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] Technicall

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