[sf-lug] (forw) Re: The LUG list is back and just in time...

[Rick Moen]

Todd Hawley (celticdm at gmail.com) wrote:

> I ran into one of my ex-co-workers at Sun on BART recently
> who told me Oracle took over the old Agnews Mental Health facility in
> Santa Clara and put some ex-Sun employees there.

They did, indeed.  As an old codger who remembers the Agnews State
Hospital facility that _was_, I was somewhat astonished to notice when
it got re-opened and rebuilt as an Oracle/Sun campus.

> My former co-worker offered to work at home and probably gained
> himself an extra year or two of employment by doing that. He
> eventually saw massive layoffs coming and retired before Oracle could
> lay him off. As for Sun Quentin (at the other end of the bridge), I
> never got to work there.

Somehow, I missed hearing the 'Sun Quentin' joke until a few days ago. 
For those who don't quite get the local reference, the main building
at the Menlo Park Sun campus (which is now a Facebook campus) was built
around a big square courtyard:  Thus the resemblance to a prison yard.

> I'm going to have to check out the Illumos-based distros soon then.

I'm going to hazard some personal impressions of the ex-Solaris
ecosystem, here, in case they are useful.

When Oracle bought out Sun and (in time) killed the OpenIndiana project,
there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth among the Solaris technical
community -- for years.  I kept talking to angry and frustrated Solaris
users who disliked the direction Oracle was going for various reasons,
and I kept saying to them 

RM:  Fork the codebase, man.  No time like the present.
Them:  Hmm?
RM:  Stop waiting for something to happen.  Oracle cares only 
     about funding for Larry's MIGs, and so on.  If you want
     a healthy Solaris, you have to start with where Ian Murdock
     let the Project Indiana codebase, _fork it_, give it a 
     new name so Larry's lawyers can't hassle you, spend
     six months writing replacements for the small bits 
     that aren't open source yet, and you're done.
Them:  I don't know if that's wise.
RM:  BSD went through exactly that.
Them:  I don't know.  Maybe we should wait.

They waited almost a decade.  One guy, Garrett D'Amore, with key help from  
some other extremely important ex-Sun engineers such as Bryan Cantrill
and Adam Leventhal, finally forked the darned thing starting in 2010,
chose the name 'illumos', and started rewrting the last few proprietary
bits.

But my impression is:  It's divided into a bunch of little camps that
each want a distinct brand identity, and most are pursuing pretty
specialised niches.  That's to say, there isn't much of an illumos
_movement_ the way there has been a Linux movement.  All the 
publicity is about the individual niches, under their individual names.

They're also, well, small communities by our standards.  But with
deep expertise.  Might be your cuppa.



> -th
> 
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