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> And Sun customers should blame the planet model for one of the worst decisions in the history of a company that had plenty of contenders for the distinction:

by Ologn 11y ago

> And Sun customers should blame the planet model for one of the worst decisions in the history of a company that had plenty of contenders for the distinction: unbundling the compilers from the operating system and separately monetizing them. Hear, hear. The only thing Sun did that is the running for being even dumber is blowing Solaris x86. They released a pretty (for the time) awesome Solaris x86 product back in 1993, but never really got behind it. I had a Solaris 2.5.1 x86 workstation at work in 1997, and even then, my then-boss Scott Swanson was saying how Sun had blown it in terms of taking over the x86 server market. I mean, even into the year 2006, Red Hat was telling me if their kernel crashed on a RHEL box, I had to set things up so the core file would go out over the network, instead of somewhere on a local disk. Sun had solved problems like that long, long before.

technofiend 11y ago
Aaaaaaaggh. Solaris x86. I know of at least one firm with 30-40,000 instances of RHEL that had been a Solaris shop. The firm tried Solaris x86, Sun essentially abandoned the platform and the firm's internal engineering board said "Never again." I'm sure that story played out again and again. What a colossal mistake.
- bcantrill 11y ago
  Ugh, yes. For those who don't necessarily have the context: in January 2002, Solaris management elected to "defer" shipments of Solaris 9 on x86.[1] Technically, it was not EOL'd (and support was never removed from the operating system) -- it was merely "deferred." Of course, everyone (rightly) inferred this to be the death of Solaris x86. We in Solaris engineering knew that this was entirely asinine (and that x86 was handily outperforming SPARC) and we continued to test x86 and assert that it function (that is, if you broke x86, it remained grounds for work to be backed out)[2]. In October 2002, thanks to the work of Solaris x86 activists outside the company and Solaris engineering inside the company, the decision was reversed[3] -- but the damage was done. The only upside (such as it was) was that the loss of trust helped accelerate the argument internally to open source the operating system, which we finally did in 2005 -- a system that lives on today in illumos.[4][5] So in the end, Solaris x86 (like many Sun technologies) represented both the company's worst (capriciously killing it) and its best (open sourcing it, giving it eternal life). Nothing about Sun was simple! [1] http://www.cnet.com/news/sun-delays-solaris-9-for-intel-chips/ http://www.cnet.com/news/sun-delays-solaris-9-for-intel-chip... [2] http://www.theregister.co.uk/2002/06/07/sun_to_reprieve_solaris/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2002/06/07/sun_to_reprieve_sola... [3] http://www.theregister.co.uk/2002/10/04/sun_to_unbundle_solaris/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2002/10/04/sun_to_unbundle_sola... [4] http://www.slideshare.net/bcantrill/fork-yeah-the-rise-and-development-of-illumos http://www.slideshare.net/bcantrill/fork-yeah-the-rise-and-d... [5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc

by Ologn 11y ago

technofiend 11y ago

Aaaaaaaggh. Solaris x86. I know of at least one firm with 30-40,000 instances of RHEL that had been a Solaris shop. The firm tried Solaris x86, Sun essentially abandoned the platform and the firm's internal engineering board said "Never again." I'm sure that story played out again and again. What a colossal mistake.

bcantrill 11y ago
Ugh, yes. For those who don't necessarily have the context: in January 2002, Solaris management elected to "defer" shipments of Solaris 9 on x86.[1] Technically, it was not EOL'd (and support was never removed from the operating system) -- it was merely "deferred." Of course, everyone (rightly) inferred this to be the death of Solaris x86. We in Solaris engineering knew that this was entirely asinine (and that x86 was handily outperforming SPARC) and we continued to test x86 and assert that it function (that is, if you broke x86, it remained grounds for work to be backed out)[2]. In October 2002, thanks to the work of Solaris x86 activists outside the company and Solaris engineering inside the company, the decision was reversed[3] -- but the damage was done. The only upside (such as it was) was that the loss of trust helped accelerate the argument internally to open source the operating system, which we finally did in 2005 -- a system that lives on today in illumos.[4][5] So in the end, Solaris x86 (like many Sun technologies) represented both the company's worst (capriciously killing it) and its best (open sourcing it, giving it eternal life). Nothing about Sun was simple! [1] http://www.cnet.com/news/sun-delays-solaris-9-for-intel-chips/ http://www.cnet.com/news/sun-delays-solaris-9-for-intel-chip... [2] http://www.theregister.co.uk/2002/06/07/sun_to_reprieve_solaris/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2002/06/07/sun_to_reprieve_sola... [3] http://www.theregister.co.uk/2002/10/04/sun_to_unbundle_solaris/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2002/10/04/sun_to_unbundle_sola... [4] http://www.slideshare.net/bcantrill/fork-yeah-the-rise-and-development-of-illumos http://www.slideshare.net/bcantrill/fork-yeah-the-rise-and-d... [5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc