vi or some other editor. I had to figure it out myself how to fix this. I thought it was part of some hazing ritual until I saw the same shit on a machine at my new job. Thankfully with the advent of free software distributions, these little details things started working out of the box.

mmagin 9y ago
Ha. The defaults on Sun workstations (at least mid-late 90s) weren't that bad. HPUX seemed to default to making delete the interrupt character, at least in a shell when I telneted into them remotely.

benhacker127001 9y ago

I am a mobile phone and software encryption specialist. Contact me if you need a phone hack or any other related service. email: eightspyders@gmail.com

pgaddict 9y ago

Take this as a positive thing. A large number of talented engineers are no longer trapped in Oracle.

xenadu02 9y ago

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: if Oracle acquires your company GET OUT. Do not wait, bail out immediately. Oracle is expert at slowly bleeding teams while suppressing pay to milk products for all they’re worth. They are developer-hostile (including to employees). It is career death. If Oracle acquires a partner you depend on, you have 12-24 months to find an alternative before they cut your legs out from under you and steal every last drop of profit from the relationship you have with your customers. Don’t believe any promises to the contrary. Oracle promised ours would be different. They gave us pay raises to stick through the transition. It was all a ruse. Once we were in the jaws of the machine stack ranking took over, raises and bonuses were crap, and a lot of architecture astronaut garbage was rained down from above. They increased the price of our product by two orders of magnitude which lead to massive revenue gains. They simultaneously shrunk the team and claimed there was no money for bonuses or equipment. Developers have a 5-year laptop replacement policy. I repeat: get out!

soloracle 9y ago
I call FUD. Oracle acquired Sun in 2010 - that's seven years, and it wasn't until this past January and August that major project changes were made and large number of staff laid off. "Get out now" seems unnecessarily alarming. Also, this may vary from org to org, but our (sparc/solaris dev) laptop replacement was every three years. I'll admit that the way they've handled the recent layoffs is atrocious, with most employees finding out via FedEx notification and a pre-recorded concall message. Rumors of this major cut have been circulating for months. I've lost many good friends with 10,20,30+ years in Sun/Oracle. But I think Oracle gave hardware a fair shake. Full disclosure: I worked in a Solaris dev/sustaining group until this past week.
- VonGuard 9y ago
  Agreed. Oracle does kill products and end teams, but no more so than other large acquireres. Hell, it is NOTHING compared to Yahoo! or HP. HP is the absolute kings of ruining products and teams long term, while Yahoo! has killed more acquired products than any other company I can think of. Oracle has good benefits, takes pretty good care of their employees, but they'er old school so people don't get to work at home and have to drive to Redwood City every day. Not the worst, but not the best either.

Friedduck 9y ago

@xenadu02, I feel the same way as a client. Everything I've used that they've purchased has turned out for the worse. Be it neglect or price increases the promises always exceed what's actually delivered. Moreover they're transparent about their desire to lock you in and then press that to their advantage. I actively avoid few companies but they're at the top of the list. I came her to reminisce about the beauty of Solaris from a long time ago and your comment struck a nerve.

sunstone 9y ago

I can recall a list of things Oracle killed/lost since it bought Sun, but is there anything left of it at this point?

hawski 9y ago
VirtualBox?
_delirium 9y ago
Java and the JDK are the main ex-Sun products that're still being actively developed, I think.
0x4a42 9y ago
MySQL

bradleyjg 9y ago

I think that just leaves AIX and HP-UX of the old commercial unicies.

pjmlp 9y ago
There is still macOS as NeXTSTEP derivative.
- 0x4a42 9y ago
  Mac OS X wasn't there at this time - the classic Mac OS wasn't an Unix like/derivative during the nineties.
  - pjmlp 9y ago
    I wrote NeXTSTEP.
xeeeeeeeeeeenu 9y ago
Itanium is dead and there are no plans to port HP-UX to x86. Only AIX is still alive.

trollied 9y ago

I used to love working with E10k/E15k boxes back in the day. X86 just couldn’t compete with 128 CPU SPARC systems. It was amazing! Sad to see Solaris go. <3 ZFS <3 dtrace

sunsu 9y ago

Does this mean VirtualBox is dead soon as well?

auvi 9y ago

Does anybody know how many people were laid off? I am interested to know to figure out how many people you need to make a modern operating system these days.

agumonkey 9y ago

Anyone looking for a bunch of quality employees ?

gigatexal 9y ago

Crap. What does this mean for the fate of ZFS?!?

nosequel 9y ago
Nothing, ZFS is alive and strong in Illumos and FreeBSD.
- seabrookmx 9y ago
  And Linux. OpenZFS shares code across them all which is pretty swell.

shmerl 9y ago

Will some illumos related projects be interested in those people? And on related note, I suppose Oracle won't open their diverged Solaris even if they plan to shut it down? In the past, Sun also planned to open their Sun studio and C/C++ compiler. That never happened because of Oracle.

bcantrill 9y ago
Yes, absolutely. Based on the number of conversations I have had in the last 72 hours, I can assure you that the illumos community will be gaining some terrific talent over the coming weeks and months!

kingmanaz 9y ago

I was present for training at Informix headquarters in Menlo Park when it was announced that IBM purchased the company (I believe around 1999 and 2000). I can still recall the deathly pallor of the trainer as well as the shocked silence of the employees. A couple months later I barely located the new Informix webpage on IBM.com; it advertised for DB2.

ausjke 9y ago

All Ultrasparc silicon engineers were already laid off, this is seldom a big news per se. I just wish google bought Sun for its Java and mysql, personally I do not want to have anything to do with Oracle as much as tech goes.

Animats 9y ago

When will Oracle turn off the marketing for Solaris.[1] [1] https://www.oracle.com/solaris/solaris11/index.html https://www.oracle.com/solaris/solaris11/index.html

yeukhon 9y ago

Anyone run Solaris on recent projects? Why? There are other options. Very curious.

yebyen 9y ago

Honestly the fact that this can happen seems like a better reason to stay away from proprietary software than any other reason. Even software that is open source but owned by some company. On a not completely unrelated note, there was something I read in the Kubernetes Steering Committee bootstrapping process that sounds really logical in the context of this news. In Kubernetes Steering Committee, there will be no more than 33% membership from any given company. So if Docker, and CoreOS, and Weave, and Google, and Microsoft, and Amazon all come to the table and somehow get equal representation, which seems possible given how I understand the voting process, ... that's great, and no one company can "silent EOL" the product of Kubernetes. And even if one of those companies is significantly over-represented within the list of members of standing that will vote for the Steering Committee members, and the second of those companies significantly eclipses any of the remaining nominees, the steering committee will still probably be in the hands of at least 4 companies. I'm really quite miffed about a few well-liked community driven things, suddenly getting shut down by ownership lately. Not going to name any names, but in meetings to determine our organization's future direction in software, it's going to have to come to everyone's attention that in general overall momentum is a whole lot more important than corporate backing.

consultSKI 9y ago

Sad.

skyde 9y ago

This is very sad, I really hope open Solaris can keep alive without Oracle.

acd 9y ago

RIP Solaris. We shall remember Solaris for all the good things that came out of it! Highlights ZFS one of the best file systems including copy on write snapshot functionality. Solaris zones. Proper containers before Linux and LXC/Docker existed. Dtrace for application and kernel performance. And the SUN hardware workstations and servers that Solaris powered. Still remembers watching 4th of July fireworks being live streamed remotely on a Sun workstation using Solaris.

chhum 9y ago

More details on this here: https://www.infoq.com/news/2017/09/solaris-sunsets https://www.infoq.com/news/2017/09/solaris-sunsets

yuhong 9y ago

I have been thinking of a server vendor for startups company like Sun was trying to do with Schwartz as CEO. Ideally it would use local server manufacturing instead of Chinese ODMs. Of course, not every startup is interested, but 1TB+ RAM and fast SSDs might be attractive to some of them like GitLab.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]