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Sun responded swiftly and justly with OpenSolaris for x86. It's a lot easier to go evaluate this in hindsight and see that cheap x86 was not really a barrier,
by kev009 10y ago
Sun responded swiftly and justly with OpenSolaris for x86. It's a lot easier to go evaluate this in hindsight and see that cheap x86 was not really a barrier, OpenSolaris could have become another Java level of ubiquity save politics and inertia. I remember how tainted things seemed when reading LWN.net.. which in retrospect were largely FUD around the CDDL and fear of actual competition. The continued rise of Linux was really just inertia at that point, it was largely inferior outside desktop use, but had too much sunk cost investment from IBM, SGI, HP (where a lot of the real scalability culture was imported from - RCU, NUMA, locking refinements in particular).
UNIX rose to prominence because it's what everyone learned in college in the '80s. Linux, because you installed it on your laptop or a VM in high school or college late '90s. Don't underestimate the power of this.
- tyingq 10y agoI disagree regarding Solaris x86. There was a lot of commercial software that either didn't have Solaris x86 binaries at all, or only had 32 bit binaries. It was arguably "better" from a purely technical view, but cheaper beat out better.
- kev009 10y agoThat sounds very believable and would have slowed commercial SPARC users from switching to whitebox x86, likely intentionally, but would have had no relevance to startups and the rapid onslaught of hyperscalers. A video that amuses me with respect to engineering culture and organization blindness is Cantrill doing a DTrace demo at Google in 2007 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6chLw2aodYQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6chLw2aodYQ. The audience seems completely unaware about the significance of what they are seeing. The length of time between Linux getting cogent tracing support is telling. GOOG could have single-handedly propped up an extra-Sun OpenSolaris community, and there would have been nice symbiosis considering their early container usage and how long that took to grow as well.
- yarou 10y agoSolaris had some neat integration with Java, containerization way before lxc, and DTrace which still lives on. The reason I think it didn't rise to ubiquity in the same way that Linux did is the lack of customization. One can easily customize the Linux kernel for their use case (i.e. Embedded), compile it, add busybox/dropbear, and you have a decent starting point for an embedded OS. You couldn't do the same with Solaris.
- btilly 10y agoIt was arguably "better" from a purely technical view, but cheaper beat out better. The commodity always wins. Never forget that.
- tyingq 10y agoSteve Jobs might disagree :)
- justin66 10y agoSun changed its mind about whether SunOS / Solaris x86 was going to be a real, serious thing several times over the years. I wouldn't blame vendors for steering clear of the mess until it worked itself out. Which it certainly did...