8 ms·

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

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.
    - wahern 9y ago
      Sparc is also effectively dead. Solaris and Sparc exist as ongoing projects only to the extent Oracle is contractually required to maintain them--e.g. to Fujitsu. If you accept that Solaris is dead, then by the same evidence Sparc is dead. If you believe Sparc is still viable, then by the same evidence Solaris is still viable.
    - rbanffy 9y ago
      SPARC died the moment every developer had a good enough x86 desktop running a Unix flavor (and Sun decided it'd be happy not to build desktops anymore). At that point, we cease to imagine deploying our stuff in SPARC. We test on x86 and make it run well on x86 before it gets compiled for SPARC. At that point, unless the SPARC hardware has some definitive cost/performance advantage, we'll buy x86. SPARC is for legacy. Same applies to POWER, BTW. How many new apps have you seen in the past 10 years that were designed for POWER?
      - emmelaich 9y ago
        What accelerated it even further was when Linux went 64 bit and hardware improved to the point where it was a suitable replacement for big iron Solaris (the SunFire 6900 for example). That was around 2005 from memory. And the 6900's features with regard to HA in the field fell well short of advertised. Now you can get a Linux box with 4Tb of RAM so no-one should buy Solaris over Linux.
        rbanffy 9y ago
  - toyg 9y ago
    No, Oracle at the time was big on the "fullstack" play, and thought Sun hardware could provide the last piece of the puzzle: selling absolutely everything to a business, from metal to apps and services, in one neat box. Java would have been safe with IBM too, that wasn't much of a worry - although I'm sure Ellison hoped they could leverage it against competitors invested in it, like they tried to do with Google. The enemy #1 for Oracle at the time was SAP, which they couldn't force out because it's another cancer (the lock-in is huge); so they developed a strategy of buying loads of ecosystem apps to "surround" it. At that point, they could sell the database and apps in one package, and then slowly erode sap away. Hardware was a natural addition to that strategy. Unfortunately they borked execution. They didn't invest properly in making solutions ready-made, so after you bought a (very expensive) box, you still had to pay tons to consultants to set it up, making it uncompetitive on the whole. The industry shift to cloud did the rest. Now they're way too busy turning into "bigger Salesforce" to care about metal.
    - pram 9y ago
      Exactly. Oracle+Sun allowed 'vertically integrated' solutions with their Engineered Systems. You could literally buy your entire rack, software, storage, infiniband, even the network portion (Oracle has copper ethernet switches believe it or not) straight from them. It would be under one contract for support etc.
  - emmelaich 9y ago
    > ... why would IBM have been a better fit to buy Sun? IBM Services do a lot of support work for Solaris around the world. But yeah, other than that it doesn't make a lot of sense.
- rootbear 9y ago
  Agreed. I think IBM would have fixed the licensing issues that kept ZFS off Linux and would have kept Solaris Open Source, perhaps with a better license. It's tragic that Sun went to Oracle and not IBM.
mrweasel 9y ago
We sell Solaris installation and support all the time, but only for running Oracle database installation.
noir_lord 9y ago
> Would it have been different if any other company had bought Sun? Red Hat (if they could have afforded it) would have been an awesome home for Solaris/Sun.
- tannhaeuser 9y ago
  That would have been terrible (and pointless for RedHat anyway). RedHat already owns the entire enterprise Linux market.
  - noir_lord 9y ago
    I dont' see why, they'd have been able to integrate the various buts of Solaris that where ahead of the Linux curve and since RH has been good about open sourcing stuff the rest of the ecosystem would have benefited.
    - rbanffy 9y ago
      Considering the differences under the hood, that wouldn't be easy.
acdha 9y ago
I think that would very much depend on when: Sun's primary problem was bad management so an early 2000s change might have enabled them to compete against Red Hat — treat usability as a concern, wrap all of those cool kernel features in a non-joke userland, sell support, etc. Sitting out package management for a couple decades really hurt them and that's a relatively cheap engineering commitment. It's interesting to imagine ZFS and zones bringing containerization a decade earlier, but every time they came up the reaction from most of the sysadmins I knew was roughly “call me back when they have apt/yum”. A coworker who used to work at Sun maintains that they really needed to go private to avoid years of chaos from waves of layoffs when they were profitable but not enough to satisfy Wall Street.
- karlkatzke 9y ago
  > It's interesting to imagine ZFS and zones bringing containerization a decade earlier I have a legacy production environment that is Debian based OpenVZ and Nexenta. Containers and ZFS were in heavy use a decade ago, the marketing just wasn't there to make it "cool" like Docker. Sun was great at many things, but they were never great at marketing.
- sgift 9y ago
  > A coworker who used to work at Sun maintains that they really needed to go private to avoid years of chaos from waves of layoffs when they were profitable but not enough to satisfy Wall Street. It still surprises me that Dell was able to somehow go private before Wall Street killed them too.
- davidgerard 9y ago
  Zones were way cool. Solaris 10 was on the right path and I actually quite liked it. (Ran it in earnest on various SPARC and x64 kit.)
  - Annatar 9y ago
    Zones are still cool, and they live on in illumos and especially SmartOS.
Spooky23 9y ago
Sure. Red Hat is very successful with selling a product that is free!
gaius 9y ago
Not really. Sun would have survived and thrived if it had thrown its weight behind Solaris x86. But they were too worried about cannibalising SPARC and when commodity kit started to beat them on price/performance they had nowhere to go. I remember when we ripped out our 3 6800s and replaced them with 9 Dells, for way more power at a fraction of the price. Would have loved to recompile on Solaris, but the hardware savings easily covered the cost of a port...
- binarycrusader 9y ago
  Not really. Sun would have survived and thrived if it had thrown its weight behind Solaris x86. Except they did; anyone working in Solaris engineering at that time or even now could tell you that x86 was just as important as SPARC. From a technological perspective, they are completely equivalent. For example, the ZFS Storage Appliance is x86-based, not SPARC-based.
  - justin66 9y ago
    From the end user point of view, Sun recommitted (and later lessened their commitment) to Solaris x86 support so many times over the years that it's hard to imagine what would convince a user that they were really "throwing their weight behind it." We really mean it this time... wait, where are you going???
    - binarycrusader 9y ago
      The hardest software to change is in people's heads.
    - Annatar 9y ago
      But it is true. For a while, AMD based Acer Ferrari laptops were the primary development hardware for Solaris, SPARC or otherwise. It showed up on i86pc first, then it would be built on sparc during the night. SmartOS for example only supports i86pc; there is no sparc port.
heybrother 9y ago
I don't know if it would've been any different for Solaris, but I can imagine Google would've been a whole lot better off owning Java. They probably would've been far better stewards too. Even if they win Oracle v Google, it's been a huge distraction, a huge cost in lawyers (who knows how much they'll recoup), a big unknown and the search for an alternative has to be costly and time-consuming. $8.3 billion almost seems like a bargain in hindsight.
- kpil 9y ago
  To be fair I don't think that Oracle have been particularly bad to Java, except beeing Oracle. I doubt Google was ever an alternative. Realistically it was a fight for power over the enterprise customers between IBM and Oracle, with most (non OS) products built or integrated with Java. Maybe it was even a hot potato- someone needed to keep their strategic bet alive, since Microsoft also share the same strategy in the enterprise app segment. (Sell complex but underperforming applications to ill-advised customers using long feature lists.)
bachmeier 9y ago
> Solaris was competing against free Is that true? Don't companies interested in Solaris pay for their OS? Weren't they competing against companies like Red Hat?
- SwellJoe 9y ago
  Decisions like that trickle up from what developers and IT guys want. There was a generation that was raised on Solaris, and those folks built the first generation web on Solaris-on-SPARC with Oracle databases. But, then the next generation came along, and they hadn't learned UNIX in college on Solaris boxes. They'd learned on Linux in their parent's basement. I came up during that middle era when the shift was happening. I was an early adopter of Linux, but all of the real training I got (my employer at the time paid for it) was Solaris-based. But, even with the training and access to Solaris, I prefered Linux. I just had more comfort with it because it was my daily driver. When people I worked for were making decisions about OS, the recommendation they nearly always got from me was "Linux". And, I believe that played out millions of times to get us to the world we're in today. So, yeah, Solaris was competing with free, but not always at the business level...the part that mattered was "how many people with influence are using this OS as their daily driver?" And, Linux was/is a phenomenon. People love Linux. People loved Solaris, too, but it was a much lower number due to lack of access...early days of Linux, you couldn't even get Solaris without a SPARC box to run it on. Later, they made x86 Solaris free, but it was too little too late, and by that time Linux was better than Solaris on a number of extremely important metrics (package management and package selection, for example, but also in terms of just plain fun).
  - pjmlp 9y ago
    I can easily relate to this, started with Xenix, moved into DG-UX at university, we moved into GNU/Linux after that server eventually died, so it was mostly used of OS related classes. At work GNU/Linux was just an internal server, all real work was being done in Solaris, HP-UX and Aix servers. So fast forward to modern times and even Microsoft uses Linux kernel syscalls on their new POSIX personality subsystem, instead of actually supporting POSIX.
coredog64 9y ago
ISTR rumors that Google was interested in Sun for their IP. I think that would have worked out well. No stupid Java API trial, Solaris truly open source, ZFS in more places. Fujitsu probably would have wound up with the hardware side of SPARC, and I could imagine that Dell or IBM would have taken the server/storage stuff for close to what Sun sold for.
- peoplewindow 9y ago
  Google, really? Please. Google is a Linux shop that doesn't care at all about product continuity. Why would they have cared about Solaris? I'm sure it'd have got the chop instantly if Google had bought Sun. Sure, the engineers might have been able to find other opportunities within the firm, but Solaris would have been scrapped instantly (maybe open sourced, maybe not).
  - jedberg 9y ago
    Maybe, but the main lament is that some great IP is lost (ZFS, etc.) If Google had bought them for the IP, then at least that IP would live on, which is what everyone really wants.
    - nosequel 9y ago
      ZFS isn't lost. ZFS on Illumos (Smartos) and FreeBSD is alive and well.
      - jedberg 9y ago
        Sure but who owns the rights to it? That's what we mean by lost. It's locked up in a way to make it less usable.
        cyphar 9y ago
        The original ZFS engineers now work on OpenZFS, and have for almost a decade. While the base is "owned" by Oracle, most of the innovation in ZFS (and other Solaris technologies) have been done in illumos and are owned by their respective authors. While I feel empathy for the engineers who lost their jobs, modern Solaris innovation hasn't been funded by Oracle since 2010 and the OpenSolaris debacle.
protomyth 9y ago
> Solaris was competing against free Red Hat gets a nice check from us once a year. It isn't free by any means.
- pjmlp 9y ago
  Which is why many people use CentOS instead.
  - protomyth 9y ago
    Do you know the ratio of Red Hat to CentOS?
    - pjmlp 9y ago
      No, just that I hear it a lot, that teams are using CentOS instead of Red-Hat to avoid paying. Usually in the same kind of companies that use tons of FOSS software and never give anything back.
    - SwellJoe 9y ago
      In our market, it's at least 1:10 (CentOS is ten times as popular as RHEL). We don't actually record a difference between them in our license system (they both register as generic "redhat" with a major version), but we distinguish between them in our ticket tracker. We had a bug in our installer recently where it wouldn't work at all on RHEL (I stopped testing on RHEL a few years ago because compatibility was so reliable that it never behaved any differently from CentOS). It took almost 24 hours to get a bug report about it (we see about a hundred new installations a day). So...it may be even less than 1/10th. That said, we mostly operate in the low-end web hosting market: solo web developers, small design shops, web hosts selling to solo web developers, small businesses, etc. Our software rarely ends up in huge enterprise deployments. Even for our customers that are big businesses that use RHEL on the backend, they might have CentOS on their web server, because it's just a rental and that's what their web host installed for them. So, our numbers are certainly skewed toward CentOS because margins in web hosting are razor thin.
rodgerd 9y ago
Someone who (at the time) was senior enough in an IBM/Red Hat joint role told me the plan was that IBM would buy Sun, essentially for their Telco and a few other key market segments. To avoid any anti-trust risks (which IBM was still institutionally paranoid about) that might come from owning AIX, Solaris, WebSphere, Java, and various other overlapping properties, they would spin much of the software division (including Java and Solaris) off to Red Hat. Unfortunately for the free software world, IBM's lawyers got cold feet when it turned out that Sun were mired in bribery claims. Oracle didn't care. Pity, because actually having Java properly open sourced, and likewise with various other Sun technologies (e.g. an OpenSolaris that didn't rely on a couple of binary-only libraries, for example) would have been quite a net win.
- peoplewindow 9y ago
  By "properly" open sourced you mean no proprietary builds at all? Because virtually all of Java is available in OpenJDK and Oracle has continued to fund and open source major new Java upgrades.
  - rodgerd 9y ago
    By properly open sourced I mean that the various testing and validation suites for Java and key Java tech (like J2EE) would be available, that proprietary bits (like the Windows installer) wouldn't be silently parachuted into the JDK install, as two examples.
    - jsiepkes 9y ago
      You do know that J2EE has been called JEE for ages now right?
protomyth 9y ago
Amazon would have been interesting. It sure would of made for very interesting cloud services.
jsudhams 9y ago
I think Redhat or IBM with another product would have been great with software on top availble for both Linux and Solaris

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.
  - wahern 9y ago
    Sparc is also effectively dead. Solaris and Sparc exist as ongoing projects only to the extent Oracle is contractually required to maintain them--e.g. to Fujitsu. If you accept that Solaris is dead, then by the same evidence Sparc is dead. If you believe Sparc is still viable, then by the same evidence Solaris is still viable.
  - rbanffy 9y ago
    SPARC died the moment every developer had a good enough x86 desktop running a Unix flavor (and Sun decided it'd be happy not to build desktops anymore). At that point, we cease to imagine deploying our stuff in SPARC. We test on x86 and make it run well on x86 before it gets compiled for SPARC. At that point, unless the SPARC hardware has some definitive cost/performance advantage, we'll buy x86. SPARC is for legacy. Same applies to POWER, BTW. How many new apps have you seen in the past 10 years that were designed for POWER?
    - emmelaich 9y ago
      What accelerated it even further was when Linux went 64 bit and hardware improved to the point where it was a suitable replacement for big iron Solaris (the SunFire 6900 for example). That was around 2005 from memory. And the 6900's features with regard to HA in the field fell well short of advertised. Now you can get a Linux box with 4Tb of RAM so no-one should buy Solaris over Linux.
      - rbanffy 9y ago
- toyg 9y ago
  No, Oracle at the time was big on the "fullstack" play, and thought Sun hardware could provide the last piece of the puzzle: selling absolutely everything to a business, from metal to apps and services, in one neat box. Java would have been safe with IBM too, that wasn't much of a worry - although I'm sure Ellison hoped they could leverage it against competitors invested in it, like they tried to do with Google. The enemy #1 for Oracle at the time was SAP, which they couldn't force out because it's another cancer (the lock-in is huge); so they developed a strategy of buying loads of ecosystem apps to "surround" it. At that point, they could sell the database and apps in one package, and then slowly erode sap away. Hardware was a natural addition to that strategy. Unfortunately they borked execution. They didn't invest properly in making solutions ready-made, so after you bought a (very expensive) box, you still had to pay tons to consultants to set it up, making it uncompetitive on the whole. The industry shift to cloud did the rest. Now they're way too busy turning into "bigger Salesforce" to care about metal.
  - pram 9y ago
    Exactly. Oracle+Sun allowed 'vertically integrated' solutions with their Engineered Systems. You could literally buy your entire rack, software, storage, infiniband, even the network portion (Oracle has copper ethernet switches believe it or not) straight from them. It would be under one contract for support etc.
- emmelaich 9y ago
  > ... why would IBM have been a better fit to buy Sun? IBM Services do a lot of support work for Solaris around the world. But yeah, other than that it doesn't make a lot of sense.
rootbear 9y ago
Agreed. I think IBM would have fixed the licensing issues that kept ZFS off Linux and would have kept Solaris Open Source, perhaps with a better license. It's tragic that Sun went to Oracle and not IBM.

mrweasel 9y ago

We sell Solaris installation and support all the time, but only for running Oracle database installation.

noir_lord 9y ago

> Would it have been different if any other company had bought Sun? Red Hat (if they could have afforded it) would have been an awesome home for Solaris/Sun.

tannhaeuser 9y ago
That would have been terrible (and pointless for RedHat anyway). RedHat already owns the entire enterprise Linux market.
- noir_lord 9y ago
  I dont' see why, they'd have been able to integrate the various buts of Solaris that where ahead of the Linux curve and since RH has been good about open sourcing stuff the rest of the ecosystem would have benefited.
  - rbanffy 9y ago
    Considering the differences under the hood, that wouldn't be easy.

acdha 9y ago

I think that would very much depend on when: Sun's primary problem was bad management so an early 2000s change might have enabled them to compete against Red Hat — treat usability as a concern, wrap all of those cool kernel features in a non-joke userland, sell support, etc. Sitting out package management for a couple decades really hurt them and that's a relatively cheap engineering commitment. It's interesting to imagine ZFS and zones bringing containerization a decade earlier, but every time they came up the reaction from most of the sysadmins I knew was roughly “call me back when they have apt/yum”. A coworker who used to work at Sun maintains that they really needed to go private to avoid years of chaos from waves of layoffs when they were profitable but not enough to satisfy Wall Street.

karlkatzke 9y ago
> It's interesting to imagine ZFS and zones bringing containerization a decade earlier I have a legacy production environment that is Debian based OpenVZ and Nexenta. Containers and ZFS were in heavy use a decade ago, the marketing just wasn't there to make it "cool" like Docker. Sun was great at many things, but they were never great at marketing.
sgift 9y ago
> A coworker who used to work at Sun maintains that they really needed to go private to avoid years of chaos from waves of layoffs when they were profitable but not enough to satisfy Wall Street. It still surprises me that Dell was able to somehow go private before Wall Street killed them too.
davidgerard 9y ago
Zones were way cool. Solaris 10 was on the right path and I actually quite liked it. (Ran it in earnest on various SPARC and x64 kit.)
- Annatar 9y ago
  Zones are still cool, and they live on in illumos and especially SmartOS.

Spooky23 9y ago

Sure. Red Hat is very successful with selling a product that is free!

gaius 9y ago

Not really. Sun would have survived and thrived if it had thrown its weight behind Solaris x86. But they were too worried about cannibalising SPARC and when commodity kit started to beat them on price/performance they had nowhere to go. I remember when we ripped out our 3 6800s and replaced them with 9 Dells, for way more power at a fraction of the price. Would have loved to recompile on Solaris, but the hardware savings easily covered the cost of a port...

binarycrusader 9y ago
Not really. Sun would have survived and thrived if it had thrown its weight behind Solaris x86. Except they did; anyone working in Solaris engineering at that time or even now could tell you that x86 was just as important as SPARC. From a technological perspective, they are completely equivalent. For example, the ZFS Storage Appliance is x86-based, not SPARC-based.
- justin66 9y ago
  From the end user point of view, Sun recommitted (and later lessened their commitment) to Solaris x86 support so many times over the years that it's hard to imagine what would convince a user that they were really "throwing their weight behind it." We really mean it this time... wait, where are you going???
  - binarycrusader 9y ago
    The hardest software to change is in people's heads.
  - Annatar 9y ago
    But it is true. For a while, AMD based Acer Ferrari laptops were the primary development hardware for Solaris, SPARC or otherwise. It showed up on i86pc first, then it would be built on sparc during the night. SmartOS for example only supports i86pc; there is no sparc port.

heybrother 9y ago

I don't know if it would've been any different for Solaris, but I can imagine Google would've been a whole lot better off owning Java. They probably would've been far better stewards too. Even if they win Oracle v Google, it's been a huge distraction, a huge cost in lawyers (who knows how much they'll recoup), a big unknown and the search for an alternative has to be costly and time-consuming. $8.3 billion almost seems like a bargain in hindsight.

kpil 9y ago
To be fair I don't think that Oracle have been particularly bad to Java, except beeing Oracle. I doubt Google was ever an alternative. Realistically it was a fight for power over the enterprise customers between IBM and Oracle, with most (non OS) products built or integrated with Java. Maybe it was even a hot potato- someone needed to keep their strategic bet alive, since Microsoft also share the same strategy in the enterprise app segment. (Sell complex but underperforming applications to ill-advised customers using long feature lists.)

bachmeier 9y ago

> Solaris was competing against free Is that true? Don't companies interested in Solaris pay for their OS? Weren't they competing against companies like Red Hat?

SwellJoe 9y ago
Decisions like that trickle up from what developers and IT guys want. There was a generation that was raised on Solaris, and those folks built the first generation web on Solaris-on-SPARC with Oracle databases. But, then the next generation came along, and they hadn't learned UNIX in college on Solaris boxes. They'd learned on Linux in their parent's basement. I came up during that middle era when the shift was happening. I was an early adopter of Linux, but all of the real training I got (my employer at the time paid for it) was Solaris-based. But, even with the training and access to Solaris, I prefered Linux. I just had more comfort with it because it was my daily driver. When people I worked for were making decisions about OS, the recommendation they nearly always got from me was "Linux". And, I believe that played out millions of times to get us to the world we're in today. So, yeah, Solaris was competing with free, but not always at the business level...the part that mattered was "how many people with influence are using this OS as their daily driver?" And, Linux was/is a phenomenon. People love Linux. People loved Solaris, too, but it was a much lower number due to lack of access...early days of Linux, you couldn't even get Solaris without a SPARC box to run it on. Later, they made x86 Solaris free, but it was too little too late, and by that time Linux was better than Solaris on a number of extremely important metrics (package management and package selection, for example, but also in terms of just plain fun).
- pjmlp 9y ago
  I can easily relate to this, started with Xenix, moved into DG-UX at university, we moved into GNU/Linux after that server eventually died, so it was mostly used of OS related classes. At work GNU/Linux was just an internal server, all real work was being done in Solaris, HP-UX and Aix servers. So fast forward to modern times and even Microsoft uses Linux kernel syscalls on their new POSIX personality subsystem, instead of actually supporting POSIX.

coredog64 9y ago

ISTR rumors that Google was interested in Sun for their IP. I think that would have worked out well. No stupid Java API trial, Solaris truly open source, ZFS in more places. Fujitsu probably would have wound up with the hardware side of SPARC, and I could imagine that Dell or IBM would have taken the server/storage stuff for close to what Sun sold for.

peoplewindow 9y ago
Google, really? Please. Google is a Linux shop that doesn't care at all about product continuity. Why would they have cared about Solaris? I'm sure it'd have got the chop instantly if Google had bought Sun. Sure, the engineers might have been able to find other opportunities within the firm, but Solaris would have been scrapped instantly (maybe open sourced, maybe not).
- jedberg 9y ago
  Maybe, but the main lament is that some great IP is lost (ZFS, etc.) If Google had bought them for the IP, then at least that IP would live on, which is what everyone really wants.
  - nosequel 9y ago
    ZFS isn't lost. ZFS on Illumos (Smartos) and FreeBSD is alive and well.
    - jedberg 9y ago
      Sure but who owns the rights to it? That's what we mean by lost. It's locked up in a way to make it less usable.
      - cyphar 9y ago
        The original ZFS engineers now work on OpenZFS, and have for almost a decade. While the base is "owned" by Oracle, most of the innovation in ZFS (and other Solaris technologies) have been done in illumos and are owned by their respective authors. While I feel empathy for the engineers who lost their jobs, modern Solaris innovation hasn't been funded by Oracle since 2010 and the OpenSolaris debacle.

protomyth 9y ago

> Solaris was competing against free Red Hat gets a nice check from us once a year. It isn't free by any means.

pjmlp 9y ago
Which is why many people use CentOS instead.
- protomyth 9y ago
  Do you know the ratio of Red Hat to CentOS?
  - pjmlp 9y ago
    No, just that I hear it a lot, that teams are using CentOS instead of Red-Hat to avoid paying. Usually in the same kind of companies that use tons of FOSS software and never give anything back.
  - SwellJoe 9y ago
    In our market, it's at least 1:10 (CentOS is ten times as popular as RHEL). We don't actually record a difference between them in our license system (they both register as generic "redhat" with a major version), but we distinguish between them in our ticket tracker. We had a bug in our installer recently where it wouldn't work at all on RHEL (I stopped testing on RHEL a few years ago because compatibility was so reliable that it never behaved any differently from CentOS). It took almost 24 hours to get a bug report about it (we see about a hundred new installations a day). So...it may be even less than 1/10th. That said, we mostly operate in the low-end web hosting market: solo web developers, small design shops, web hosts selling to solo web developers, small businesses, etc. Our software rarely ends up in huge enterprise deployments. Even for our customers that are big businesses that use RHEL on the backend, they might have CentOS on their web server, because it's just a rental and that's what their web host installed for them. So, our numbers are certainly skewed toward CentOS because margins in web hosting are razor thin.

rodgerd 9y ago

Someone who (at the time) was senior enough in an IBM/Red Hat joint role told me the plan was that IBM would buy Sun, essentially for their Telco and a few other key market segments. To avoid any anti-trust risks (which IBM was still institutionally paranoid about) that might come from owning AIX, Solaris, WebSphere, Java, and various other overlapping properties, they would spin much of the software division (including Java and Solaris) off to Red Hat. Unfortunately for the free software world, IBM's lawyers got cold feet when it turned out that Sun were mired in bribery claims. Oracle didn't care. Pity, because actually having Java properly open sourced, and likewise with various other Sun technologies (e.g. an OpenSolaris that didn't rely on a couple of binary-only libraries, for example) would have been quite a net win.

peoplewindow 9y ago
By "properly" open sourced you mean no proprietary builds at all? Because virtually all of Java is available in OpenJDK and Oracle has continued to fund and open source major new Java upgrades.
- rodgerd 9y ago
  By properly open sourced I mean that the various testing and validation suites for Java and key Java tech (like J2EE) would be available, that proprietary bits (like the Windows installer) wouldn't be silently parachuted into the JDK install, as two examples.
  - jsiepkes 9y ago
    You do know that J2EE has been called JEE for ages now right?

protomyth 9y ago

Amazon would have been interesting. It sure would of made for very interesting cloud services.

jsudhams 9y ago

I think Redhat or IBM with another product would have been great with software on top availble for both Linux and Solaris