

Noracle - bkudria
http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2010/02/26/Noracle

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retro
What is Tim Bray known for? (please excuse my ignorance)

~~~
mrduncan
He was the director of web technologies at Sun, he's also worked on the XML
and Atom standards.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Bray>

According to his website, he is also _a member of the Technorati advisory
board and a friend of the company, a former advisor and friend of Make
Technologies, and a friend of Smallthought Systems; I have an equity interest
in all three companies._

<http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/misc/Tim>

~~~
megaduck
He's also got an amazing series on his blog about concurrent programming
languages, called Concur.next. If you're a language and tooling geek, it's
pure gold.

[http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2009/09/27/Concur-
dot...](http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2009/09/27/Concur-dot-next)

Mr. Bray is also notable for having one of the most amazing and intelligent
'comments' sections I've ever seen on a blog. Good reading.

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hypermatt
First JRuby guys to Engine yard, now Tim. Sun is losing a lot of good people.
Now I wonder how the main ordinary developers are doing there ;/ Can't be a
fun place right now

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icey
I know a few people from Sun. The salespeople are happy to go to Oracle. The
technical people are all looking for other things to do now.

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SwellJoe
It was the sales people taking over that killed Sun, IMHO, so it seems likely
to hasten the demise of Oracle when they get there and start celebrating in
earnest. Since most hackers don't have much love for Oracle, I guess it won't
be too upsetting to see it happen.

~~~
prakash
With a handful of exceptions, most enterprise companies are sales companies in
the long run.

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seldo
Oracle's acquisition of Sun seems to be leading to a similar exodus of talent
as did Microsoft's long courtship of Yahoo.

~~~
msluyter
Just curious. What is so bad about Oracle, exactly?

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henrikschroder
They're very good at selling, but not so good at engineering. It's an average
database product, with a ruthless sales team.

~~~
bjelkeman-again
I wish I could make my pal, who used to work for Oracle, write down some of
the Oracle "war" stories which he told to me. But in essence what
henrikschroder says is the truth.

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clofresh
Yet another elf leaving Middle Earth

~~~
dmoney
Sun = Middle Earth? Does that make Oracle Sauron?

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dnsworks
Personally, I'm rather excited by the impending death of Sun. There must be
dozens of new startups in the works because of this. Recurly.com is one of
them.

~~~
rbanffy
When a company like Sun dies, many of the technologies that are not part of
the combined product line die with it. Sadly, many of those are patented, so
fewer startups will be able to use them.

A lot of history also dies with it. If there is anyone willing to write the
ultimate book about the history of Unix workstations, now is the time to do
it. Preserving this history is also important for preventing future mistakes.
Nobody wants another HP-150 or Microsoft Bob.

As for my personal hopes, I hope SPARC continues. We need diversity in the
processor space.

I also fear for Solaris/OpenSolaris. I don't want them to join Tru64.

Maybe Sun could follow Atari's example and launch a "SPARCstation Flashback"
limited edition
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_Flashback_2#Atari_Flashba...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_Flashback_2#Atari_Flashback_2)),
but with a Niagara 3 inside ;-)

~~~
tsuraan
I've never been a Solaris fan (used it in school, and it's running one one of
my old Ultra2s), but I really do love zfs. Every week it scans all my drives
to ensure my data's really still there, and my file server sends me email when
things go wrong (both from smartd and cron). If Solaris dies it will be a sad
loss, but if zfs dies with it, it would really be horrible.

To be honest, I'm hopeing for some lgpl/bsd release of the OpenSolaris code so
that all the fun bits can be fully integrated into BSD/Linux/Darwin. Solaris's
driver support is too sparse for it to really be a good general purpose OS,
but it has a few great functions that would do a lot to improve more generally
useful operating systems.

~~~
rbanffy
> I've never been a Solaris fan (used it in school, and it's running one one
> of my old Ultra2s), but I really do love zfs

That's somewhat like my relationship with Debian and Ubuntu. I like the Gnome
desktop and the rest of Linux, but what I definitively love is APT. I could
move to a flavour of BSD or start using OpenSolaris as my netbook's OS, as
long as it had APT.

~~~
tsuraan
For FreeBSD, there's Debian GNU/kFreeBSD
(<http://www.debian.org/ports/kfreebsd-gnu/>), and for Solaris there's nexenta
(<http://nexenta.org>). I'm guessing Solaris won't have useful drivers for
your netbook, but FreeBSD might. It's always fun to play, anyhow.

