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tbray.org

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What is Tim Bray known for? (please excuse my ignorance)

I would say mainly being an author of the XML specs.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Bray

He was the director of web technologies at Sun, he's also worked on the XML and Atom standards.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Bray

According to his website, he is also a member of the Technorati advisory board and a friend of the company, a former advisor and friend of Make Technologies, and a friend of Smallthought Systems; I have an equity interest in all three companies.

http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/misc/Tim

He's also got an amazing series on his blog about concurrent programming languages, called Concur.next. If you're a language and tooling geek, it's pure gold.

http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2009/09/27/Concur-dot...

Mr. Bray is also notable for having one of the most amazing and intelligent 'comments' sections I've ever seen on a blog. Good reading.

Intelligence, honesty, curiosity, humanity, and getting things done. :-)

First JRuby guys to Engine yard, now Tim. Sun is losing a lot of good people. Now I wonder how the main ordinary developers are doing there ;/ Can't be a fun place right now

I think it's safe to say that Sun no longer exists:

  % curl -I http://www.sun.com/
  HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
  Server: Sun-Java-System-Web-Server/7.0
  Date: Sat, 27 Feb 2010 02:16:46 GMT
  P3p: policyref="http://www.sun.com/p3p/Sun_P3P_Policy.xml", CP="CAO DSP COR CUR ADMa DEVa TAIa PSAa PSDa CONi TELi OUR  SAMi PUBi IND PHY ONL PUR COM NAV INT DEM CNT STA POL PRE GOV"
  Location: http://www.oracle.com
  Content-length: 0

Somehow, I have trouble feeling the same sense of sympathy for Oracle at the moment.

  % curl -I http://www.sun.com/
  HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently

:,(

Back in the day, I cut my teeth on a Sun SPARCstation at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. This is a sad time.

I know a few people from Sun. The salespeople are happy to go to Oracle. The technical people are all looking for other things to do now.

It was the sales people taking over that killed Sun, IMHO, so it seems likely to hasten the demise of Oracle when they get there and start celebrating in earnest. Since most hackers don't have much love for Oracle, I guess it won't be too upsetting to see it happen.

With a handful of exceptions, most enterprise companies are sales companies in the long run.

Maybe now the Sun sales people will learn how to sell from their Oracle compatriots.

Oracle's acquisition of Sun seems to be leading to a similar exodus of talent as did Microsoft's long courtship of Yahoo.

Just curious. What is so bad about Oracle, exactly?

They're very good at selling, but not so good at engineering. It's an average database product, with a ruthless sales team.

I wish I could make my pal, who used to work for Oracle, write down some of the Oracle "war" stories which he told to me. But in essence what henrikschroder says is the truth.

Well, for one thing, Sun has long been a hardware-centric Unix powerhouse, and Oracle is a software company that focuses on databases and rebranded Linux distributions...

Yet another elf leaving Middle Earth

Sun = Middle Earth? Does that make Oracle Sauron?

Personally, I'm rather excited by the impending death of Sun. There must be dozens of new startups in the works because of this. Recurly.com is one of them.

Sun has/had so many fantastic engineers, and a lot of times in the past decade or more, I've felt like they've been producing fantastic work only to have it rot in a ghetto and never really get the exposure it deserves. That said, a ghetto at Sun Microsystems probably means it had more users than a huge breakout success in a startup. So, it's kind of hard to keep things in perspective. But, there are a number of technologies that have come out of Sun, and I'll be curious to see what the engineers responsible for those technologies do when they free themselves (or are freed by being laid off) from Oracle.

If we had the resources, I think I'd be trying to woo a handful of them to work for my company. Maybe they'd work for mostly equity, since many of them aren't hurting for cash.

When a company like Sun dies, many of the technologies that are not part of the combined product line die with it. Sadly, many of those are patented, so fewer startups will be able to use them.

A lot of history also dies with it. If there is anyone willing to write the ultimate book about the history of Unix workstations, now is the time to do it. Preserving this history is also important for preventing future mistakes. Nobody wants another HP-150 or Microsoft Bob.

As for my personal hopes, I hope SPARC continues. We need diversity in the processor space.

I also fear for Solaris/OpenSolaris. I don't want them to join Tru64.

Maybe Sun could follow Atari's example and launch a "SPARCstation Flashback" limited edition (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_Flashback_2#Atari_Flashba...), but with a Niagara 3 inside ;-)

I've never been a Solaris fan (used it in school, and it's running one one of my old Ultra2s), but I really do love zfs. Every week it scans all my drives to ensure my data's really still there, and my file server sends me email when things go wrong (both from smartd and cron). If Solaris dies it will be a sad loss, but if zfs dies with it, it would really be horrible.

To be honest, I'm hopeing for some lgpl/bsd release of the OpenSolaris code so that all the fun bits can be fully integrated into BSD/Linux/Darwin. Solaris's driver support is too sparse for it to really be a good general purpose OS, but it has a few great functions that would do a lot to improve more generally useful operating systems.

> I've never been a Solaris fan (used it in school, and it's running one one of my old Ultra2s), but I really do love zfs

That's somewhat like my relationship with Debian and Ubuntu. I like the Gnome desktop and the rest of Linux, but what I definitively love is APT. I could move to a flavour of BSD or start using OpenSolaris as my netbook's OS, as long as it had APT.

For FreeBSD, there's Debian GNU/kFreeBSD (http://www.debian.org/ports/kfreebsd-gnu/), and for Solaris there's nexenta (http://nexenta.org). I'm guessing Solaris won't have useful drivers for your netbook, but FreeBSD might. It's always fun to play, anyhow.

I wish Oracle would just release ZFS under GPL. I know a lot of people say that Btrfs will be as good. But I say let both out of the box (Btrfs is already available under GPL) and let the best system win.

I wish they would release it under BSD or MIT, so we could truly have it on all platforms.

Microsoft ZFS? No, thanks.

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