
Creator of ZFS, Jeff Bonwick, leaves Oracle - chibea
http://blogs.sun.com/bonwick/en_US/entry/and_now_page_2
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etherael
Did Oracle buy Sun to strip it and liquidate the intellectual assets? What's
their plan here? It seems like they have zero interest in building the
products.

~~~
melling
Oracle is a consistently profitable company. They know how to run a business.
They know what they're doing. If the old Sun and their culture wanted to
survive, they needed to run a better business.

~~~
etherael
Of that I have no doubt, but what I originally thought they would do; use
their business resources mixed with Sun's engineering resources, does not
appear to be their plan at all. They seem to be losing all of the best Sun
engineering talent and do not seem at all concerned about about that fact.

That leads me not to conclude they are failing at what I originally thought
they were doing, but succeeding at something else and I am curious as to what
that is.

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lzw
They bought suns business. They will probably replace engineers and continue
projects they like, they will lose engineers focused in products that are cut.

I think part of suns problem was engineering that was going in for engineering
sake, not business sake, and oracle is going to lose those engineers.

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bad_user
I don't know what businesses other people have collaborated with ... but to me
the people behind the products I'm using matter a lot, I'm not dealing with
faceless entities.

Personally that's precisely why I'm using Postgresql ... I can talk to the
core team of developers and get their input whenever I feel like there's a
problem with Postgresql. And for a web service we worked on, we even hired a
Mysql developer to come and help us (was also on Sun's payroll at the time).

How could I trust a product based on ZFS or how could I trust them to build my
products on top of Java or any of their Sun-derived solutions ... when the top
talent that worked on those products left?

Not to mention I don't like hypocrites ... before the Sun acquisition they
called on Sun to make the JCP more open. Is this an US thing? Can companies
fuck with you because it's just business?

Oracle seems to me like a sweat shop. Nothing wrong with that and I'm glad
they are making lots of money ... but in my shop you can get fired for
suggesting Oracle products, and it's not just me, there's a whole generation
of software developers that won't touch their cash cows.

There's a whole generation of developer that have chosen Mysql or Postgres or
implemented their own shit, and did not go for Oracle's DB ... that's revenue
and opportunities lost for them, and I'm only seeing this trend getting
stronger.

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rbanffy
That's too bad. ZFS (along with crossbow) is one of the best things in
Solaris/OpenSolaris.

I was about to say Oracle has a serious human resources problem, but I noticed
that, maybe, the problem is in calling humans "resources".

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lsc
I don't think that's it. Every corporation thinks of its employees in a
dollars and cents kind of way.

The operative problem here seems to be that Oracle doesn't value senior
technical resources as much as some other companies might, or as much as those
resources are used to being valued (and really, few people react well to a cut
in autonomy, pay or respect.) They aren't willing to invest what is required,
probably in the non-monetary sense as much as the monetary sense, to keep the
top talent that came with the Sun acquisition. Personally, I agree that this
sounds like a mistake, but this sort of attitude is not new for Oracle, and
eh, they've done okay so far, so what do I know?

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nailer
I agree re: your second point, but when I worked at IBM it was explicitly
discouraged to use the term 'resources' to refer to people.

Personally I find the people that use this outdated term stop doing so when
continually referred to as 'Outlook resources'.

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rbanffy
> Personally I find the people that use this outdated term stop doing so when
> continually referred to as 'Outlook resources'.

I use to call them "Powerpoint resources", but I think I'll adopt your
designation.

~~~
gaius
I think you're being unfair - some of them are "Visio resources". Tho' they
call themselves "architects".

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yarapavan
"Your ideas will go further if you don't insist on going with them."

Good luck Jeff Bonwick.

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bstrong
It's good to see something positive coming out of the Sun acquisition: a whole
crop of very interesting startups are probably being founded right now.

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alphabeat
I'm really uncertain now of the future of Illumos and ZFS. I hope there's more
push behind these projects as well as BTRFS. Will be interesting to see where
this goes.

~~~
azakus
Since btrfs is an Oracle funded project, I'm real interested to see what
happens to both of these filesystems going forward.

~~~
gaius
As someone who has actually used OCFS2 on a real production system, I will
never voluntarily touch another Oracle-written filesystem.

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ableal
His Nov.2009 blog entry on ZFS data deduplication is a pretty good primer:

<http://blogs.sun.com/bonwick/en_US/entry/zfs_dedup>

P.S. also, the 2008 pics with Linus. I suppose there is no further story to go
with those ...

~~~
alecco
IMHO, with my little work in compression, all that dedup stuff was a bit
hyped. And BTW it is older than ZFS, at least Plan 9's network storage had the
same feature. But alignment kills looking for matching chunks of data. And
"generally best left to the application" sounds like a cop-out.

~~~
ww520
It's the ease of usage, speed, and very large compression window that makes
dedup better than traditional compression.

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didip
Wow, major talent leakage. Whoever running a startup right now, if there's a
need for low-level programming talents, better snatch these guys.

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quux
Hmm I was hoping he would go work for Apple on a new filesystem to replace
HFS+... oh well.

Will be interesting to see what his startup is working on when they come out
of stealth mode.

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mrb
Oracle's strategy seems to be:

(1) Don't bother investing too much in R&D or figuring out the next big
technology, just buy companies that are alread profitable (to name a few: Sun,
BEA, Hyperion, Sieble, Innobase, PeopleSoft...).

(2) Immediately execute massive layoffs to increase profits even more. And
suck every dollar possible out of the business for a couple years.

(3) After a while, the profits will start decreasing, but slowly enough (due
to market inertia) that they have time to rinse and repeat. Go back to step 1.

Sometimes, Oracle will get lucky and be able to keep running a business good
enough that the profits will somewhat be stable enough for years.

~~~
VladRussian
"just buy companies that are alread profitable (to name a few: Sun, "

don't know about the rest in your list, can you specify what do you mean
saying "profitable" in application to Sun?

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VladRussian
during recent years Sun was like an aircraft carrier steered by (actually with
all the systems controlled by) a bunch of monkeys - a lot of noise and jerking
right an left. When finally it was grounded and started to sink, its crew was
saved by another ship.

Why it so surprising that ones who grounded the carrier didn't get to steer
the rescuing ship?

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pshirishreddy
I don't know how much of the oracle's academic initiative was a success. From
the likes of what is being happening to Sun's Academic Initiative to promote
university grad students to take the certification exams such as SCJP now
called Oracle certified java programmer. Sun has offered its student members
the certification exam for 40 $ which has been recently dropped by oracle
making it 40% of the voucher fee which implies 40% of 150 around 90$. The 40%
discount voucher is also for a limited period which will be done for good this
December. I seriously doubt oracle's contribution towards opensource too.

