[rescue] Oracle kills Solaris

[Jonathan Patschke]

On Wed, 6 Sep 2017, Liam Proven wrote:

> Oracle has laid off ~2,500 Solaris and SPARC developers, leaving a tiny
> remnant, presumably to fulfil some support contracts.
>
> Apart from the forks -- Illumos, SmartOS etc. -- that's it. It appears
> that Solaris is dead. Sad times.

It's probably for the best.  Oracle's been pretty clear about being
uninterested in developing Solaris or selling it ($1000/socket/year?).

The code quality of Solaris went to hell after Oracle bought Sun.  Few of
the administration tools share a common "feel" or even similar
command-line styles.  Lots of features act half-implemented and fragile.
I've run into a few race-conditions in the iSCSI stack, for instance.

It's a night-and-day difference to the solid (if spartan) distribution
that Solaris 9 was.

It would be Really Really Nice if Oracle would open-source (under an
actual open-source license like Apache, X11, or even GPLv2) Solaris and
disclaim their patents over ZFS.  But, it's evident that the purchase was
really about controlling Sun's patents and choking MySQL to uselessness.
The last decade has been about milking support contracts, rent-seeking
litigation, and nothing more.

I've long hoped that Oracle would buy Adobe so that the company that
added backdoor-sufficient programmability to Flash, murdered FrameMaker,
and keeps trying to close-off PDF would see a fitting end.

-- 
Jonathan Patschke
Austin, TX
USA