Hacker News Reader

Comment by rbanffy | Hacker News Reader

That's too bad. ZFS (along with crossbow) is one of the best things in Solaris/OpenSolaris.

I was about to say Oracle has a serious human resources problem, but I noticed that, maybe, the problem is in calling humans "resources".

View on HN

I don't think that's it. Every corporation thinks of its employees in a dollars and cents kind of way.

The operative problem here seems to be that Oracle doesn't value senior technical resources as much as some other companies might, or as much as those resources are used to being valued (and really, few people react well to a cut in autonomy, pay or respect.) They aren't willing to invest what is required, probably in the non-monetary sense as much as the monetary sense, to keep the top talent that came with the Sun acquisition. Personally, I agree that this sounds like a mistake, but this sort of attitude is not new for Oracle, and eh, they've done okay so far, so what do I know?

I agree re: your second point, but when I worked at IBM it was explicitly discouraged to use the term 'resources' to refer to people.

Personally I find the people that use this outdated term stop doing so when continually referred to as 'Outlook resources'.

Really? IBM refers to layoffs/redundancies as "Resource Actions", which is surely one of the most mealy-mouthed corporate expressions

Yes, really. PMs would publicly mock new-to-IBM PMs who used mid-90s business speak. When I was there they also referred to layoffs as 'getting rid of people'. It was a pretty good environment - honest and respectful. Perhaps your office was different.

That's extraordinary and not at all what I would have expected from IBM. I wish there were more places where people ditched corporate doublespeak. Especially that vile phrase "human resources". Soylent Green is human resources.

Any place that has any kind of "employee valuation policy" doesn't value their employees.

> Personally I find the people that use this outdated term stop doing so when continually referred to as 'Outlook resources'.

I use to call them "Powerpoint resources", but I think I'll adopt your designation.

I think you're being unfair - some of them are "Visio resources". Tho' they call themselves "architects".

Every corporation thinks of its employees in a dollars and cents kind of way.

Reminds me of my brother’s old company ( http://www.freud.com/ ). Their website says:

We employ humans, not resources. Job opportunities, contact the HR manager.

Was the fun part that they suggested contacting the Human Resources manager?

Well yes, that was the point I was making :)

Based on what James Gosling has said, as a Sun Fellow Jeff Bonwick would have experienced a significant compensation cut and loss of autonomy (near total of the latter for Gosling). Which most people will interpret as a lack of respect.

As many others have wondered in this set of comments and others, just what is Oracle's cunning plan to make their purchase of Sun worth the investment???

Charging more for Solaris support and providing less of it, for starters.

And thus making it compete with a product that's freely available.

I don't think that will work.

It would work if Solaris was something people really desired. Right now, it's not. People are very happy with Linux and need some incentive to move to Solaris. Paying more is not a good one.

And don't forget that no-longer-OpenSolaris is still freely available ... and might even become something now that it's free of the dead hand of Sun (at least for it being a truly "open" project).

I for one am not happy with Linux and would love to run Open/whateverSolaris ... if it has serious driver support. That's been the Achilles heal of x86 Solaris for more than a decade (e.g. something I directly experienced in 1999) and fixing that will likely be a determining factor in its future success.

Unfortunately that's very painful hard work and lots of it, I wouldn't predict success on general principles. But one can hope.

There are existing businesses who bet on Solaris and have it widely deployed. Moving to Linux may not be trivial. That is, it may not be beyond the FYO point. [1]

The IBM AS400 isn't something that people really desire, but there are a lot of businesses that rely on it and IBM still gets paid to support mainframes.

[1] http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc/2004/08/28/the-economics-of-soft...

> The IBM AS400 isn't something that people really desire

I liked OS/400, you insensitive clod. If I come across a 5250, I'll buy it immediately.

Not sure what I'll connect it to.

But, going back to Solaris and OpenSolaris, it's easy to switch a deployment to "legacy mode". Unix machines are Unix machines and it's not nearly as difficult to move from AIX/HP-UX/Solaris/IRIX to Linux as it would be to move from MVS, unless your binaries insist on running only under Solaris. Legacy mode means no new deployments and no expansion unless justified. It's slow death.

True, in the case of very proprietary platforms (like z and iSeries boxes) it takes very long, but it's death nevertheless.

In order to be kept alive, the Solaris boxes have to be able to perform tricks Linux boxes can't and, to a large extent, this is not the case.

I'm sure that moving off iSeries, etc. is a much more significant proposition than moving off of Solaris. But the barrier isn't zero. For an installation of any significant size it's almost certainly not going to be as simple as switching a deployment to legacy mode. You've got shell scripts to port, different configurations for core features like kickstart, firewalls, different package management. If you made an "environment standardization" bet on Solaris 10, you've got barriers to overcome.

But I'm not saying that Solaris is going to live. Just that, as someone who uses Solaris 10, Oracle seems to be tightening up. I think that they don't really care that much about Solaris and are just going to squeeze it dry. I'm far more worried what they're going to do with Java.

> In order to be kept alive, the Solaris boxes have to be able to perform tricks Linux boxes can't and, to a large extent, this is not the case.

True, but keep in mind that their competitors are often limited to "enterprise" distributions like RHEL and Ubuntu Server.

You are overgeneralizing. Sun's (and Oracle's) main customer base are "people" who use Solaris/Oracle to manage their millions of customers and billions of dollars. They don't want to mess with it, they want support, and will pay for it. The question is, "how much?" -- and Oracle is very good at getting a profitable answer to that question.

Agreed. To Oracle, these are just pawns in a game. The winner of the game (which is always Oracle) gets to fund Larry's next yacht.

The alternative option was that Sun just went bankrupt and everyone lost their job, so choose between some leaving and all losing.

Aut Larry aut nihil? As James Gosling pointed out just recently, IBM was the second option, not bankruptcy. IBM was thought as worse when it came to laying off people and outsourcing their jobs, but they tend to respect their IP and engineers more -- which is a pretty sad revelation, considering that we're talking about big ol' Inferior But Marketable[1] here.

[1]: http://www.etypewriters.com/hailto.html

Actually, I think that properly managing the company and preventing the bankruptcy would be a better third option.

I know, I know... It's easy to say it now, that hindsight is always 20-20, but come on, who outside Sun thought their market strategy was sane? Who really believed they were on the right track? And, as much as I like McNeally (he was really fun), it's as much his fault as Schwartz's that Sun had a problem with "financial reality" (as Gosling so mildly said).

It was painful to watch because we knew how cool technologies they had were, what they could accomplish while, at the same time, knowing it wouldn't last.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com