
Bryan Cantrill, co-inventor of DTrace, leaving Sun - kmavm
http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc/2010/07/25/good-bye-sun/
======
ZeroGravitas
Interestingly, this is the same guy that in a discussion of open source
economics coined a term for the point when your closed source vendor pushes
you too far and you switch to open source and called it the _Fuck You, Oracle_
Point

(though there is historical reasons for that name, not just random swearing)

<http://blogs.sun.com/bmc/entry/the_economics_of_software>

random quote: _"doesn't it strike you as odd that your operating system is
essentially free, but your database is still costing you forty grand per
CPU?"_

~~~
mseebach
I don't understand why binary Oracle compatibly isn't the number one effort in
the OS DB market. That would significantly move the FYO-point.

~~~
jteo
Purchasing decisions are made by managers, not the ones doing the actual work.

Hence Oracle fits the bill if your company can afford it: It's number one,
expensive (which implies good quality), and everyone else uses it. Ergo, no
one ever got fired for choosing Oracle, licensing costs be damned.

~~~
shpxnvz
That may be the case in some places, but certainly not everywhere. One of the
public companies I've worked with uses Oracle to the tune of several million
per year in licensing fees. The CEO is responsible for maximizing shareholder
value and he's not stupid - he approves the checks to vendors and knows very
well that a single company accounts for an overwhelming percentage of their
annual software costs. Therefore they are actively looking for alternatives
where the cost-benefit ratio of switching is favorable.

Heck, they would be negligent _not_ to investigate ways to reduce their costs
on behalf of the shareholders.

------
ad93611
"One of Sun’s greatest strengths was that we technologists were never
discouraged from interacting directly and candidly with our customers and
users, and many of our most important innovations came from these
relationships."

Oracle discourages technologists from doing this. Bryan has a nice way of
phrasing his reasons for leaving. I wish he had left a clue about his future
venture too.

------
ivenkys
There is almost a sense of inevitability to all of this. The best and the
brightest leave , the foot-soldiers get cut and the company culture/technology
dies a slow,quiet death.

Sad but inevitable.

~~~
lenni
What is Oracle doing that is enraging the top engineers so much? Bray, Gosling
and now him are all saying that they don't want to work for Oracle.

I thought if you're that far up the ladder you have a lot of freedom.

~~~
mseebach
I seem to recall from Brays blog that he too shared Cantrills lack of
enthusiasm for working for Sun, but was drawn in by the culture. It seems that
Sun was an outlier in the huge-company-enterprise space in having a great
hacker culture, and that brought in some people that would otherwise be more
at ease in smaller companies.

Oracle can't/won't/isn't interested in keeping that culture around, and it is
questionable what that culture actually brought about in value at Sun. After
all, they weren't very good at making money. Oracle, on the other hand, is
very good at making money, and perfectly happy letting the cool people work
other places, acquiring their work if they decide they need it.

~~~
Nelson69
It might not even be that Oracle isn't interested in that culture so much as
Oracle simply isn't Sun and that was Sun's culture. Sun believed Sun was the
best and everything else wasn't. Sun believed in Sun, quite a bit, enough so
that Sun wouldn't wake up and smell the coffee when the CEO was blogging about
a filesystem in the 21st century.. (You know, I couldn't tell you what
filesystem gmail is on or amazon uses or salesforce.com uses, since we dumped
FAT nearly 20 years ago, I haven't really had much reason to care other than
because I'm geek. It's not impacted performance in anyway that would hurt
business, just as one example.)

If there was some sort of news from Oracle, how they weren't interested in a
class of products or they weren't interested in technology or anything like
that, or maybe all all the senior sun guys were being demoted a notch or
seomthing then folks would be screaming bloody murder and we'd all know about
it. Oracle wants to continue to make money and Sun was more interested in
making their team think they were the best, regardless of what the market
showed. That's the difference.

Some of these guys simply might be better off elsewhere, their time might be
past, but if they really want to show their greatness then they have an
opportunity to do so now with real marketing might. I went through this with a
company a few years back, we boot strapped it, got it going, came up with some
good ideas and some products but didn't have the money to make them robust and
didn't know how to sell; we got bought and maybe a quarter of the team saw
that as the ending (nobody made any money at that point) and they put that
kind of effort in, the others saw it as time to get real and do the hard work,
take things to the next level.. It's just a natural sort of thing when
companies get bought.

On the up side, I give the guys that are leaving some credit. They could just
hang out and be dead weight, draw probably giant pay checks and not do a whole
lot.

~~~
dman
I find your post extremely pessimistic about the people involved. People of
Cantrill, Gosling's caliber do great stuff no matter where they go.

------
joshu
Congrats to Bryan. I hope he moves on to something interesting.

He's one of the most technically intimidating people I've ever met.

