Re: Bad news

[John Paul Adrian Glaubitz <glaubitz@physik.fu-berlin.de>]

On 09/04/2017 05:00 PM, Mark Morgan Lloyd wrote:
> > I don't think this is excessively-optimistic. From what I have learned, the staff
> > that was let go was all in the Solaris department while we here are concerned
> > about Linux on SPARC. So I am not worried unless there comes an official statement
> > which confirms that all SPARC development has been stopped.
>
> Like yourself, I tend to be somewhat old-fashioned about this sort of thing.
> Unfortunately, we live in an era when big companies do their best to pull
> the wool over their shareholders' eyes, not to mention their staff and customers.

Actually, they cannot do that - at least towards their shareholders - because that
would be illegal. Companies traded publicly at the stock exchange MUST disclose
such information otherwise they will be subject to serious fines.

Volkswagen, for example, did not notify their sharesholders about the Diesel
emission scandal in time and are in trouble over this now, independent of
the scandal itself.

Oracle might not be the nicest company, but they are most likely not stupid
enough to break the law here.

> > And from what I have seen officially, it does not look like SPARC has been canned,
> > see for example this talk [1]:
> >
> > "General Session: SPARC Systems Update – Advancing the Software in Silicon Revolution"
>
> And also "Virtual SPARC on x86: Your Legacy Solaris Apps Survive on an x86 SPARC
> Emulator" with most of the remainder being about Oracle's "cloud" where customers
> don't have to worry about minor details like what the hardware is.

There is one talk about a SPARC emulator for x86, multiple talks about putting
your stuff into Oracle's SPARC cloud, i.e. on actual SPARC hardware.

And companies trying to push you into the cloud is not Oracle-specific and also
not a sign of SPARC being killed. They just want you to come into the cloud
because cloud services are basically a money-printing mechanism.

> And I'd remind you that this is not the first time that an entire architecture's
> been retired: Unisys dropped the proprietary "Large System" hardware they inherited
> from Burroughs a few years ago, in favour of running it on x86 using an emulator.

I still prefer official news rather than taking speculation and statements from
individuals as news. This is, after all, one of the reason why politics are as
they are these days. Because facts don't matter, it matters who is yelling
the loudest.

Really, can we please stop with this "SPARC is dead" meme. I'm tired of it. I have
constantly people holding that thing into my face, implying "Haha, told you so,
should have stuck with x86."

And, yes, I am more than pissed with Oracle that their cooperation with the
community is so utterly bad. We should have received those new SPARC machines
for Debian months ago.

Adrian

--
 .''`.  John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
: :' :  Debian Developer - glaubitz@debian.org
`. `'   Freie Universitaet Berlin - glaubitz@physik.fu-berlin.de
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