
Oracle Layoffs Hit Longtime Solaris Developers Hard - conoro
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Oracle-Solaris-Hit-Hard
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veidr
It was a truly sad day when Oracle bought Sun, because we knew right then that
ZFS wouldn't improve nearly as many people's lives as it should have, and that
Solaris would die.

The ZFS thing still bums me out to this day, but I think I got over the demise
of Solaris when OpenSolaris fizzled out.

~~~
pron
It was indeed sad when it became clear that the market is not interested in
Solaris, nor in many other Sun products that could no longer be sustained.

~~~
veidr
Well "sad" is, of course, entirely subjective.

I personally don't give a shit about Java or MySQL, so I wouldn't have been
sad if those products died, but I know lots of people who would be.

For me, it was ZFS that I was really excited about. Back then, I thought I
might have ZFS (or some ZFS-derived or -inspired equivalent bitrot-resistant
checksumming filesystem) on all my computers and phones by, say, 2017.

But I don't. My Linux box can finally have ZFS (with some caveats), but my
Macs and phones can't and won't; it was another sad day (for me) when we
learned Apple's "modern" new filesystem, APFS, does _not_ do checksumming for
user data[1][2].

[1]: [http://dtrace.org/blogs/ahl/2016/06/19/apfs-
part5/](http://dtrace.org/blogs/ahl/2016/06/19/apfs-part5/)

[2]:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14129601](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14129601)

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stingraycharles
There's a wealth of knowledge getting lost here in the process. I wonder if
some enterprises are willing to hire these devs to ensure continuity of
systems running on Solaris ?

Either way, I've always had a soft spot for Solaris, and think they're on of
the best examples of enterprises being able to produce quality software. It's
incredibly sad to see this happen to the Sun legacy, and it makes me wonder
why Oracle acquired Sun in the first place.

~~~
pjmlp
Maybe on top of that we should consider that almost no one else would cared,
there was hopes that IBM or Google would do it, but they didn't.

So if it wasn't for Oracle, maybe Sun's heritage would already have been lost
much sooner.

Not that it excuses what happened afterwards, this is just the typical Fortune
500 attitude that only cares about Excel sheet reports.

~~~
stingraycharles
I thought that IBM wanted to acquire Sun as well, but it was Oracle who simply
outbid them ?

~~~
pjmlp
Usually on a sales process one bids more than once if there is really interest
in getting the product.

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majke
There is a great demand for systems engineers. It's _very_ hard to find low
level developers on the market. Don't be intimidated by stupid requirements on
job ads like "linux experience" \- is easy to adapt to the OS-specific
environment. The valuable skill is not OS-specific, it's "reading long piece
of C with understanding"!

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yalogin
This is natural and to be expected. Whether we like it or not Solaris went the
way of Novell Netware. They have a lot of customers but no new orders. So the
staff needs to be kept around simply to serve existing customers out of which
lot of them would move tofuture proof systems every quarter. So every quarter
they will see loss of revenue and attrition in their customer base. How long
can they continue to support such a group?

