back to article DTrace co-creator quits Sun, hits delete on Oracle

The co-creator of DTrace has seemingly erased all memory of Larry Ellison’s Oracle from his mind, after quitting Sun Microsystems for an engineering veep role at Joyent last week. Bryan Cantrill is the latest in a long list of Sun men to quit the firm, following its takeover by Oracle earlier this year. His exit came just a …

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  1. amanfromMars 1 Silver badge

    Hail an EnigmatICQ Caesar.

    That was very Spartan of Bryan Cantrill .

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Down

    typical really

    this is tyical and should have been expected. Oracle don't 'get it' - rather, they don't get IT (chuckle).

    they are old dinosaurs...like Sun were before a mini revolution c.1996

    Oracle will now find that they paid top dollar for a name...but all those brilliant staff that MADE that name have deserted the sinking ship like little coding rats because of absolute incompetent management in the new regime.

    several of his remarks ring very true in my own local experiences... the new owners dont want to run the business with the same ethos and methods - which means their relationship with customers will change.... similar to cool games coding shops being bought and turned into IP sweat shops. forget the great ideas and evolution, just churn out this years verion X of the same old IP within the financial year so our shareholders get return.

    nope...under that new regime no cool features, no DTraceNG, - it'll be all about the bottom line and not about making eg sysadmin jobs easier or more fun

    1. loopy lou
      Thumb Up

      Maybe a good thing

      Seems like good thing for the rest of us that Oracle is getting indigestion after its last meal... I'd far rather see ex-Sun engineers belched out right left and center into small companies to do new and interesting things, than stay inside Oracle and never be heard of again.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Boffin

      Not quite true...

      Oracle and IBM both have created certain cultures that unless you fit in, you're better off leaving or losing your sanity.

      There's definitely a culture clash between Sun and Oracle. Since Oracle bought Sun, Oracle's culture will win.

      This is true of any large company. The only way you can change the culture is for the company to bring in a new CEO with the specific mandate to make these changes for the sake of the company.

      Oracle will survive because its not the best product that wins. Its the best marketed product that wins, so long as the competition isn't much better. ;-)

      Looks like those end loaded golden handcuffs have lost their luster.

      1. Randall Shimizu

        How many people will leave Sun

        The real question is how many key people will leave Sun. Sun is already in the midst of laying off a lot of employees. I think it's going to take a long time for Oracle to work out it's corporate culture issues with Sun.

    3. Lou Gosselin

      Re: typical really

      "this is tyical and should have been expected. Oracle don't 'get it' - rather, they don't get IT (chuckle)... they are old dinosaurs"

      All companies are expected by share holders to produce naturally unsustainable growth. People forget that ultimately, real growth is dependent on actual market growth. Once the market is saturated, that's it, further growth is necessarily at the expense of others and is therefor "zero gain". Oracle is unable to grow the market itself, but it has the wealth to buy a larger piece of the pie. This behavior is pretty much the norm these days.

      Sun, despite having many intelligent people and many innovative initiatives, were not sufficiently ruthless and cutthroat to grow in a mature market. They were unable to survive on their own. For better or worse, we encourage corporations to buy each other out to produce monopolies and oligopolies rather than encourage an environment where smaller firms can thrive.

    4. A Non e-mouse Silver badge
      Thumb Down

      It's a business, not a charity.

      "it'll be all about the bottom line and not about making eg sysadmin jobs easier or more fun"

      Er, Oracle is a business. It's sole aim is to make money for it's shareholders, not to make other peoples lives "fun" (Now, it *might* make money by making other peoples lives fun, but making peoples lives fun is not their primary aim. Making money is.)

      It's sad to see the Sun go down, but what use is cool technologies if it doesn't make any money ? Anyone remember SGI, NeXT, etc ?

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Jobs Halo

        I remember SGI, NeXT

        And all that lovely SGI 3D technology that is owned by NVidia (who admittedly got it for peanuts because SGI was in death throes). You know, that little company making spiffy 3D display technology?

        Or NeXT... created by some individual whose name escapes me for some reason, then sold it to another company he created, and runs now... tiny operation, does something about music players, phones maybe?

        What makes you think NeXT has gone anywhere when it's OS powers every Mac, and IDevice out there?

    5. Anonymous Coward
      Unhappy

      Very true indeed

      Oracle have always been about the money and pumping out cookie-cutter software, well Larry has for sure. Only around the release of Oracle v6.0 did some outside help step-in sort out the mess of finances that Oracle was getting into after the "push, push, push" Larry insisted on. Oracle would push hard to get names signed up, money would sort itself out, but it didn't and it needed help.

      Oracle only wanted the Java IP, secure the Solaris O/S to stop anyone else getting hold of it and get the SUN name. Quite frankly I don't think are that bothered about Sun really, loads of Sun kit about which means lots of license fees to be hoovered up. Unless your a DBA like me who enjoys the products Oracle makes, Oracle is no place for Sun loyal admins, best jump ship to AIX, HP or Linux as at the rate Larry and co. are at it, there won't be much Solaris left in 2 years time.

    6. MacRat
      Joke

      Profit?

      Oracle likes to sell things.

      Sun employees, not so much.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Facts

        "Oracle likes to sell things.

        Sun employees, not so much."

        Umm, no. Sun employees like to sell _things_. Servers, storage, networking gear.

        Oracle likes to lease 0s and 1s and pretend that those are tangible things. But still they don't let you have it when you pay it. Just a lease.

  3. Fazal Majid

    Oracle and DTrace have some history (not in a good way)

    Long before the Sun acquisition, Oracle tried to pressure Sun into giving it ways to disable dtrace-ing Oracle RDBMS, presumably because they don't want sys admins to know how inefficient the gobs of legacy spaghetti code in it perform. Sun refused (not sure if it was Cantrill or Leventhal). Obviously, they are now in a different position to enforce their diktat.

  4. Captain Thyratron

    How many more of these guys have they got left, anyway?

    Oracle hit a nasty bump somewhere and seems to be leaking engineers. They ought to plug that up.

  5. Michael Fremlins

    Sad, really

    I suppose Larry loves his database, and that's enough for him. But Oracle, the database, just seems to be getting bigger and more cumbersome with every release. Automatic Storage Management is hardly automatic. Not a lot about Oracle makes we say "I'm glad to be using it".

    Solaris, OTOH, is grrreeeaaattt. Some things on Solaris are done extremely well. It is a pleasure to use. It reflects the quality of the staff who put it together.

    Oracle need to show some very public support for Solaris, as well as internally too.

  6. Shingo Tamai
    FAIL

    Oracle is like Midas

    To bad they have the rare ability to turn things into shit.

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Alert

    Goodbye Sun, SPARC, Solaris, STK, MySQL.....Hello Java cash cow

    Oracle is bleeding everyone that could create a future for these products.....Larry just wants to own Java

  8. The Cube
    Grenade

    Maybe he is just a polite and well mannered guy

    who didn't want to use bad words like "Oracle" or "shit" on a blog?

  9. Anonymous Coward
    Heart

    haha Sun sucked.

    """nope...under that new regime no cool features, no DTraceNG, - it'll be all about the bottom line and not about making eg sysadmin jobs easier or more fun"""

    Your confusing Oracle with somebody that gives a shit... about Solaris.

    You know how people in 'the reg' and other places kept saying how Oracle did not really want Sparc and did not really care about Solaris and that they wanted Sun for other reasons? (java, etc)

    And then you know how the Solaris faithful came out and attacked the articles saying how obvious and how wonderful Sparc + Solaris would and that Oracle really wanted it to turn them into super-duper-ultra-fast dedicated database super machines that would obviously destroy the market by how fantastically wonderful and fast they would be?

    NOW YOU KNOW WHO WAS RIGHT. (It was not the Sun Worshipers)

    I am sure that the perspective of many in the higher stories of Oracle's main office building is that the effort and money that was spent on Sparc and on Solaris over the years turned out to be nothing more then a fantastic boat anchor that helped sink the good ship Sun.

    With the purchase of Solaris Oracle now has two open source operating systems. Linux is the one the vast majority of their customers use, it's the one that killed off more then one proprietary Unix system over the years and Solaris is the one that helped destroy the company that created it.

    Oracle does not want to go down the same path that Sun did, so they are going to do things differently. Obviously.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Badgers

      Re: haha Sun sucked.

      >NOW YOU KNOW WHO WAS RIGHT. (It was not the Sun Worshipers)

      Oracle have been delivering detailed roadmaps under NDA which completely refute your carefully considered opinion. A direct quote from LJE: "Solaris is to Oracle what MacOS is to Apple or AIX to IBM. It's *our* OS!" (from memory, may not be verbatim) and he followed this with a similar analogy for SPARC.

      It wasn't the products that killed Sun, it was the top tier of leadership (the CEO and his directs who couldn't execute and weren't even aligned among themselves). Oracle's idiosyncratic communication issues aren't helping to dispel the FUD, whether that is whipped up by competitors or via spectator schadenfreude.

  10. Tony Reeves 1

    Not The End of Open Solaris

    You might see Bryan and a few other such names turn up here... http://www.illumos.org/

  11. Kebabbert

    A.C

    You are just wrong.

    "NOW YOU KNOW WHO WAS RIGHT. (It was not the Sun Worshipers)" .... No, we dont know anything yet. It takes years to get out new products. We will see Solaris and Oracle Database tightly running on some hardware. It just takes time.

    "With the purchase of Solaris Oracle now has two open source operating systems. Linux is the one the vast majority of their customers use,".... Wrong again. In fact, Larry Ellison has said that Oracle database is run on Solaris more than any other OS.

    Oracle database is developed on Solaris, and then ported to other OS.

    Long before Oracle bought Sun, it was official and outspoken that the reference platform for Oracle database is Solaris. Not Linux.

    Wrong, wrong, wrong.

    1. gnufreex

      Kebabbert

      Do you go to all over Internet like that posting random crap and wishful thinking about Sun?

      "Oracle database is developed on Solaris, and then ported to other OS."

      Oracle DB is originally written on VAX/VMS, before Sun was even founded. THAT is a fact. Look up on Wikipedia, I think there is something about that.

      "Long before Oracle bought Sun, it was official and outspoken that the reference platform for Oracle database is Solaris. Not Linux."

      Oracle runs it's bussines on Linux since 2003

      http://www.informationweek.com/news/software/operatingsystems/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=13000344

      Also notice in the article that developer workstations are converted to Linux too. They do certify on Solaris, but Linux is where the stuff is getting written for about 7 years now.

      "In fact, Larry Ellison has said that Oracle database is run on Solaris more than any other OS."

      Number of Linux boxes ruining Oracle is bigger than all Solaris boxes (SPARC and X86, with or without Oracle) put together. Larry was just putting up a story for the press, to keep users from running away.

      "Wrong, wrong, wrong."

      Yes, you are wrong. Aren't you tired of that?

      1. Billl
        Happy

        gnufreex

        Hmmm... Me thinks you lie or are just a bit confused:

        "Oracle DB is originally written on VAX/VMS, before Sun was even founded. THAT is a fact. Look up on Wikipedia, I think there is something about that."

        So, it's developed on Solaris and Linux now. Are you saying that it is still written in VAX/VMS? Really, I'm not sure what your point is.

        "Oracle runs it's bussines on Linux since 2003

        http://www.informationweek.com/news/software/operatingsystems/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=13000344

        Also notice in the article that developer workstations are converted to Linux too. They do certify on Solaris, but Linux is where the stuff is getting written for about 7 years now."

        See this article from Oracle itself: http://www.oracle.com/corporate/press/2005_nov/solaris10.html

        Oracle stated themselves that Solaris was its preferred dev platform in 2005. I have no idea how that stands now, but it blows quite a hole in your "since 2003" comment. My guess is that Oracle did move to Linux, as they actually develop and sell OEL, but certainly not before 2005 as you claim.

        "Number of Linux boxes ruining Oracle is bigger than all Solaris boxes (SPARC and X86, with or without Oracle) put together. Larry was just putting up a story for the press, to keep users from running away."

        I like Linux, so I'll leave your "ruining Oracle" comment alone... You are wrong here, of course. It's really quite well known from Oracle, as well as IDC and Gartner that Oracle runs more on Solaris than any other platform. It's a fact, not wishful thinking... This is due to the sheer number of years Solaris has been around. You will still find Oracle DBA's that insist on nothing but Solaris. The Linux push started from the SA's, as a toy really, but moved up the chain and now the Finance guys are pushing it's use with no other argument than "but it's cheaper". This is a faulty argument for sure, but makes for good headlines.

        Remember, keep an open mind, you may learn something.

        1. gnufreex
          Pint

          I think you missunderstood me.

          I said Oracle is _originally_ developed on on VAX/VMS, and I thought just that: It got developed fist on Digital, then got ported on SunOS, then Solaris, then Linux. Point is, it is not _originally_ (as in version 1... or 2 since that was first version) developed on Solaris like Kebabbert said. Reason I said that is that he likes to go around internet lambasting Linux just because it's competitor to his precious Solaris. His main argument is that Linux kernel has 11 milion lines of code, so it must somehow be bloated because Solaris is smaller. It is silly really, because he sound surprised when people tell him that most of that are drivers and that Linux support more hardware, more filesystems and more CPU architectures than Solaris so it is apples for oranges comparison. And then he typically claims that person is bullshiting him and that mustn't be true. And then asks for "reliable sources"... at that point he gets directed on kernel.org to read sources himself. LOL.

          So my point is, kebabbert doesn't have a clue what he is talking about, when he talks about Linux nor when he talks about Solaris, or any other technology. He just trolls against Linux, and that is what he does. And it got really tiresome seeing him spew uneducated FUD.

          On the other points, Oracle saying that "Solaris is prefered OS" doesn't mean they are using it. I heard them saying "we run our business on Linux and our development platform is Linux". I don't remember exact year, but I goggled for article and got 2003. I linked it in my previous post. Do you say that article is false? They first ported DB to Linux in 1998, in wake of Red Hat IPO. http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/topics/linux/whatsnew/index.html

          That let Oracle make cheap "solutions" without hurting their margins. That's why Larry said he likes Linux, that is obvious. They are in Linux pretty long.

          As for "ruining Oracle". I meant "running Oracle", it was spell check's fault. I think I am right about that. There is bigger Linux/Oracle installed base than Solaris/Oracle. I may be little exaggerating that there is more than all Solaris all together, but there are more Oracle DB on Linux.

          However, if by "Solaris runs more Oracle" you mean _revenue_ of all Oracle software running on Solaris, then you are right. Oracle has more revenue on Solaris land then on Linux land, because Linux installations usually only run Oracle DB and other stuff is form other vendors. Other reason being UtraSPARC T cores, and Oracle license per core. So you might have a point with that, depending what definition for "more Oracle" you use.

          And I already keep my mind open as it can be.

          Cheers.

  12. Anonymous Coward
    Coffee/keyboard

    That Sun 'top tier' management is still there...

    A.C "It wasn't the products that killed Sun, it was the top tier of leadership (the CEO and his directs who couldn't execute and weren't even aligned among themselves)."

    Aside from the bi-weekly re-orgs, Fowler and the 'solaris four' are all still there and still carrying on in the same fashion they always did. And just because a roadmap is written in an NDA, it doesn't mean that it is written in stone. If more customers want linux due to platform migration or any other multitude of reasons (new 'features in solaris that they don't want), they'll kill it without a second thought.

    The fact that so many of the key folks in Solaris have left and Oracle has done nothing to retain them should kinda tell you something about how much Oracle values the future of Solaris.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Pint

      Not really disagreeing but...

      Yes Fowler et al are still there and yes NDA's can change - the original point was simply that there are no foreseeable plans to kill it off, quite the opposite.

      Indeed, to the later point about what customers want, this too may change. Solaris will likely evolve into being mainly an "appliance-OS" (sadly), which changes the migration dynamic.

      As for people leaving, that's Oracle standard acquisition practice - there are always folks who bail when acquired and their approach is simply "if they want out, let them go". That's all it is, no big "master plan" to kill Solaris.

      Frankly, if they do kill it, that'll be down to stupidity more than evil. :)

  13. Kebabbert

    gnufreex

    "In fact, Larry Ellison has said that Oracle database is run on Solaris more than any other OS."

    Number of Linux boxes ruining Oracle is bigger than all Solaris boxes (SPARC and X86, with or without Oracle) put together. Larry was just putting up a story for the press, to keep users from running away."

    Great. You think Larry was just putting up a story for the press and he lied? Sure he did. And the rest of your post is correct too, I bet. Maybe you should check things up first before you post, like official statistics?

  14. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Linux, really?

    It surprises me to hear that allegedly the majority of Oracle Database customers choose Linux when it's such a PITA to install 10g on RedHat compared to Solaris. Gave me a nice LOL one day when I installed Ora Enterprise Linux at the insistence of some clueless architect and discovered doesn't even come with Database in the yum repos! What's the point of OEL then?

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