“Oracle laid off all Solaris tech staff in a classic silent EOL of the product”

Re:“Oracle laid off all Solaris tech staff in a classic sile... by rodgerd on Sunday September 03, 2017 @03:58PM (#15163506)

Someone who (at the time) was senior enough in an IBM/Red Hat joint role told me the plan was that IBM would buy Sun, essentially for their Telco and a few other key market segments. To avoid any anti-trust risks (which IBM was still institutionally paranoid about) that might come from owning AIX, Solaris, WebSphere, Java, and various other overlapping properties, they would spin much of the software division (including Java and Solaris) off to Red Hat.

Unfortunately for the free software world, IBM's lawyers got cold feet when it turned out that Sun were mired in bribery claims. Oracle didn't care. Pity, because actually having Java properly open sourced, and likewise with various other Sun technologies (e.g. an OpenSolaris that didn't rely on a couple of binary-only libraries, for example) would have been quite a net win.

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Re:“Oracle laid off all Solaris tech staff in a classic sile... by peoplewindow on Sunday September 03, 2017 @04:01PM (#15163538)

By "properly" open sourced you mean no proprietary builds at all? Because virtually all of Java is available in OpenJDK and Oracle has continued to fund and open source major new Java upgrades.

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Re:“Oracle laid off all Solaris tech staff in a classic sile... by rodgerd on Sunday September 03, 2017 @05:02PM (#15163896)

By properly open sourced I mean that the various testing and validation suites for Java and key Java tech (like J2EE) would be available, that proprietary bits (like the Windows installer) wouldn't be silently parachuted into the JDK install, as two examples.

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Re:“Oracle laid off all Solaris tech staff in a classic sile... by jsiepkes on Tuesday September 05, 2017 @04:24PM (#15178812)

You do know that J2EE has been called JEE for ages now right?

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