Oracle Layoffs Hit Longtime Solaris Developers Hard

[garegin]

Unix already had these symptoms back in the late 70s. Unix Haters Handbook complains about the same issues of hacks and infighting. It even jokes that head and tail were written by two different people and have different parameters.

[sdack]

Frankly Linux is a sorry excuse for a Unix... its poorly integrated, has tons of infighting between developer factions, and in general has become very bloated in many instances.

Frankly it baffles me how developers and engineers see a problem and just think... lets add more code to fix the problem! Then the bandaids fall off and it bleeds out...

That's how Linux works and so does nature and evolution. You're not going to say you yourself are a sorry excuse for a life form, just because you haven't been engineered. It's rather a narrow mind who thinks everything requires engineering before it's any good. Engineers are humans too and they take short cuts and make mistakes like everybody else. You're just not aware of all the crap engineers produce and you probably are still on the level where you think only a development free of drama can also be a good development. The amount of drama has very little influence in the outcome in fact. You can produce a ton of crap without any drama - you simply don't get much done with only good intentions. And a lot of drama can help sort out the good from the bad and allow for truly great accomplishments.

Take gcc for instance. The compiler has come a long way and without a doubt is a great piece of work. Yet are there quite a few developers unhappy with the way the compiler has grown and led to the development of llvm. This then inspires more competition, which leads to better compilers. You can throw all your negativity at this development, but the fact remains that whatever happens and did happen, it always was for the betterment of software and it will continue to be like this.

You're still just stuck in negativity really and have yet to see the beauty and richness of Linux and free, open source software.

[caligula]

That's how Linux works and so does nature and evolution. You're not going to say you yourself are a sorry excuse for a life form, just because you haven't been engineered. It's rather a narrow mind who thinks everything requires engineering before it's any good. Engineers are humans too and they take short cuts and make mistakes like everybody else. You're just not aware of all the crap engineers produce and you probably are still on the level where you think only a development free of drama can also be a good development. The amount of drama has very little influence in the outcome in fact. You can produce a ton of crap without any drama - you simply don't get much done with only good intentions. And a lot of drama can help sort out the good from the bad and allow for truly great accomplishments.

Linux distros have tons of engineering work integrated - KDE, systemd, or pulseaudio just off the top of my head. All the "branded" things. Although it's sometimes hard to distinguish evolution and design in software.

[mo0n_sniper]

Oracle is a shit company. It kils everything it touches.

[cb88]

Linux bloated???? My custom Debian kernel package is 5.4MB. My Debian testing Xfce is stripped from all software that I not use. Wayland and extra gpu drivers are only bloatware due to xorg dependencies. You are using fedora when you have those other feelings. Xfce developers do not add any unneeded code and Debian is well integrated, all 50 000 software work well together.

Case in point... a friggin stripped down kernel doesn't even fit on a floppy anymore. And Linux doesn't do that much more than it did back then... Linux is by design accretive. Linus has even taken note of the decrease in performance and bloat over time... hopefully at some point he says it's time for a clean slate. You certainly can't call Linux minimal anymore... it's been infected with GNUitis. Back around Linux 2.0-2.4 you could fit an entire basic distro on a floppy... 2.2 based distros were even small enough to bundle in an Xserver.

Personally, I think code sprawl is the number one reason your average developer cannot become part of kernel and driver development.

Also remember that you actually pay a price for a large bloated kernel... in wasted cache space... While we sometimes see improvements due to architectural and scalability improvements overall the trend is downward in the performance of the kernel itself.

50k packages... and 2 releases from now half of them won't even exist anymore because they are not that useful. Also Debian tends to break out single packages into like 5 so... that 50k is really only like 10-15k.

Also, I use Gentoo... -_- .... with a custom kernel, ram usage is sitting right at 2250Mb not counting buffers. Thats running Mate, Firefox with about 6 tabs open and KiCAD with a project loaded. That's isn't super bloated... but it is still bloated by and large. It'd probably be way higher if I was running any of Lennart's code. Also XFCE used to be like a 5MB package back when it was considered Light relative to Gnome 2.x for the whole download... so yeah it is about as bloated as Mate is while having a few less features.

[miabrahams]

I'm actually a bit surprised so many were still working on Solaris and SPARC.

The 1,000-1,500 estimate measures company wide layoffs. We don't know how many Solaris/SPARC specific layoffs there were.

[Pentarctagon]

floppy

I'm not going to get into the rest of it, because honestly I just don't care about that particular argument at all, but "modern software X is bloated because it can't fit/function on ancient hardware ABC" is just plain silly. The 2.0 kernel was released over 2 decades ago (1996), the same year Java 1.0 was released.

[boxie]

Case in point... a friggin stripped down kernel doesn't even fit on a floppy anymore.

do tell, when was the last time you used a real floppy in anger?

Newer hardware has newer requirements and can do a lot more and needs more code to run it. that and storage space is cheap, why spend a year of engineering resources reducing the size of something when you can spend a few $ and have that performance issue mitigated in the short term and put that engineering effort into making things faster across the board.

[AndyChow]

Oracle has 136 000 employees. And that's 135 999 salesmen, and 1 programmer.

When Oracle took over Sun, I cried a little. Oracle is built on lies and deceit. Since the start, their business has been selling buggy software for way more than any home-made solution would have cost, and paralyze then essentially extort whomever they are doing business with into paying hundreds of millions to fix bugs that the salesmen promised was the reason to buy Oracle software in the first place.

I don't blame Oracle, I blame anyone stupid enough to do business with them. But they gutted Sun, destroyed Solaris, Sparc, and a million other Sun projects.

[rk17]

Case in point... a friggin stripped down kernel doesn't even fit on a floppy anymore. And Linux doesn't do that much more than it did back then... Linux is by design accretive. Linus has even taken note of the decrease in performance and bloat over time... hopefully at some point he says it's time for a clean slate. You certainly can't call Linux minimal anymore... it's been infected with GNUitis. Back around Linux 2.0-2.4 you could fit an entire basic distro on a floppy... 2.2 based distros were even small enough to bundle in an Xserver.

Personally, I think code sprawl is the number one reason your average developer cannot become part of kernel and driver development.

Also remember that you actually pay a price for a large bloated kernel... in wasted cache space... While we sometimes see improvements due to architectural and scalability improvements overall the trend is downward in the performance of the kernel itself.

50k packages... and 2 releases from now half of them won't even exist anymore because they are not that useful. Also Debian tends to break out single packages into like 5 so... that 50k is really only like 10-15k.

Also, I use Gentoo... -_- .... with a custom kernel, ram usage is sitting right at 2250Mb not counting buffers. Thats running Mate, Firefox with about 6 tabs open and KiCAD with a project loaded. That's isn't super bloated... but it is still bloated by and large. It'd probably be way higher if I was running any of Lennart's code. Also XFCE used to be like a 5MB package back when it was considered Light relative to Gnome 2.x for the whole download... so yeah it is about as bloated as Mate is while having a few less features.

If you still adamantly think floppy disk or size of floppy disk is practically and comfortably usable then you should have written these comment lines in a palm leaf and sent it to Michael(Phoronix) via a Pigeon or Eagle to publish this in this thread rather than comfortably replying from your latest linux rig. I think Even the smallest embedded devices now a days are having more space than a standard floppy disk.