The NIH syndrome by established Linux developers definitely slowed down Linux's adoption of these technologies. However, the inability of Sun's marketing to pro

The NIH syndrome by established Linux developers definitely slowed down Linux's adoption of these technologies. However, the inability of Sun's marketing to promulgate how awesome its technologies were to the next generation of developers slowed down adoption even further. In my case, information about how awesome ZFS is did not reach me until about 5 years ago (I started contributing to the Linux port soon afterward) while information about how awesome DTrace is did not reach me until about 2 or 3 years ago. I was barely even aware that a company called Sun existed until about 8.5 years ago when I was given access to a shell account on Solaris 9 at my university for a class on C at age 18. At the time, there was nothing to tell me that ZFS and DTrace even existed, much less how awesome they are. Back then, I had spent my entire life stuck in the desolate wasteland that is Windows computing with a tiny bit of LAMP sprinkled into my life that I had used to play webmaster of a Pokemon fan site between ages 10 and 15. Years later, I realized that I really disliked writing PHP. Maybe things would have been different if Sun had tried fighting Microsoft for the PC market, but the knowledge that anything better out there existed just did not make it to me. I did not learn about Sun's technologies until I started actively looking for good technologies in their respective categories. I found out not long after my searches began, but it would have been nice had there been a bit more advertising. These days, I cannot imagine going back to computing without ZFS and while I do not quite have DTrace available to me yet, when I finally do, I imagine that I will feel the same about DTrace too.