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

[Todd Hawley]

On Fri, Oct 26, 2018 at 2:14 AM Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com> wrote:

>
> 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.
>

As was I. I'm not sure I'd want to work at a place that once was a mental
health facility. Gotta still be some residual bad energy in the place.


> > 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.
>

Plus that whole area is landfill. When we have the "next big one," those
buildings
likely will suffer heavy damage.

> 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.
>

Er in that case, maybe not. :/

-th
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