Submitted by It appears that Oracle has lost interest in supporting the Solaris port for IBM SystemZ machines: “The SystemZ port of Solaris is dead. Oracle pulled all plugs and refused to further help the authors.” In two years, the project has been downloaded only 1000 times.
Reducing functionality and support is sad, but I go and say this nevertheless: good for them. This is exactly the kind of waste of resources Oracle is probably good at cutting down.
Agreed. It is good that finally there are managers who are pushing Sun int the direction of where customers want the resources put rather than engineers running the company who simply do stuff because it happens to be ‘cool’ and ‘hip’ and ‘interesting’ even though it adds not a single cent to the bottom line. Hopefully the buy out will result in a massive culling of programmers and managers who sabotaged every move to improve Solaris on x86, open source Java and Solaris, and actually holding the SPARC development team accountable for the useless poorly performing processors they’ve been developing each year and each year having their ass handed to them on a platter via shrinking revenue and customer base.
Edited 2010-03-31 04:01 UTC
I’m a little confused. Do you mean that you hope that Oracle will get rid of the people who open sourced Java and Solaris, or do you mean that you hope Oracle will get a move on and open source the rest of Java and Solaris?
Where did I state that; I said culling those who worked against trying to open sourcing Java and Solaris. Do you have reading comprehension problems or something or do you just like to pick fights because you need something to keep you occupied between social welfare cheques?
Edited 2010-03-31 06:56 UTC
err, learn to speak English properly before you hit out at others for not understanding what you said!
Excuse me but how the hell is this remotely confusing about my original post let alone my follow up post?
Please, tell me, what is confusing; I am clearly talking about the managers and programmers who sabotaged the open sourcing effort. There is no ambiguity there.
The fact that you signed up over 5 months ago and made less than 5 posts tells me that your account is nothing more than a sock puppet.
Edited 2010-04-01 00:47 UTC
Actually no, that’s not perfectly clear. Because I was the one who originally asked you to clarify, I’ll explain exactly what I found confusing. You advocate that Oracle should fire the engineers who sabotaged Solaris on X86. This is perfectly clear. However, since the next item in your list says “open source Java and Solaris”, you can read that two ways. First, the way you meant, is a separate item that Oracle should open source Java and Solaris. The other way to read it though is inclusive, i.e. that Oracle should fire the managers who were open sourcing Java and Solaris. I was simply asking which it was you meant to say. Why exactly this degenerated into a flame war is beyond me.
Re-reading your post, it does look like you’re advocating Oracle fire the engineers behind the Sun FOSS projects, and there was nothing provocative in his post.
I doubt Oracle is going to cull the anti-FOSS guys. I’d expect the opposite. Cull the FOSS guys; nurture and grow the proprietary guys. It was a sad day when Oracle bought Sun.
Wow, someone had a bad day. Sounds like you are the one trying to pick a fight by shouting baseless insults at others. I asked a *question* about your wording, how the hell is that trying to provoke you? Go have a beer and chill out.
Oracle knows what it takes to get a project to focus on the things that will make is successful and utilize the development talent they have in a productive way. Solaris focus should be on x86-64 and SPARC, thats where the money is, wheres where the users are, thats whats important. The ARM port is next on the chopping block.
…with IBM never letting Oracle port their DB to zOS then it does with cutting out support for strange platforms. Oracle have been trying to get a foot in the Mainframe door for years and have been consistently blocked by Big Blue. I think this has at least as much to do with taking value away from the Mainframe as it does with cutting dead wood.
There where many Mainframe SysProgs that where interested in replacing zLinux with what is arguably a more enterprise orientated UNIX. In the end, it’s trivial to edit and recompile GPL’d software for another kernel an that is what the SysProgs wanted, a way to run cheap software on the Mainframe. Solaris, with all it’s advanced and stable features, would have been exactly what these guys wanted.
Unfortunately, my experience is that IBM running unix on their mainframes is the kind of answer they are shoveling down the throats of people who did not ask the question to begin with.
IBM wants people to run Linux partitions on their mainframes, because that is one of the way they get to charge people licensing for something which is technically free. (i.e. the OS and a lot of the userland is indeed free, but the license to run the partition on the mainframe is most definitively not free or cheap for that matter). It is the genius of IBM marketing though. I gottat give that to them…
Absolutely spot on. But in the end, the partition costs are negligible compared to the licensing costs of software for the Mainframe. Running Tomcat on zLinux is a hell of a lot cheaper than running Websphere on zOS and even though the two are worlds apart in terms of functionality, sometimes Tomcat is all you need.
Maybe there have been so few downloads because… drumroll… mainframes are crazy expensive and the few who can afford them don’t tend to play around with a different OS every week.
Well you dont choose Mainframes for their cpu speed.
I takes 8-16 Intel Nehalem-EX cpus to match one z10 Mainframe with 64 cpus, in terms of raw cpu speed. Of course the Mainframe has much better I/O but you do not choose them for cpu speed. In that case, any modern x86 is 5-10x times faster.