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

[Bobbie Sellers]

On 10/26/18 9:52 AM, Todd Hawley wrote:
> 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.

     I doubt that such bad energy exists apart from the brains of the 
mental patients which are
long gone.
>
>>> 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 would want to check if that building was updated.
>
>> I'm going to have to check out the Illumos-based distros soon then.

     If you want it I will bring it to the next meeting on November 4th. 
Announcement will be on Monday.
>>
>> 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
>
         Don't worry about expertise.
     I had no expertise in Linux when I started using it which
is why I joined the LUG.  I still don't have much expertise in
Linux but still I use it and produce too many emails and
Usenet posts.  ;^)

     bliss