[Bacula-devel] Sun's incompetence

[Kern S. <ke...@si...>]

Hello,

<serious-flame>

I very seldom complain publicly about vendors such as Sun Microsystems, so 
this is a bit unusual.  Just to note, in 1983, Sun was the first Unix system 
that I had ever used, and I continuously used it until about 1998, when I 
switched to Linux.  Their OS was quite stable and worked with a lot of high 
end equipment.  I enjoyed working with it, but found that Linux OS was very 
nice and worked with much cheaper and more available hardware (the reason for 
my switch to Linux).

Recently I tried loading OpenSolaris in a VM, and I discovered that they 
somehow have remained frozen in time in 1998 and had not significantly 
improved their user interface -- a big disappointment for me.  I ended up 
with a default system that had a Java user interface and a /home/kern that 
was read-only (can you imagine that by default your home directory is 
read-only?).  I finally gave up.

I would have been happy to leave things there, but Sun has not stopped making 
my life difficult.  First they bought MySQL, which is heavily used by Bacula 
users.  Their latest source prerelease for Solaris, which two of our 
regression testers were using was simply broken and did not work.  Great, Sun 
buys MySQL and breaks it!  I can understand why the MySQL developers are 
leaving and MariaDB was created -- what a pity.

For the last several users I have been using VirtualBox.  It has worked 
perfectly.  Recently, my RHEL 64 when applying upgrades upgraded from RHEL 
5.3 to 5.4, then shortly later, the VM hard disk image destroyed itself.  The 
first time in 2 or 3 years that I had any problem.  OK, that kind of thing 
can happen.

So, I upgraded from VirtualBox version 2.2 to version 3.1 on my Xeon machine.   
In doing so, the new Virtual box has destroyed *all* the VM images that I had 
(8-10).  I don't know if you have ever setup and configured a VM, but it is 
not a trivial amount of work.

As far as I am concerned Sun OpenSource software venture stinks.  I think with 
all the noise about Oracle buying them, and their blunders in implementation 
of OpenSolaris, MySQL, and VirtualBox, they have little chance of surviving 
in the Open Source software market.  Perhaps their high-end hardware 
offerings will fare better.

</serious-flame>

Kern