Top Solaris developer flees Oracle Greg Lavender, the lead developer in charge of the Solaris operating system at Oracle, has left the company. And the OpenSolaris Governing Board, which is supposed to steer the open source version of Solaris, is thinking about disbanding because Oracle has not had any contact with the board for the past six months. As one El …
And Linux somehow isn't copyrighted?
GPL is copyright license. Everything under GPL is copyrighted by developer who released it under GPL, allowing free use are redistribution by doing that. But if you break GPL (close down something), you are infringing copyright . Oracle could change from CDDL to GPL.
That said, I don't think they will do it.
Linux is crap compared to Solaris. Linux = reinvention of the same old wheels time and time again, then pretending it is new.
Every "good" thing about Linux has already been done elsewhere. Linux devs then just implement the same thing on Linux. That is neither original nor inventive.
The incredibly useful database at http://bugs.sun.com doesn't appear to have been updated since march, although Oracle did throw out a Java 1.6.0_21 just a few days ago with a goodly number of bug fixes - so it's not like development is stalled.
The bug db has saved me countless hours of wasted effort - I really, really hope Oracle doesn't have an aversion to sharing its "dirty laundry" and this is just a transitional hitch, otherwise Java development just got a whole lot harder.
Lost the father of Java
Lost the father of XML
Lost Stephen Hahn
Lost Sunay Tripathi
Lost Greg Lavender
Lost Garrett D'Amore
Bill Moore joins Nexanta advisory board
Who's next, Levanthal, Bonwick, Gregg, Cantrill?
Congratulations on doing such a stellar job so far of retaining Sun engineering talent and protecting your community of customers and developers. Excellent work.
As I see it, there are three possible ways to consider this:
First, there is the rabid Sunshiner "the sky is falling" view, where this is all the machinations of Evil Larry destroying the "heritage" of Sun, for no other reason than.... well, they actually never seem to have a good reason for accusing Larry of wanting to "destroy" OpenSlowaris, they just imply he must be mad and evil 'cos he doesn't "think" like they do.
The second view is that of the Oraclista, which is that Larry is clearing out the dead wood and egos that led Sun down the path to self-destruction for so many years. They willl point out that all the Sun "greats" listed by the Sunshiners were the same people to blame for the meadering and bloated product "development" that left Sun with products the customers just didn't want. Products that were often developed in ego-driven competition with more popular and relevant solutions that Sun could have collaborated with if those same "greats" had been able to see their own limitations.
Then there is the third view, of the amused spectator, which is pointing and laughing!
/SP&L
While Sun did plenty of things to drive themselves into the ground, like spending upwards of five billion dollars on unnecessary acquisitions and failing for no adequately explained reason to get two major chip designs out the door on time (or at all), and while a hell of a lot of self-licking lollipops needed to be fired, I do not think OpenSolaris is much to blame for it. No, I think that's one of the few things they were doing right--attracting the attention of developers to a free Unix that's actually good. It is never bad to secure the loyalty of tens of thousands of hackers.
While it is plenty profitable for Solaris to be nothing more than the boot loader for Oracle's money-printing database, that sort of thing will just make sure that Solaris ends up like OpenVMS--making a few hundred million dollars a year while the world forgets it exists and it slowly disappears from the face of the Earth. Users think about what they use, and many a good OS has died for lack of such exposure. How many people out there know that the OS that pretty much invented kernel-level clustering and whose clusters can demonstrably survive the destruction of a data center with high explosives is still around and processing financial transactions? Nobody knows and nobody cares. A small hobbyist community is still alive and kicking--I still have a couple of CD-ROMs from it, in fact--and most of the people who read this site have probably never seen a DCL prompt in their lives, and likely never will. Is that really a good way to manage an OS project?
As somebody who uses OpenVMS now and then, I don't like where this business with Solaris is going. It is much too familiar.
One key aspect of a takeover is keeping key staff on side - especially in parts of the business you have no intention of killing off. Oracle have clearly failed to do this - first James Gosling and now Greg Lavender. Yes, Java and Solaris respectively won't die because these people have left. Although I personally regard James Gosling as the bigger loss, I imagine the Solaris community have been more worried by the news of Greg Lavender's leaving that I was about hearing that Java's creator had left.
Is there room in Oracle for speculative R&D? No. But if they want to keep the talent they acquired with the purchase of Sun, then they need to re-think this approach - take a leaf out of Google's book and give people one day in five for speculative research.
It seems the Opensolaris crowd has started banning all people who point out the lies and inconsistencies in the postings of certain corporate shills masquerading as "users". Maybe they know that the FUD is better than straight facts, I don't know, but currently they are cleansing the list of people who don't like the taste of koolaid.
Is it wrong that all these people who brought bloat and instability to the kernel are going away? I want a stable kernel I can run for years with no bugs but Sun forgot that when they decided the shiny windows way was the right way. That is about the same time that they lost most of their old school supporters. I have a business to run and I need computers to be stable. I don't give a damn about the latest feature or self healing BS. I just want it to run, log when it can't and let me make the decisions without introducing hacker doors just so it looks like any idiot can drive it with a mouse.
Oracle has not made any attractive offers to try to hold on to Sun people. There attitude seems to be: be grateful to us that you still have a job. Oracle paid off our ESPPs and the Sun options and RSUs were never worth dirt, so what interest does a former Sunner have in staying? This is the perfect opportunity to re-start elsewhere.
I dare say I saw that coming long ago.
OpenSolaris will suffocate because it is too small to survive outside of Oracle and because Oracle considers it a waste of resources; meanwhile, mainstream Solaris will join the ranks of those operating systems which retreated into the high end and died there, quietly and profitably.
I can confirm having spoken to a friend of mine at Cisco that Greg has joined the Cisco team. He called me last week to find out if I knew him or not which I didn't. As an ex Sun employee it makes me a bit sad to watch them screw up a great customer relationship company that was Sun.
We will be moving our massive system to Windows - SQL Server from Solaris -Sybase purely for performance reasons. It also cost 1/5 of the price or less haven't done the sums and we converted 99% of the sql code with a free tool. The new system can process double the amount of information at least, performance tests proved it. It's a risky move for us because of the initial costs but worth taking the risk looking ahead. I think this performance handicap is more to do with Sybase but technology moves on and people move on.
Sun made a big mistake with their open source move. I thought you bought Solaris so you can use the supposedly superior software so they can sell you the hardware. Now we have Fujitsu boxes. Smells like Apple in late 80's when they tried to sell it as software only but they realised their mistakes. Oracle have a big job in front of them and they will struggle, Solaris is on the decline with people moving to Linux or Windows. People will leave the company, it's natural, they want to do other things.
He was not a lead developer.
http://opensolaris.org/jive/thread.jspa?threadID=131983&tstart=0
"Many of us very much like Greg... he was a VP here, not a developer,
and he has a great opportunity that he wanted to pursue. We wish
him luck in his new role @Cisco, and we'll continue building a better
Solaris under different (but also familiar) management.
Nothing to see here folks; just business in the valley.
- Bart
--
Bart Smaalders Solaris Kernel Performance"
To be fair, Oracle's information about the future and roadmap for their own products is equally vague.
Every time I think they've quietly killed Oracle for OS X support, I find that they will do something like slip out 10g, or a 64-bit Intel Client library - with no announcement.
They don't even bother addressing their own forums when people ask the straight blunt question - are you are are you not still supporting OS X.
Of course, we're already used to getting that from Apple with regard to Java, or answering any question ever about anything trivial.
No wonder Larry and Jobs are friends.
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