6 ms·

Creator of ZFS, Jeff Bonwick, leaves Oracle

96 points by chibea 16y ago

alphabeat 16y ago
I'm really uncertain now of the future of Illumos and ZFS. I hope there's more push behind these projects as well as BTRFS. Will be interesting to see where this goes.
- azakus 16y ago
  Since btrfs is an Oracle funded project, I'm real interested to see what happens to both of these filesystems going forward.
  - gaius 16y ago
    As someone who has actually used OCFS2 on a real production system, I will never voluntarily touch another Oracle-written filesystem.
- sgt 16y ago
  I think the future of Illumos is safe. They've already got a lot of heavy-weighters behind it, ex-Sun/Oracle and others.
  - rbanffy 16y ago
    Someone still has to fund them...
yarapavan 16y ago
"Your ideas will go further if you don't insist on going with them." Good luck Jeff Bonwick.
ableal 16y ago
His Nov.2009 blog entry on ZFS data deduplication is a pretty good primer: http://blogs.sun.com/bonwick/en_US/entry/zfs_dedup http://blogs.sun.com/bonwick/en_US/entry/zfs_dedup P.S. also, the 2008 pics with Linus. I suppose there is no further story to go with those ...
- alecco 16y ago
  IMHO, with my little work in compression, all that dedup stuff was a bit hyped. And BTW it is older than ZFS, at least Plan 9's network storage had the same feature. But alignment kills looking for matching chunks of data. And "generally best left to the application" sounds like a cop-out.
  - ww520 16y ago
    It's the ease of usage, speed, and very large compression window that makes dedup better than traditional compression.
rbanffy 16y ago
That's too bad. ZFS (along with crossbow) is one of the best things in Solaris/OpenSolaris. I was about to say Oracle has a serious human resources problem, but I noticed that, maybe, the problem is in calling humans "resources".
- sgt 16y ago
  Agreed. To Oracle, these are just pawns in a game. The winner of the game (which is always Oracle) gets to fund Larry's next yacht.
  - krschultz 16y ago
    The alternative option was that Sun just went bankrupt and everyone lost their job, so choose between some leaving and all losing.
    - mhd 16y ago
      Aut Larry aut nihil? As James Gosling pointed out just recently, IBM was the second option, not bankruptcy. IBM was thought as worse when it came to laying off people and outsourcing their jobs, but they tend to respect their IP and engineers more -- which is a pretty sad revelation, considering that we're talking about big ol' Inferior But Marketable[1] here. [1]: http://www.etypewriters.com/hailto.html http://www.etypewriters.com/hailto.html
    - rbanffy 16y ago
      Actually, I think that properly managing the company and preventing the bankruptcy would be a better third option. I know, I know... It's easy to say it now, that hindsight is always 20-20, but come on, who outside Sun thought their market strategy was sane? Who really believed they were on the right track? And, as much as I like McNeally (he was really fun), it's as much his fault as Schwartz's that Sun had a problem with "financial reality" (as Gosling so mildly said). It was painful to watch because we knew how cool technologies they had were, what they could accomplish while, at the same time, knowing it wouldn't last.
- 16y ago
etherael 16y ago
Did Oracle buy Sun to strip it and liquidate the intellectual assets? What's their plan here? It seems like they have zero interest in building the products.
- melling 16y ago
  Oracle is a consistently profitable company. They know how to run a business. They know what they're doing. If the old Sun and their culture wanted to survive, they needed to run a better business.
  - mhd 16y ago
    They certainly know how to sell their database. Whether this translates into an equal success with their Sun IP has to be shown. The good thing for them is that they acquired pretty mature products, so they can probably "coast" along and still make a reasonable profit. It's still open whether they can foster enough innovation to keep things going with Java, Solaris… Their track record isn't very good in that respect. Of course, it all boils down to whether they need to innovate in the first place. By now, Java is well established enough in the enterprise sector, just as BEA and Oracle DB are.
    - hga 16y ago
      ZFS, however, is not in that category, and everything I've heard says that it needs more work and a lot more polish.
      - barrkel 16y ago
        You should try putting it through its paces before coming to that conclusion; I've heard different things from other people, and I currently use it for my media storage.
        hga 16y ago
        The problem is that for this type of thing credible reports of failure carry more weight than reports of success. If you're making a big bet on the reliability of file system you want to mitigate risk, and for all I know either you haven't tickled a bug I would or you've just been lucky so far. When I looked hard at this 2-3 years ago, it was clear to me that without a tape backup system I couldn't justify purchasing, ZFS just wasn't there yet. I've heard nothing since them to convince me it has been sufficiently polished to get over my threshold or required reliability. ADDED: I don't think it can be said that ZFS is established to the same degree that the parent's examples are (Java, BEA and Oracle's DB).
quux 16y ago
Hmm I was hoping he would go work for Apple on a new filesystem to replace HFS+... oh well. Will be interesting to see what his startup is working on when they come out of stealth mode.
bstrong 16y ago
It's good to see something positive coming out of the Sun acquisition: a whole crop of very interesting startups are probably being founded right now.
didip 16y ago
Wow, major talent leakage. Whoever running a startup right now, if there's a need for low-level programming talents, better snatch these guys.
pshirishreddy 16y ago
I don't know how much of the oracle's academic initiative was a success. From the likes of what is being happening to Sun's Academic Initiative to promote university grad students to take the certification exams such as SCJP now called Oracle certified java programmer. Sun has offered its student members the certification exam for 40 $ which has been recently dropped by oracle making it 40% of the voucher fee which implies 40% of 150 around 90$. The 40% discount voucher is also for a limited period which will be done for good this December. I seriously doubt oracle's contribution towards opensource too.
mrb 16y ago
Oracle's strategy seems to be: (1) Don't bother investing too much in R&D or figuring out the next big technology, just buy companies that are alread profitable (to name a few: Sun, BEA, Hyperion, Sieble, Innobase, PeopleSoft...). (2) Immediately execute massive layoffs to increase profits even more. And suck every dollar possible out of the business for a couple years. (3) After a while, the profits will start decreasing, but slowly enough (due to market inertia) that they have time to rinse and repeat. Go back to step 1. Sometimes, Oracle will get lucky and be able to keep running a business good enough that the profits will somewhat be stable enough for years.
- VladRussian 16y ago
  "just buy companies that are alread profitable (to name a few: Sun, " don't know about the rest in your list, can you specify what do you mean saying "profitable" in application to Sun?
VladRussian 16y ago
during recent years Sun was like an aircraft carrier steered by (actually with all the systems controlled by) a bunch of monkeys - a lot of noise and jerking right an left. When finally it was grounded and started to sink, its crew was saved by another ship. Why it so surprising that ones who grounded the carrier didn't get to steer the rescuing ship?

96 points by chibea 16y ago

I'm really uncertain now of the future of Illumos and ZFS. I hope there's more push behind these projects as well as BTRFS. Will be interesting to see where this goes.

azakus 16y ago
Since btrfs is an Oracle funded project, I'm real interested to see what happens to both of these filesystems going forward.
- gaius 16y ago
  As someone who has actually used OCFS2 on a real production system, I will never voluntarily touch another Oracle-written filesystem.
sgt 16y ago
I think the future of Illumos is safe. They've already got a lot of heavy-weighters behind it, ex-Sun/Oracle and others.
- rbanffy 16y ago
  Someone still has to fund them...

yarapavan 16y ago

"Your ideas will go further if you don't insist on going with them." Good luck Jeff Bonwick.

ableal 16y ago

His Nov.2009 blog entry on ZFS data deduplication is a pretty good primer: http://blogs.sun.com/bonwick/en_US/entry/zfs_dedup http://blogs.sun.com/bonwick/en_US/entry/zfs_dedup P.S. also, the 2008 pics with Linus. I suppose there is no further story to go with those ...

alecco 16y ago
IMHO, with my little work in compression, all that dedup stuff was a bit hyped. And BTW it is older than ZFS, at least Plan 9's network storage had the same feature. But alignment kills looking for matching chunks of data. And "generally best left to the application" sounds like a cop-out.
- ww520 16y ago
  It's the ease of usage, speed, and very large compression window that makes dedup better than traditional compression.

rbanffy 16y ago

That's too bad. ZFS (along with crossbow) is one of the best things in Solaris/OpenSolaris. I was about to say Oracle has a serious human resources problem, but I noticed that, maybe, the problem is in calling humans "resources".

sgt 16y ago
Agreed. To Oracle, these are just pawns in a game. The winner of the game (which is always Oracle) gets to fund Larry's next yacht.
- krschultz 16y ago
  The alternative option was that Sun just went bankrupt and everyone lost their job, so choose between some leaving and all losing.
  - mhd 16y ago
    Aut Larry aut nihil? As James Gosling pointed out just recently, IBM was the second option, not bankruptcy. IBM was thought as worse when it came to laying off people and outsourcing their jobs, but they tend to respect their IP and engineers more -- which is a pretty sad revelation, considering that we're talking about big ol' Inferior But Marketable[1] here. [1]: http://www.etypewriters.com/hailto.html http://www.etypewriters.com/hailto.html
  - rbanffy 16y ago
    Actually, I think that properly managing the company and preventing the bankruptcy would be a better third option. I know, I know... It's easy to say it now, that hindsight is always 20-20, but come on, who outside Sun thought their market strategy was sane? Who really believed they were on the right track? And, as much as I like McNeally (he was really fun), it's as much his fault as Schwartz's that Sun had a problem with "financial reality" (as Gosling so mildly said). It was painful to watch because we knew how cool technologies they had were, what they could accomplish while, at the same time, knowing it wouldn't last.
16y ago

etherael 16y ago

Did Oracle buy Sun to strip it and liquidate the intellectual assets? What's their plan here? It seems like they have zero interest in building the products.

melling 16y ago
Oracle is a consistently profitable company. They know how to run a business. They know what they're doing. If the old Sun and their culture wanted to survive, they needed to run a better business.
- mhd 16y ago
  They certainly know how to sell their database. Whether this translates into an equal success with their Sun IP has to be shown. The good thing for them is that they acquired pretty mature products, so they can probably "coast" along and still make a reasonable profit. It's still open whether they can foster enough innovation to keep things going with Java, Solaris… Their track record isn't very good in that respect. Of course, it all boils down to whether they need to innovate in the first place. By now, Java is well established enough in the enterprise sector, just as BEA and Oracle DB are.
  - hga 16y ago
    ZFS, however, is not in that category, and everything I've heard says that it needs more work and a lot more polish.
    - barrkel 16y ago
      You should try putting it through its paces before coming to that conclusion; I've heard different things from other people, and I currently use it for my media storage.
      - hga 16y ago
        The problem is that for this type of thing credible reports of failure carry more weight than reports of success. If you're making a big bet on the reliability of file system you want to mitigate risk, and for all I know either you haven't tickled a bug I would or you've just been lucky so far. When I looked hard at this 2-3 years ago, it was clear to me that without a tape backup system I couldn't justify purchasing, ZFS just wasn't there yet. I've heard nothing since them to convince me it has been sufficiently polished to get over my threshold or required reliability. ADDED: I don't think it can be said that ZFS is established to the same degree that the parent's examples are (Java, BEA and Oracle's DB).

quux 16y ago

Hmm I was hoping he would go work for Apple on a new filesystem to replace HFS+... oh well. Will be interesting to see what his startup is working on when they come out of stealth mode.

bstrong 16y ago

It's good to see something positive coming out of the Sun acquisition: a whole crop of very interesting startups are probably being founded right now.

didip 16y ago

Wow, major talent leakage. Whoever running a startup right now, if there's a need for low-level programming talents, better snatch these guys.

pshirishreddy 16y ago

I don't know how much of the oracle's academic initiative was a success. From the likes of what is being happening to Sun's Academic Initiative to promote university grad students to take the certification exams such as SCJP now called Oracle certified java programmer. Sun has offered its student members the certification exam for 40 $ which has been recently dropped by oracle making it 40% of the voucher fee which implies 40% of 150 around 90$. The 40% discount voucher is also for a limited period which will be done for good this December. I seriously doubt oracle's contribution towards opensource too.

mrb 16y ago

Oracle's strategy seems to be: (1) Don't bother investing too much in R&D or figuring out the next big technology, just buy companies that are alread profitable (to name a few: Sun, BEA, Hyperion, Sieble, Innobase, PeopleSoft...). (2) Immediately execute massive layoffs to increase profits even more. And suck every dollar possible out of the business for a couple years. (3) After a while, the profits will start decreasing, but slowly enough (due to market inertia) that they have time to rinse and repeat. Go back to step 1. Sometimes, Oracle will get lucky and be able to keep running a business good enough that the profits will somewhat be stable enough for years.

VladRussian 16y ago
"just buy companies that are alread profitable (to name a few: Sun, " don't know about the rest in your list, can you specify what do you mean saying "profitable" in application to Sun?

VladRussian 16y ago

during recent years Sun was like an aircraft carrier steered by (actually with all the systems controlled by) a bunch of monkeys - a lot of noise and jerking right an left. When finally it was grounded and started to sink, its crew was saved by another ship. Why it so surprising that ones who grounded the carrier didn't get to steer the rescuing ship?