4 ms·

Sure, if you ignore the massive effort that was being invested in revamping Solaris to be more FOSS friendly and engage with the community prior to oracle's sun

by cat199 9y ago

Sure, if you ignore the massive effort that was being invested in revamping Solaris to be more FOSS friendly and engage with the community prior to oracle's sun takeover.. I suspect if the takeover hadn't happened, the FOSS systems landscape would look a whole lot different. Like what, I don't know, but definitely different.

SkyMarshal 9y ago
Sun really needed to FOSS license Solaris before Linux hit critical mass. That would have been amazing. Linux is pretty good for what it is, but imagine if it had been Solaris that won instead of Linux, and thus running on most of the servers of the world and potentially iOS and Android as well. It might have even made some desktop inroads, given it would have launched out of the FOSS gate with a more developed desktop than Linux at the time. Such a huge missed opportunity.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- Tloewald 9y ago
  I doubt Apple or NeXT would have ported their platform to Solaris (from BSD/Mach). it seems to me that BSD would have been Linux if Linux hadn't happened.
  - madkangas 9y ago
    Actually, NeXT did just that. OPENSTEP ran on Mach, Solaris, HPUX, and (amazingly) Windows NT. It didn't make a difference for NeXT's market share. NeXT was acquired by Apple. 6 months later... Jobs was in charge, and history unfolded.
    - Tloewald 9y ago
      Oh of course you're right (/facepalm). But does/did Solaris have anything worthwhile to offer over BSD/Mach.
riku_iki 9y ago
> I suspect if the takeover hadn't happened, the FOSS systems landscape would look a whole lot different. Sun was in bad financial situation at that point, there is a high chance all these engineers would be laid off 8 years earlier if takeover hadn't happened.
davidgerard 9y ago
> I suspect if the takeover hadn't happened, the FOSS systems landscape would look a whole lot different. Like what, I don't know, but definitely different. It's possible IBM would have been a significantly better steward. Of course, it would have been hard to be a worse one.
- toyg 9y ago
  > it would have been hard to be a worse one. That's a bit unfair. IBM would have probably canned hardware (and hence Solaris) much earlier than Oracle did, because they already had their own offering in that space and they were as invested as Oracle in Linux (ok, they don't have their own RedHat clone, but they are definitely big on supporting Linux). IBM was buying Sun because of Java, and planning to chuck the hardware out one way or another. Oracle bought Sun because of the hardware and basically kept everything else going, albeit in a reduced fashion where there was overlap (MySQL) or they were not interested in the niche (OpenOffice). I think Oracle had some decent ideas and didn't execute well on them, partly because of cultural issues. I don't think IBM would have done better, certainly not on the hardware/Solaris side. They would have probably done a bit better with Java/OpenOffice but that's about it. Solaris was doomed by the Linux boom, there is very little anyone could have done about that by the time the acquisition became inevitable.
  - davidgerard 9y ago
    I do know in the mid-2000s IBM was one of the biggest resellers of Sun's hardware, possibly doing more volume than Sun did directly. They were interested in OpenOffice ... just not sustainably, as it turned out.

by cat199 9y ago

SkyMarshal 9y ago

Sun really needed to FOSS license Solaris before Linux hit critical mass. That would have been amazing. Linux is pretty good for what it is, but imagine if it had been Solaris that won instead of Linux, and thus running on most of the servers of the world and potentially iOS and Android as well. It might have even made some desktop inroads, given it would have launched out of the FOSS gate with a more developed desktop than Linux at the time. Such a huge missed opportunity.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
Tloewald 9y ago
I doubt Apple or NeXT would have ported their platform to Solaris (from BSD/Mach). it seems to me that BSD would have been Linux if Linux hadn't happened.
- madkangas 9y ago
  Actually, NeXT did just that. OPENSTEP ran on Mach, Solaris, HPUX, and (amazingly) Windows NT. It didn't make a difference for NeXT's market share. NeXT was acquired by Apple. 6 months later... Jobs was in charge, and history unfolded.
  - Tloewald 9y ago
    Oh of course you're right (/facepalm). But does/did Solaris have anything worthwhile to offer over BSD/Mach.

riku_iki 9y ago

> I suspect if the takeover hadn't happened, the FOSS systems landscape would look a whole lot different. Sun was in bad financial situation at that point, there is a high chance all these engineers would be laid off 8 years earlier if takeover hadn't happened.

davidgerard 9y ago

> I suspect if the takeover hadn't happened, the FOSS systems landscape would look a whole lot different. Like what, I don't know, but definitely different. It's possible IBM would have been a significantly better steward. Of course, it would have been hard to be a worse one.

toyg 9y ago
> it would have been hard to be a worse one. That's a bit unfair. IBM would have probably canned hardware (and hence Solaris) much earlier than Oracle did, because they already had their own offering in that space and they were as invested as Oracle in Linux (ok, they don't have their own RedHat clone, but they are definitely big on supporting Linux). IBM was buying Sun because of Java, and planning to chuck the hardware out one way or another. Oracle bought Sun because of the hardware and basically kept everything else going, albeit in a reduced fashion where there was overlap (MySQL) or they were not interested in the niche (OpenOffice). I think Oracle had some decent ideas and didn't execute well on them, partly because of cultural issues. I don't think IBM would have done better, certainly not on the hardware/Solaris side. They would have probably done a bit better with Java/OpenOffice but that's about it. Solaris was doomed by the Linux boom, there is very little anyone could have done about that by the time the acquisition became inevitable.
- davidgerard 9y ago
  I do know in the mid-2000s IBM was one of the biggest resellers of Sun's hardware, possibly doing more volume than Sun did directly. They were interested in OpenOffice ... just not sustainably, as it turned out.