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I'm very saddened by what happens with what is left of Sun. I used to work at Sun, and the Solaris codebase is the most amazing C code I've ever worked with. I

I'm very saddened by what happens with what is left of Sun. I used to work at Sun, and the Solaris codebase is the most amazing C code I've ever worked with. I'm probably going to be accused of bias, but the Linux code is really messy compared to Solaris. Sun was already on the way down by the time I left many years ago, but what had happened since Oracle bought them has been nothing but depressing.

unkown-unknowns 9y ago
ZFS lives on in OpenZFS, which is where FreeBSD, Linux and other platform developers and some companies exchange their modifications of ZFS. Solaris lives on in illumos and forks of it.
- lokedhs 9y ago
  Illumos is a great project and doesn't get nearly as much attention as it should. I'm also glad that ZFS has managed to find its way to other operating systems. I've been a huge fan of it ever since it first arrived in Solaris.
  - jokr004 9y ago
    I discovered the Illumos project about a year ago and was extatic to see that Open Solaris had come back to life. I've been using OpenIndiana as my daily driver at work for a while now.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
- zokula 9y ago
  OpenZFS is a joke compared to the real ZFS in Solaris. OpenZFS is so far behind Solaris ZFS in features and stability.
  - Annatar 9y ago
    Really? Post the output of a zpool upgrade -v on Solaris.
peoplewindow 9y ago
Would it have been different if any other company had bought Sun? Solaris was competing against free, without much to justify the large added cost. It's been a very long time since I heard of anyone buying new Solaris installations.
- DonHopkins 9y ago
  I always thought IBM would be the most fitting company to buy Sun.
  - doozy 9y ago
    s/IBM/SAP/
  - tannhaeuser 9y ago
    IBM is facing the exact same problem selling AIX boxes as Sun/Oracle and HP do selling their Unix hardware and OS, so why would IBM have been a better fit to buy Sun? I think Sun was (mostly) acquired to prevent Java IP being sold to other, more nefarious parties (such as MS or patent trolls). Both Oracle and IBM were (and still are, though to a lesser extent) heavily invested into the Java ecosystem. Sun OS/Solaris has historically also been the reference O/S and platform for big-time installations of the Oracle RDBMS.
    - DonHopkins 9y ago
      I meant it more in the sense of how an old friend/rival could respectfully carry their casket to the grave, as opposed to the way Oracle desecrated and devoured the flesh of the corpse.
      - pmiller2 9y ago
        Where's the profit in that?
    - hindsightbias 9y ago
      That Oracle is moving to Linux on Sparc tells you they still think there is an enterprise business that Exadata/x86 couldn't win (after years of destroying Solaris). IBM+Sun would have been most of the E-biz and those customers would have been more comfortable with Oracle as just the DB provider. Solaris on PPC existed at various times, IBM could have provided a convergence path for the Fortune 500, AIX/Solaris/Linux/Java all on PPC. It was actually a close thing, but someone else will have to write that story.
xroche 9y ago
> but what had happened since Oracle bought them has been nothing but depressing Oracle is nothing but a cancer. Everything they touch turn into goo. This is not the first company to be killed by Oracle acquisition. And not the last. And don't let me started on the ridiculous range-check trial: this sums up the disgusting state this company has fallen into.
- shadowtree 9y ago
  ORA is the elephant's graveyard of software. Once something gets bought by them, you know it is done. Slowly, but surely. They perform a function akin to the maggots that destroy cadavers in nature. Part of the overall ecosystem. ORA stopped being a tech co a while ago, now it is a finance play. Use cash to buy a business for its locked in customers, gut it to squeeze max money out of it until last customer is gone. Rinse, repeat. Aurea does the same in mid-tier by the way. The circle of life...
  - xroche 9y ago
    > ORA stopped being a tech co a while ago, now it is a finance play. Use cash to buy a business for its locked in customers, gut it to squeeze max money out of it until last customer is gone. Rinse, repeat. Yup. Precisely what happened to Stellent, a company that used to produce great document filters. After ORA buyout, employees fled like there was a plague epidemic and prices spiked at such a level that you'd either cut your veins or consider migrating to another technology. > ORA is the elephant's graveyard of software. Well, except that some of the elephants were still alive and perfectly fine, and ora worms started eating them before they were dead.
    - bbarn 9y ago
      Working on UCM Oracle for a consulting gig once was what I consider the low point of my career. I do believe that's the stellent product post-acquisition, right?
  - notacoward 9y ago
    > ORA is the elephant's graveyard of software. I think that's a more apt description of CA, BMC, or Symantec. Places where tired old software goes to die a quiet death. What Oracle does is worse: kill software that still has plenty of life in it. I've seen them do it by acquisition, and I've seen them do it by stealing code or ideas from partners (personally, twice). So they're not so much a graveyard as a slaughterhouse for software.
quickben 9y ago
Nature of things unfortunately. I did my internship at Nortel. A decade later and having worked from small shops to IBM and beyond, nothing comes close to the quality of people/code that I saw at Nortel. From another perspective: It is up to you to carry the torch now.
- AndyMcConachie 9y ago
  Software gets shittier because speed of development and time to market continues to outweigh any reason for quality. Code written 20-30 years ago almost always looks cleaner to me than the code I'm working on today :( What is the incentive for quality?
  - kstrauser 9y ago
    Be careful of the large selection bias there: you're looking at the 20-30 year old code good enough not to have been replaced 18-28 years ago.
    - Shaanie 9y ago
      Survivorship bias, to be precise.
    - nitrogen 9y ago
      So what's a good example of the code of today that will survive the next 30 years?
      - dredmorbius 9y ago
        Get back to me ... in 30 years.
  - quickben 9y ago
    No incentive beyond personal satisfaction these days. Most people write and jump ship, which is so sad.
jjtheblunt 9y ago
agreed totally (worked at Sun years ago, Solaris internals : amazing engineering with minimal nonsense )
animex 9y ago
I feel that Sun did the same thing to the Cobalt RAQ product. Karma's a bitch.
hyperpallium 9y ago
The real answer is for Sun to have remained profitable. Unfortunately, due to their workstation focus, it probably wasn't possible. e.g. Digital was an excellent company, but also went down with (in their case) mini-computers. Christensen's frustration at how such a great company could get killed was part inspiration for developing his "disruption" theory. I'd hate to think Sun's demise, in the alternative, was due to their hippy open-standards approach, which is very appealing to engineers...
oscargrouch 9y ago
> I used to work at Sun, and the Solaris codebase is the most amazing C code I've ever worked with. I'm probably going to be accused of bias, but the Linux code is really messy compared to Solaris. Its not bias. Im a (mostly) C/C++ dev, and very curious about some open source implementations, and the Solaris C source code is the most beautiful complex C codebase i've know. Linux is what it is now, because of the amazing amount of man-hours into the codebase, but given the quality of the Solaris code compared to Linux, i bet if we could measure how many hours/enginners/money it would be necessary to make some features in parity for both OS's, not only Solaris would require less people and be implemented in less hours, but it would probably be less buggy. If Solaris were open sourced in the right time, and not too late as it was, im sure it would probably be the top Unix flavor by now.
- cat199 9y ago
  BSD guy here - My heirarchy would be more better bsd's > not as clean bsds > solaris > linux with not as clean and solaris being on roughly the same footing- much like SMF requiring XML, solaris code, while very clean, seems very overengineered and not as elegant to me. that said, i really haven't hacked enough kernel code to deserve to be commenting, so yeah..
  - foo101 9y ago
    Can you share some examples of what you consider "better bsd" and what you consider "not as clean bsd"?
  - lokedhs 9y ago
    It seems as though SMF was a bit controversial in the community. I do agree that it's a bit overengineered, but on the other hand I would take SMF before systemd any day.
  - zokula 9y ago
    Meh Linux > Solaris =/= BSD Linux have less bugs per lines of code than any major OS in use. Linux code is the 'benchmark of quality http://www.pcworld.com/article/2038244/linux-code-is-the-benchmark-of-quality-study-concludes.html http://www.pcworld.com/article/2038244/linux-code-is-the-ben...
angled 9y ago
> Sun was already on the way down by the time I left many years ago, but what had happened since Oracle bought them has been nothing but depressing. I wonder what this means for their big iron, such as SuperClusters? Those still run Solaris.

unkown-unknowns 9y ago

ZFS lives on in OpenZFS, which is where FreeBSD, Linux and other platform developers and some companies exchange their modifications of ZFS. Solaris lives on in illumos and forks of it.

lokedhs 9y ago
Illumos is a great project and doesn't get nearly as much attention as it should. I'm also glad that ZFS has managed to find its way to other operating systems. I've been a huge fan of it ever since it first arrived in Solaris.
- jokr004 9y ago
  I discovered the Illumos project about a year ago and was extatic to see that Open Solaris had come back to life. I've been using OpenIndiana as my daily driver at work for a while now.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
zokula 9y ago
OpenZFS is a joke compared to the real ZFS in Solaris. OpenZFS is so far behind Solaris ZFS in features and stability.
- Annatar 9y ago
  Really? Post the output of a zpool upgrade -v on Solaris.

peoplewindow 9y ago

Would it have been different if any other company had bought Sun? Solaris was competing against free, without much to justify the large added cost. It's been a very long time since I heard of anyone buying new Solaris installations.

DonHopkins 9y ago
I always thought IBM would be the most fitting company to buy Sun.
- doozy 9y ago
  s/IBM/SAP/
- tannhaeuser 9y ago
  IBM is facing the exact same problem selling AIX boxes as Sun/Oracle and HP do selling their Unix hardware and OS, so why would IBM have been a better fit to buy Sun? I think Sun was (mostly) acquired to prevent Java IP being sold to other, more nefarious parties (such as MS or patent trolls). Both Oracle and IBM were (and still are, though to a lesser extent) heavily invested into the Java ecosystem. Sun OS/Solaris has historically also been the reference O/S and platform for big-time installations of the Oracle RDBMS.
  - DonHopkins 9y ago
    I meant it more in the sense of how an old friend/rival could respectfully carry their casket to the grave, as opposed to the way Oracle desecrated and devoured the flesh of the corpse.
    - pmiller2 9y ago
      Where's the profit in that?
  - hindsightbias 9y ago
    That Oracle is moving to Linux on Sparc tells you they still think there is an enterprise business that Exadata/x86 couldn't win (after years of destroying Solaris). IBM+Sun would have been most of the E-biz and those customers would have been more comfortable with Oracle as just the DB provider. Solaris on PPC existed at various times, IBM could have provided a convergence path for the Fortune 500, AIX/Solaris/Linux/Java all on PPC. It was actually a close thing, but someone else will have to write that story.

xroche 9y ago

> but what had happened since Oracle bought them has been nothing but depressing Oracle is nothing but a cancer. Everything they touch turn into goo. This is not the first company to be killed by Oracle acquisition. And not the last. And don't let me started on the ridiculous range-check trial: this sums up the disgusting state this company has fallen into.

shadowtree 9y ago
ORA is the elephant's graveyard of software. Once something gets bought by them, you know it is done. Slowly, but surely. They perform a function akin to the maggots that destroy cadavers in nature. Part of the overall ecosystem. ORA stopped being a tech co a while ago, now it is a finance play. Use cash to buy a business for its locked in customers, gut it to squeeze max money out of it until last customer is gone. Rinse, repeat. Aurea does the same in mid-tier by the way. The circle of life...
- xroche 9y ago
  > ORA stopped being a tech co a while ago, now it is a finance play. Use cash to buy a business for its locked in customers, gut it to squeeze max money out of it until last customer is gone. Rinse, repeat. Yup. Precisely what happened to Stellent, a company that used to produce great document filters. After ORA buyout, employees fled like there was a plague epidemic and prices spiked at such a level that you'd either cut your veins or consider migrating to another technology. > ORA is the elephant's graveyard of software. Well, except that some of the elephants were still alive and perfectly fine, and ora worms started eating them before they were dead.
  - bbarn 9y ago
    Working on UCM Oracle for a consulting gig once was what I consider the low point of my career. I do believe that's the stellent product post-acquisition, right?
- notacoward 9y ago
  > ORA is the elephant's graveyard of software. I think that's a more apt description of CA, BMC, or Symantec. Places where tired old software goes to die a quiet death. What Oracle does is worse: kill software that still has plenty of life in it. I've seen them do it by acquisition, and I've seen them do it by stealing code or ideas from partners (personally, twice). So they're not so much a graveyard as a slaughterhouse for software.

quickben 9y ago

Nature of things unfortunately. I did my internship at Nortel. A decade later and having worked from small shops to IBM and beyond, nothing comes close to the quality of people/code that I saw at Nortel. From another perspective: It is up to you to carry the torch now.

AndyMcConachie 9y ago
Software gets shittier because speed of development and time to market continues to outweigh any reason for quality. Code written 20-30 years ago almost always looks cleaner to me than the code I'm working on today :( What is the incentive for quality?
- kstrauser 9y ago
  Be careful of the large selection bias there: you're looking at the 20-30 year old code good enough not to have been replaced 18-28 years ago.
  - Shaanie 9y ago
    Survivorship bias, to be precise.
  - nitrogen 9y ago
    So what's a good example of the code of today that will survive the next 30 years?
    - dredmorbius 9y ago
      Get back to me ... in 30 years.
- quickben 9y ago
  No incentive beyond personal satisfaction these days. Most people write and jump ship, which is so sad.

jjtheblunt 9y ago

agreed totally (worked at Sun years ago, Solaris internals : amazing engineering with minimal nonsense )

animex 9y ago

I feel that Sun did the same thing to the Cobalt RAQ product. Karma's a bitch.

hyperpallium 9y ago

The real answer is for Sun to have remained profitable. Unfortunately, due to their workstation focus, it probably wasn't possible. e.g. Digital was an excellent company, but also went down with (in their case) mini-computers. Christensen's frustration at how such a great company could get killed was part inspiration for developing his "disruption" theory. I'd hate to think Sun's demise, in the alternative, was due to their hippy open-standards approach, which is very appealing to engineers...

oscargrouch 9y ago

> I used to work at Sun, and the Solaris codebase is the most amazing C code I've ever worked with. I'm probably going to be accused of bias, but the Linux code is really messy compared to Solaris. Its not bias. Im a (mostly) C/C++ dev, and very curious about some open source implementations, and the Solaris C source code is the most beautiful complex C codebase i've know. Linux is what it is now, because of the amazing amount of man-hours into the codebase, but given the quality of the Solaris code compared to Linux, i bet if we could measure how many hours/enginners/money it would be necessary to make some features in parity for both OS's, not only Solaris would require less people and be implemented in less hours, but it would probably be less buggy. If Solaris were open sourced in the right time, and not too late as it was, im sure it would probably be the top Unix flavor by now.

cat199 9y ago
BSD guy here - My heirarchy would be more better bsd's > not as clean bsds > solaris > linux with not as clean and solaris being on roughly the same footing- much like SMF requiring XML, solaris code, while very clean, seems very overengineered and not as elegant to me. that said, i really haven't hacked enough kernel code to deserve to be commenting, so yeah..
- foo101 9y ago
  Can you share some examples of what you consider "better bsd" and what you consider "not as clean bsd"?
- lokedhs 9y ago
  It seems as though SMF was a bit controversial in the community. I do agree that it's a bit overengineered, but on the other hand I would take SMF before systemd any day.
- zokula 9y ago
  Meh Linux > Solaris =/= BSD Linux have less bugs per lines of code than any major OS in use. Linux code is the 'benchmark of quality http://www.pcworld.com/article/2038244/linux-code-is-the-benchmark-of-quality-study-concludes.html http://www.pcworld.com/article/2038244/linux-code-is-the-ben...

angled 9y ago

> Sun was already on the way down by the time I left many years ago, but what had happened since Oracle bought them has been nothing but depressing. I wonder what this means for their big iron, such as SuperClusters? Those still run Solaris.