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My understanding is that Joyent is comprised primarily of Sun refugees who've attempted to compete in the same OS/server space that Solaris operated upon way ba

My understanding is that Joyent is comprised primarily of Sun refugees who've attempted to compete in the same OS/server space that Solaris operated upon way back when. They were acquired by Samsung in 2016-ish iirc. Solaris/illumos has failed to gain traction and the already-tiny community has only dwindled over the last few years with the expiry of OmniTI and other major illumos users. The death knell really being the abandonment of illumos-gate as the authoritative ZFS upstream. If old-school diehards like Matt Ahrens are throwing up their hands and saying that the momentum in ZFS is in ZoL, the battle is over IMO. node.js was always a diversion IMO. I think it was a play to maintain relevance, something Joyent has always acknowledged a need to do, but I don't think they've ever had the manpower or the buy-in to go full throttle. I don't know if this is the end of Joyent as such or not, but IMO it's finally time for Cantrill et al to turn in. They've undoubtedly fought the good fight, but illumos is a farce at this point. Better to accept that their old-school big Unix development model is a thing of the past and put those efforts to something more practically useful, like FreeBSD. At this point, they're torturing the legacy of Solaris more than maintaining it.

masklinn 7y ago
> My understanding is that Joyent is comprised primarily of Sun refugees who've attempted to compete in the same OS/server space that Solaris operated upon way back when. I man not really, Joyent is a hosting company (cloud & virtualisation). That's built upon an Illumos distribution (SmartOS) but SmartOS is not their business.
- cookiecaper 7y ago
  I guess it needs clarification that I'm not trying to indicate they relied on proprietary hardware platforms like SPARC or a 1990s big-iron licensing model. These days, it's acknowledged that rent-seeking by a million cuts is the only viable way to make money. Even Microsoft is acknowledging that. SmartOS may've been indirectly implicated in revenue, but let's be real, illumos and Joyent have always been tied at the hip. Joyent was never going to become a Linux-centric alternative public cloud like AWS, GCloud, etc. If there had been less ideological fervor and with Samsung's backing, maybe they could've offered more serious competition to the incumbents, but the Solaris style oozes out of Joyent's every pore. It's fundamental to their way of thinking. That purity and commitment is certainly admirable, but it's simply not commercially viable anymore.
Annatar 7y ago
It's far, far from over as long as SmartOS remains easier to use and more reliable than GNU/Linux. The source code is there to fork, so just like GNU/Linux, there will be people working on it and using it. OpenBSD has 5.71 developers and yet they're kicking ass churning out security features and innovations like there's no tomorrow. I secured my copies of the illumos and SmartOS gates. Joyent is proof that large scale cloud can be done with SmartOS.
- chipotle_coyote 7y ago
  I'm sure SmartOS is very reliable once you get it up and running, but "easier to use" than Linux is one of the most "[citation needed]" comments I've seen on HN in a while. Perhaps for folks who've had long familiarity with Solaris, it's easy-peasy, but I never found an OpenSolaris distribution/derivative that was remotely friendly to Solaris newbies.
  - Annatar 7y ago
    I'm an old Solaris diehard who grew up on Solaris, which was my first UNIX®️. I'm also a Solaris 7 and a Solaris 10 certified system administrator. So for me SmartOS is a walk in the park to use. I even prefer SVR4 tools over GNU.
  - fiddlerwoaroof 7y ago
    I’m relatively a Solaris newbie, but I’ve always found smartos easier to manage than equivalent infrastructure on Linux: it’s a pain figuring out equivalent commands for free and top, etc. but the general system architecture is a lot easier to learn than the hodgepodge that is a typical Linux distribution (and I’ve been using Linux since Mandrake 7)
  - Annatar 7y ago
    You have five commands you need to know: zpool, zfs, imgadm, vmadm and man. The rest are the same applications as on GNU/Linux. I don't know of any other system where five commands suffice to run it.
davidpaulyoung 7y ago
"like FreeBSD". I was hoping Bryan would turn to unikernels. :)
- Annatar 7y ago
  You know he hates unikernels, so this must be some sort of an internal jab.
bcantrill 7y ago
While I appreciate your thoughts and prayers for my future endeavors, know that you will likely be disappointed: the beauty of open source is that it endures on the strength of its ideas alone -- and telling a group of people to stop working on a technology simply because you find alternatives scary is unlikely to be convincing. One of the most important lessons I have drawn from the many open source communities that Joyent has participated in is that large communities are not necessarily stronger ones -- and that sometimes the smallest communities are the strongest of all. In this regard, software communities are reflections of their shared values, a notion that I expanded on at length in a Node Summit talk a few years ago.[1] So if by asking me to "turn in" you are asking me to forsake my own engineering values for purposes of your comfort, well, no, I'm afraid that isn't going to happen. [1] https://vimeo.com/230142234 https://vimeo.com/230142234 (slides: https://www.slideshare.net/bcantrill/platform-as-reflection-of-values-joyent-nodejs-and-beyond https://www.slideshare.net/bcantrill/platform-as-reflection-...)
- cookiecaper 7y ago
  > So if by asking me to "turn in" you are asking me to forsake my own engineering values for purposes of your comfort, well, no, I'm afraid that isn't going to happen. Of course I'm not suggesting that you forsake your values. I'm sure anyone who has followed you for any amount of time knows that will never happen. There is no stronger advocate for the principles upon which your work is based, and your fervor and commitment is extremely admirable. My suggestion is merely that it's perhaps time to acknowledge that the market is not going to adopt illumos in a major way. An outflow of that is considering the possibility that the considerable engineering resources at your command may be better deployed in attempting to instill and carry forth the same crucial, badly-needed principles and values into projects that have more realistic prospects, to the extent possible, rather than remaining 1000% committed to a lost cause, where the principles and values will flare out in obscurity. "If a tree falls in the forest..." illumos is an immense contribution to our collective engineering heritage and I entertain no illusion that it should be totally iced. Personally I would consider it a glorious resurgence to see it more widely adopted, and to see it become the basis of a new generation of systems. SmartOS is simply a joy compared to the train wreck that passes for systems management in today's mainstream, and I sincerely hope that the wheels turn to make it a more viable option. The ongoing open-source contributions of the faithful volunteer keepers of the flame will be invaluable in leaving that possibility open. While there is no doubt that illumos's open-source heritage ensures it will live on, we must be realistic and admit that for all practical intents and purposes, the sun has set on the project's general commercial viability (at least for the time being -- the thing about sunsets is, they're followed by sunrises). The question I pose is whether your advocacy may be more effective in bringing the values and contributions of yourself and your team in force to more active venues, than by continuing to toil in the last fleeting fragments of the twilight of Solaris's commercial viability. I personally know many young engineers who admire your talks but have no exposure to the actual process of working with you directly. What would change if they got that? Would there be a Cantrill Youth? What's the likelihood of passing on that flame within illumos v. expanding your horizons to other groups?
andrew_n 7y ago
> My understanding is that Joyent is comprised primarily of Sun refugees This is by far the best explanation I have heard. Suddenly Joyent makes sense to me after all these years. They have been continuing to do what Sun did. In a very similar way to how Sun followed the fatal strategy of simultaneously trying to make money selling proprietary Unix hardware, while also making their software open source and porting it to more popular architectures, while simultaneously developing Java as a portable programming language intending to erase all differentiation in underlying architecture/OS differences … Yes: Joyent is (was) a hosting company trying to compete with AWS, claiming technical superiority in the software stack. Yes they also make an OpenStack competitor. And had their own programming language runtime, node.js, which seemed to be an odd implementation choice for their classic old-school unix tech. All of the above.
- rhinoceraptor 7y ago
  The original pitch of Node.js matched well with Unix, it was a simple programming model that exploited async I/O abstractions in Unix.
- hinkley 7y ago
  Part of the overengineering in J2EE comes from essentially trying to make one app server be multitenant instead of just spinning up one process per tenant. That this came from a company essentially selling mini computers. In fact, we are trying to do multi-tenant all over again. To my mind, this cycle of containerization is still trying to fulfill all the promises we were given in the early 90's about memory protected, pre-emptive multitasking OSes that never came true. Which itself wasn't the first time (it's all copying mainframe ideas, badly). Given all of the problems coming out about speculative execution and data breaches, I'm already curious what the next set of promises will look like.
  - snaky 7y ago
    Didn't AS/400 fulfill the promise? OTOH it may been considered 'mini-mainframe'.
    - 7y ago

masklinn 7y ago

> My understanding is that Joyent is comprised primarily of Sun refugees who've attempted to compete in the same OS/server space that Solaris operated upon way back when. I man not really, Joyent is a hosting company (cloud & virtualisation). That's built upon an Illumos distribution (SmartOS) but SmartOS is not their business.

cookiecaper 7y ago
I guess it needs clarification that I'm not trying to indicate they relied on proprietary hardware platforms like SPARC or a 1990s big-iron licensing model. These days, it's acknowledged that rent-seeking by a million cuts is the only viable way to make money. Even Microsoft is acknowledging that. SmartOS may've been indirectly implicated in revenue, but let's be real, illumos and Joyent have always been tied at the hip. Joyent was never going to become a Linux-centric alternative public cloud like AWS, GCloud, etc. If there had been less ideological fervor and with Samsung's backing, maybe they could've offered more serious competition to the incumbents, but the Solaris style oozes out of Joyent's every pore. It's fundamental to their way of thinking. That purity and commitment is certainly admirable, but it's simply not commercially viable anymore.

Annatar 7y ago

It's far, far from over as long as SmartOS remains easier to use and more reliable than GNU/Linux. The source code is there to fork, so just like GNU/Linux, there will be people working on it and using it. OpenBSD has 5.71 developers and yet they're kicking ass churning out security features and innovations like there's no tomorrow. I secured my copies of the illumos and SmartOS gates. Joyent is proof that large scale cloud can be done with SmartOS.

chipotle_coyote 7y ago
I'm sure SmartOS is very reliable once you get it up and running, but "easier to use" than Linux is one of the most "[citation needed]" comments I've seen on HN in a while. Perhaps for folks who've had long familiarity with Solaris, it's easy-peasy, but I never found an OpenSolaris distribution/derivative that was remotely friendly to Solaris newbies.
- Annatar 7y ago
  I'm an old Solaris diehard who grew up on Solaris, which was my first UNIX®️. I'm also a Solaris 7 and a Solaris 10 certified system administrator. So for me SmartOS is a walk in the park to use. I even prefer SVR4 tools over GNU.
- fiddlerwoaroof 7y ago
  I’m relatively a Solaris newbie, but I’ve always found smartos easier to manage than equivalent infrastructure on Linux: it’s a pain figuring out equivalent commands for free and top, etc. but the general system architecture is a lot easier to learn than the hodgepodge that is a typical Linux distribution (and I’ve been using Linux since Mandrake 7)
- Annatar 7y ago
  You have five commands you need to know: zpool, zfs, imgadm, vmadm and man. The rest are the same applications as on GNU/Linux. I don't know of any other system where five commands suffice to run it.

davidpaulyoung 7y ago

"like FreeBSD". I was hoping Bryan would turn to unikernels. :)

Annatar 7y ago
You know he hates unikernels, so this must be some sort of an internal jab.

bcantrill 7y ago

While I appreciate your thoughts and prayers for my future endeavors, know that you will likely be disappointed: the beauty of open source is that it endures on the strength of its ideas alone -- and telling a group of people to stop working on a technology simply because you find alternatives scary is unlikely to be convincing. One of the most important lessons I have drawn from the many open source communities that Joyent has participated in is that large communities are not necessarily stronger ones -- and that sometimes the smallest communities are the strongest of all. In this regard, software communities are reflections of their shared values, a notion that I expanded on at length in a Node Summit talk a few years ago.[1] So if by asking me to "turn in" you are asking me to forsake my own engineering values for purposes of your comfort, well, no, I'm afraid that isn't going to happen. [1] https://vimeo.com/230142234 https://vimeo.com/230142234 (slides: https://www.slideshare.net/bcantrill/platform-as-reflection-of-values-joyent-nodejs-and-beyond https://www.slideshare.net/bcantrill/platform-as-reflection-...)

cookiecaper 7y ago
> So if by asking me to "turn in" you are asking me to forsake my own engineering values for purposes of your comfort, well, no, I'm afraid that isn't going to happen. Of course I'm not suggesting that you forsake your values. I'm sure anyone who has followed you for any amount of time knows that will never happen. There is no stronger advocate for the principles upon which your work is based, and your fervor and commitment is extremely admirable. My suggestion is merely that it's perhaps time to acknowledge that the market is not going to adopt illumos in a major way. An outflow of that is considering the possibility that the considerable engineering resources at your command may be better deployed in attempting to instill and carry forth the same crucial, badly-needed principles and values into projects that have more realistic prospects, to the extent possible, rather than remaining 1000% committed to a lost cause, where the principles and values will flare out in obscurity. "If a tree falls in the forest..." illumos is an immense contribution to our collective engineering heritage and I entertain no illusion that it should be totally iced. Personally I would consider it a glorious resurgence to see it more widely adopted, and to see it become the basis of a new generation of systems. SmartOS is simply a joy compared to the train wreck that passes for systems management in today's mainstream, and I sincerely hope that the wheels turn to make it a more viable option. The ongoing open-source contributions of the faithful volunteer keepers of the flame will be invaluable in leaving that possibility open. While there is no doubt that illumos's open-source heritage ensures it will live on, we must be realistic and admit that for all practical intents and purposes, the sun has set on the project's general commercial viability (at least for the time being -- the thing about sunsets is, they're followed by sunrises). The question I pose is whether your advocacy may be more effective in bringing the values and contributions of yourself and your team in force to more active venues, than by continuing to toil in the last fleeting fragments of the twilight of Solaris's commercial viability. I personally know many young engineers who admire your talks but have no exposure to the actual process of working with you directly. What would change if they got that? Would there be a Cantrill Youth? What's the likelihood of passing on that flame within illumos v. expanding your horizons to other groups?

andrew_n 7y ago

> My understanding is that Joyent is comprised primarily of Sun refugees This is by far the best explanation I have heard. Suddenly Joyent makes sense to me after all these years. They have been continuing to do what Sun did. In a very similar way to how Sun followed the fatal strategy of simultaneously trying to make money selling proprietary Unix hardware, while also making their software open source and porting it to more popular architectures, while simultaneously developing Java as a portable programming language intending to erase all differentiation in underlying architecture/OS differences … Yes: Joyent is (was) a hosting company trying to compete with AWS, claiming technical superiority in the software stack. Yes they also make an OpenStack competitor. And had their own programming language runtime, node.js, which seemed to be an odd implementation choice for their classic old-school unix tech. All of the above.

rhinoceraptor 7y ago
The original pitch of Node.js matched well with Unix, it was a simple programming model that exploited async I/O abstractions in Unix.
hinkley 7y ago
Part of the overengineering in J2EE comes from essentially trying to make one app server be multitenant instead of just spinning up one process per tenant. That this came from a company essentially selling mini computers. In fact, we are trying to do multi-tenant all over again. To my mind, this cycle of containerization is still trying to fulfill all the promises we were given in the early 90's about memory protected, pre-emptive multitasking OSes that never came true. Which itself wasn't the first time (it's all copying mainframe ideas, badly). Given all of the problems coming out about speculative execution and data breaches, I'm already curious what the next set of promises will look like.
- snaky 7y ago
  Didn't AS/400 fulfill the promise? OTOH it may been considered 'mini-mainframe'.
  - 7y ago