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.
Oracle is nothing but a cancer. Everything they touch turn into goo. This is not the first company to be killed by Oracle acquisition. And not the last.
And don't let me started on the ridiculous range-check trial: this sums up the disgusting state this company has fallen into.
Once something gets bought by them, you know it is done. Slowly, but surely.
They perform a function akin to the maggots that destroy cadavers in nature. Part of the overall ecosystem.
ORA stopped being a tech co a while ago, now it is a finance play. Use cash to buy a business for its locked in customers, gut it to squeeze max money out of it until last customer is gone. Rinse, repeat.
Aurea does the same in mid-tier by the way.
The circle of life...
Solaris lives on in illumos and forks of it.
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.
Its not bias. Im a (mostly) C/C++ dev, and very curious about some open source implementations, and the Solaris C source code is the most beautiful complex C codebase i've know.
Linux is what it is now, because of the amazing amount of man-hours into the codebase, but given the quality of the Solaris code compared to Linux, i bet if we could measure how many hours/enginners/money it would be necessary to make some features in parity for both OS's, not only Solaris would require less people and be implemented in less hours, but it would probably be less buggy.
If Solaris were open sourced in the right time, and not too late as it was, im sure it would probably be the top Unix flavor by now.
better bsd's > not as clean bsds > solaris > linux
with not as clean and solaris being on roughly the same footing- much like SMF requiring XML, solaris code, while very clean, seems very overengineered and not as elegant to me.
that said, i really haven't hacked enough kernel code to deserve to be commenting, so yeah..
Solaris was competing against free, without much to justify the large added cost. It's been a very long time since I heard of anyone buying new Solaris installations.
A coworker who used to work at Sun maintains that they really needed to go private to avoid years of chaos from waves of layoffs when they were profitable but not enough to satisfy Wall Street.
Even if they win Oracle v Google, it's been a huge distraction, a huge cost in lawyers (who knows how much they'll recoup), a big unknown and the search for an alternative has to be costly and time-consuming.
$8.3 billion almost seems like a bargain in hindsight.
Unfortunately for the free software world, IBM's lawyers got cold feet when it turned out that Sun were mired in bribery claims. Oracle didn't care. Pity, because actually having Java properly open sourced, and likewise with various other Sun technologies (e.g. an OpenSolaris that didn't rely on a couple of binary-only libraries, for example) would have been quite a net win.
Red Hat (if they could have afforded it) would have been an awesome home for Solaris/Sun.
Red Hat gets a nice check from us once a year. It isn't free by any means.
Is that true? Don't companies interested in Solaris pay for their OS? Weren't they competing against companies like Red Hat?
I remember when we ripped out our 3 6800s and replaced them with 9 Dells, for way more power at a fraction of the price. Would have loved to recompile on Solaris, but the hardware savings easily covered the cost of a port...
I did my internship at Nortel. A decade later and having worked from small shops to IBM and beyond, nothing comes close to the quality of people/code that I saw at Nortel.
From another perspective:
It is up to you to carry the torch now.
What is the incentive for quality?
Even more disappointing was that RIM/Blackberry had every opportunity to take that mantle (business/enterprise IP telephony) and didn't even try.
I'd hate to think Sun's demise, in the alternative, was due to their hippy open-standards approach, which is very appealing to engineers...
I wonder what this means for their big iron, such as SuperClusters? Those still run Solaris.
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-...
The way Oracle as company behaves, is quite common in that universe.
I will miss having Solaris around.
> Also, asked whether in hindsight he would have preferred Sun having been acquired by IBM (which pursued a deal to acquire Sun and then backed out late in the game) rather than Oracle, Gosling said he and at least Sun Chairman Scott McNealy debated the prospect. And the consensus, led by McNealy, was that although they said they believed "Oracle would be more savage, IBM would make more layoffs."
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.
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.
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/09/09/oracle_netapp_zfs_d...
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.
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!
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.
I’m telling people forcefully because Oracle has been doing the acquisition game for a very long time; they’ve figured out how to string people along to get the maximum value out of the acquisition. I personally lost out on thousands in pay by sticking around for too long.
Oracle as a company does not value engineers. A software engineer is scum compared to sales. If you want to be an engineer and make the real money (and get any respect) work in Sales Engineering. You’ll be away from home for 40 weeks a year but you get decent hardware and a small commission from the deals.
For those with career ambitions or self respect my original advice applies: get out.
As for SPARC, Oracle does seem to have invested heavily, in part because of the elaborate self-delusion that Ellison seemed to have that he could develop magical database hardware that would somehow repeal the laws of physics.
As for the warning, it is indeed apt; Oracle is a mechanized and myopic profit-maximizer -- a remorseless and shameless corporate sociopath that lacks the ability to feel anything at all for its customers. Yes, your products will die of asphyxiation and incompetence and so on, but the much more acute damage will be to one's sense of purpose in the world: working for Oracle is a nonstop trip to either an existential crisis or a mercenary's existence (or both). And as many discovered on Friday, working for such an entity out of a noble (if misplaced) sense of duty or loyalty is pointless; Oracle feels nothing for you, its employees, for the same reason it feels nothing for its customers or its partners or the domain or the industry or society writ large: because it feels nothing at all.
Haha, what? Oracle (silently!) closed-sourced Solaris again seven months after its acquisition and much of the core talent walked.
Went to a bunch of architecture meetings, and saw that nobody had a hint of a clue. "Project Fusion" was supposed to fix everything... As far as I know they're still working on that, some 12 years later.
Then I tried to get myself laid off; there was supposedly a list you could yourself on to be laid off with severance. After one month waiting I had enough and quit. So for one month I "worked" at Oracle. Best decision in a while.
That said, I do have some engineering friends who work at Oracle, and they generally like it, so your mileage may vary.
We are planning to move to another CPQ in the next few months, but that's not cause oracle at all or the product got worse under Oracle.
But then we also use oracle DBMS part of our product, and we are moving away cause we hate oracle licensing/ support costs and while oracle can do alot, we are only using limited subset of functionality.
That's pretty stupid advice since you're most likely vesting some very profitable stock options.
Most people won't really have the kind of stock.
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.”
I (thankfully only) used to do Linux BSPs in a former life. In the last year or so of doing that, I think we spent about 15-20% of a project's time debugging systemd problems and working around it being too smart for its own good. 20% for the bloody init system sounds fine until you realize the rest of the time included stuff like writing or expanding device drivers.
What is this about?
(And I think Oracle MySQL is still alive/supported)
Care to elaborate on the 'mess' created? I highly doubt you even used it yourself, sounds like something you've heard and are repeating for some cheap karma. The init scripts used before were the real mess, if you ask me. It's getting really tiring to hear these systemd rants with no good reasons to back them up. I guess ranting against systemd is the cool thing to do, just like calling Apple users sheep once was, there's no need for facts, just hyperbole.
While systemd isn't all bad and in some ways for sure an improvement over init (not that that is hard), there are also very questionable architectural decisions that have been made in systemd.
Next up you have the attitude of the two lead developers, Lennart Poettering and Kay Sievers and the way they handle community interaction and bug reports. If it doesn't fit into their rather limited view of how you should use your system and you break it, it's most likely not a bug they're going to bother fixing.
https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/6237
Last but not least, systemd is forcefully being pushed down our throats. Not with well-reasoned technical arguments, but with mostly emotional arguments about what they think is best for everyone. And since more and more of independent functionality is being integrated into and replaced by systemd, it becomes constantly more tedious to maintain software without hooking also into systemd.
>>... 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. :-(
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!)
But then Oracle doesn't seem to have the organizational capability to start major new successful product lines anymore. They grow through acquisition.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 As far as I understand it Oracle has been pretty irrelevant for things to do with Solaris since then.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
<3 ZFS <3 dtrace
