Oracle actually eliminates Sun

    Avoid this trap, you should not give anthropomorphic features to Larry Ellison.
    Brian Cantrill


    It seems that Oracle has decided to permanently get rid of the labor resources that make up the backbone of Sun Microsystems. The layoffs affected some 2,500 employees working on the Solaris operating system, SPARC platform, and ZFS Storage Appliance storage systems.





    This is not an ordinary transformation - optimization , but a real slaughter. According to the creator of the dynamic debugging Dtracesystem, Bryan Cantrill, this time, irreparable damage was caused as a result of the loss of 90% of the production staff of the Solaris division, including the entire management.


    From Solaris to Illumos


    In 2009, Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems, which is experiencing severe difficulties in the market, for $ 5.6 billion. The company has lost ground in the market due to the avalanche of Linux as a server OS, the success of the amd64 platform, and a slurred strategy for relationships with the open source community. Solaris became open too late - only in 2005, and not completely open, certain elements of the OS, such as localization and some drivers, remained proprietary . Then OpenSolaris appeared , but it failed to become a community gathering point. Either it was the 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 McNeely reflects the life of the company as well as possible - they had great fun, didn’t fool their customers and changed IT forever. Pretty quickly it became obvious that Oracle simply didn’t need Solaris , and he did not intend to develop it. Then on August 13, 2010, one of the most shameful events in the history of open source software happened - the company quietly closed the source code for OS Solaris. No official statements were made in this regard.


    We will distribute updates to approved CDDL or other open source-licensed code following full releases of our enterprise Solaris operating system. In this manner, new technology innovations will show up in our releases before anywhere else. We will no longer distribute source code for the entirety of the Solaris operating system in real-time while it is developed, on a nightly basis .

    This is just an excerpt from the internal circular for company employees, which naturally leaked to the press right away. 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 updates will only be binary. But this was not true, after the release of Solaris 11, the source code was not laid out .


    For those who speak English I would highly recommend looking statement Bryan Kantrilla on 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 leadership of the managers, the engineers gave out a mountain of innovation: ZFS, DTrace, Zones and many others.


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

    About closing OpenSolaris source code.


    This is a disgusting trick on the part of the corporation. Because of this behavior, we become cynical and suspicious .

    About the consequences of closing OpenSolaris sources for a new illumos OS project - a completely open fork of OpenSolaris.


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

    Soon after, all of the DTrace developers, ZFS creators, the zones command, and networkers quit Oracle. All development and innovation in these areas went on to the illumos operating system, where the diaspora of Sun Solaris programmers settled. Due to the features of open licenses, including the CDDL, under which the development of OpenSolaris was underway, 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 .


    To complete the picture, it is worth adding that Oracle is actively involved in the development of the Linux kernel, where it is traditionally one of the ten most active companies.


    Facts in bulk


    • The main goal: to milk patent fees and fines from Google for using Java in the Android OS, the stakes were large - $ 8 billion. It did not grow together.
    • In general, Java monetization failed, Oracle passes theNetBeans Apache Foundation, the right solution.
    • It was also decided not to launch the Sun Cloud platform .
    • Due to bureaucratic delays around security patches for MySQL, the MariaDB fork appeared, where a significant number of developers and part of the community moved. They were enough for the new company .

    conclusions


    More recently, Sun Microsystems is a living legend and the best Unix has ever had. Here are just a small part of their heritage.


    • Nfs
    • Rpc
    • Zfs
    • Dtrace
    • Zones
    • Fault management architecture
    • Service Management Facility

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


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