The January rumours were true and on Friday Oracle laid off the core talent from the Solaris and SPARC teams, in effect finally killing what they had left of Sun Microsystems. When Oracle aquired Sun, there were a lot of valuable assets, each of which, except VirtualBox, has been squandered and abandoned. Simon Phipps enumerates the main ones and what happened to them.
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(Score: -1, Spam) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 05 2017, @04:56PM
Yeah so Dick Niggers.
You know we don't ever fuck no old pussy.
We fuck lots and lots of young pussy tho.
Dick Niggers gonna shoot ya in yo hot snatch.
(Score: 5, Funny) by bob_super on Tuesday September 05 2017, @05:03PM
Thebes tourism market plummets.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 05 2017, @05:03PM (2 children)
No I finally wrote a good song... Damn Oracle.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_O1QKQCsGs [youtube.com]
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 05 2017, @05:23PM
Kill The Sun
https://youtu.be/XUEo4jeP90c [youtu.be]
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 05 2017, @08:12PM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9OUWgxu7xng [youtube.com]
Though being honest, Nina Simone's is more metal than that.
(Score: 3, Touché) by Grishnakh on Tuesday September 05 2017, @05:13PM (1 child)
Kudos to Oracle for finally freeing these enslaved developers! It was wrong to keep them bound in wage slavery this long, but it's good to see Oracle finally admitting its mistake and letting them go free. IBM also emancipated many of its servants, but way back in '03 [theonion.com]. Better late than never, I guess.
(Score: 3, Informative) by takyon on Tuesday September 05 2017, @05:28PM
IBM has freed 10-15% of its (wage) slaves every year or two. They have been very proactive about this:
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/03/31/ibm_bloodbath_continues/ [theregister.co.uk]
https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=16/03/23/0350234 [soylentnews.org]
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 5, Informative) by quacking duck on Tuesday September 05 2017, @05:17PM (8 children)
From the 2009 Oracle press release about the Sun acquisition [oracle.com]: “This is a fantastic day for Sun’s customers, developers, partners and employees across the globe, joining forces with the global leader in enterprise software to drive innovation and value across every aspect of the technology marketplace”
This is why I never, ever believe the corporate PR BS whenever one large company swallows up another large company.
(Score: 3, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 05 2017, @05:51PM
Only then? So you believe corporate PR in other cases? Great. Let me tell you about this awesome bridge I'm trying to sell... :)
(Score: 5, Funny) by maxwell demon on Tuesday September 05 2017, @06:18PM (1 child)
Come on, they only made two small errors: They wrote "fantastic" instead of "sad", and they wrote a second "across" instead of "out of".
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 3, Funny) by bzipitidoo on Wednesday September 06 2017, @02:08AM
You only saw 2 errors? It was a fantastic example of corporate speak, loaded with euphemisms and catch words and phrases across every aspect!
"drive innovation": Never been a mainstream automobile called the "Innovation". The Nova and the Edsel were real cars though. Oh, they didn't mean that kind of "drive"? Oh, right, they omitted "slave". Guess it's so obvious it doesn't have to be said.
"joining forces": Doesn't that imply an element of voluntary acquiescence? Next time I eat a steak, can I say "a cow joined forces with me"?
"technology marketplace": Yes, the Holy Market. Bow down before the Market! We know, we know, corporations think they have no other purpose than worshipping at the Marketplace altar.
"enterprise software": So Oracle is the company that Scotty visited when the Enterprise went back in time to save the whales!
"across the globe", "global leader": A bit redundant, wouldn't you say? Must be obsessed over global domination. Or they watched too much Pinky and The Brain.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by frojack on Tuesday September 05 2017, @07:51PM (3 children)
Well call it corporate PR BS if you want, but I have to ask, how many Spark/Solaris machines have you purchased since Oracle's acquisition of Sun?
If there is zero market for something, why continue to manufacture it? If none of the other companies in the processor market want to buy the company or its IP or resources, why pour money into it?
If they had stated that they were ramping it down over the next 5 years when they first gobbled up Sun would you have rushed in to buy a Spark machine? It would have killed sales instantly.
Lets face it. This is either a foregone conclusion, or a self fulfilling prophesy.
If Sparc was an attractive product Sun would still be booming. If Sun was merely mismanaged, Oracle should have been able to change that.
As I mentioned in the HPE/MicroFocus story a couple days ago, acquisitions are never a good sign, and no matter how good of a face you put on it, it seldom fools anyone. [soylentnews.org]
The best you could hope for is all those laid off engineers and software developers band together with something from the BSD world and forge a viable hardware/software alternative.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by D2 on Tuesday September 05 2017, @09:46PM (2 children)
Zero market: I'd respectfully disagree -- Sparc is a RISC architecture -- looking at ARM and ATOM, there seems to be a pretty hefty market for them. Ditto for Sun's core competencies: stability, redundancy and large data. Between ZFS, elements of Solaris, and their hardware, perhaps the last piece needed was an OS-level transition toward map/reduce instead of mirroring. That realignment was possible as Sun (The Network Is The Computer), but map/reduce would never happen in Oracle, because it's contrary to Oracle's dependency on SQL. When at (Ford | Disney | Microsoft | Oracle), don't fuck with (Pickups | the Mouse | Windows/Office | SQL).
Ramping down: meh, assumes foregone conclusion. Oracle kept Sun/Sparc focused on high end. Their midtier offerings were dreadfully overpriced.
"Let's face it. This is either a foregone conclusion or a self-fulfilling prophesy. If Sparc was an attractive product, Sun would still be booming. If Sun were merely mismanaged, Oracle should have been able to change that."
Yeah, Sun was in trouble. So was Apple, once upon a time. Sun *still* has some damn sexy tech nobody else has, and which aligns to current market.
So, let's put blame where it needs to be: Mismanagement BY ORACLE killed Sun/Sparc. The growing demand for RISC chips, five-9's stability and performance didn't change. Instead of 7 years of mismanagement, another company could have leveraged Sun from big-iron to a spectrum: mobile to a fabric of midtier boxen to niche high-end servers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 06 2017, @05:57AM
If only those engineers have the wherewithal to go independent, spin up a design off the unpatented/protected portions of the T1/2 GPL'd cores, and convince people to spend enough money to tape out a chip, and lay out a motherboard (possibly giving in and using hypertransport so they can leverage any HT compatible AMD motherboard chipsets still available for sale.)
Do it right and they could gain the 'means of production' for themselves instead of the two generations of abusive corporations they have worked under (Reading those delusional rants about how great sun was, if only Oracle hadn't bought them.... they really didn't remember what Sun was like post-00..), they could kill three birds with one stone: Give those of us who want secure processors and chipsets a new platform to build off of, with auditable open 'source' hardware, that can be programmatically tested against its vhdl/verilog/bitcode formatted source code for errata/some intentional backdoors. Give themselves a more solid future, even given age discrimination in-industry, by providing a workplace that cares more about results than age or buzzwords, and lastly provide a long term example that the plucky electronic hacking startup is not dead, and that companies like Mostek, or WDC can be spun up in the modern era and produce new designs, perhaps even working up to their own fabs given enough time and crowdsourced financial support.
The key things are: we would need to financially support such an initiative, and they would have to be willing to tighten their belts and make it through the startup phase without selling their souls to VC to speed things up, at the expense of losing their corporate independence.
Remember: From the corporate/direction/talent perspective, the workers owning the means of production is the important part. That means not allowing any one worker to take over the whole company, and it means eventually owning the land that company works from, otherwise it is all for naught. Marketing is necessary but can't compromise engineering, and engineering/qa is necessary but not enough without marketing/marketing based management. More companies need to balance these powers, much like yin and yang or else they will become sick and fail.
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Wednesday September 06 2017, @10:13AM
Huh? Atom is x86, which is about as CISC as they come. ARM is RISC, but is a much richer RISC ISA than SPARC (for example, it has a modern set of SIMD instructions, rich addressing modes and things like bitfield insert / extract as single instructions). ARMv8 is pretty close to the sweet spot in terms of making instructions as complex as they can be without requiring microcode (which hurts power consumption because it means a complex decoder needs to be powered all of the time). SPARC is much closer to a classic RISC design (very close to RISC II) and hasn't been updated much since the '80s. It's too simple to make good use of silicon (lots of things are two or more SPARC instructions that can be done easily in a single modern pipeline) and it doesn't map easily from the back end of a modern compiler.
sudo mod me up
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 05 2017, @08:46PM
You should never believe anything coming from a marketing drone --- corporate or otherwise and no matter the context. There is one thing that discipline is about, finding new and improved ways to lie to people. Nothing else about it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 05 2017, @05:24PM (1 child)
they finally did it. They killed the fucking sun.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 06 2017, @06:48AM
The upside is that the President's chances of going blind significantly went down!
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 05 2017, @05:53PM (2 children)
"Oracle Goes Supernova"
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 05 2017, @06:17PM
Black Hole Sun
Oracle Black Holed Sun
Oracle Blacked Sun
Dick Niggers
(Score: 1) by shrewdsheep on Tuesday September 05 2017, @08:39PM
Sun collapsed into black hole. Oracle said so.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by terrab0t on Tuesday September 05 2017, @05:56PM (4 children)
The customers.
I’m sure they lost some along the way, but they were the assets Oracle bought Sun for. They kept those technologies alive for this long to give them time to transition those customers over to other things, or to milk them for support money as long as possible while putting nothing into R&D.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Tuesday September 05 2017, @07:58PM (3 children)
Like what, for instance?
Other than Java-related stuff - what exactly?
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by DECbot on Tuesday September 05 2017, @08:16PM (2 children)
I thought the purchase was to ensure MySQL never developed the necessary feature set to directly challenge Oracle's own dbms.
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
(Score: 3, Interesting) by requerdanos on Tuesday September 05 2017, @11:35PM (1 child)
On the other hand, Mysql was (dual-licensed but) GPL, meaning that Oracle would have to release (major portions of) their dbms if they took Mysql code and incorporated it.
Whereas, now, Oracle is the copyright holder and can do what they darn well please with Mysql, including incorporating parts into their proprietary dbms.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 06 2017, @06:08AM
Not true. They could choose to use the other license, they just can't change the license if they don't own the code.
So anybody who has the gpl licensed code can continue to use it under the gpl if they wish and Oracle doesn't have to provide any of their changes if the other license doesn't require it.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 05 2017, @06:04PM (3 children)
I tried to understand the meaning of Oracle. The thesaurus only listed one synonym: disgusting. Under disgusting, I only saw one entry: Oracle.
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Tuesday September 05 2017, @06:09PM (2 children)
The polite form of the popular backronym is "one rich American called Larry Ellison".
(Score: 3, Interesting) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Tuesday September 05 2017, @08:10PM (1 child)
He has a mansion you can see from orbit. All by himself his property taxes were funding the schools.
But then somehow he convinced the city to reappraise his mention. IIRC the schools lost $3M in funding.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 06 2017, @04:49AM
I mentioned my appraisal once, they told me to live in it!?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by fustakrakich on Tuesday September 05 2017, @06:17PM (6 children)
Why should they be allowed to keep the copyrights and patents?
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 4, Interesting) by crafoo on Tuesday September 05 2017, @07:36PM (5 children)
I think this is an excellent point. They should transfer to the public domain or follow the people that created the innovations.
More generally, should patents and copyrights ever be transferable to a corporation? Only humans should retain patents and copyright. They should never be transferable to accountants, lawyers, and bureaucrats (corporations).
(Score: 2, Interesting) by frojack on Tuesday September 05 2017, @08:03PM (4 children)
Oh FFS, what does it matter if the patent's are held in Oracle's name or Larry Ellison's name? The result would be the same.
First you insist on only Humans. Then you disqualify wide swaths of humans simply based on their profession.
Tell you what: Lets all check with YOU from now on any time a patent is to be transferred. You seem to be the expert in this field. Should we call you the patent Tzar, or would "Your Majesty" sound better?
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by crafoo on Tuesday September 05 2017, @08:56PM (3 children)
Money doesn't innovate. Bureaucrats, Lawyers, and MBAs do not innovate. Corporations do not innovate. People do. Humans. IF patents and copyrights are allowed to exist (and they are a very artificial construction, remember) then they should stay where they are created. I don't understand why this makes you angry. It's a much more natural state to advocate for. Look at the colossal mess that's created when you make up all of these artificial, unnatural, and ridiculous rules to govern the transfer of ownership of ideas. It's absurd.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by MostCynical on Tuesday September 05 2017, @11:05PM (2 children)
Are you saying Patents, or IP generally, should not be transferrable, or saleable, or licensable?
How then does an "inventor" make any money from their "invention"?
If it is transferrable, or saleable, then why would the guy with the money (in this case, Larry) not just buy it? The owner would n be... Larry.
A person, but not the inventor. Wether a person or a corporation owns the IP/patent doesn't matter. Somone paid for the lab space, the hardware, the software, the whiteboard.. Sometimes that may have been the "inventor", but not often.
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 06 2017, @05:00AM
You are looking at the problem from faulty assumptions. Money? Another artificial construct developed to help humans interact. You have an Ouroboros argument there, and it is currently killing our world.
I am not being hyperbolic. Many countries are suffering from the effects of human greed paired with a dispassionate accounting system which is easily gamed. The planet is suffering from the effects of human greed, the wellbeing of our environment subjugated to our need for profit in an economy built upon artificial human constructs.
The answer to these problems will not be simple and will entail a lot of struggle, but we should begin with understanding that the "economy" is merely a tool to facilitate human development. Right now people have become disillusioned with religion, but humans haven't changed that much so what filled the void? All hail our great Lord of economics.
(Score: 2) by crafoo on Wednesday September 06 2017, @08:57AM
"If it is transferrable, or saleable, then why would the guy with the money (in this case, Larry) not just buy it? The owner would n be... Larry."
I'm saying that it shouldn't be transferable and they should not be able to buy it. "it" is an artificial thing granted by government to promote the generation of new innovations. The current mess doesn't really do that. I believe a big part of the problem is the transferring of control and the ability to create wealth of each new innovations away from the innovators and to the people that control the capital. At most, limited contracts that grant another person the ability to use a patent to build something useful and make money from the product is probably a good idea. Not control of the IP itself, or the ability to litigate it without the original inventors/creators present, in person, and in agreement.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by looorg on Tuesday September 05 2017, @06:19PM (4 children)
I really wonder what took them so long. I guess SUN had nobody to blame but themselves, that said I'll miss them. I liked working with SUN products, I preferred it over other hardware and software solutions at the time.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 05 2017, @06:29PM (3 children)
You miss the good old days of Stanford University Network? It's a wonder Stanford didn't sue their goddamned asses to change the fucking trade name long ago.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Tuesday September 05 2017, @08:14PM (2 children)
Filter error: entire comment contained in the Subject
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 05 2017, @09:42PM (1 child)
Well you would know. Stanford graduates know only Stanford graduates are any good. So do you have a Stanford degree or a Sanford degree?
(Score: 3, Funny) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Wednesday September 06 2017, @12:26AM
From Uncle Charlie's Summer Camp.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 5, Insightful) by mendax on Tuesday September 05 2017, @07:21PM (5 children)
Oracle has yet to kill Java, another asset acquired from Sun Microsystems. There has been speculation that it will spin it off somewhere but I'm inclined to doubt it.
It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.
(Score: 3, Informative) by bob_super on Tuesday September 05 2017, @07:37PM
Java is consistently in the top3 of languages used.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 05 2017, @08:07PM (1 child)
I read something in TFA about Oracle wanting to unload it onto some kind of foundation.
Java just isn't going away. I use IcedTea (OpenJDK) on my machines at home. Prevents me from having to fetch the installer tarball from Oracle's retarded website.
Apparently NetBeans is going to Apache, too. That's fine with me. NetBeans is a decent IDE.
Common confusions: No, I'm not talking about applets. Nobody uses applets anymore. No, I'm not talking about AWT or Swing applications. Nobody uses Java desktop applications anymore (except NetBeans). No, I'm not talking about appy Android apps used by modern app appers. (I'm a LUDDITE, I guess.) I'm talking about servlets and web applications. The Java open source community for server-side is huge. Apache Commons has a ton of stuff.
There's too much momentum for it to go away. Even if Oracle tried to shut it down, everybody would switch to OpenJDK/IcedTea. Of course, last time I thought that some retarded judge made a retarded judgement that made that murkier, so I suppose there's always the possibility for the BSA to have a field day, but I don't know what would be the point. (Greed, avarice, spite...)
(Score: 1) by tbuskey on Saturday September 09 2017, @11:45AM
I'd like to find a Windows OpenJDK installer. Our product uses OpenJDK on Linux, but some of our developers are using Windows. They need to use Oracle's JDK.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 06 2017, @07:27AM
Which parts?
Desktop Java was stillborn. Browser Java has been dead so long that even the banks have mostly caught on. Oracle even sued Google to kill mobile Java. The only thing left is server-side Java which has the advantage of being so slow that you need a Sparc cluster for it to be useful, which is why it's been kept alive - to sell more Sparc machines.
With Oracle killing off Sparc, there is no point in keeping the remains of Java alive.
(Score: 2) by arslan on Wednesday September 06 2017, @07:37AM
Can they even if they want to? Other folks like Apache and IBM produce their own Java runtime off the spec. People can just move to it. If anything I'd rather like to see Oracle give up on it and Apache take ownership.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Grishnakh on Tuesday September 05 2017, @07:37PM (2 children)
Honestly, you have to be seriously stupid to be sticking with Oracle as a vendor at this point, so just like with Microsoft customers, I hope Oracle succeeds in screwing them over even more. Companies have had many, many, many years to see the writing on the wall and transition to better vendors and more open technologies.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Tuesday September 05 2017, @08:17PM (1 child)
Somehow Oracle convinced Oregon to pay by the hour, without the requirement that they produce a working deliverable, let alone on time.
Well after the, uh... "rollout" of Cover Oregon, I tried to sign up for medical insurance, but was informed the Cover Oregon required Internet Exploder.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 3, Informative) by frojack on Tuesday September 05 2017, @08:24PM
And had you changed your browser's Agent ID string they would have been none the wiser, and you would have been insured. Worked for my son running linux.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by crafoo on Tuesday September 05 2017, @07:38PM (5 children)
What's the status of Virtualbox? Thoroughly and completely compromised?
(Score: 5, Informative) by frojack on Tuesday September 05 2017, @08:09PM
Largely open source.
There are a few modules you have to get directly from them (Extension Packs: hardware abstraction and emulation for use in VM's). But the rest is all GPLv2.
It's eating VMware's lunch. It's THAT good.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 3, Troll) by fritsd on Tuesday September 05 2017, @08:41PM (2 children)
I recently couldn't find the source of virtualbox.
I'm switching to qemu-kvm, just in case.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 05 2017, @09:25PM
Forget that kvm shit, if you dare to be badass, you should compile your own optimized build of qemu with march=native and run only tcg.
(Score: 3, Informative) by cubancigar11 on Wednesday September 06 2017, @08:17AM
Damn man, try harder [virtualbox.org]!
(Score: 3, Informative) by Marand on Wednesday September 06 2017, @07:20AM
More like "thoroughly and completely ignored". I wouldn't say it's been abandoned, because they still have some people working on it, but Debian gave up packaging the open source edition because of upstream issues [debian.org], and I've noticed that the third-party repo version is slowly acquiring more and more problems, making it less convenient to use by the day. For example, KDE5 is completely broken in VirtualBox unless you disable hardware acceleration [virtualbox.org] because the 3d acceleration support is generally broken and unmaintained. Now, 3d accel for X11 guests is declared "user supported" [virtualbox.org], e.g. "fix it yourself, because we can't or won't do shit."
All said, vmware seems to be a much better option right now, except that there's a problem with its drivers and newer (4.12+ I think) kernels, which has been a blocker for me because I need new kernels for better Ryzen support. That leaves "wait for vmware to fix it" or "use qemu-kvm more", so I guess the next time I need to fire up a VM, if it's still not fixed, it'll be time for a qemu crash course.
(Score: 2) by richtopia on Tuesday September 05 2017, @07:45PM (2 children)
I wonder if SUN had not been purchased if things would have worked out differently. For the most part I liked dealing with SUN products, but I am not a network administrator so my opinion is not well founded. Oracle's decisions lead to many forks in SUN's open source projects: OpenOffice.org, ZFS, OpenSolaris for example. However I remember SUN was in serious trouble financially, and probably couldn't have kept the lights on (they were shedding employees even during the acquisition).
Has anyone here used the T-series of SPARC processors? I remember reading about the Niagara when it was first released with so many threads and wondering what applications it would be used for. I'm still not sure if there is a niche somewhere that loves these chips or if they are mostly legacy.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by frojack on Tuesday September 05 2017, @08:21PM
The acquisition spree that Sun itself went on [wikipedia.org] was probably the seeds of its own demise.
All the stuff they gobbled up was not necessary, never went anywhere, and brought no revenue. But a few attracted attention of Oracle: MySQL. An unnecessary shot across Oracle's bow.
There were a cluster of acquisitions that made it look like Sun was going to make a serious run at Virtual computing, but I doubt Oracle was all that worried about that. Vmware or Intel might have snapped up that segment if the first IB Bubble hadn't intervened.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 5, Informative) by turgid on Tuesday September 05 2017, @08:24PM
It would have died years ago in that case.
Correct.
I've worked for a couple of big, famous American companies during my career, including Sun in a very junior engineering position just as the Dot Com bubble burst.
The hubris and ego in the place was enormous when I joined and quite intoxicating, but after a year or two it seemed like the company had lost its way. Sun was rightly very proud of Solaris, Java and its SPARC hardware but many of the old-timers/engineering egos refused to acknowledge the threat from Linux, they refused to see x86 performance and scalability catching up and they really didn't want to admit that not everyone wanted to code in Java for the Java platform. They just didn't get the whole FOSS thing at all. They couldn't understand why people were writing in Perl, Python, C, C++, Ruby... They didn't get GNU tools either.
They even all but killed Solaris x86 just as AMD64 came out, but eventually they saw the light and resurrected it, doing a port to AMD64 in six weeks flat, including paying to have AMD64 support in gcc and binutils fixed for Solaris.
We (young, enthusiastic, naive) tried to tell them (managers, institutionalised big egos), and they did start to listen but it was too late. They did open source Solaris, they did bring out a line of x86-64 machines, they even open sourced SPARC, they sponsored GNOME development (back when it was still good) and made it an official desktop on Solaris, they bought Star Office and open sourced it.
However, the engineering egos really didn't "get" why anyone would run Linux instead of "free" Solaris. They didn't understand that we preferred the more user-friendly and modern GNU userland. Solaris had to stick to official POSIX/SUS standards for commercial contractual reasons, but they did bolt on some GNU/FOSS stuff as an afterthought.
The PHBs and VPs liked to exert their authority and take "decisions."
The UltraSPARC development was years late. It was way behind POWER from IBM. Even though AIX was awful compared to Solaris, POWER hardware was a lot faster in some cases. Fujitsu had its own SPARC64 CPUs which were much better than UltraSPARC and Sun did eventually adopt some of them.
The fact that all the other Unix vendors had got aboard the Good Ship itanic was a golden opportunity for Sun to pull ahead with UltraSPARC but they just couldn't execute. They should have made more of AMD64 but that would have been losing face.
Now, as for the T-Series UltraSPARC (Niagara), those were very interesting. They were designed to be very simple and highly parallel, ideal for certain tasks such as web serving. They were no good for compute-intensive stuff but they had low context switch latency and high memory bandwidth.
A few years after I was laid off from Sun I found myself working for another large company that used Sun hardware and they bought some of the UltraSPARC T2 systems (with a whopping 32GB RAM) as development servers hosting ClearCase (yuck). They were much slower than the old boxes they replaced because they were the wrong CPUs for the job. ClearCase didn't rely much on multi-threading so the advantages of the T2 processors were lost, and their disadvantages amplified...
I believe that the subsequent T-processors were much more powerful. Oracle invested heavily in their development, and continued to use the Fujitsu technology for the more conventional servers.
What really upset me was when Oracle closed off Solaris development. I had collected some old but nice Sun gear (including a couple of 4-CPU Ultra 80 workstations) at home and it instantly became useless.
Being taken over by Oracle was bad, but we used to believe that being taken over by IBM would have been worse. Who knows? It's all history now.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 05 2017, @11:27PM
You forget why they bought sun in the first place - java.
But yes, they are bastards.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 05 2017, @11:48PM
Oracle is run day-to-day by Mark Hurd and Safra Catz.
That's right, a Hurd of Catz.