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While I'd love to think that illumos will rise and be great like Solaris was again, after several years I now think that's an incredible long shot. The death o

While I'd love to think that illumos will rise and be great like Solaris was again, after several years I now think that's an incredible long shot. The death of Solaris may well be a death blow to illumos as well. It sounds like Oracle, the owners of the Solaris code and copyrights, aren't seeing a future for it. That's an incredible vote of no confidence from the very owners of the code. And the positive energy they have put into Solaris at large for years (marketing, sales, staff) will cease. While I loved Solaris and illumos back in the day, in the end I'm glad I left and switched to Linux and FreeBSD. I'm working on similar technical challenges with much bigger impact. It's been more difficult, but also more rewarding.

X86BSD 10y ago
I know I speak for many in the BSD camp when I say we thank you too for ALL your work in our corner of the open source world.
scarmig 10y ago
Is it fair to judge Solaris by the fact that Oracle has mismanaged it? I don't mean to imply that Solaris necessarily had a brilliant and uncomplicated future before the acquisition, but it turned it from a product developed as a (profitable?) labor of love into a tool to extract ransoms from hostages. A vote of no confidence from a parasite just speaks to how valuable it is to the parasite, not any inherent value.
ryao 10y ago
What would we need to see from Illumos for it to qualify as being great like Solaris was?
- Annatar 10y ago
  It's already great: SmartOS is the best one can get when it comes to running a cloud, public or private, and if that cloud must, without compromise, function correctly in the face of even the most severe failures, hardware or software wise. Zones + ZFS + fault management architecture (fmadm(1M) / svcadm(1M)) make it possible. Have a piece of software which must run on GNU/Linux? No problem, it'll happily run inside of an lx-branded zone with zero performance penalty, where both it (/usr) and the illumos native commands will be available (/native), so one can keep one's cake and eat it, too. Otherwise - there are 14,000 packages ready to run, something Solaris never, ever had. It's not a desktop operating system, it doesn't have that kind of a mass adoption. But on the other hand, when one considers just how Windows-like GNU/Linux became (systemd), it's better that it doesn't: it does one thing and does it well, and that's powering the high performance, massive clouds. For desktop, there's macOS, and that's fine.
  - RantyDave 10y ago
    FWIW the packages are essentially NetBSD and the dependencies can be spectacular (pkgin in git). But lx works really, really well.

X86BSD 10y ago

I know I speak for many in the BSD camp when I say we thank you too for ALL your work in our corner of the open source world.

scarmig 10y ago

Is it fair to judge Solaris by the fact that Oracle has mismanaged it? I don't mean to imply that Solaris necessarily had a brilliant and uncomplicated future before the acquisition, but it turned it from a product developed as a (profitable?) labor of love into a tool to extract ransoms from hostages. A vote of no confidence from a parasite just speaks to how valuable it is to the parasite, not any inherent value.

ryao 10y ago

What would we need to see from Illumos for it to qualify as being great like Solaris was?

Annatar 10y ago
It's already great: SmartOS is the best one can get when it comes to running a cloud, public or private, and if that cloud must, without compromise, function correctly in the face of even the most severe failures, hardware or software wise. Zones + ZFS + fault management architecture (fmadm(1M) / svcadm(1M)) make it possible. Have a piece of software which must run on GNU/Linux? No problem, it'll happily run inside of an lx-branded zone with zero performance penalty, where both it (/usr) and the illumos native commands will be available (/native), so one can keep one's cake and eat it, too. Otherwise - there are 14,000 packages ready to run, something Solaris never, ever had. It's not a desktop operating system, it doesn't have that kind of a mass adoption. But on the other hand, when one considers just how Windows-like GNU/Linux became (systemd), it's better that it doesn't: it does one thing and does it well, and that's powering the high performance, massive clouds. For desktop, there's macOS, and that's fine.
- RantyDave 10y ago
  FWIW the packages are essentially NetBSD and the dependencies can be spectacular (pkgin in git). But lx works really, really well.