19 ms·

The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris

485 points by elvinyung 9y ago

pavlov 9y ago
I always thought Solaris was a beautiful and memorable name for an operating system. Any connection with the Stanislaw Lem novel (or Tarkovsky movie) was always a bit unclear to me... But I guess a book about futile interactions with a planet-sized alien brain that doesn't care about you other than mysteriously experimenting with your memories is a reasonable metaphor for the Unix user experience.
- type0 9y ago
  Soderberghs version is much more reflective of what happened with the emergence of OpenSolaris and Illumos (not to give away any spoilers but apparently forking is a real thing and it lives on). Tarkovskys movie was such a philosophical drivel that I feel asleep. How is the book - is it worth reading? As I understood it neither of films follow the novel very closely.
  - shmerl 9y ago
    The book is good.
  - oelmekki 9y ago
    I didn't read the book, but being boring is Tarkovsky's touch, so it sounds pretty safe to say it comes from him. Also people, please don't downvote parent. It's very fair to say this movie is boring and confusing, and I think it was the very point. Tarkovsky has this style of filming around supernatural / sf things but never actually showing them. Instead, he prefers to explore the anxiety they cause on humans, anxiety which he often represents through long waiting with deceptive conclusions, so I would say that feeling annoyed is quite what is expected from people watching them. It's art, not entertainment.
    - bhangi 9y ago
      Tarkovsky's works are generally demanding works of art. They are definitely slow paced and almost boring, but I've always found myself in a much more thoughtful frame of mind after watching his films. As for Solaris, it is worth reading the book as well as watching both versions of the film -- they ask and explore different questions. The book is about the nature of intelligence and life whereas the films are more about the human part of the equation -- what does it mean to be a human as opposed to be a "replicant"? Tarkovsky is slower paced, but IMHO encourages deep reflection. Soderbergh's version is definitely more watchable and is actually quite thoughtful by Hollywood standards.
    - mark_l_watson 9y ago
      We all like different things, which is good. Personally, I have watched the US version of Solaris about 6 or 7 times, and the Russian version twice, and read the book. A planet size consciousness, messing with people - great premise for a story.
  - gpvos 9y ago
    I haven't seen any of the films, but I loved the book.
  - inopinatus 9y ago
    Stanislaw Lem deserves a much wider readership. Well, I say that but actually he has a wide readership, just not so much in English-language markets. Besides Solaris, his meditations on life and society in The Cyberiad remain some of my favourite science fiction of all time.
    - abetusk 9y ago
      And "His Master's Voice" is one of my favorite books. I totally agree, Lem deserves a place right along Gibson.
      - cpeterso 9y ago
        I'm reading The Star Diaries, a collection of Lem's short stories from the 1950s. Their absurdity reminds me of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. I just discovered that there was a 2007 German TV series based on the stories, too: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0978537/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0978537/
      - boondaburrah 9y ago
        If Lem deserves a place among Gibson, I guess I gotta pick some up
        lobster_johnson 9y ago
        I recommend starting with Solaris. The Futurological Congress is also a lot of fun; it's one of his comedies, a satiric look at futurism. His Master's Voice is advanced level Lem. It's less a novel than a fictional autobiography of a scientist, and while the subject matter is fascinating, it's a bit dry. The Cyberiad is a classic, but very different and not really sci-fi. It's a collection of absurd, surreal fairytales about a pair of robots. It contains math puzzles and rhymes and lots of weird stuff. Fiasco, Memoirs Found in a Bathtub, Tales of Pirx the Pilot and Star Diaries are supposed to be good. I found Eden (one of his early works) to be a little juvenile and poorly written. It, too, is about first contact gone wrong.
  - SwellJoe 9y ago
    The book is better than both films, though I liked the films, too. And, yes, the films diverged from the book in significant ways. Lem is a fantastic writer, and Solaris is one of his best. I definitely recommend it, if you like cerebral sci-fi.
  - rossjudson 9y ago
    Soderbergh's version has one of the most gorgeous film soundtracks; in my top ten. Cliff Martinez scored it. Good film, phenomenal soundtrack.
  - lobster_johnson 9y ago
    The book is superb. But to appreciate the book have to understand that Lem, in his serious mode (he also wrote comedies and light-hearted adventures, which are quite different), is not very concerned about plot, nor about most things American sci-fi has always been about: There are no heroics, no politics, no space wars, no McGuffins, and there's only minimal world-building. Lem is an engaging writer, but also a somewhat dry one, and Solaris is a sort of essay on science, camouflaged as a novel: Like his other masterpiece, His Master's Voice, it is a critique of science. Whereas HMV attacks the scientific field pretty broadly, Solaris is more of an investigation into the limitations of the human mind: A scientist visits a far-away research station and comes to realize that all previous research (by decades of so-called "Solarisists") isn't even wrong, it's irrelevant. About a third of the book is spent on a wry summary of all the scholarly research that Solarisists have been performing and collecting in journals. Even after many decades, Solaris has funded many scientists, and yielded endless observations, but also zero insight. (At the time the book is set, most scientists have simply given up, and the station is largely abandoned.) Solaris is an inscrutable alien organism that the human mind can simply not understand. Ironically, even the main character comes to think, towards the end, that he has understood Solaris, when it's obvious to the reader that his conclusions are just more of the same, a reflection of our human-ness. Of course, both movie adaptations got this wrong, or chose to ignore that aspect of the book. They think it's about people reincarnated from memories, and that it's about love. In the book, the "ghosts" are actually dealt with rather simply and matter-of-factly; the scientists find themselves being tormented by them, and quickly move to destroy them. Lem, however, doesn't bother with the emotional melodrama you find in both movies. I don't remember what Soderbergh's version aimed for exactly (other than being a sort of Last Tango in Paris in space), but Tarkovsky's is very much inward-looking and concerned with the nature of artifice and truth (the "ghosts" are not real, and neither is Solaris, in a way). Tarkovsky didn't really want to create a sci-fi movie, and so you get something which is not entirely convincing.
    - watersb 9y ago
      Yes, yes yes. Thank you for this defense of one of my favorite meditation-as-novels. In a similar tone, I actually love the Tartovsky film. A very weird piece of work, and a hell of a thing to experience a few weeks before a summer spent in Russia...
  - rdtsc 9y ago
    I watched both movies. Tarkovsky's version is my favorite but I grew up with Soviet cinema so maybe that's why (though one can argue his films are so outside the norm with Soviet cinema that it wouldn't matter). One of the keys to Tarkovsky's movies is that he is concerned with human relationships primarily. Romantic relationships, parents and children, etc. Even when he directed "sci-Fi" movies, they were never about rockets, aliens, shooting, explosions. This quote from the movie, illustrates that well I think: --- We don't want to conquer space at all. We want to expand Earth endlessly. We don't want other worlds; we want a mirror. We seek contact and will never achieve it. We are in the foolish position of a man striving for a goal he fears and doesn't want. Man needs man! --- I remember watching this movie and being disappointed because I expected more sci-fi stuff. Same thing with Stalker, his other sci-fi film. Only after seeing The Mirror (my favorite of his films) started liking his other movies.
  - adrianN 9y ago
    I also found the films extremely boring and thought the book might be better. It turns out, the films were very good at capturing the book's boringness.
  - edem 9y ago
    I read the book several times. I think it is a good read. I did not fell asleep on the Tarkovsky movie I just hit quit after looking at the road scene at the start for 20 minutes. You can try the George Clooney variant it is a bit better. The interesting part is that both movies have their own interpretation of the book, so it is like having 3 different stories.
- syntheticnature 9y ago
  I figure the connection is probably more about being from a company named "Sun," since it's a Latin word and the source of the English adjective "solar" for 'pertaining to the sun.'
  - cyphar 9y ago
    And illumos is similarly named (Latin for illuminate).
    - DonHopkins 9y ago
      And Eclipse was similarly named, just to annoy Sun.
      - smarks 9y ago
        I thought so too, but eclipses in real life are always transient phenomena.
        DonHopkins 9y ago
        Do no look into Eclipse with remaining eye!
- cmkrnl 9y ago
  Beautiful name indeed. Happy memories of trying out Solaris 8 x86 on a Celeron with 64MB.
type0 9y ago
RIP Solaris, it introduced UNIX to me and I will always remember it fondly.
runarb 9y ago
> ..employees who had given their careers to the company were told of their termination via a pre-recorded call — “robo-RIF’d” This sounds awful, and very long from what would be the legal requirements demanded in the country I live in. What would such a robot call say?
- m_samuel_l 9y ago
  I'd imagine something like "shutdown -h now" or the solaris equivalent
  - gruturo 9y ago
    Solaris would understand that, but Oracle's move was nowhere that gentle. "uadmin 1 6" was more like it (Immediate poweroff, do not even sync disks)
    - fimbulvetr 9y ago
      More like: lom> poweroff As that is definitely something the os has no cability to block.
  - Nursie 9y ago
    Stop-A :)
  - mjcl 9y ago
    Good old killall!
    - justin66 9y ago
      Which behaves differently on Solaris than Linux, of course. Linux killall kills specific processes but on Solaris it forcefully kills everything on the landscape...
      - vacri 9y ago
        It doesn't shut the machine down though, right? Just kills all the processes? I remember reading somewhere that solaris-killall was only a part of the shutdown process. I remember having a related problem with an ubuntu cloud server a while back. I'd called 'halt' instead of 'shutdown' - they're not the same, and on this machine 'halt' didn't actually send the 'okay, now power off' bit.
z1mm32m4n 9y ago
As someone who's never used Solaris or looked into its merits I'm curious: can someone comment on why all the nostalgia for Solaris?
- dozzie 9y ago
  > As someone who's never used Solaris [...], can someone comment on why [...] I can't, because I'm not somebody who's never used Solaris.
  - marvy 9y ago
    If you have indeed used Solaris, you could have left a more useful comment. Your creative use of ellipsis is totally cheating by the way: you did not preserve the structure of the sentence.
    - dozzie 9y ago
      Oh, but I did preserve the structure. It's OP who doesn't understand how this grammatical construction works, and this particular mistake irritates me so much.
      - marvy 9y ago
        This preserves the structure better: > As someone who's never used Solaris [...] I'm curious: can someone [...] Notice that you left out the subject (I), left out the verb (am), and replaced a colon with a comma!
        dozzie 9y ago
        > Notice that you left out the subject (I), left out the verb (am), and replaced a colon with a comma! No, I didn't left out anything important to the structure nor did I replace a colon with anything. The thing is that you and I were looking at two different sentences, because OP silently edited his comment (I only noticed that now). The original sentence was "As someone who's never used Solaris or looked into its merits, can someone comment on why all the nostalgia for Solaris?"
brian-armstrong 9y ago
My only experience with Solaris was on the campus computer lab. It was also one of the first UNIX experiences I had had. I think what stood out most was the strongly 90s GUI and focus-follows-cursor, which seemed very strange at first. It seemed like an interesting OS with its own quirks
- tyingq 9y ago
  Probably olwm or olvwm. Either supported a -c switch for click to focus.
spilk 9y ago
Does the death of Solaris have any implications for the future of SPARC? Seemed like most of the SPARC hardware that Oracle sells/sold exclusively ran Solaris. I could be wrong about that, though.
- tankenmate 9y ago
  Fujitsu as been the largest manufacturer of SPARC chips for a number of years now. They make super computers (and mainframes) with SPARC chips although for how much longer... Their latest major announcement along side Oracle was in May this year.
  - jabl 9y ago
    At least on the supercomputing side, they're switching to ARM: http://www.fujitsu.com/global/Images/post-k-supercomputer-overview.pdf http://www.fujitsu.com/global/Images/post-k-supercomputer-ov... (no idea about whether mainframes will continue using SPARC)
- jsiepkes 9y ago
  From what I understand most of the SPARC people got laid of too. So unless Fujitsu really ups it's SPARC game I doubt there is much future for SPARC.
  - noselasd 9y ago
    SPARC was released under the GPL license. It might be living on through the LEON processor, at least for a while. It's the processor of choice at the European Space Agency, used for most of their recent satellites and spacecrafts. LEON pretty neat, you can run it on an FPGA and boot linux on it if you're brave enough.
SirLJ 9y ago
This was the best OS hands down, so sad...
wiremine 9y ago
> ..employees who had given their careers to the company were told of their termination via a pre-recorded call — “robo-RIF’d” Every single first person or second hand account I've heard about Oracle makes like a terrible place to work... is this just people being hyperbolic, or is is truly that terrible?
- busterarm 9y ago
  robo-RIFs are the new normal. Support.com is another big offender.
- znpy 9y ago
  > Every single first person or second hand account I've heard You answered yourself
- BrainInAJar 9y ago
  it very much is a terrible place to work
- michaelbuckbee 9y ago
  RIF == Reduction In Force (Saved you a Google)
- paulmd 9y ago
  > is this just people being hyperbolic, or is is truly that terrible? I'm on the outside looking in and don't have any special internal insight, but they didn't just pull this robo-RIF idea out of their ass spur-of-the-moment. Oracle is the kind of place that maintains a robo-layoff system, which pretty much says all you need to know. "What you think of Oracle is even truer than you think it is. There has been no entity in human history with less complexity or nuance to it than Oracle." https://youtu.be/-zRN7XLCRhc?t=33m https://youtu.be/-zRN7XLCRhc?t=33m
  - fasquoika 9y ago
    Oh man, so many good quotes in that talk. "Do not fall into the trap of anthropomorphizing Larry Ellison"
smegel 9y ago
It never seemed quite right that Solaris and all this awesome engineering tech from Sun ended up as personal playthings of someone like Larry Ellison. Edit: grammar.
xeeeeeeeeeeenu 9y ago
I wouldn't call illumos "thriving". Commit activity[1] is low for a project of this size (compared to e.g. BSDs) and its hardware support is poor. Probably the biggest problem is the fact that all existing distributions are undermaintained and unpolished. SmartOS is the only exception, but it's not a replacement for Solaris which was a general-purpose server OS. SmartOS is merely a bare-metal hypervisor. I really hope that some of the laid-off developers will start contributing to the project. It really needs them. [1] - https://github.com/illumos/illumos-gate/commits/master https://github.com/illumos/illumos-gate/commits/master
- Philipp__ 9y ago
  I can relate to your statement to some extent. Why illumos is not "thriving" is _maybe_ because it does not have solid general purpose distribution. Tribblix is kinda trying to get there, but I haven't used it for more than few sessions inside VM. Dream OS for me would be something ala OpenBSD, but built on top of illumos and with all the goods that would come with it.
  - paulmd 9y ago
    Wouldn't that be OpenIndiana?
- foxhop 9y ago
  SmartOS is better then Solaris for servers. It's truly badass. I have an HP DL160 G6 running SmartOS in my basement. If you learn to use zones (which you should) it can run any workload that Solaris can. On top of that it also runs native Linux containers and KVM for virtualizing everything else. It's hands down my favorite operating system.
  - Vivtek 9y ago
    Well, and as of Friday, of course, SmartOS is infinitely better than Solaris.
- bcantrill 9y ago
  While I'm obviously biased, I think you are succumbing to a kind of cargo culting with respect to both commit activity and hardware support. On commit activity, we in illumos don't necessarily have the same values as other projects: we really want to get it correct the first time -- a trait inherited from Solaris that we call "FCS quality all the time."[1] As such, commits have to be tested, thoroughly reviewed (four or more reviewers is not uncommon), and (as a practical matter) are more often than not shipping in a downstream repo for an extended period of time before they integrate upstream into illumos. In short, we value quality much, much more than quantity -- and what you perceive to be "low" activity I perceive to be quality activity (and as someone who very much relies on the ability to stay current and deploy into production, high commit activity would leave me nervous). In terms of hardware support, you need to be specific. Yes, there is esoteric hardware we don't support -- but we in illumos are really focused on the server-side, where there is less hardware variation than you might realize. At the moment, the biggest hardware limitations aren't in the traditional domain of CPU/NIC/HBA/flash/spindle (where we have broad support), but rather in the emerging domain of the GPGPU. And anyone who is interested in engaging in the substantial kernel work in this domain (both to make NVIDIA-based GPGPUs to work in hardware virtualized guests and to allow AMD-based GPGPUs to work natively) should consider reaching out -- Joyent is very much hiring![2] [1] http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc/2015/09/03/software-immaculate-fetid-and-grimy/ http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc/2015/09/03/software-immaculate-f... [2] https://www.joyent.com/about/careers https://www.joyent.com/about/careers
harry8 9y ago
Bryan Cantrill give a great lecture. I saw him give an overview of DTrace a decade or more ago and remain impressed. Check him out. https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=bryan+cantrill https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=bryan+cantrill It's sad that we live in a world where a company doing good , innovative and useful tech is gobbled up by a company like Oracle who should not exist and do largely on their ability to con ignorant senior management and even more ignorant boards of directors. Is there ever a technical reason to use Oracle? If there is what percentage of Oracle sales does it account for? Ie if it really is non-zero I bet it's a single digit percentage. Woeful company from the top down is their reputation and they've earned it.
- topkeker 9y ago
  Unfortunately the world doesn't run off technical ability though. Oracle is a mammoth because it's proficient at extracting value and profit from its businesses. Don't get me wrong, I agree with you in principle, but it's the equivalent of someone destroying artwork and making a gain from it and wondering how they get away with it when the world doesn't care about art, they care about money.
  - ptero 9y ago
    IIRC, Oracle got a huge boost from US government as it was the semi-official database engine developed (for the Navy?) with taxpayer funds, then deployed (again with taxpayer funds). I'm not complaining, the US probably needed a better DB engine, but it was partly luck, partly backroom agreements that launched and supported Oracle for years. That said, maybe I got my facts badly mixed up.
    - MrMorden 9y ago
      CIA. (Source: Larry Ellison, as quoted in Business Insider: http://www.businessinsider.com/the-cia-made-larry-ellison-a-billionaire-2014-9 http://www.businessinsider.com/the-cia-made-larry-ellison-a-...) Which is why the villain in Charlie Stross's _The Jennifer Morgue_ is "Ellis Billington".
    - 9y ago
ty_a 9y ago
I'm curious where this leaves things like the ZFS appliances? They aren't going to use openzfs on oel are they?
rodgerd 9y ago
Twenty years ago, if you'd said that the surviving commercial *ixen would be AIX and HP/UX, you'd have been drummed out of the Unix Beard club.
- StillBored 9y ago
  HP/UX is dead too because HP despite apparently having an x86 port won't be porting it off itanium. Random link about it (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/06/08/hp_ux_on_x86_project_kinetic/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/06/08/hp_ux_on_x86_project...). Whether they do a 180 and port it to x86, the fact remains its probably to late, the damage has been done. That leaves AIX, which at least has decent hardware to run on. But its got the OS/2 problem too, you can write your app for linux, and use the AIX toolbox for linux apps, and port your app. Although with power8 the move to LE linux, makes moving applications/data between linux on POWER and AIX on POWER more difficult.
  - rodgerd 9y ago
    Ironically HP/UX may nonetheless outlive Solaris - the claim of its imminent demise being the event that provided the excuse to de-support Oracle software on HP/UX.
  - girvo 9y ago
    For my work (and the 160-thread POWER8 box I got given to run it on by IBM) AIX didn't even enter the discussion, which was sort of a shame. I had no need for it, but it would've been fun; but Linux on POWER with Docker and everything else is surprisingly nice. Now to get myself one of those POWER9 workstations for home...
  - rodgerd 9y ago
    I was at an IBM conf in 2014 where they were basically telling the AIX guys to get familiar with KVM as it would likely be replacing PowerVM sooner or later. The writing has been on the wall for a while, for better or worse.
- hindsightbias 9y ago
  Research and fabs. Once HP had gone Itanium, we knew it would come down to Intel vs IBM. Sun never had pockets deep enough. Winning Enterprise may be a pyrrhic victory, but we'll see how many server architectures are left in a few years.
oxryly1 9y ago
I hate to be facile, but if Sun and Solaris were so great and Oracle was this known bad place, why did they let the Oracle people in the door in the first place? Maybe sell to someone else?
- mrpippy 9y ago
  Oracle paid $5.6 billion for Sun. If someone else wanted to pay that much they could have submitted an offer too. The board cares about maximizing shareholder value, not about the future of any ongoing technologies. Sun had been in discussions with IBM for months about an acquisition, but I believe the offer was lower and there were antitrust concerns (they did compete directly in a lot of markets) [1]. I suspect they would have been a much better steward of the open-source efforts though [1]: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/06/technology/business-computing/06blue.html http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/06/technology/business-comput...
  - oxryly1 9y ago
    Yeah, mine was little of a leading question certainly. Oracle seems like bad guys, but it's really the board of Sun that had priorities other than the health of Solaris and the long term employment of the engineers. Oracle was a known snake [1]. Also, sale of the entire business of Sun was probably only one of many options on the table. [1]: http://www.gballard.net/lifes_lessons/girl_rattlesnake/ http://www.gballard.net/lifes_lessons/girl_rattlesnake/
  - astine 9y ago
    I was a Solaris admin at the time of the acquisition and some of the Sun folks I was in contact with were glad that it was at least not IBM that had bought them out because IBM had always been their primary 'enemy.'
- InTheArena 9y ago
  Not a lot of other options. Linux basically rolled the UNIX market. I remember rumours that MS was in the game, but the fit there was a lot harder to find.
- 9y ago
InTheArena 9y ago
Solaris, hell, I still mourn the death of SunOS (esp verison 4.1.3) at the hands of Solaris,
- buserror 9y ago
  Ah... I loved SunOS! Fondly remember my Sun Station 3/80, nothing like that fancy SPARC processor in there, a good solid 68040 like real men used back then ;-) Mind you, I still use the 'sun' font when booting my linux kernel on framebuffers, I always loved that font.
  - unexistance 9y ago
    oooh what is this sun font you're talking about? is it available anywhere?
  - DonHopkins 9y ago
    "Love your country but never trust its government." https://nohats.ca/wordpress/blog/2016/01/24/why-the-sun-sparc2-has-the-message-love-your-country-but-never-trust-its-government/ https://nohats.ca/wordpress/blog/2016/01/24/why-the-sun-spar... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10966571 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10966571
- arethuza 9y ago
  Indeed, I still remember (just) the jokes about Slowlaris and BloatedWindows...
crudbug 9y ago
Oracle should open source it back, probably donate it to Apache.
- sprayk 9y ago
  what's in it for Oracle?
  - artursapek 9y ago
    some goodwill. Microsoft earned a lot of with all of the open sourcing they've been doing in the last few years.
    - nickhalfasleep 9y ago
      Microsoft is clawing it's way back into the agile stacks as a way to sell it's cloud services to small shops. I don't think Oracle really aims for startups or less than $10mil/year companies right now. They sell on the golf course, not the meetup or con presentation.
    - cyphar 9y ago
      To paraphrase Bryan Cantrill, don't fall into the trap of anthropomorphising Larry Ellison. Your lawnmower doesn't care about community goodwill either.
      - artursapek 9y ago
        What? I'm saying it matters in the community of developers - and it does.
        cyphar 9y ago
        My point is that "showing goodwill" is not something that makes sense within Oracle (at least that's what I've heard). I agree that acting correctly to a community is the right thing to do, but that doesn't mean it's something that Oracle will do.
exikyut 9y ago
> And, it turns out, illumos was born at exactly the right moment: shortly after illumos was announced, Oracle — in what remains to me a singularly loathsome and cowardly act — silently re-proprietarized Solaris on August 13, 2010. I was very curious about this, and stumbled on further details in https://www.usenix.org/legacy/events/lisa11/tech/slides/cantrill.pdf https://www.usenix.org/legacy/events/lisa11/tech/slides/cant... on page 15. But read the entire PDF anyway, it's interesting.
icedchai 9y ago
Very sad. Solaris was my first commercial Unix. Technically it was SunOS 4.x, on a SparcStation 10. This was probably around the time they renamed SunOS 4.x to Solaris 1? I still have an old Ultra 10 downstairs. It hasn't been turned on since 2004 or so. I think it had Solaris 8?
magnawave 9y ago
At the end of the day, Sun/Oracle has to be able to make revenue from Solaris for them to keep paying those peoples' salaries. Is your startup / company deploying on Solaris? Nope of course you aren't - who is?! Pretty much nobody nowadays - w3techs.com shows Solaris at 0.0005% for webservers for example. Everyone talks about how great it is(to be sure there are some small bits that are pretty dang amazing) - yet for some reason nearly no one actually DOES use it! Perhaps there is a reason for that. Lord knows I have many battle scars from the many real world rough edges that never seemed to get less fundamentally shitty(for starters: path_to_inst and smf I'm looking right at you!) I definitely respect the amazing work of some of the engineers on the Solaris team back in the day. ZFS and DTrace being two that have made the tech world by in large a better place either directly or thru inspiration. And Linux and the BSDs are definitely better for those selective code gifts! But nonetheless, the world voted with their feet, and Solaris didn't make the cut.
- emmelaich 9y ago
  I always sensed a great tension between the engineers and the business people at Sun, to the detriment of both. The business didn't know how to drive and target sales, and the engineers built brilliant things (ZFS, dtrace, mdb, zones, internal high availability, firewall*) that customers weren't asking for. [edited to add firewall, that first gen that no-one used because it was so complex]
  - thanatropism 9y ago
    This is not a good look on the engineers. Business is fundamentally uncertain, and decomposing failure into avoidable and unavoidable factors is very very hard. This is even harder in industries dominated by network externalities like computer platforms. On the other hand: if engineering wasn't serving the stated business purpose (things that customers want, at least as far as business can see) but doing semi-academic research on the company dime... well, it's an indirect misappropriation of funds, however cool the results turned out. Analogy: Sugarcube Industries is in the business of farm built infrastructure and its flagship product is a barn that can comfortably house N horses cutting down on injuries, promoting weight gain by proper thermal environment. I don't know much about horses, bear with me. Engineering is asked to design such a horse barn. Maybe it's fundamentally impossible to fix heat flows in such and such weather or idiotic in general to try and improve horse health by those means. Maybe business even understood market research wrong, and what people wanted was barns with hooks where farmstaff can hang horse ponchos that will be manually deployed in times of need. It's a bad look on engineering if instead of delivering the best horse barn on the market, they come up with a three-storey optimized IVF-incubator-horse feeding operation. ---- Unix (a decades-long project whose capital costs are inestimable when considering all the failed companies and free labor) nearly lost to Windows NT because the latter had hooks where sysadmins could hang those needed ponchos.
jtchang 9y ago
I remember playing around on a old Sun sparc. It was my first exposure to unix and curiosity got the better of me. I picked up a copy of freebsd and started to tinker with that and read more and more about the unix philosophy. To this day I still think Solaris was really well thought out. It had a certain rock solidness to it that I can't really describe. Compare to even openbsd or freebsd I always thought or felt it was more stable (regardless of that was actually the case). I'm sad that so much work went into such a great OS and now it is basically gone to die. These days if you're thinking about creating a piece of software and want it to last open source is probably the only option.
pron 9y ago
Sudden death? Solaris has been dying for at least a decade. An entire company collapsed after not being able to monetize Solaris-based systems. Solaris wasn't killed by a company; it was killed by the market. A company just stopped trying to resuscitate it after years of CPR. Cantrill blames "executive whims, shareholder demands, and a fickle public," but not even a little bit the product designers and engineers who are so attuned to the needs and desires of the market that they have somehow missed the collapse of a Fortune 500 company due to their products not selling and years later are still surprised that the product is being shut down?
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
tacon 9y ago
An old, old Oracle joke: Q: On what hardware does Oracle run best? A: A 35mm slide projector.
kristoffer 9y ago
I'm surprised he is surprised. Everybody knew Solaris was dead. I'm more surprised Oracle still had so many engineers working on it. I guess they where waiting out some SLAs. Of course Oracle is a horrible company and all but Solaris has been dead for a long time.
dandare 9y ago
Just wondering, at what point could the Solaris name be reused for another Unix distribution?
- perlgeek 9y ago
  Without causing confusion? Probably when all current Solaris users are dead or don't care anymore. Reusing names tends to be a terrible idea.
titzer 9y ago
If there is a one phrase takeaway from this excellent essay it would be Brian's terse and apt characterization of Oracle as a "remorseless corporate sociopath."
- davidgerard 9y ago
  "Don't make the mistake of anthropomorphizing Larry Ellison!" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&t=33m https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&t=33m
  - titzer 9y ago
    lol. +100
- peterwwillis 9y ago
  Corporations do not have remorse and they can not be sociopathic. Corporations are like ant colonies. They are bodies of people who are bound together in order that the whole outlasts the individual, in order to serve the needs of the group. They are made up of individuals with feelings, but they can't "feel" things on their own. They can reflect the shared feelings of the group, but this is just a reflection, like seeing the image of trees reflected in a body of water. The author is obviously very upset about the whole thing, but personifying a corporation is illogical (even if the Supreme Court disagrees with me)
snw 9y ago
There seems to be a lot of odd nostalgia for Solaris in the comments here and on twitter. I think that's missing the point of the article. Yes, Oracle Solaris is dead. But illumos is better, open source, alive and here to stay. You can use illumos today, right now, and have your ZFS, mdb, DTrace and zones. It really is open source and we're a community using and improving it. For 7 years now already. As illumos is only the basic building block of the operating system (but unlike linux includes kernel + basic userland) one usually runs one of the distributions: - SmartOS, developed by Joyent as a cloud hypervisor. Supports zones, KVM and lx-branded linux containers. [1] - OmniOS CE, a minimal distribution targeted for bare metal server installations [2] - OpenIndiana, similar to the traditional opensolaris. If you care about GUI this is probably the one. [3] - Tribblix, modern components with retro style [4] Sure, the user base is smaller than Linux. But that is also true for FreeBSD which is used by Netflix and Whatsapp. Running a different OS than most other people can give your company an advantage and I know that ZFS and zones have done that for mine. [1] https://wiki.smartos.org/display/DOC/Download+SmartOS https://wiki.smartos.org/display/DOC/Download+SmartOS [2] http://www.omniosce.org http://www.omniosce.org [3] https://www.openindiana.org https://www.openindiana.org [4] http://www.tribblix.org http://www.tribblix.org
- cryptonector 9y ago
  The nostalgia I feel is for Sun, for MPK17, for the people I got to work with, and the technology. Of those things only Sun is gone, but the people scattered, and technology, though still vibrant, is still always at risk -- it depends too much on Bryan Cantrill and friends to keep it going, while the Linux crowd blissfully ignores all the good ideas and reinvents every wheel badly. We're in a dark ages with a sliver of light. We might be in it for a while. People who have never used ZFS, SMF, DTrace, or FMA, have no idea that they are stuck in the dark.
- samoright 9y ago
  How does running a different OS than most people can give a company an advantage? Can you elaborate this?
  - rhinoceraptor 9y ago
tannhaeuser 9y ago
Is there no chance of saving Solaris? If Oracle doesn't have a commercial interest in it, why don't they transfer it to Apache or other foundation? It's not an unusual thing to do, and Solaris devs could make a living by support and maintenance.
- snw 9y ago
  Oracle has been slowly killing Solaris for some time. At the same time the community has already saved it - this is what illumos is about. It exists and is open source.
DonHopkins 9y ago
To quote the brilliant Jim Morrison: "Waiting for the Sun" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A0kypyGSKsE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A0kypyGSKsE "The End" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6FMGYycBAMU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6FMGYycBAMU And to quote the also brilliant Jim Thompson (whose Levenshtein distance from Jim Morrison is 5): We had Joy, we had fun We ran Unix on a Sun, But the source and the song Of Solaris have all gone.
dmh2000 9y ago
just a question: was Solaris making any money? If not, then it should be shelved.
DonHopkins 9y ago
Just ran across this: Scott McNealy's answer to "why didn't Sun sell to IBM": https://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/12/07/mcnealy_sun_and_open_source/?page=3 https://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/12/07/mcnealy_sun_and_ope... "One of the issues I had with one of the other suitors was there was a complete overlap in what they did and what we did, and I could see 100 per cent of the Sun employees getting fired," McNealy told us. He didn't name names, but he was referring to IBM's bid for Sun. IBM had competed heavily with Sun for decades on processors, servers, Unix, Java tools, middleware, and open source. There weren't too many areas where they didn't overlap. "At least with Oracle, they weren't in the hardware business, the operating systems business — the places and spaces where I saw chance for some Sun employees to keep their jobs, and that for me was an important consideration," McNealy said.
- equalunique 9y ago
  i.e., AIX and Power systems
nickbauman 9y ago
I know of a least one major company (fortune 30) that requires solaris for several safety critical systems products (think, for example, but not necessarily, commercial aircraft control systems) with thousands of active installations all over the world. Without it, they can't maintain these systems.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

485 points by elvinyung 9y ago

I always thought Solaris was a beautiful and memorable name for an operating system. Any connection with the Stanislaw Lem novel (or Tarkovsky movie) was always a bit unclear to me... But I guess a book about futile interactions with a planet-sized alien brain that doesn't care about you other than mysteriously experimenting with your memories is a reasonable metaphor for the Unix user experience.

type0 9y ago
Soderberghs version is much more reflective of what happened with the emergence of OpenSolaris and Illumos (not to give away any spoilers but apparently forking is a real thing and it lives on). Tarkovskys movie was such a philosophical drivel that I feel asleep. How is the book - is it worth reading? As I understood it neither of films follow the novel very closely.
- shmerl 9y ago
  The book is good.
- oelmekki 9y ago
  I didn't read the book, but being boring is Tarkovsky's touch, so it sounds pretty safe to say it comes from him. Also people, please don't downvote parent. It's very fair to say this movie is boring and confusing, and I think it was the very point. Tarkovsky has this style of filming around supernatural / sf things but never actually showing them. Instead, he prefers to explore the anxiety they cause on humans, anxiety which he often represents through long waiting with deceptive conclusions, so I would say that feeling annoyed is quite what is expected from people watching them. It's art, not entertainment.
  - bhangi 9y ago
    Tarkovsky's works are generally demanding works of art. They are definitely slow paced and almost boring, but I've always found myself in a much more thoughtful frame of mind after watching his films. As for Solaris, it is worth reading the book as well as watching both versions of the film -- they ask and explore different questions. The book is about the nature of intelligence and life whereas the films are more about the human part of the equation -- what does it mean to be a human as opposed to be a "replicant"? Tarkovsky is slower paced, but IMHO encourages deep reflection. Soderbergh's version is definitely more watchable and is actually quite thoughtful by Hollywood standards.
  - mark_l_watson 9y ago
    We all like different things, which is good. Personally, I have watched the US version of Solaris about 6 or 7 times, and the Russian version twice, and read the book. A planet size consciousness, messing with people - great premise for a story.
- gpvos 9y ago
  I haven't seen any of the films, but I loved the book.
- inopinatus 9y ago
  Stanislaw Lem deserves a much wider readership. Well, I say that but actually he has a wide readership, just not so much in English-language markets. Besides Solaris, his meditations on life and society in The Cyberiad remain some of my favourite science fiction of all time.
  - abetusk 9y ago
    And "His Master's Voice" is one of my favorite books. I totally agree, Lem deserves a place right along Gibson.
    - cpeterso 9y ago
      I'm reading The Star Diaries, a collection of Lem's short stories from the 1950s. Their absurdity reminds me of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. I just discovered that there was a 2007 German TV series based on the stories, too: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0978537/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0978537/
    - boondaburrah 9y ago
      If Lem deserves a place among Gibson, I guess I gotta pick some up
      - lobster_johnson 9y ago
        I recommend starting with Solaris. The Futurological Congress is also a lot of fun; it's one of his comedies, a satiric look at futurism. His Master's Voice is advanced level Lem. It's less a novel than a fictional autobiography of a scientist, and while the subject matter is fascinating, it's a bit dry. The Cyberiad is a classic, but very different and not really sci-fi. It's a collection of absurd, surreal fairytales about a pair of robots. It contains math puzzles and rhymes and lots of weird stuff. Fiasco, Memoirs Found in a Bathtub, Tales of Pirx the Pilot and Star Diaries are supposed to be good. I found Eden (one of his early works) to be a little juvenile and poorly written. It, too, is about first contact gone wrong.
- SwellJoe 9y ago
  The book is better than both films, though I liked the films, too. And, yes, the films diverged from the book in significant ways. Lem is a fantastic writer, and Solaris is one of his best. I definitely recommend it, if you like cerebral sci-fi.
- rossjudson 9y ago
  Soderbergh's version has one of the most gorgeous film soundtracks; in my top ten. Cliff Martinez scored it. Good film, phenomenal soundtrack.
- lobster_johnson 9y ago
  The book is superb. But to appreciate the book have to understand that Lem, in his serious mode (he also wrote comedies and light-hearted adventures, which are quite different), is not very concerned about plot, nor about most things American sci-fi has always been about: There are no heroics, no politics, no space wars, no McGuffins, and there's only minimal world-building. Lem is an engaging writer, but also a somewhat dry one, and Solaris is a sort of essay on science, camouflaged as a novel: Like his other masterpiece, His Master's Voice, it is a critique of science. Whereas HMV attacks the scientific field pretty broadly, Solaris is more of an investigation into the limitations of the human mind: A scientist visits a far-away research station and comes to realize that all previous research (by decades of so-called "Solarisists") isn't even wrong, it's irrelevant. About a third of the book is spent on a wry summary of all the scholarly research that Solarisists have been performing and collecting in journals. Even after many decades, Solaris has funded many scientists, and yielded endless observations, but also zero insight. (At the time the book is set, most scientists have simply given up, and the station is largely abandoned.) Solaris is an inscrutable alien organism that the human mind can simply not understand. Ironically, even the main character comes to think, towards the end, that he has understood Solaris, when it's obvious to the reader that his conclusions are just more of the same, a reflection of our human-ness. Of course, both movie adaptations got this wrong, or chose to ignore that aspect of the book. They think it's about people reincarnated from memories, and that it's about love. In the book, the "ghosts" are actually dealt with rather simply and matter-of-factly; the scientists find themselves being tormented by them, and quickly move to destroy them. Lem, however, doesn't bother with the emotional melodrama you find in both movies. I don't remember what Soderbergh's version aimed for exactly (other than being a sort of Last Tango in Paris in space), but Tarkovsky's is very much inward-looking and concerned with the nature of artifice and truth (the "ghosts" are not real, and neither is Solaris, in a way). Tarkovsky didn't really want to create a sci-fi movie, and so you get something which is not entirely convincing.
  - watersb 9y ago
    Yes, yes yes. Thank you for this defense of one of my favorite meditation-as-novels. In a similar tone, I actually love the Tartovsky film. A very weird piece of work, and a hell of a thing to experience a few weeks before a summer spent in Russia...
- rdtsc 9y ago
  I watched both movies. Tarkovsky's version is my favorite but I grew up with Soviet cinema so maybe that's why (though one can argue his films are so outside the norm with Soviet cinema that it wouldn't matter). One of the keys to Tarkovsky's movies is that he is concerned with human relationships primarily. Romantic relationships, parents and children, etc. Even when he directed "sci-Fi" movies, they were never about rockets, aliens, shooting, explosions. This quote from the movie, illustrates that well I think: --- We don't want to conquer space at all. We want to expand Earth endlessly. We don't want other worlds; we want a mirror. We seek contact and will never achieve it. We are in the foolish position of a man striving for a goal he fears and doesn't want. Man needs man! --- I remember watching this movie and being disappointed because I expected more sci-fi stuff. Same thing with Stalker, his other sci-fi film. Only after seeing The Mirror (my favorite of his films) started liking his other movies.
- adrianN 9y ago
  I also found the films extremely boring and thought the book might be better. It turns out, the films were very good at capturing the book's boringness.
- edem 9y ago
  I read the book several times. I think it is a good read. I did not fell asleep on the Tarkovsky movie I just hit quit after looking at the road scene at the start for 20 minutes. You can try the George Clooney variant it is a bit better. The interesting part is that both movies have their own interpretation of the book, so it is like having 3 different stories.
syntheticnature 9y ago
I figure the connection is probably more about being from a company named "Sun," since it's a Latin word and the source of the English adjective "solar" for 'pertaining to the sun.'
- cyphar 9y ago
  And illumos is similarly named (Latin for illuminate).
  - DonHopkins 9y ago
    And Eclipse was similarly named, just to annoy Sun.
    - smarks 9y ago
      I thought so too, but eclipses in real life are always transient phenomena.
      - DonHopkins 9y ago
        Do no look into Eclipse with remaining eye!
cmkrnl 9y ago
Beautiful name indeed. Happy memories of trying out Solaris 8 x86 on a Celeron with 64MB.

type0 9y ago

RIP Solaris, it introduced UNIX to me and I will always remember it fondly.

runarb 9y ago

> ..employees who had given their careers to the company were told of their termination via a pre-recorded call — “robo-RIF’d” This sounds awful, and very long from what would be the legal requirements demanded in the country I live in. What would such a robot call say?

m_samuel_l 9y ago
I'd imagine something like "shutdown -h now" or the solaris equivalent
- gruturo 9y ago
  Solaris would understand that, but Oracle's move was nowhere that gentle. "uadmin 1 6" was more like it (Immediate poweroff, do not even sync disks)
  - fimbulvetr 9y ago
    More like: lom> poweroff As that is definitely something the os has no cability to block.
- Nursie 9y ago
  Stop-A :)
- mjcl 9y ago
  Good old killall!
  - justin66 9y ago
    Which behaves differently on Solaris than Linux, of course. Linux killall kills specific processes but on Solaris it forcefully kills everything on the landscape...
    - vacri 9y ago
      It doesn't shut the machine down though, right? Just kills all the processes? I remember reading somewhere that solaris-killall was only a part of the shutdown process. I remember having a related problem with an ubuntu cloud server a while back. I'd called 'halt' instead of 'shutdown' - they're not the same, and on this machine 'halt' didn't actually send the 'okay, now power off' bit.

z1mm32m4n 9y ago

As someone who's never used Solaris or looked into its merits I'm curious: can someone comment on why all the nostalgia for Solaris?

dozzie 9y ago
> As someone who's never used Solaris [...], can someone comment on why [...] I can't, because I'm not somebody who's never used Solaris.
- marvy 9y ago
  If you have indeed used Solaris, you could have left a more useful comment. Your creative use of ellipsis is totally cheating by the way: you did not preserve the structure of the sentence.
  - dozzie 9y ago
    Oh, but I did preserve the structure. It's OP who doesn't understand how this grammatical construction works, and this particular mistake irritates me so much.
    - marvy 9y ago
      This preserves the structure better: > As someone who's never used Solaris [...] I'm curious: can someone [...] Notice that you left out the subject (I), left out the verb (am), and replaced a colon with a comma!
      - dozzie 9y ago
        > Notice that you left out the subject (I), left out the verb (am), and replaced a colon with a comma! No, I didn't left out anything important to the structure nor did I replace a colon with anything. The thing is that you and I were looking at two different sentences, because OP silently edited his comment (I only noticed that now). The original sentence was "As someone who's never used Solaris or looked into its merits, can someone comment on why all the nostalgia for Solaris?"

brian-armstrong 9y ago

My only experience with Solaris was on the campus computer lab. It was also one of the first UNIX experiences I had had. I think what stood out most was the strongly 90s GUI and focus-follows-cursor, which seemed very strange at first. It seemed like an interesting OS with its own quirks

tyingq 9y ago
Probably olwm or olvwm. Either supported a -c switch for click to focus.

spilk 9y ago

Does the death of Solaris have any implications for the future of SPARC? Seemed like most of the SPARC hardware that Oracle sells/sold exclusively ran Solaris. I could be wrong about that, though.

tankenmate 9y ago
Fujitsu as been the largest manufacturer of SPARC chips for a number of years now. They make super computers (and mainframes) with SPARC chips although for how much longer... Their latest major announcement along side Oracle was in May this year.
- jabl 9y ago
  At least on the supercomputing side, they're switching to ARM: http://www.fujitsu.com/global/Images/post-k-supercomputer-overview.pdf http://www.fujitsu.com/global/Images/post-k-supercomputer-ov... (no idea about whether mainframes will continue using SPARC)
jsiepkes 9y ago
From what I understand most of the SPARC people got laid of too. So unless Fujitsu really ups it's SPARC game I doubt there is much future for SPARC.
- noselasd 9y ago
  SPARC was released under the GPL license. It might be living on through the LEON processor, at least for a while. It's the processor of choice at the European Space Agency, used for most of their recent satellites and spacecrafts. LEON pretty neat, you can run it on an FPGA and boot linux on it if you're brave enough.

SirLJ 9y ago

This was the best OS hands down, so sad...

wiremine 9y ago

> ..employees who had given their careers to the company were told of their termination via a pre-recorded call — “robo-RIF’d” Every single first person or second hand account I've heard about Oracle makes like a terrible place to work... is this just people being hyperbolic, or is is truly that terrible?

busterarm 9y ago
robo-RIFs are the new normal. Support.com is another big offender.
znpy 9y ago
> Every single first person or second hand account I've heard You answered yourself
BrainInAJar 9y ago
it very much is a terrible place to work
michaelbuckbee 9y ago
RIF == Reduction In Force (Saved you a Google)
paulmd 9y ago
> is this just people being hyperbolic, or is is truly that terrible? I'm on the outside looking in and don't have any special internal insight, but they didn't just pull this robo-RIF idea out of their ass spur-of-the-moment. Oracle is the kind of place that maintains a robo-layoff system, which pretty much says all you need to know. "What you think of Oracle is even truer than you think it is. There has been no entity in human history with less complexity or nuance to it than Oracle." https://youtu.be/-zRN7XLCRhc?t=33m https://youtu.be/-zRN7XLCRhc?t=33m
- fasquoika 9y ago
  Oh man, so many good quotes in that talk. "Do not fall into the trap of anthropomorphizing Larry Ellison"

smegel 9y ago

It never seemed quite right that Solaris and all this awesome engineering tech from Sun ended up as personal playthings of someone like Larry Ellison. Edit: grammar.

xeeeeeeeeeeenu 9y ago

I wouldn't call illumos "thriving". Commit activity[1] is low for a project of this size (compared to e.g. BSDs) and its hardware support is poor. Probably the biggest problem is the fact that all existing distributions are undermaintained and unpolished. SmartOS is the only exception, but it's not a replacement for Solaris which was a general-purpose server OS. SmartOS is merely a bare-metal hypervisor. I really hope that some of the laid-off developers will start contributing to the project. It really needs them. [1] - https://github.com/illumos/illumos-gate/commits/master https://github.com/illumos/illumos-gate/commits/master

Philipp__ 9y ago
I can relate to your statement to some extent. Why illumos is not "thriving" is _maybe_ because it does not have solid general purpose distribution. Tribblix is kinda trying to get there, but I haven't used it for more than few sessions inside VM. Dream OS for me would be something ala OpenBSD, but built on top of illumos and with all the goods that would come with it.
- paulmd 9y ago
  Wouldn't that be OpenIndiana?
foxhop 9y ago
SmartOS is better then Solaris for servers. It's truly badass. I have an HP DL160 G6 running SmartOS in my basement. If you learn to use zones (which you should) it can run any workload that Solaris can. On top of that it also runs native Linux containers and KVM for virtualizing everything else. It's hands down my favorite operating system.
- Vivtek 9y ago
  Well, and as of Friday, of course, SmartOS is infinitely better than Solaris.
bcantrill 9y ago
While I'm obviously biased, I think you are succumbing to a kind of cargo culting with respect to both commit activity and hardware support. On commit activity, we in illumos don't necessarily have the same values as other projects: we really want to get it correct the first time -- a trait inherited from Solaris that we call "FCS quality all the time."[1] As such, commits have to be tested, thoroughly reviewed (four or more reviewers is not uncommon), and (as a practical matter) are more often than not shipping in a downstream repo for an extended period of time before they integrate upstream into illumos. In short, we value quality much, much more than quantity -- and what you perceive to be "low" activity I perceive to be quality activity (and as someone who very much relies on the ability to stay current and deploy into production, high commit activity would leave me nervous). In terms of hardware support, you need to be specific. Yes, there is esoteric hardware we don't support -- but we in illumos are really focused on the server-side, where there is less hardware variation than you might realize. At the moment, the biggest hardware limitations aren't in the traditional domain of CPU/NIC/HBA/flash/spindle (where we have broad support), but rather in the emerging domain of the GPGPU. And anyone who is interested in engaging in the substantial kernel work in this domain (both to make NVIDIA-based GPGPUs to work in hardware virtualized guests and to allow AMD-based GPGPUs to work natively) should consider reaching out -- Joyent is very much hiring![2] [1] http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc/2015/09/03/software-immaculate-fetid-and-grimy/ http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc/2015/09/03/software-immaculate-f... [2] https://www.joyent.com/about/careers https://www.joyent.com/about/careers

harry8 9y ago

Bryan Cantrill give a great lecture. I saw him give an overview of DTrace a decade or more ago and remain impressed. Check him out. https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=bryan+cantrill https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=bryan+cantrill It's sad that we live in a world where a company doing good , innovative and useful tech is gobbled up by a company like Oracle who should not exist and do largely on their ability to con ignorant senior management and even more ignorant boards of directors. Is there ever a technical reason to use Oracle? If there is what percentage of Oracle sales does it account for? Ie if it really is non-zero I bet it's a single digit percentage. Woeful company from the top down is their reputation and they've earned it.

topkeker 9y ago
Unfortunately the world doesn't run off technical ability though. Oracle is a mammoth because it's proficient at extracting value and profit from its businesses. Don't get me wrong, I agree with you in principle, but it's the equivalent of someone destroying artwork and making a gain from it and wondering how they get away with it when the world doesn't care about art, they care about money.
- ptero 9y ago
  IIRC, Oracle got a huge boost from US government as it was the semi-official database engine developed (for the Navy?) with taxpayer funds, then deployed (again with taxpayer funds). I'm not complaining, the US probably needed a better DB engine, but it was partly luck, partly backroom agreements that launched and supported Oracle for years. That said, maybe I got my facts badly mixed up.
  - MrMorden 9y ago
    CIA. (Source: Larry Ellison, as quoted in Business Insider: http://www.businessinsider.com/the-cia-made-larry-ellison-a-billionaire-2014-9 http://www.businessinsider.com/the-cia-made-larry-ellison-a-...) Which is why the villain in Charlie Stross's _The Jennifer Morgue_ is "Ellis Billington".
  - 9y ago

ty_a 9y ago

I'm curious where this leaves things like the ZFS appliances? They aren't going to use openzfs on oel are they?

rodgerd 9y ago

Twenty years ago, if you'd said that the surviving commercial *ixen would be AIX and HP/UX, you'd have been drummed out of the Unix Beard club.

StillBored 9y ago
HP/UX is dead too because HP despite apparently having an x86 port won't be porting it off itanium. Random link about it (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/06/08/hp_ux_on_x86_project_kinetic/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/06/08/hp_ux_on_x86_project...). Whether they do a 180 and port it to x86, the fact remains its probably to late, the damage has been done. That leaves AIX, which at least has decent hardware to run on. But its got the OS/2 problem too, you can write your app for linux, and use the AIX toolbox for linux apps, and port your app. Although with power8 the move to LE linux, makes moving applications/data between linux on POWER and AIX on POWER more difficult.
- rodgerd 9y ago
  Ironically HP/UX may nonetheless outlive Solaris - the claim of its imminent demise being the event that provided the excuse to de-support Oracle software on HP/UX.
- girvo 9y ago
  For my work (and the 160-thread POWER8 box I got given to run it on by IBM) AIX didn't even enter the discussion, which was sort of a shame. I had no need for it, but it would've been fun; but Linux on POWER with Docker and everything else is surprisingly nice. Now to get myself one of those POWER9 workstations for home...
- rodgerd 9y ago
  I was at an IBM conf in 2014 where they were basically telling the AIX guys to get familiar with KVM as it would likely be replacing PowerVM sooner or later. The writing has been on the wall for a while, for better or worse.
hindsightbias 9y ago
Research and fabs. Once HP had gone Itanium, we knew it would come down to Intel vs IBM. Sun never had pockets deep enough. Winning Enterprise may be a pyrrhic victory, but we'll see how many server architectures are left in a few years.

oxryly1 9y ago

I hate to be facile, but if Sun and Solaris were so great and Oracle was this known bad place, why did they let the Oracle people in the door in the first place? Maybe sell to someone else?

mrpippy 9y ago
Oracle paid $5.6 billion for Sun. If someone else wanted to pay that much they could have submitted an offer too. The board cares about maximizing shareholder value, not about the future of any ongoing technologies. Sun had been in discussions with IBM for months about an acquisition, but I believe the offer was lower and there were antitrust concerns (they did compete directly in a lot of markets) [1]. I suspect they would have been a much better steward of the open-source efforts though [1]: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/06/technology/business-computing/06blue.html http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/06/technology/business-comput...
- oxryly1 9y ago
  Yeah, mine was little of a leading question certainly. Oracle seems like bad guys, but it's really the board of Sun that had priorities other than the health of Solaris and the long term employment of the engineers. Oracle was a known snake [1]. Also, sale of the entire business of Sun was probably only one of many options on the table. [1]: http://www.gballard.net/lifes_lessons/girl_rattlesnake/ http://www.gballard.net/lifes_lessons/girl_rattlesnake/
- astine 9y ago
  I was a Solaris admin at the time of the acquisition and some of the Sun folks I was in contact with were glad that it was at least not IBM that had bought them out because IBM had always been their primary 'enemy.'
InTheArena 9y ago
Not a lot of other options. Linux basically rolled the UNIX market. I remember rumours that MS was in the game, but the fit there was a lot harder to find.
9y ago

InTheArena 9y ago

Solaris, hell, I still mourn the death of SunOS (esp verison 4.1.3) at the hands of Solaris,

buserror 9y ago
Ah... I loved SunOS! Fondly remember my Sun Station 3/80, nothing like that fancy SPARC processor in there, a good solid 68040 like real men used back then ;-) Mind you, I still use the 'sun' font when booting my linux kernel on framebuffers, I always loved that font.
- unexistance 9y ago
  oooh what is this sun font you're talking about? is it available anywhere?
- DonHopkins 9y ago
  "Love your country but never trust its government." https://nohats.ca/wordpress/blog/2016/01/24/why-the-sun-sparc2-has-the-message-love-your-country-but-never-trust-its-government/ https://nohats.ca/wordpress/blog/2016/01/24/why-the-sun-spar... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10966571 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10966571
arethuza 9y ago
Indeed, I still remember (just) the jokes about Slowlaris and BloatedWindows...

crudbug 9y ago

Oracle should open source it back, probably donate it to Apache.

sprayk 9y ago
what's in it for Oracle?
- artursapek 9y ago
  some goodwill. Microsoft earned a lot of with all of the open sourcing they've been doing in the last few years.
  - nickhalfasleep 9y ago
    Microsoft is clawing it's way back into the agile stacks as a way to sell it's cloud services to small shops. I don't think Oracle really aims for startups or less than $10mil/year companies right now. They sell on the golf course, not the meetup or con presentation.
  - cyphar 9y ago
    To paraphrase Bryan Cantrill, don't fall into the trap of anthropomorphising Larry Ellison. Your lawnmower doesn't care about community goodwill either.
    - artursapek 9y ago
      What? I'm saying it matters in the community of developers - and it does.
      - cyphar 9y ago
        My point is that "showing goodwill" is not something that makes sense within Oracle (at least that's what I've heard). I agree that acting correctly to a community is the right thing to do, but that doesn't mean it's something that Oracle will do.

exikyut 9y ago

> And, it turns out, illumos was born at exactly the right moment: shortly after illumos was announced, Oracle — in what remains to me a singularly loathsome and cowardly act — silently re-proprietarized Solaris on August 13, 2010. I was very curious about this, and stumbled on further details in https://www.usenix.org/legacy/events/lisa11/tech/slides/cantrill.pdf https://www.usenix.org/legacy/events/lisa11/tech/slides/cant... on page 15. But read the entire PDF anyway, it's interesting.

icedchai 9y ago

Very sad. Solaris was my first commercial Unix. Technically it was SunOS 4.x, on a SparcStation 10. This was probably around the time they renamed SunOS 4.x to Solaris 1? I still have an old Ultra 10 downstairs. It hasn't been turned on since 2004 or so. I think it had Solaris 8?

magnawave 9y ago

At the end of the day, Sun/Oracle has to be able to make revenue from Solaris for them to keep paying those peoples' salaries. Is your startup / company deploying on Solaris? Nope of course you aren't - who is?! Pretty much nobody nowadays - w3techs.com shows Solaris at 0.0005% for webservers for example. Everyone talks about how great it is(to be sure there are some small bits that are pretty dang amazing) - yet for some reason nearly no one actually DOES use it! Perhaps there is a reason for that. Lord knows I have many battle scars from the many real world rough edges that never seemed to get less fundamentally shitty(for starters: path_to_inst and smf I'm looking right at you!) I definitely respect the amazing work of some of the engineers on the Solaris team back in the day. ZFS and DTrace being two that have made the tech world by in large a better place either directly or thru inspiration. And Linux and the BSDs are definitely better for those selective code gifts! But nonetheless, the world voted with their feet, and Solaris didn't make the cut.

emmelaich 9y ago
I always sensed a great tension between the engineers and the business people at Sun, to the detriment of both. The business didn't know how to drive and target sales, and the engineers built brilliant things (ZFS, dtrace, mdb, zones, internal high availability, firewall*) that customers weren't asking for. [edited to add firewall, that first gen that no-one used because it was so complex]
- thanatropism 9y ago
  This is not a good look on the engineers. Business is fundamentally uncertain, and decomposing failure into avoidable and unavoidable factors is very very hard. This is even harder in industries dominated by network externalities like computer platforms. On the other hand: if engineering wasn't serving the stated business purpose (things that customers want, at least as far as business can see) but doing semi-academic research on the company dime... well, it's an indirect misappropriation of funds, however cool the results turned out. Analogy: Sugarcube Industries is in the business of farm built infrastructure and its flagship product is a barn that can comfortably house N horses cutting down on injuries, promoting weight gain by proper thermal environment. I don't know much about horses, bear with me. Engineering is asked to design such a horse barn. Maybe it's fundamentally impossible to fix heat flows in such and such weather or idiotic in general to try and improve horse health by those means. Maybe business even understood market research wrong, and what people wanted was barns with hooks where farmstaff can hang horse ponchos that will be manually deployed in times of need. It's a bad look on engineering if instead of delivering the best horse barn on the market, they come up with a three-storey optimized IVF-incubator-horse feeding operation. ---- Unix (a decades-long project whose capital costs are inestimable when considering all the failed companies and free labor) nearly lost to Windows NT because the latter had hooks where sysadmins could hang those needed ponchos.

jtchang 9y ago

I remember playing around on a old Sun sparc. It was my first exposure to unix and curiosity got the better of me. I picked up a copy of freebsd and started to tinker with that and read more and more about the unix philosophy. To this day I still think Solaris was really well thought out. It had a certain rock solidness to it that I can't really describe. Compare to even openbsd or freebsd I always thought or felt it was more stable (regardless of that was actually the case). I'm sad that so much work went into such a great OS and now it is basically gone to die. These days if you're thinking about creating a piece of software and want it to last open source is probably the only option.

pron 9y ago

Sudden death? Solaris has been dying for at least a decade. An entire company collapsed after not being able to monetize Solaris-based systems. Solaris wasn't killed by a company; it was killed by the market. A company just stopped trying to resuscitate it after years of CPR. Cantrill blames "executive whims, shareholder demands, and a fickle public," but not even a little bit the product designers and engineers who are so attuned to the needs and desires of the market that they have somehow missed the collapse of a Fortune 500 company due to their products not selling and years later are still surprised that the product is being shut down?

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

tacon 9y ago

An old, old Oracle joke: Q: On what hardware does Oracle run best? A: A 35mm slide projector.

kristoffer 9y ago

I'm surprised he is surprised. Everybody knew Solaris was dead. I'm more surprised Oracle still had so many engineers working on it. I guess they where waiting out some SLAs. Of course Oracle is a horrible company and all but Solaris has been dead for a long time.

dandare 9y ago

Just wondering, at what point could the Solaris name be reused for another Unix distribution?

perlgeek 9y ago
Without causing confusion? Probably when all current Solaris users are dead or don't care anymore. Reusing names tends to be a terrible idea.

titzer 9y ago

If there is a one phrase takeaway from this excellent essay it would be Brian's terse and apt characterization of Oracle as a "remorseless corporate sociopath."

davidgerard 9y ago
"Don't make the mistake of anthropomorphizing Larry Ellison!" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&t=33m https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&t=33m
- titzer 9y ago
  lol. +100
peterwwillis 9y ago
Corporations do not have remorse and they can not be sociopathic. Corporations are like ant colonies. They are bodies of people who are bound together in order that the whole outlasts the individual, in order to serve the needs of the group. They are made up of individuals with feelings, but they can't "feel" things on their own. They can reflect the shared feelings of the group, but this is just a reflection, like seeing the image of trees reflected in a body of water. The author is obviously very upset about the whole thing, but personifying a corporation is illogical (even if the Supreme Court disagrees with me)

snw 9y ago

There seems to be a lot of odd nostalgia for Solaris in the comments here and on twitter. I think that's missing the point of the article. Yes, Oracle Solaris is dead. But illumos is better, open source, alive and here to stay. You can use illumos today, right now, and have your ZFS, mdb, DTrace and zones. It really is open source and we're a community using and improving it. For 7 years now already. As illumos is only the basic building block of the operating system (but unlike linux includes kernel + basic userland) one usually runs one of the distributions: - SmartOS, developed by Joyent as a cloud hypervisor. Supports zones, KVM and lx-branded linux containers. [1] - OmniOS CE, a minimal distribution targeted for bare metal server installations [2] - OpenIndiana, similar to the traditional opensolaris. If you care about GUI this is probably the one. [3] - Tribblix, modern components with retro style [4] Sure, the user base is smaller than Linux. But that is also true for FreeBSD which is used by Netflix and Whatsapp. Running a different OS than most other people can give your company an advantage and I know that ZFS and zones have done that for mine. [1] https://wiki.smartos.org/display/DOC/Download+SmartOS https://wiki.smartos.org/display/DOC/Download+SmartOS [2] http://www.omniosce.org http://www.omniosce.org [3] https://www.openindiana.org https://www.openindiana.org [4] http://www.tribblix.org http://www.tribblix.org

cryptonector 9y ago
The nostalgia I feel is for Sun, for MPK17, for the people I got to work with, and the technology. Of those things only Sun is gone, but the people scattered, and technology, though still vibrant, is still always at risk -- it depends too much on Bryan Cantrill and friends to keep it going, while the Linux crowd blissfully ignores all the good ideas and reinvents every wheel badly. We're in a dark ages with a sliver of light. We might be in it for a while. People who have never used ZFS, SMF, DTrace, or FMA, have no idea that they are stuck in the dark.
samoright 9y ago
How does running a different OS than most people can give a company an advantage? Can you elaborate this?
- rhinoceraptor 9y ago

tannhaeuser 9y ago

Is there no chance of saving Solaris? If Oracle doesn't have a commercial interest in it, why don't they transfer it to Apache or other foundation? It's not an unusual thing to do, and Solaris devs could make a living by support and maintenance.

snw 9y ago
Oracle has been slowly killing Solaris for some time. At the same time the community has already saved it - this is what illumos is about. It exists and is open source.

DonHopkins 9y ago

To quote the brilliant Jim Morrison: "Waiting for the Sun" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A0kypyGSKsE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A0kypyGSKsE "The End" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6FMGYycBAMU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6FMGYycBAMU And to quote the also brilliant Jim Thompson (whose Levenshtein distance from Jim Morrison is 5): We had Joy, we had fun We ran Unix on a Sun, But the source and the song Of Solaris have all gone.

dmh2000 9y ago

just a question: was Solaris making any money? If not, then it should be shelved.

DonHopkins 9y ago

Just ran across this: Scott McNealy's answer to "why didn't Sun sell to IBM": https://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/12/07/mcnealy_sun_and_open_source/?page=3 https://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/12/07/mcnealy_sun_and_ope... "One of the issues I had with one of the other suitors was there was a complete overlap in what they did and what we did, and I could see 100 per cent of the Sun employees getting fired," McNealy told us. He didn't name names, but he was referring to IBM's bid for Sun. IBM had competed heavily with Sun for decades on processors, servers, Unix, Java tools, middleware, and open source. There weren't too many areas where they didn't overlap. "At least with Oracle, they weren't in the hardware business, the operating systems business — the places and spaces where I saw chance for some Sun employees to keep their jobs, and that for me was an important consideration," McNealy said.

equalunique 9y ago
i.e., AIX and Power systems

nickbauman 9y ago

I know of a least one major company (fortune 30) that requires solaris for several safety critical systems products (think, for example, but not necessarily, commercial aircraft control systems) with thousands of active installations all over the world. Without it, they can't maintain these systems.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]