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I wish they gave actual numbers on how few people were downloading Solaris builds.

daenney 9y ago
Me too. It's easy to say "it doesn't have the numbers" but without sharing those actual numbers and showing what portion they account for in the total it always leaves me wondering if it's truly as low as implied. That said, it seems perfectly reasonable to me that interest in Solaris releases is rather low and that maintaining support for it is probably costing them more than the returns.
SwellJoe 9y ago
Our numbers aren't comparable to MongoDB, but when we dropped support for Solaris in Virtualmin a few years ago, we had a couple dozen active Solaris installations left (and we had maybe 75,000 active installations on Linux at that time), only a couple of which were paying customers. At its peak, it was never more than a few thousand Solaris installations (and most of those were because Joyent installed Virtualmin GPL on their containers, and they also used it for shared hosting on Solaris before that, by default, but when they shifted their business model those disappeared). I don't know anything about MongoDB usage, but I do know Solaris/Illumos is a tiny blip on the radar of usage in web dev and web hosting. We just don't hear about it at all. I think we still get Solaris bug reports and patches every now and then, like once or twice a year, for Webmin on Solaris (which is still supported in a "we won't intentionally break it" sort of way and Jamie still builds Solaris packages), but even that's very rare, and Webmin has a million or so installations. The biggest factor for me wasn't the raw number, it was simply that usage was shrinking rapidly. You can't reasonably devote a bunch of effort to maintaining support for an OS that has a small number of users today and will have half as many in a year. Software is a bet on returns with interest; I'm betting that putting in weeks of effort to support a new OS (or Linux distro, or platform, or web server, or language, or whatever) will keep paying for months or years. There's no way to count Solaris usage that I'm aware of that doesn't show it being smaller next year. That's unfortunate, perhaps; there's a lot of cool stuff in Solaris (and Illumos). But, market forces aren't sentimental and Linux is a juggernaut that rolls over everything in its path and consumes the best features (and some of the bad features too) of everything it touches. It's funny that the old wisdom of Microsoft being like the Borg and Linux being a scrappy upstart has kinda turned on its end. Linux now absorbs the best of other operating systems and just keeps multiplying and spreading into more and more markets from mobile to big iron.

Me too. It's easy to say "it doesn't have the numbers" but without sharing those actual numbers and showing what portion they account for in the total it always leaves me wondering if it's truly as low as implied. That said, it seems perfectly reasonable to me that interest in Solaris releases is rather low and that maintaining support for it is probably costing them more than the returns.

SwellJoe 9y ago

Our numbers aren't comparable to MongoDB, but when we dropped support for Solaris in Virtualmin a few years ago, we had a couple dozen active Solaris installations left (and we had maybe 75,000 active installations on Linux at that time), only a couple of which were paying customers. At its peak, it was never more than a few thousand Solaris installations (and most of those were because Joyent installed Virtualmin GPL on their containers, and they also used it for shared hosting on Solaris before that, by default, but when they shifted their business model those disappeared). I don't know anything about MongoDB usage, but I do know Solaris/Illumos is a tiny blip on the radar of usage in web dev and web hosting. We just don't hear about it at all. I think we still get Solaris bug reports and patches every now and then, like once or twice a year, for Webmin on Solaris (which is still supported in a "we won't intentionally break it" sort of way and Jamie still builds Solaris packages), but even that's very rare, and Webmin has a million or so installations. The biggest factor for me wasn't the raw number, it was simply that usage was shrinking rapidly. You can't reasonably devote a bunch of effort to maintaining support for an OS that has a small number of users today and will have half as many in a year. Software is a bet on returns with interest; I'm betting that putting in weeks of effort to support a new OS (or Linux distro, or platform, or web server, or language, or whatever) will keep paying for months or years. There's no way to count Solaris usage that I'm aware of that doesn't show it being smaller next year. That's unfortunate, perhaps; there's a lot of cool stuff in Solaris (and Illumos). But, market forces aren't sentimental and Linux is a juggernaut that rolls over everything in its path and consumes the best features (and some of the bad features too) of everything it touches. It's funny that the old wisdom of Microsoft being like the Borg and Linux being a scrappy upstart has kinda turned on its end. Linux now absorbs the best of other operating systems and just keeps multiplying and spreading into more and more markets from mobile to big iron.