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posted by Fnord666 on Tuesday September 05 2017, @04:55PM   Printer-friendly
from the will-it-become-dark? dept.

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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 06 2017, @05:57AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 06 2017, @05:57AM (#564048)

    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.