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Comment by shrubble | Hacker News Reader

I’m of the opinion that the acquisition of Sun by Oracle was the worst possible outcome; it guaranteed that Solaris would decline.

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Solaris was the development OS for Oracle for years. I presume that's now shifted to their own linux distro but for many years that was the case, to the point that if you were a serious Oracle customer you ran it on Solaris (and Sun hardware) because all the bug fixes and updates came out first for that platform.

So from that standpoint it makes sense that they acquired it. They probably just didn't care about any non-Oracle users.

> Solaris was the development OS for Oracle for years. I presume that's now shifted to their own linux distro

I wouldn't bet on that. Their Linux distro is a RHEL clone, but they have total control over Solaris.

Given that they killed the roadmap and admitted there will never be a Solaris 12 after laying off 90% of the core developers - I would bet on that.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/sun-set-oracle-closes-down-las...

Not doing another major release of doesn't exactly rule out keeping it as the reference platform for their core database product.

I guess my question - I honestly have no idea and it's been years since I paid attention to Oracle or Sun's inner workings - is whether they're still developing SPARC hardware? The Google seems to say no, they've abandoned that... so I'm inclined to agree with you guys now.

I don't have a ton of nostalgia left for Sun stuff, but still... what a waste.

SPARC hardware is also dead.

Their core reference platform moved from SPARC to Linux + X86 almost a decade ago. They pushed Exadata down everyone's throat at the time with their "it'd be too bad if we have to audit you unless you buy this new hardware" approach.

https://www.oracle.com/engineered-systems/exadata/

I have seen some of the hardware on eBay for not much money - can they take a regular Linux or possibly OpenIndiana distro being installed on them?

Yes, they’re standard x86 kit with I believe infiniband interconnects.

I'm endlessly surprised that Oracle has enough customers to support them. I was familiar with the reasoning a long time ago but so many of those same users have moved on to SQL Server or open source stuff.

Still mad at IBM for screwing the pooch on that one. They basically handed the company to Oracle.

Did IBM consider purchasing Sun?

Yes, although IBM only wanted Java and was planning to cancel SPARC and maybe Solaris.

Makes sense given that IBM already had the POWER arch & AIX, which was based on BSD rather than SysV for Solaris.

Kind of like Oracle did.

Oracle also tried to kill MySQL, with extremely amusing results.

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