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Oracle actually eliminates Sun

Avoid this trap; Larry Ellison should not be given anthropomorphic traits.
Brian countryrill


It seems that Oracle decided to finally get rid of the labor resources that form the backbone of Sun Microsystems. The massive layoffs affected about 2500 employees working on the Solaris operating system, the SPARC platform, and the ZFS Storage Appliance data storage systems.





This is not an ordinary transformation - optimization , but a real slaughterhouse. According to the creator of the dynamic debugging system for Dtrace Bryan Cantrill (Bryan Cantrill) this time suffered irreparable damage as a result of the loss of 90% of the production staff of the Solaris division, including the entire manual.


From Solaris to illumos


In 2009, Oracle acquired the most severe difficulties in the Sun Microsystems market for $ 5.6 billion. The company was losing ground in the market due to the avalanche-like distribution of Linux as a server operating system, the success of the amd64 platform, and a vague strategy for interacting with the open source community. Solaris became open too late - only in 2005, and not fully open, individual elements of the OS, such as localization and some drivers, remained proprietary . Then OpenSolaris appeared, but it failed to become a community gathering point. Whether it was a CDDL license, or the problem was that Sun was trying to manipulate the project. It is difficult to say why, but did not take off.


Kicked butt, had fun, didn't cheat, loved our customers, changed computing forever . Scott mcnealy

The epitaph of Scott MacNeil reflects the life of the company in the best way possible - they had a lot of fun, they didn’t make a fool of their customers and changed IT forever. It quickly became apparent that Oracle simply did not need Solaris , and he did not intend to develop it. Then, on August 13, 2010, one of the most disgraceful events in the history of open source software happened - the company quietly closed the source code of the OS Solaris. No official statements on this account followed.


We will distribute our CDDL or other open source system licenses. In this manner, new technology innovations will show up in our releases before anywhere else. It is a real-time while it is being developed, on a nightly basis .

This is just an excerpt from the internal circular for the company's employees, who naturally immediately leaked to the press. Here we are talking about the fact that the source code will be uploaded only during the release of the new version of the OS, and the updates will be only binary. But this turned out to be wrong, after the release of Solaris 11, the source code was not posted .


For those who speak English, I highly recommend watching Bryan Cantrill speak at a Usenix conference. The epigraph to the article is one of his quotes, here are a few more.





On the principles of company management. Left without the wise guidance of managers, engineers gave a mountain of innovations: ZFS, DTrace, Zones, and many others.


Sun was ruled by warring factions led by atamans like Somalia.

About closing OpenSolaris source code.


This is a NEGATIVE trick by the corporation. It is because of this behavior that we become cynical and suspicious .

On the implications of closing the OpenSolaris source for the new OS project illumos , the fully open fork of OpenSolaris.


We are preparing for the time of the Doomsday in open source licenses, we have such scenarios, they work and it's great .

Soon after, all the DTrace developers, the creators of ZFS, the zones command, and the networkers left Oracle. All development and innovation in these areas then took place on the illumos operating system, where the diaspora of programmers from Sun Solaris settled. Due to the peculiarities of open licenses, including CDDL, within which OpenSolaris was being developed, Oracle cannot claim all subsequent improvements in the illumos code. That is, it can, but only as part of its own open source project. Doomsday scripts work as they should .


For completeness, it is worth adding that Oracle is actively involved in the development of the Linux kernel, where it traditionally ranks among the ten most active companies.


Facts in bulk



findings


Sun Microsystems is still a living legend and the best that ever was in Unix. Here are just a small part of their heritage.



Oracle had every opportunity to develop and maintain OpenSolaris, but instead closed source, and since then Solaris has no future. When the lawsuit with Google for using Java in the Android mobile OS ended up in Oracle, they lost all interest to the assets of Sun Microsystems. Instead, the company will sell software based on its own operating system - Unbreakable Linux .


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Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/337682/

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