6 ms·

I don't know if it was the immediate cause of their lack of success, but they had also brought with them from Sun the Sun attitude of doing stuff that their eng

by pron 7y ago

I don't know if it was the immediate cause of their lack of success, but they had also brought with them from Sun the Sun attitude of doing stuff that their engineers thought was cool (and it probably was) without paying attention to how much people are willing to pay for it and whether their focus is correct from a market perspective. For example, Bryan Cantrill, Joyent's CTO, liked blaming Oracle's Larry Ellison for the demise of Solaris, on which Cantrill had worked, but by the time Ellison acquired the failing Sun, Solaris, cool technology and all, had been pretty much dead or dying for a while -- at the hands of Linux, and not much helped by the Sun attitude. Cantrill was furious and blamed Ellison of being monomaniacal about making money ("don't anthropomorphize Larry Ellison," he said) but perhaps it was Cantrill who was monomaniacal all along, not keeping his eyes on the market. Then again, luck plays such an important role in these things that nice narratives rarely give the whole picture.

bcantrill 7y ago
To be clear, I have never blamed Ellison for the demise of Sun or even Solaris -- but I do blame Oracle for re-proprietarizing OpenSolaris, and thereby ripping up the social contract of copyright assignment in an open source project. If it must be said, this wasn't an isolated incident -- and in hindsight, was merely the front of a conga line bad Oracle behavior. As for my own putative ignorance of market demands, one of Sun's growth areas at the time of acquisition in terms of revenue was the group that I had co-founded within Sun[1][2] -- in part because we had listened carefully to the market, and built a product that it very much wanted. Finally, if we want to engage in the perennial musing as to the demise of Sun, I think for my part I still broadly stand by my analysis from 2011.[3] [1] http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc/2008/11/10/fishworks-now-it-can-be-told/ http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc/2008/11/10/fishworks-now-it-can-... [2] http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc/2010/07/25/good-bye-sun/ http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc/2010/07/25/good-bye-sun/ [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2287033 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2287033
kragen 7y ago
Solaris's death at the hands of Linux can be attributed in part not just to "the Sun attitude" but specifically to the attitude of Bryan Cantrill personally. In response to Dave Miller explaining how Linux's networking was technically superior (at that moment) due to more care for things like TLB footprints and system call overhead, and also had more accessible technical support, Cantrill famously decided to respond by making fun of Miller for being a nerd: "Have you ever kissed a girl?" https://www.osnews.com/story/28261/have-you-ever-kissed-a-girl/ https://www.osnews.com/story/28261/have-you-ever-kissed-a-gi... https://web.archive.org/web/20110721130404/https://cryptnet.net/mirrors/texts/kissedagirl.html https://web.archive.org/web/20110721130404/https://cryptnet.... Admittedly, this was in 1996, and it's possible Cantrill regretted this remark, or the nerd-hating attitude behind it, at some point in the intervening 23 years. But I've never seen him admit it. I see he's participating in this thread, so if you see him not replying to this message, that's him doubling down.
- cyphar 7y ago
  He has said he regrets it in a Reddit AMA[1]. I find it quite strange that you attribute the death of an entire company to the attitude of a single engineer in an email from 1996 where he made a silly remark. You'd think if Cantrill was that powerful of a king-maker you'd want to be much nicer to him. Not to mention that Cantrill himself is also clearly a nerd, so "nerd-hating" is a bit of a weird statement. [1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/31ny87/comment/cq3e4y9 https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/31ny87/comment/cq3e4y...
  - andrew_n 7y ago
    Consider the remark not as the cause of death of the company, but the remark as an instance of a general attitude, and that attitude fitting in quite well at the company.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - Annatar 7y ago
      I have never in my life dealt with engineers so competent, professional and kind as the Sun Microsystems folks were. If they were technologically arrogant, they earned it: their inventions outlasted the company and live on in many products. I cannot name a single GNU/Linux "hacker" inventing anything. Everything they implemented is a shoddy copy of what the engineers at hp, SGI and Sun Microsystems did. They might have shoddily implemented it by writing the code from scratch, but they blatantly stole everything. For instance, the manual page for chkconfig(8) will even tell one that the command comes from SGI's IRIX.
      - cyphar 7y ago
        While I definitely agree that Sun, HP, and SGI had amazing engineering this section of your comment is particularly ridiculous: > I cannot name a single GNU/Linux "hacker" inventing anything. Everything they implemented is a shoddy copy of what the engineers at [...] did. If we ignore the obvious counter-arguments (GCC, Apache, nginx, arguably git, and so on), and just look at your statement at face value -- you're saying that nobody from the largest free software community in the world has invented anything new in the past 10-15 years. What possible evidence do you have that this is true? It's not just wrong, it's offensively so. Heck, ZFS-on-Linux is now the repo-of-record for ZFS -- that's a specific example of the GNU/Linux community implementing things alongside the rest of the free software community (and currently ZoL has more features than any other ZFS port). It's also the case that those brilliant engineers did the same thing. Zones are arguably a re-implementation of Jails with some slightly different design goals. IOCP is objectively just a copy of kqueue (to the point where Cantrill said he wished they'd just ported kqueue). And so on. I don't think this is a bad thing at all, but it's quite strange to put them up on a pedestal to the point where you effectively say that any engineer who didn't work at Sun/HP/SGI in 2003 hasn't invented anything. There are obviously plenty of examples of Linux not learning from others (Jails/Zones vs containers, kqueue/IOCP vs epoll, DTrace vs eBPF+bpftrace, and so on). But arguing that nothing innovative has come out of the GNU/Linux community ever is just awful.
SwellJoe 7y ago
"perhaps it was Cantrill who was monomaniacal all along, not keeping his eyes on the market" Joyent made money and was acquired, all while producing metric shit tons of incredibly cool Open Source software. We should all be so "monomaniacal".
- unixhero 7y ago
  We have an art installation at the corporate campus where I work. It's a parody of 1984, with inspirational quotes flowing over the entire building (300meters long). But they are not inspirational, rather artsy sometimes edgy and provocative. The sentences change every day, and are controlled by an artist in California somewhere. One of the sentences one day was: "Monomania creates success" I keep a logbook of the strangest entries.
  - moeffju 7y ago
    Would you happen to be working in Germany?
    - unixhero 7y ago
      No, but maybe there are several? There are 430 statements. Holzer’s work reflects both a political and with a focus on interpersonal relations and a moral perspective. With her fleeting forms – texts that sweep past – she symbolizes aspects of life itself. Holzer represents a melancholic and committed voice in contemporary art. * Strange section * In a paradisiac state the basic survival tasks you need to perform all seems clear and your objective is right there in front of you. There is a period where you know you have gone wrong but continue Monomania creates success * Very dark section * Scream so powerful that it empties all the kindness you could have shown and blackened the entire fabric of your soul Form a noise so true that your tormentor recognizes it as a sound that can come from his throat Murder has its sexual side You are caught thinking about killing anyone you know Sometimes you have no other choice but to watch something gruesome occur.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]

by pron 7y ago

bcantrill 7y ago

To be clear, I have never blamed Ellison for the demise of Sun or even Solaris -- but I do blame Oracle for re-proprietarizing OpenSolaris, and thereby ripping up the social contract of copyright assignment in an open source project. If it must be said, this wasn't an isolated incident -- and in hindsight, was merely the front of a conga line bad Oracle behavior. As for my own putative ignorance of market demands, one of Sun's growth areas at the time of acquisition in terms of revenue was the group that I had co-founded within Sun[1][2] -- in part because we had listened carefully to the market, and built a product that it very much wanted. Finally, if we want to engage in the perennial musing as to the demise of Sun, I think for my part I still broadly stand by my analysis from 2011.[3] [1] http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc/2008/11/10/fishworks-now-it-can-be-told/ http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc/2008/11/10/fishworks-now-it-can-... [2] http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc/2010/07/25/good-bye-sun/ http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc/2010/07/25/good-bye-sun/ [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2287033 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2287033

kragen 7y ago

Solaris's death at the hands of Linux can be attributed in part not just to "the Sun attitude" but specifically to the attitude of Bryan Cantrill personally. In response to Dave Miller explaining how Linux's networking was technically superior (at that moment) due to more care for things like TLB footprints and system call overhead, and also had more accessible technical support, Cantrill famously decided to respond by making fun of Miller for being a nerd: "Have you ever kissed a girl?" https://www.osnews.com/story/28261/have-you-ever-kissed-a-girl/ https://www.osnews.com/story/28261/have-you-ever-kissed-a-gi... https://web.archive.org/web/20110721130404/https://cryptnet.net/mirrors/texts/kissedagirl.html https://web.archive.org/web/20110721130404/https://cryptnet.... Admittedly, this was in 1996, and it's possible Cantrill regretted this remark, or the nerd-hating attitude behind it, at some point in the intervening 23 years. But I've never seen him admit it. I see he's participating in this thread, so if you see him not replying to this message, that's him doubling down.

cyphar 7y ago
He has said he regrets it in a Reddit AMA[1]. I find it quite strange that you attribute the death of an entire company to the attitude of a single engineer in an email from 1996 where he made a silly remark. You'd think if Cantrill was that powerful of a king-maker you'd want to be much nicer to him. Not to mention that Cantrill himself is also clearly a nerd, so "nerd-hating" is a bit of a weird statement. [1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/31ny87/comment/cq3e4y9 https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/31ny87/comment/cq3e4y...
- andrew_n 7y ago
  Consider the remark not as the cause of death of the company, but the remark as an instance of a general attitude, and that attitude fitting in quite well at the company.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - Annatar 7y ago
    I have never in my life dealt with engineers so competent, professional and kind as the Sun Microsystems folks were. If they were technologically arrogant, they earned it: their inventions outlasted the company and live on in many products. I cannot name a single GNU/Linux "hacker" inventing anything. Everything they implemented is a shoddy copy of what the engineers at hp, SGI and Sun Microsystems did. They might have shoddily implemented it by writing the code from scratch, but they blatantly stole everything. For instance, the manual page for chkconfig(8) will even tell one that the command comes from SGI's IRIX.
    - cyphar 7y ago
      While I definitely agree that Sun, HP, and SGI had amazing engineering this section of your comment is particularly ridiculous: > I cannot name a single GNU/Linux "hacker" inventing anything. Everything they implemented is a shoddy copy of what the engineers at [...] did. If we ignore the obvious counter-arguments (GCC, Apache, nginx, arguably git, and so on), and just look at your statement at face value -- you're saying that nobody from the largest free software community in the world has invented anything new in the past 10-15 years. What possible evidence do you have that this is true? It's not just wrong, it's offensively so. Heck, ZFS-on-Linux is now the repo-of-record for ZFS -- that's a specific example of the GNU/Linux community implementing things alongside the rest of the free software community (and currently ZoL has more features than any other ZFS port). It's also the case that those brilliant engineers did the same thing. Zones are arguably a re-implementation of Jails with some slightly different design goals. IOCP is objectively just a copy of kqueue (to the point where Cantrill said he wished they'd just ported kqueue). And so on. I don't think this is a bad thing at all, but it's quite strange to put them up on a pedestal to the point where you effectively say that any engineer who didn't work at Sun/HP/SGI in 2003 hasn't invented anything. There are obviously plenty of examples of Linux not learning from others (Jails/Zones vs containers, kqueue/IOCP vs epoll, DTrace vs eBPF+bpftrace, and so on). But arguing that nothing innovative has come out of the GNU/Linux community ever is just awful.

SwellJoe 7y ago

"perhaps it was Cantrill who was monomaniacal all along, not keeping his eyes on the market" Joyent made money and was acquired, all while producing metric shit tons of incredibly cool Open Source software. We should all be so "monomaniacal".

unixhero 7y ago
We have an art installation at the corporate campus where I work. It's a parody of 1984, with inspirational quotes flowing over the entire building (300meters long). But they are not inspirational, rather artsy sometimes edgy and provocative. The sentences change every day, and are controlled by an artist in California somewhere. One of the sentences one day was: "Monomania creates success" I keep a logbook of the strangest entries.
- moeffju 7y ago
  Would you happen to be working in Germany?
  - unixhero 7y ago
    No, but maybe there are several? There are 430 statements. Holzer’s work reflects both a political and with a focus on interpersonal relations and a moral perspective. With her fleeting forms – texts that sweep past – she symbolizes aspects of life itself. Holzer represents a melancholic and committed voice in contemporary art. * Strange section * In a paradisiac state the basic survival tasks you need to perform all seems clear and your objective is right there in front of you. There is a period where you know you have gone wrong but continue Monomania creates success * Very dark section * Scream so powerful that it empties all the kindness you could have shown and blackened the entire fabric of your soul Form a noise so true that your tormentor recognizes it as a sound that can come from his throat Murder has its sexual side You are caught thinking about killing anyone you know Sometimes you have no other choice but to watch something gruesome occur.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]