DTrace co-creator quits Sun, hits delete on Oracle
Bryan Cantrill dreams of eternal sunshine
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The co-creator of DTrace has seemingly erased all memory of Larry Ellison’s Oracle from his mind, after quitting Sun Microsystems for an engineering veep role at Joyent last week.
Bryan Cantrill is the latest in a long list of Sun men to quit the firm, following its takeover by Oracle earlier this year.
His exit came just a week after Greg Lavender, the lead developer in charge of the Solaris operating system at Oracle, left the company.
Worse still, the OpenSolaris Governing Board, which is supposed to steer the open source version of Solaris, is mulling disbanding because Oracle has had zero contact with the board for the past six months.
DTrace - developed by Cantrill, Adam Leventhal and Mike Shapiro - was of course added to Sun’s Solaris 10 operating system way back in 2004. The software was seen as a gift to sysadmins because it granted them thousands upon thousands of ways to check on a system’s performance and then tweak the server box while it was still running.
Sun later ported DTrace to FreeBSD following its decision to open source the software and the analytics tool has been a mainstay of Solaris and OpenSolaris ever since.
Sadly, the same can no longer be said of Cantrill, who walked from Sun Oracle on 25 July.
In a blog post the kernel engineer said he had no regrets about working at Sun for the past 14 years. At the same time, his missive read like yet another obituary about the Oracle-owned firm.
“One of Sun’s greatest strengths was that we technologists were never discouraged from interacting directly and candidly with our customers and users, and many of our most important innovations came from these relationships,” he opined.
“This symbiosis was critically important at several junctures of my own career, and I owe many of you a profound debt of gratitude - both for your counsel over the years, and for your willingness to bet your own business and livelihood on the technologies that I helped develop.
"You, like us, are innovators who love nothing more than great technology, and your steadfast faith in us means more to me than I can express; thank you.”
But, as pointed out in a comment on the blog post, Cantrill edited out any mention of Oracle, presumably to make his mind spotless again. ®
COMMENTS
Re: typical really
"this is tyical and should have been expected. Oracle don't 'get it' - rather, they don't get IT (chuckle)... they are old dinosaurs"
All companies are expected by share holders to produce naturally unsustainable growth. People forget that ultimately, real growth is dependent on actual market growth. Once the market is saturated, that's it, further growth is necessarily at the expense of others and is therefor "zero gain". Oracle is unable to grow the market itself, but it has the wealth to buy a larger piece of the pie. This behavior is pretty much the norm these days.
Sun, despite having many intelligent people and many innovative initiatives, were not sufficiently ruthless and cutthroat to grow in a mature market. They were unable to survive on their own. For better or worse, we encourage corporations to buy each other out to produce monopolies and oligopolies rather than encourage an environment where smaller firms can thrive.
typical really
this is tyical and should have been expected. Oracle don't 'get it' - rather, they don't get IT (chuckle).
they are old dinosaurs...like Sun were before a mini revolution c.1996
Oracle will now find that they paid top dollar for a name...but all those brilliant staff that MADE that name have deserted the sinking ship like little coding rats because of absolute incompetent management in the new regime.
several of his remarks ring very true in my own local experiences... the new owners dont want to run the business with the same ethos and methods - which means their relationship with customers will change.... similar to cool games coding shops being bought and turned into IP sweat shops. forget the great ideas and evolution, just churn out this years verion X of the same old IP within the financial year so our shareholders get return.
nope...under that new regime no cool features, no DTraceNG, - it'll be all about the bottom line and not about making eg sysadmin jobs easier or more fun
Goodbye Sun, SPARC, Solaris, STK, MySQL.....Hello Java cash cow
Oracle is bleeding everyone that could create a future for these products.....Larry just wants to own Java
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