Oracle Reportedly Laying Off More Solaris & ZFS Staff

[Michael_S]

It's almost like they bought Sun Microsystems with the sole intent of suing Google rather than continuing to develop the properties beyond what they were legally obligated to do. Don't be surprised if Oracle jettisons Java once the legal war between them and Google is finally over.

Is this a surprise? Oracle bought Sun for 5.6 billion and then filed a 9 billion lawsuit against Google. I really think that was the single biggest factor in their decision to purchase Sun.

I wonder how popular OpenSolaris would be today if Sun had made it open source ten years earlier. That move might have killed Sun the company sooner - but OpenSolaris, or Illumos, or whatever, might be a major player on servers today instead of an itty, bitty, teensy weeny player.

[cjcox]

Sun died the day they were acquired by Oracle. I'll never understand how people thought otherwise. But I suppose they understand (finally) now.

[Vistaus]

I wonder if there are still people defending Oracle 'cause sometimes when I say that Oracle killed Solaris, I get Oracle defenders saying they didn't kill it. But if they're laying off so much Solaris staff...

[Guest]

Sun died the day they were acquired by Oracle. I'll never understand how people thought otherwise. But I suppose they understand (finally) now.

Sun died when they didn't realize Solaris become obsolete.

[Michael_S]

Sun died when they didn't realize Solaris become obsolete.

Did Solaris become obsolete, or just too expensive for what it offered? I don't know much about it, but I know it has some rabid fans. Among other things, I understand that the profiling tools were way ahead of equivalent options on Linux - at least ten or fifteen years ago. I don't know how they compare now.

But if you're a company deploying dozens or hundreds of servers, GPLv2 license pricing ( ) is a lot nicer than Solaris pricing. Some companies probably spend a similar amount on their Red Hat support contract as they would on a Solaris contract, but most companies probably don't.

[Guest]

Did Solaris become obsolete, or just too expensive for what it offered? I don't know much about it, but I know it has some rabid fans. Among other things, I understand that the profiling tools were way ahead of equivalent options on Linux - at least ten or fifteen years ago. I don't know how they compare now.

Dtrace and ZFS were only interesting features of Solaris. The problem is everything else was crap, so even great profiling tool won't fix what's broken by design.

[Staffan]

Did Solaris become obsolete, or just too expensive for what it offered? I don't know much about it, but I know it has some rabid fans. Among other things, I understand that the profiling tools were way ahead of equivalent options on Linux - at least ten or fifteen years ago. I don't know how they compare now.

But if you're a company deploying dozens or hundreds of servers, GPLv2 license pricing ( ) is a lot nicer than Solaris pricing. Some companies probably spend a similar amount on their Red Hat support contract as they would on a Solaris contract, but most companies probably don't.

I'd say SUN died because it wasn't able to keep up. It tried selling overpriced hardware AND software that didn't perform as expected for the price.

[mulenmar]

Oracle posses the something like the Midas touch but everything they touch dies instead of turns to gold.

Having all your fiddly metabolic meat-bits turned to gold tends to be lethal anyway. :P

It's more like everything they touch turns to really thin, low-density polyethylene -- it's worth almost nothing at all afterwards, unless someone else comes along, melts it down, and makes something new from it (like OpenOffice -> LibreOffice).

[speculatrix]

I just want Solaris to hurry up and die so that I don't have to support it any more. Oh, and throw HPUX and AIX on the bonfire too.

[dreh23]

Dtrace and ZFS were only interesting features of Solaris. The problem is everything else was crap, so even great profiling tool won't fix what's broken by design.

Don't forget Zones! That became obsolete with Linux cgroups and docker.