
“Oracle laid off all Solaris tech staff in a classic silent EOL of the product” - sengork
https://twitter.com/webmink/status/904081073256243201?s=15
======
lokedhs
I'm very saddened by what happens with what is left of Sun.

I used to work at Sun, and the Solaris codebase is the most amazing C code
I've ever worked with. I'm probably going to be accused of bias, but the Linux
code is really messy compared to Solaris.

Sun was already on the way down by the time I left many years ago, but what
had happened since Oracle bought them has been nothing but depressing.

~~~
peoplewindow
Would it have been different if any other company had bought Sun?

Solaris was competing against free, without much to justify the large added
cost. It's been a very long time since I heard of anyone buying new Solaris
installations.

~~~
acdha
I think that would very much depend on when: Sun's primary problem was bad
management so an early 2000s change might have enabled them to compete against
Red Hat — treat usability as a concern, wrap all of those cool kernel features
in a non-joke userland, sell support, etc. Sitting out package management for
a couple decades really hurt them and that's a relatively cheap engineering
commitment. It's interesting to imagine ZFS and zones bringing
containerization a decade earlier, but every time they came up the reaction
from most of the sysadmins I knew was roughly “call me back when they have
apt/yum”.

A coworker who used to work at Sun maintains that they really needed to go
private to avoid years of chaos from waves of layoffs when they were
profitable but not enough to satisfy Wall Street.

~~~
davidgerard
Zones were way cool. Solaris 10 was _on the right path_ and I actually quite
liked it. (Ran it in earnest on various SPARC and x64 kit.)

~~~
Annatar
Zones are still cool, and they live on in illumos and especially SmartOS.

~~~
ece
Joyent was definitely ahead of the game, hopefully Samsung is better at
acquisitions than Oracle.

------
Joeri
That's a lot of very highly skilled staff which they won't be able to
reassemble for another product or project for years. Those people will scatter
to the winds now. It's a shame they lacked the imagination to make them do
something new.

But then Oracle doesn't seem to have the organizational capability to start
major new successful product lines anymore. They grow through acquisition.

~~~
ptero
I think most of the folks able to work on something different left a while
ago. I am sure working on Solaris support at Oracle they saw the writing on
the wall.

Also, some of those "firings" come with a decent chunk of money; maybe some of
the folks who stayed made a rational choice of waiting until fired, then will
move to a prearranged job somewhere else.

~~~
fred_is_fred
Anyone still left is likely far too comfortable working on Solaris, not really
interested in working on something different or like you said they would have
left.

------
xenadu02
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: if Oracle acquires your company GET
OUT. Do not wait, bail out immediately.

Oracle is expert at slowly bleeding teams while suppressing pay to milk
products for all they’re worth. They are developer-hostile (including to
employees). It is career death.

If Oracle acquires a partner you depend on, you have 12-24 months to find an
alternative before they cut your legs out from under you and steal every last
drop of profit from the relationship you have with your customers.

Don’t believe any promises to the contrary. Oracle promised ours would be
different. They gave us pay raises to stick through the transition. It was all
a ruse. Once we were in the jaws of the machine stack ranking took over,
raises and bonuses were crap, and a lot of architecture astronaut garbage was
rained down from above. They increased the price of our product by two orders
of magnitude which lead to massive revenue gains. They simultaneously shrunk
the team and claimed there was no money for bonuses or equipment. Developers
have a 5-year laptop replacement policy.

I repeat: get out!

~~~
soloracle
I call FUD. Oracle acquired Sun in 2010 - that's seven years, and it wasn't
until this past January and August that major project changes were made and
large number of staff laid off. "Get out now" seems unnecessarily alarming.
Also, this may vary from org to org, but our (sparc/solaris dev) laptop
replacement was every three years.

I'll admit that the way they've handled the recent layoffs is atrocious, with
most employees finding out via FedEx notification and a pre-recorded concall
message. Rumors of this major cut have been circulating for months. I've lost
many good friends with 10,20,30+ years in Sun/Oracle. But I think Oracle gave
hardware a fair shake.

Full disclosure: I worked in a Solaris dev/sustaining group until this past
week.

~~~
bcantrill
I think that Solaris and SPARC had different fates in this regard: Solaris was
dead the moment they (re)closed it in 2010 -- there was simply no way that
Solaris was going to survive as a proprietary operating system (the era for
which had passed half a decade before).

As for SPARC, Oracle does seem to have invested heavily, in part because of
the elaborate self-delusion that Ellison seemed to have that he could develop
magical database hardware that would somehow repeal the laws of physics.

As for the warning, it is indeed apt; Oracle is a mechanized and myopic
profit-maximizer -- a remorseless and shameless corporate sociopath that lacks
the ability to feel anything at all for its customers. Yes, your products will
die of asphyxiation and incompetence and so on, but the much more acute damage
will be to one's sense of purpose in the world: working for Oracle is a
nonstop trip to either an existential crisis or a mercenary's existence (or
both). And as many discovered on Friday, working for such an entity out of a
noble (if misplaced) sense of duty or loyalty is pointless; Oracle feels
nothing for you, its employees, for the same reason it feels nothing for its
customers or its partners or the domain or the industry or society writ large:
because it feels nothing at all.

~~~
alexvoda
"Do not make the mistake of anthropomorphizing Larry Ellison [or Oracle] " \-
Bryan Cantrill

~~~
pgeorgi
> ... - Bryan Cantrill

Guess who that "bcantrill" person is that you replied to :-)

------
znpy
Just FOUR DAYS AGO, someone posted:

>>... most of the recent innovations in Solaris's core technologies (DTrace,
ZFS, Zones, etc) have all happened in illumos.

> As a core Solaris dev at Oracle, I can tell you that's not true. I just
> can't prove it to you. :-(

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15125355](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15125355)

~~~
spankweasel
Yeah, this has been a SUPER week let me tell you....

~~~
cyphar
I was just remembering that we discussed this a few days ago. This really does
suck, and I hope you can find some work at Nexenta or Joyent/Samsung or one of
the other businesses that help develop illumos. There's a page on the illumos
wiki with links to job listings:
[https://wiki.illumos.org/display/illumos/illumos+Jobs](https://wiki.illumos.org/display/illumos/illumos+Jobs).

------
pgaddict
Take this as a positive thing. A large number of talented engineers are no
longer trapped in Oracle.

------
aquamo
_sigh_

Sad to see the loss of diversity in the operating system space. Thank you
SunOS & Solaris for all the goodies over the years - Zones, ZFS, NFS, AutoFS,
dtrace, etc.

~~~
Jach
All of that lives on with Illumos and SmartOS and companies like Joyent. You
can even run Ubuntu inside a zone.

But such reactions happening now seem to indicate that people missed the
attempted reproprietarization of OpenSolaris or at least missed out on
marketing for the successors? Well here's what I see as kind of the canonical
video detailing everything up to that drama point:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc)
As far as I understand it Oracle has been pretty irrelevant for things to do
with Solaris since then.

------
kim0
@Oracle, please do the right thing and open-source Solaris. At least that's a
proper way to die!

~~~
foo101
It is very unlikely that Oracle will do the right thing. Oracle, as a company,
is known to be ethically challenged. A company like Oracle that is known for
its apathy towards its own developers cannot be expected to make careful
consideration towards the software it is killing.

For those, who have not worked in Oracle or have little understanding of
Oracle's internal culture, I recommend this nice article about why James
Gosling, the creator of Java, quit Oracle:
[http://www.eweek.com/development/java-creator-james-
gosling-...](http://www.eweek.com/development/java-creator-james-gosling-why-
i-quit-oracle)

~~~
johan_larson
Is open-sourcing a codebase for an abandoned product somehow expensive or
complicated? Are there legal or accounting issues? If not, it seems like
buying a bit of good-will for the price of a bit of paperwork would be a
useful investment.

~~~
hu88
I was at Intel once upon a time when they open sourced some telecom stuff they
wanted to get out off. The issues were crazy because of the size of the code
base that had accumulated from multiple acquisitions spanning many different
divisions in different countries over many years. We couldn't even find people
who could tell us what large chunks of the code did or whether they contained
anything under patent, trademark etc. It's can be quite expensive and the only
reason we did it was there were customers who were willing to pay for the
effort.

~~~
johannes1234321
Sun did that a few years back, Oracle only has to reevaluate what was added
since they acquired Sun ...

~~~
tw04
It's entirely possible everything added since it was acquired by Sun is
_STILL_ under an open source license. Just because they haven't released the
code or provided it to end-users under that license says nothing about how
it's structured internally.

------
Keyframe
SGI, Sun, DEC... I really miss those days a lot. Sure, they were daylight
robbery (SGI especially so), but computing was far more heterogeneous.

~~~
shagie
Ahh yes... the days of the Software Wars. [http://mshiltonj.com/software-
wars/](http://mshiltonj.com/software-wars/) (last update 2003) - it might be
interesting to reimagine that in today's world. From the 2006 map, Oracle's
assimilation of the lion's share of the "south" (MySQL, Sun, Java) and the
battle between Apple and Google in the "north west".

That said, consider the flip side of the heterogeneous aspect. You were
unlikely to be able to run software on two different platforms that could
communicate in a meaningful way. It was duct tape everywhere. There was no
"cloud" that one could get significant computing resources on. You could pay
(much more) for time on a shell at uunet or another isp... or buy your own for
$$$.

A 250MHz Octane MXE with 128MB RAM and 4GB disk has a US list price of $47,995
in 1998. That's $72k in 2017 money. Making consistent technology stacks has
reduced the cost to the point were we think very little about the hardware
anymore - and by making those decisions unnecessary it has allowed for
improved portability of skills and not worrying about the abstraction of the
hardware (until it leaks).

~~~
Keyframe
Good points and I'm not arguing them. Things are now extremely more convenient
then they were. What's missing is differences in approach to solving, well,
everything. Everything was different from system to system (esp. mid 80's to
mid 90's). People were still figuring out what to settle on. From a
perspective of someone who likes to tinker with stuff, it was a blast. From a
business and maybe usability perspective - it was a nightmare.

Now, when most stuff is settled-upon, it's like cars. There are differences,
but not really. Turn lights to your left, wipers to your right, wheel turns
left and right, there's a manual stick or automatic, pedals... it's all there,
where you expect them to be. And that's good! Times were a bit more pioneering
back then, naturally.

~~~
iso-8859-1
The industry has grown. Linux was niche in 1992. E.g. Genode is niche today.
UNIX beards don't see the pioneering because they just want UNIX.

Sounds like you can't see the wood for the trees. :P

~~~
Keyframe
Maybe! :) But, when I try to look at it objectively, as far as I can, I can
see there aren't any big paradigm shifts / explorations in OS' and computer
architectures anymore. With a reason, industry has matured and moved from
tectonic shifts to iteration.

------
DonHopkins
I wonder if the poor guy from Sun with the Worst Job in the World was hired by
Oracle and still has his terrible job?

[http://eng.umd.edu/~blj/funny/worst-
job.html](http://eng.umd.edu/~blj/funny/worst-job.html)

~~~
smarks
Ha, that's funny. I had almost forgotten about the SunOS-vs-Solaris wars.
Everybody wanted to hang onto SunOS as long as possible. Seems ironic that
(many) people feel this way about Solaris now.

~~~
DonHopkins
Remember the poster they were giving out at Usenix with a picture of the BSD
Tie Fighter blowing up the AT&T Death Star, and the mathematical formulation
"4.x > V for all values of x from zero to infinity"?

It just didn't make sense that Sun kicked AT&T's ass with BSD Unix, and then
capitulated to them by switching over to SVR4.

Yeah, yeah, I'm sure there was some business reason, but it was a bitter pill
to swallow.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_wars](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_wars)

~~~
amacbride
Remember when you had to boot it into kadb and fiddle around with symbols to
get it to run at all? (IDR3.2 or so)

Good times, good times...

------
shmerl
Will some illumos related projects be interested in those people?

And on related note, I suppose Oracle won't open their diverged Solaris even
if they plan to shut it down? In the past, Sun also planned to open their Sun
studio and C/C++ compiler. That never happened because of Oracle.

~~~
bcantrill
Yes, absolutely. Based on the number of conversations I have had in the last
72 hours, I can assure you that the illumos community will be gaining some
terrific talent over the coming weeks and months!

------
pkaye
I remember my college days having to use various Sun/Unix machines and the
delete key was invariably misconfigured particularly with vi or some other
editor. I had to figure it out myself how to fix this. I thought it was part
of some hazing ritual until I saw the same shit on a machine at my new job.
Thankfully with the advent of free software distributions, these little
details things started working out of the box.

~~~
mmagin
Ha. The defaults on Sun workstations (at least mid-late 90s) weren't that bad.
HPUX seemed to default to making delete the interrupt character, at least in a
shell when I telneted into them remotely.

------
sunsu
Does this mean VirtualBox is dead soon as well?

------
holydude
You need billions and billions of dollars to keep such project alive. And even
then if you cant attract the right amount of interest you are doomed. It is
bloody expensive to keep these people employed and i guess oracle is not
competent enough to manage these resources. It is sad to see solaris go but
this is what was about to happen with any proprietary technology with a
limited stream of revenue. I mean i do not think customers cared that much
about what they run on as long as their apps and dbs were fine. Since windows
and linux are way cheaper it was a matter of time.

~~~
jacquesm
> You need billions and billions of dollars to keep such project alive.

Makes you wonder where Linus stores his old socks.

~~~
holydude
Oh you seriously believe linux is not where it is due to huge sums from
intel,samsung,red hat and countless of others ? Please...

~~~
jacquesm
> Oh you seriously believe linux is not where it is due to huge sums from
> intel,samsung,red hat and countless of others ?

With the exception of Red Hat I totally concur that Linux has moved very far
because of financial infusions from industry. But at the same time that 'toy
operating system' was already quite usable before any of that happened.

As for Red Hat, they exist because of Linux, not the other way around.

~~~
tw04
We can agree to disagree on that point. Redhat is basically the universally
supported platform in the enterprise. You want to call inf or a support case
on that SAS HBA? You need to be running Redhat. You have a flaky NIC? Redhat.
New Fibre Channel HBA? Redhat.

And rightly so, the vendor on the other end needs to know they've got an
actual live person to work with on troubleshooting. Without Redhat I have no
doubt Linux would still be alive and well, but it would NEVER have gotten the
foothold it has in the enterprise today (coming from someone who worked at one
of those hardware vendors back in the day and tried to push for support of
other distributions).

------
yebyen
Honestly the fact that this can happen seems like a better reason to stay away
from proprietary software than any other reason. Even software that is open
source but owned by some company.

On a not completely unrelated note, there was something I read in the
Kubernetes Steering Committee bootstrapping process that sounds really logical
in the context of this news.

In Kubernetes Steering Committee, there will be no more than 33% membership
from any given company. So if Docker, and CoreOS, and Weave, and Google, and
Microsoft, and Amazon all come to the table and somehow get equal
representation, which seems possible given how I understand the voting
process, ... that's great, and no one company can "silent EOL" the product of
Kubernetes.

And even if one of those companies is significantly over-represented within
the list of members of standing that will vote for the Steering Committee
members, and the second of those companies significantly eclipses any of the
remaining nominees, the steering committee will _still_ probably be in the
hands of at least 4 companies.

I'm really quite miffed about a few well-liked community driven things,
suddenly getting shut down by ownership lately. Not going to name any names,
but in meetings to determine our organization's future direction in software,
it's going to have to come to everyone's attention that in general overall
momentum is a whole lot more important than corporate backing.

------
technofiend
As the only other major vendor of Sparc-based systems, I wonder if Fujitsu is
picking up anyone out of this. I certainly hope so.

~~~
dom0
As far as I know Oracle stopped developing SPARC systems, it is all Fujitsu
now, including the chips.

~~~
protomyth
Fujitsu went with ARM for their latest performance machine.

~~~
dom0
So far they only announced to go with a heavily modified ARM ISA for their
next-gen supercomputer (forgot the name), while saying _yadda yadda remain
committed to SPARC yadda yadda_. At least as far as I know. Probably still
means life-support-only for SPARC.

------
Animats
When will Oracle turn off the marketing for Solaris.[1]

[1]
[https://www.oracle.com/solaris/solaris11/index.html](https://www.oracle.com/solaris/solaris11/index.html)

------
acd
RIP Solaris.

We shall remember Solaris for all the good things that came out of it!

Highlights ZFS one of the best file systems including copy on write snapshot
functionality.

Solaris zones. Proper containers before Linux and LXC/Docker existed.

Dtrace for application and kernel performance.

And the SUN hardware workstations and servers that Solaris powered. Still
remembers watching 4th of July fireworks being live streamed remotely on a Sun
workstation using Solaris.

------
Friedduck
@xenadu02,

I feel the same way as a client. Everything I've used that they've purchased
has turned out for the worse. Be it neglect or price increases the promises
always exceed what's actually delivered.

Moreover they're transparent about their desire to lock you in and then press
that to their advantage.

I actively avoid few companies but they're at the top of the list.

I came her to reminisce about the beauty of Solaris from a long time ago and
your comment struck a nerve.

------
binaryapparatus
Sad news all over industry. Red Hat creating huge mess throughout linux with
systemd for years. Solaris killed. Thankfully zfs continues living trough
FreeBSD. MariaDB is forked at the last moment. Some of my work depends on
VirtualBox.

Quote from American Gods: “A single product manufactured by a single company
for a single global market. Spicy, medium, or chunky! They get a choice, of
course! OF COURSE! But they are buying salsa.”

~~~
nailer
Every major Linux distro uses systemd. I know its opponents are vocal but a
bunch of us are silently enjoying the simplicity of .service files and systemd
timers.

~~~
pjmlp
I guess many that are against it, would rather have a pure UNIX V
installation, eventually running twm.

~~~
AnonymousPlanet
I don't. I just want the core components of Linux to be 1.) done by people who
have enough experience to know the perils of overengineering and have done
some serious software maintenance and debugging themselves 2.) done by project
leads who don't think that changes that break things in a major way can be
buried somewhere down in the changelogs 3.) done by people who don't react in
a jaded way to every piece of criticism, regardless of the tone.

I don't think Linux would have gotten this far if its core wouldn't be
influenced by the design principles of Unix and the kernel project wouldn't be
run by a person who takes care regarding incompatible changes. Look at ReactOS
or Wine. I'm worried that systemd might prove to be a major headache in the
future.

------
yuhong
I have been thinking of a server vendor for startups company like Sun was
trying to do with Schwartz as CEO. Ideally it would use local server
manufacturing instead of Chinese ODMs. Of course, not every startup is
interested, but 1TB+ RAM and fast SSDs might be attractive to some of them
like GitLab.

------
kingmanaz
I was present for training at Informix headquarters in Menlo Park when it was
announced that IBM purchased the company (I believe around 1999 and 2000). I
can still recall the deathly pallor of the trainer as well as the shocked
silence of the employees. A couple months later I barely located the new
Informix webpage on IBM.com; it advertised for DB2.

------
chhum
More details on this here: [https://www.infoq.com/news/2017/09/solaris-
sunsets](https://www.infoq.com/news/2017/09/solaris-sunsets)

------
et2o
For a curious novice, can anyone point out why one would use Solaris/Illumos
over Linux?

~~~
hedora
After evaluating various Linux solutions, then FreeNAS, I went with SmartOS
(an Illumnos variant) at home because it was the only one with rock solid
secure containers, virtualization and zfs.

Unfortunately, I never managed to get single node docker compatibility to
work, and then there was a design flaw in the inexpensive atom server
processors that it runs well on that leads to failure after a year or so.

Faced with a >>$1000 hardware expenditure to get a reliable replacement NAS
that's compatible with SmartOS, I jumped ship to Synology and haven't looked
back.

My Synology box is way more available than my ISP or Amazon Cloud Drive, and I
reproduced months of setup work from SmartOS in an afternoon with the
Synology.

------
ausjke
All Ultrasparc silicon engineers were already laid off, this is seldom a big
news per se.

I just wish google bought Sun for its Java and mysql, personally I do not want
to have anything to do with Oracle as much as tech goes.

------
trollied
I used to love working with E10k/E15k boxes back in the day. X86 just couldn’t
compete with 128 CPU SPARC systems. It was amazing! Sad to see Solaris go.

<3 ZFS <3 dtrace

------
auvi
Does anybody know how many people were laid off? I am interested to know to
figure out how many people you need to make a modern operating system these
days.

------
agumonkey
Anyone looking for a bunch of quality employees ?

------
sunstone
I can recall a list of things Oracle killed/lost since it bought Sun, but is
there anything left of it at this point?

~~~
_delirium
Java and the JDK are the main ex-Sun products that're still being actively
developed, I think.

------
yeukhon
Anyone run Solaris on recent projects? Why? There are other options. Very
curious.

------
skyde
This is very sad, I really hope open Solaris can keep alive without Oracle.

------
gigatexal
Crap. What does this mean for the fate of ZFS?!?

~~~
nosequel
Nothing, ZFS is alive and strong in Illumos and FreeBSD.

~~~
seabrookmx
And Linux. OpenZFS shares code across them all which is pretty swell.

------
ryanqian
Sad to see that happen, what a great OS.

------
consultSKI
Sad.

------
bradleyjg
I think that just leaves AIX and HP-UX of the old commercial unicies.

~~~
pjmlp
There is still macOS as NeXTSTEP derivative.

~~~
0x4a42
Mac OS X wasn't there at this time - the classic Mac OS wasn't an Unix
like/derivative during the nineties.

~~~
pjmlp
I wrote NeXTSTEP.

------
known
Oracle ignored/underestimated China's role in hardware business before buying
Sun

