5 ms·

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 deploy

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.
bad_user 9y ago
If you let the product die with a not giving a fuck attitude, of course nobody is going to use it. For example when was the last marketing campaign that you can remember for Solaris? Besides, they've started killing Solaris since 2010: http://garrett.damore.org/2010/08/hand-may-be-forced.html http://garrett.damore.org/2010/08/hand-may-be-forced.html > And Linux and the BSDs are definitely better for those selective code gifts! AFAIK DTrace and ZFS can't be used with Linux due to their license being incompatible with GPL.
- imhoguy 9y ago
  ZoL[1] works fine here on production and LXC+Docker loves it. [1] https://github.com/zfsonlinux/zfs https://github.com/zfsonlinux/zfs
- valarauca1 9y ago
  ZFS can't be added to the kernel. You need to install the kernel module yourself. Ubuntu packages it in the default distro, your base install can have ZFS as root with no configuration. For Debian/Fedora I think you need "non-free" packages added.
- samoa4 9y ago
  > AFAIK DTrace and ZFS can't be used with Linux due to their license being incompatible with GPL. for debian based: add non-free repo and apt install ... while installing, there comes a prompt were you have literally no choice but to accept the incompatibility of the licenses (and move on :)
digitalzombie 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. This is a crop out that you're giving on behalf of Oracle. Oracle does this all the time. It's their modus operandi. They buy companies/technologies out, milk them for license fees and let it trudge along until it stops making money anymore and either close shop or abandon it to Apache Foundation. There are anecdotes out there ranging from technologies they've bought to sale representatives having their bonus taken away from selling licenses. Your statement also just ignore their cowardly act of re proprietrating solaris. They did the same with Java not giving out TCK for Apache open source Java. There are many other instances of hostile actions toward the open source communities.
- magnawave 9y ago
  Yes Oracle did that to Solaris. You are right. But it was already pretty dead before Oracle bought Sun. Which was why Sun was for-sale in the first place. That's not just Oracle's fault. Place blame where blame is due(java) - but blaming everything on Oracle is kinda silly here. Sun mis-stepped pretty hard in the years after the original .com bubble and what we are seeing now the the final result. I'm shocked it took this long.
  - daemin 9y ago
    Whenever I read about Sun going down, I'm always reminded by the Joel Spolsky article https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/
  - DonHopkins 9y ago
    I blame System V. I'm shocked, I say shocked, that it took much longer for System V to kill it than you're shocked, you say shocked, how long it took Java to kill it. ;)
  - remline 9y ago
    Fujitsu was interested, US threatened to block any foreign sale. IBM was interested, a loud mouth blocked negotiations and pushed his golf buddy instead.. Sun made some strange moves toward the end, but there absolutely could have been a product line left if the developer market felt neutral about the buyer and the buyer tried to focus on upsells and professional services. The way Oracle tried to sneak this EOL in is very much evidence of there still being support licenses and professional services money for a few years more. But it was worth it if the Sun curse took down Ellison. May your foot never leave your mouth again, cloud boy. Now go play golf with network's owner.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
easytiger 9y ago
> Is your startup / company deploying on Solaris? For precisely the reason of Oracle's direction from day1
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
appleflaxen 9y ago
nobody disputes the capitalist imperative; but it's still worth having the discussion of how messed up the Oracle playbook is.
gcb0 9y ago
looking at webserver is silly. if a company is using solaris, it likely host a Linux kernel and apache in virtualized containers to serve web content.
cyberpunk 9y ago
We are for sure. We run a number of physical hosts using SmartOS (only 20 or so, but they're quite big (512GB, quads)) and on top of those we use a mix of KVM and zones (both solaris and lx) for various workloads (around 400 zones/vms). It's easily been the correct choice for us. YMMV.

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.

bad_user 9y ago

If you let the product die with a not giving a fuck attitude, of course nobody is going to use it. For example when was the last marketing campaign that you can remember for Solaris? Besides, they've started killing Solaris since 2010: http://garrett.damore.org/2010/08/hand-may-be-forced.html http://garrett.damore.org/2010/08/hand-may-be-forced.html > And Linux and the BSDs are definitely better for those selective code gifts! AFAIK DTrace and ZFS can't be used with Linux due to their license being incompatible with GPL.

imhoguy 9y ago
ZoL[1] works fine here on production and LXC+Docker loves it. [1] https://github.com/zfsonlinux/zfs https://github.com/zfsonlinux/zfs
valarauca1 9y ago
ZFS can't be added to the kernel. You need to install the kernel module yourself. Ubuntu packages it in the default distro, your base install can have ZFS as root with no configuration. For Debian/Fedora I think you need "non-free" packages added.
samoa4 9y ago
> AFAIK DTrace and ZFS can't be used with Linux due to their license being incompatible with GPL. for debian based: add non-free repo and apt install ... while installing, there comes a prompt were you have literally no choice but to accept the incompatibility of the licenses (and move on :)

digitalzombie 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. This is a crop out that you're giving on behalf of Oracle. Oracle does this all the time. It's their modus operandi. They buy companies/technologies out, milk them for license fees and let it trudge along until it stops making money anymore and either close shop or abandon it to Apache Foundation. There are anecdotes out there ranging from technologies they've bought to sale representatives having their bonus taken away from selling licenses. Your statement also just ignore their cowardly act of re proprietrating solaris. They did the same with Java not giving out TCK for Apache open source Java. There are many other instances of hostile actions toward the open source communities.

magnawave 9y ago
Yes Oracle did that to Solaris. You are right. But it was already pretty dead before Oracle bought Sun. Which was why Sun was for-sale in the first place. That's not just Oracle's fault. Place blame where blame is due(java) - but blaming everything on Oracle is kinda silly here. Sun mis-stepped pretty hard in the years after the original .com bubble and what we are seeing now the the final result. I'm shocked it took this long.
- daemin 9y ago
  Whenever I read about Sun going down, I'm always reminded by the Joel Spolsky article https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/
- DonHopkins 9y ago
  I blame System V. I'm shocked, I say shocked, that it took much longer for System V to kill it than you're shocked, you say shocked, how long it took Java to kill it. ;)
- remline 9y ago
  Fujitsu was interested, US threatened to block any foreign sale. IBM was interested, a loud mouth blocked negotiations and pushed his golf buddy instead.. Sun made some strange moves toward the end, but there absolutely could have been a product line left if the developer market felt neutral about the buyer and the buyer tried to focus on upsells and professional services. The way Oracle tried to sneak this EOL in is very much evidence of there still being support licenses and professional services money for a few years more. But it was worth it if the Sun curse took down Ellison. May your foot never leave your mouth again, cloud boy. Now go play golf with network's owner.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

easytiger 9y ago

> Is your startup / company deploying on Solaris? For precisely the reason of Oracle's direction from day1

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

appleflaxen 9y ago

nobody disputes the capitalist imperative; but it's still worth having the discussion of how messed up the Oracle playbook is.

gcb0 9y ago

looking at webserver is silly. if a company is using solaris, it likely host a Linux kernel and apache in virtualized containers to serve web content.

cyberpunk 9y ago

We are for sure. We run a number of physical hosts using SmartOS (only 20 or so, but they're quite big (512GB, quads)) and on top of those we use a mix of KVM and zones (both solaris and lx) for various workloads (around 400 zones/vms). It's easily been the correct choice for us. YMMV.