I think that's a more apt description of CA, BMC, or Symantec. Places where tired old software goes to die a quiet death. What Oracle does is worse: kill software that still has plenty of life in it. I've seen them do it by acquisition, and I've seen them do it by stealing code or ideas from partners (personally, twice). So they're not so much a graveyard as a slaughterhouse for software.

Oh and don't forget to tell the truth in your next job interview: "CA is a tremendously successful company and excellent employer, unfortunately, the role was not the right fit for me".

Yup. Precisely what happened to Stellent, a company that used to produce great document filters. After ORA buyout, employees fled like there was a plague epidemic and prices spiked at such a level that you'd either cut your veins or consider migrating to another technology.

> ORA is the elephant's graveyard of software.

Well, except that some of the elephants were still alive and perfectly fine, and ora worms started eating them before they were dead.

Of course, these businesses don't make enough money to cover the massive shareholder draw, so it's all a stage play to convince Wells Fargo to loan them enough to pay those dividends.

It's an untenable and irrational position in the long run, but markets can remain irrational longer than individuals can remain solvent. And many businesses are in this same situation, needing bank loans to pay never-reducing dividends.

This is true also of companies that are taken over by private equity firms, although that is probably common knowledge by now. e.g. every single one in my team at Rackspace has left for a different role (all at different companies, all at different times) after being acquired by PE firm.

Sometimes I wonder how the engineers can't see this coming. Sure there are cost savings to be made by streamlining product offerings, cutting the "recreational budget" etc (i.e. money for office parties). But the biggest cost center for tech companies are its employees (probably that and real estate).

I am actually surprised they invested into Solaris for so long, considering its long time half dead status on the market.

I suspect if the takeover hadn't happened, the FOSS systems landscape would look a whole lot different. Like what, I don't know, but definitely different.

NeXT was acquired by Apple. 6 months later... Jobs was in charge, and history unfolded.

But does/did Solaris have anything worthwhile to offer over BSD/Mach.

Sun was in bad financial situation at that point, there is a high chance all these engineers would be laid off 8 years earlier if takeover hadn't happened.

It's possible IBM would have been a significantly better steward. Of course, it would have been hard to be a worse one.

That's a bit unfair. IBM would have probably canned hardware (and hence Solaris) much earlier than Oracle did, because they already had their own offering in that space and they were as invested as Oracle in Linux (ok, they don't have their own RedHat clone, but they are definitely big on supporting Linux).

IBM was buying Sun because of Java, and planning to chuck the hardware out one way or another. Oracle bought Sun because of the hardware and basically kept everything else going, albeit in a reduced fashion where there was overlap (MySQL) or they were not interested in the niche (OpenOffice).

I think Oracle had some decent ideas and didn't execute well on them, partly because of cultural issues. I don't think IBM would have done better, certainly not on the hardware/Solaris side. They would have probably done a bit better with Java/OpenOffice but that's about it. Solaris was doomed by the Linux boom, there is very little anyone could have done about that by the time the acquisition became inevitable.

They were interested in OpenOffice ... just not sustainably, as it turned out.