11 ms·

The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris (2017)

79 points by kick 7y ago

thinkingkong 7y ago
This is from 2017 and I hope the title can be adjusted to reflect as much. Its still a great article.
- mathattack 7y ago
  That would explain why I couldn’t find in Google News.
beefhash 7y ago
I still kind of wish SunOS (the BSD-based version, before AT&T made them switch over to System V) had made it out of Sun as an open source version. Sources for 4.1.4 leaked, but of course that's without official blessing... And Oracle's lawyers probably make up more than half the company.
- flomo 7y ago
  I had no involvement in this, but Sun caused some huge split in their userbase with the switch to SysV Solaris. I had an ISP that never switched off SunOS 4 until they went out of business. I've always wondered how much *BSD love is SunOS Lost Causeism. I think maybe most younger people (@ my old age) just never really got it.
  - nineteen999 7y ago
    Sometimes I feel like I'm the only person in the world who has any affection for SVR4 and its derivatives. Everyone seems to hate it, despite it resulting partially in Solaris, XENIX, the universally despised SCO and Unixware, NCR UNIX etc. It ultimately ended up being a huge influence on Linux, which started life as a Minix clone and eventually added more and more interfaces from SVR4 (eg. iBCS2, SysV IPC) as it grew. SVR4 even had a half-decent packaging system for its time as well. I suppose everybody feels like too much other core "UNIX" stuff came from BSD - vi, TCP/IP etc. Plus the SVR4 vendors typically insisted that you pay separately for C/C++ compilers etc...
    - hapless 7y ago
      Something to keep in mind is that SVR4 is the ATT/Sun joint venture. It was SysV with all those BSD-isms included. Solaris was essentially the reference implementation. Older SysV and SysIII derivatives were a total crapshoot. Depending on vendor, you could have or not have any number of important things: sockets, tcp/ip, nfs, the list goes on. SVR4 finally started to heal the rift between ATT and BSD systems. It made Unix applications radically more portable.
      - nineteen999 7y ago
        > Solaris was essentially the reference implementation. Interesting, I always thought that AT&T SVR4 was the reference implementation, and that Solaris was the Sun hybrid that was basically AT&T SVR4 with the BSD compatibility added to support legacy SunOS applications. Yes I was aware that both AIX and HP-UX were originally SVR3 based, and my experience with both of those showed that they were very inconsistent with each other (eg. AIX 4.1 through 4.3, vs HP-UX 10.0, 11 etc). > SVR4 finally started to heal the rift between ATT and BSD systems. It made Unix applications radically more portable. Agree and this is one of the reasons that I liked it - it feels like an earlier attempt at creating a "standard" much as Linux is considered today, albeit a fairly closed source one by modern considerations. Of course I wasn't there at the time, but my first UNIX experiences as a teenager were on XENIX, so that probably coloured my perception somewhat.
        notacoward 7y ago
        > AT&T SVR4 was the reference implementation That is correct. When I was working on one of the early SMP UNIX flavors at Encore, the SVR4 code we used as a base was from AT&T. The only thing we got from Sun was NFS source - for which they'd accept patches, and apply them to their own version of NFS, but then ship the next version back to us with our own changes stripped back out. Such a lovely bunch of people.
        hapless 7y ago
        You didn't need to get a bunch of extra stuff from Sun, because SVR4 was, itself, a Sun/AT&T joint venture. e.g. The Sun sockets support was in the base SVR4 kernel and libc.
  - hapless 7y ago
    The early versions of Solaris — 2.0, 2.1, 2.2, 2.3 — were basically alpha quality software inflicted on users as if in vengeance for some unknown crime against the vendor. SunOS 4 was old and crusty but it wasn’t shithouse buggy, and some folks were very reluctant to migrate even after Solaris got a lot better.
    - icedchai 7y ago
      I remember the early Solaris 2.x era. Seriously, nobody wanted to run it. We all ran SunOS 4.1 on our SparcStations. Personally I didn't consider Solaris 2 "usable" until 2.5.
    - jiveturkey 7y ago
      SunOS 4 didn't scale to the degree needed for the future, both imagined and real.
- easytiger 7y ago
  The loss of Solaris is a tremendous tragedy to the technology world. I once welcomed it's demise. But the lack of any and all competing platforms for Linux has lead Linux down a not entirely happy road
  - Annatar 7y ago
    Remember how we used to have this dreadful Windows monoculture in the '90's of the past century? Now it's GNU/Linux monoculture...
    - jcelerier 7y ago
      There is nothing comparable with an open and a closed monoculture though. And can we even talk of GNU/Linux monoculture when you've got a few working distros - e.g. Void, Alpine - with non-GNU userland, or distros with completely different userspace models - try to compare Ubuntu, Gentoo, Nix, GoboLinux, etc. Do you have init (systemd-init, sysvinit, openrc), network management (systemd-networkd, NetworkManager, connman), dhcp (systemd-networkd dhcpcd, etc), audio (pulseaudio, pipewire, raw alsa + dmix, etc), graphics (X11, wayland), desktop shell (gnome, KDE Plasma, XFCE, i3) debate in the windows world ? No because except for the last you cannot ever change how it is done yourself on windows, while on the "GNU/Linux" ecosystem everyone is free to come with its own better idea for $SYSTEMCOMPONENT and put it in the open marketplace of competing ideas.
  - trasz 7y ago
    Only if you assume OSX or FreeBSD don’t exist.
    - Decade 7y ago
      OS X was never a great Unix (other than paying to get the official trademark that one time), and it’s becoming even less of a Unix over time. FreeBSD is OK, but very lacking in manpower. Every time I install a desktop package these days, I see multiple warnings about how this or that dependency has no maintainer. With so much attention these days on Docker and other halfway measures involving namespaces, it’s not really Unix that’s the platform anymore. Linux is the platform for a variety of network and desktop applications.
fargle 7y ago
Yep, old news 2017. But everybody seems to kinda see about the same thing. Although I'd say it really died when Oracle bought what was left of Sun. And so then died java (meh), and everything else, btw. Kinda sad, I think Sun was a fairly innocent victim of the dot-com bubble bust. So fck larry fcking ellison, and I hope the horse he rode in on throws him and then kicks him square in the nuts (I have nothing against the horse).
- codesushi42 7y ago
  Genuine question, what was so bad about Larry Ellison?
  - kick 7y ago
    "As you know people, as you learn about things, you realize that these generalizations we have are, virtually to a generalization, false. Well, except for this one, as it turns out. 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. And I gotta say, as someone who has seen that complexity for my entire life, it's very hard to get used to that idea. It's like, 'surely this is more complicated!' but it's like: Wow, this is really simple!" "This company is very straightforward, in its defense. This company is about one man, his alter-ego, and what he wants to inflict upon humanity -- that's it! ...Ship mediocrity, inflict misery, lie our asses off, screw our customers, and make a whole shitload of money. Yeah... you talk to Oracle, it's like, 'no, we don't fucking make dreams happen -- we make money!'" "You need to think of Larry Ellison the way you think of a lawnmower. You don't anthropomorphize your lawnmower, the lawnmower just mows the lawn, you stick your hand in there and it'll chop it off, the end. You don't think 'oh, the lawnmower hates me' -- lawnmower doesn't give a shit about you, lawnmower can't hate you. Don't anthropomorphize the lawnmower. Don't fall into that trap about Oracle." -- Bryan Cantrill https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc
    - armitron 7y ago
      Bryan Cantrill went on to peddle Node.js to the clueless shortly after that rant so I wouldn't put much weight on what he says.
hackerbabz 7y ago
What did Solaris do that made it a good choice?
- kick 7y ago
  Zones, DTrace, leastpriv, ZFS, a bunch of innovations and concepts that influence system development to today.
- asveikau 7y ago
  Another one not mentioned by the sibling comment: they tried to improve upon the poor scalability of poll(2) before epoll was a thing. Also a bunch of random things in section 2 of your Linux manpages started out as Sun-introduced APIs back in the day. But a bunch of stuff has been ported or integrated elsewhere. Zfs runs well out of the box on freebsd and as a module on linux. "Containers" are a big thing now where zones might have applied. Etc.
- scurvy 7y ago
  Hot swapping CPU and memory boards was pretty dope in 2000. Can't do that in equivalently priced hardware and servers as easily today.
  - robocat 7y ago
    Because the unit of swappability changed to a VM or server... for good reasons.
    - scurvy 7y ago
      If that's the case, why do my VMs in public clouds constantly go down for hardware maintenance? We've definitely regressed despite the buzzwords and hype.
      - zorked 7y ago
        Most of the "hardware maintainance" is defragmenting the workload so that the VMs run in fewer physical machines to retire racks of old hardware. Some load balancing too.
armitron 7y ago
Let's face it, Solaris was a pile of crap. Security-wise alone, it was a disaster. I'm glad Linux (and not Oracle) killed it, for all its faults, it's a much better foundation for the future. I never liked dtrace either, and much prefer the direction eBPF is going. ZFS I'm ambivalent about, but I find that on average it's more trouble than it's worth.
- geofft 7y ago
  > Let's face it, Solaris was a pile of crap. Security-wise alone, it was a disaster. Huh, that wasn't my impression at all - for a long while wasn't it much safer to have unprivileged untrusted users on Solaris than on Linux? (that is, Linux quite frequently had local privilege escalations, I thought Solaris didn't?) I guess "security" is a broad term, what sort of security?
  - armitron 7y ago
    https://www.cvedetails.com/product/19755/Oracle-Solaris.html?vendor_id=93 https://www.cvedetails.com/product/19755/Oracle-Solaris.html... https://www.cvedetails.com/product/32658/?q=Suse+Linux+Enterprise+Server https://www.cvedetails.com/product/32658/?q=Suse+Linux+Enter...
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - geofft 7y ago
      Both of those only show data from after 2013, which is well after Solaris lost. I'm afraid I don't understand your point? The code execution vulnerabilities from 2013 seem to be from third-parry products (pip, squid, etc.) What part of these links should I be looking at?
  - evanweaver 7y ago
    I remember Irix as the bad one. SunOS/Solaris was ok. Linux/BSD was worse, until it was better.
lngnmn1 7y ago
Why, I used to be down-voted into oblivion by declaring Joyent's OS a bullshit.
dang 7y ago
Discussed at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15170378 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15170378
cable2600 7y ago
I used SunOS and Solaris in 1995-1996 as a federal contractor for the US Military. It seemed to work well for a Unix OS. We used many different types of Unix. GNU/Linux, BSD Unix, and MacOSX slowly took marketshare away from Sun/Oracle. Expensive SPARCStations no longer were affordable.
Annatar 7y ago
That's okay, Solaris lives on as the free, open source software that is the illumos source code, from which distributions like Tribblix and SmartOS are made. illumos is being actively developed and it's very lively.
trhway 7y ago
One of the major aspects of Solaris demise was that it fell victim to the anti-cannibalization efforts by the extremely politically strong SPARC division inside Sun. That bound the Solaris fate to the [rapidly falling] fate of the Sun SPARC and prevented any serious investment into the development of the x86 version. As Solaris was falling more and more painfully behind in support of popular x86 hardware a running joke ca. 2002-4 from the Solaris dev guys was - to have an instance of Linux kernel with its drivers running inside the Solaris instance and use that Linux instance to proxy requests to the various otherwise unsupported by Solaris hardware.
drmpeg 7y ago
As a homage, I use this wallpaper for my iPhone. http://www.w6rz.net/solaris_iphone.png http://www.w6rz.net/solaris_iphone.png
m12k 7y ago
It's fascinating to me that a company like Oracle that I only ever see ridiculed and despised for its products and business practices, is also so profitable. I hear so many tales of companies that decline and eventually become irrelevant when they start being run by MBAs with no product vision, but it seems that once a company reaches a certain size, it's just par for the course, and they seem to do fine anyway. Is it just inertia and brand value at that point?
- mothsonasloth 7y ago
  As someone who has worked in corporate companies, here is a list of reasons why Oracle, IBM, Microsoft, Google, VMWare, Deloitte etc. are "par for the course" * If you are upper level management at Blue Chip company "Initech", the last thing you want to be dealing with is a smaller B2B provider, with a hipster name like "Data Badger". Being smaller means more risk (not necessarily but thats the culture). You want the big safe boring companies. * Big corporates are still wined and dined by Oracle's sales teams etc. Yes you might have to do your mandatory HR training about bribes and corporate gifts, but this stuff still happens under the table. Its business, it might not be ethical, but its business. * Cronyism etc. management tends to circulate around companies closely connected with each other. A Microsoft manager might float to Vodafone or JP Morgan. When they get there, they are more likely to throw any of their old MS colleagues a bone when it comes to service contracts etc. This is why networking is so important in LinkedIn for corporate careerism. * Did I mention sales already, yes, but these big companies have large sales and marketing budgets. Those buzzwords are expensive you know! * Those sales and marketers target managers and people with a high influence / low technical understand co-efficient. Don't get me wrong there are smart managers out there that know their stuff however they are generally a rareity. So they tend to drink the kool-aid from the big tech corporates e.g. "Hey Bob, I think Microsoft's Foobar Cloud Hypervisor, can streamline our data acquisition and increase synergy in the business". * When you take your first hit of Oracle's software or services, you are effectively tied into service contracts which make it painful to leave but easy to extend. You might spend £200million for a 5 year contract, then three years in you see a new technology offering for an extra £4million etc. That's relatively pennies to what you've already sunk into the service contract. * Marketing and branding which you picked up on in your post. There is a reason you see IBM or Oracle advertised a lot in the Financial Times, Economist, New Scientist etc. Hope this explains why Oracle et al. are dominent in the industry.
hapless 7y ago
It is worth noting how much has changed since this blog post. ZFS on Linux, the dubiously licensed mess that it is, now drives most of the bug tracking and patches. Joyent, once deeply committed to illumos, is now primarily a Linux company, because Samsung has no particular need to hold onto Solaris. Solaris is even sadder and deader today than the author foresaw :(

79 points by kick 7y ago

thinkingkong 7y ago

This is from 2017 and I hope the title can be adjusted to reflect as much. Its still a great article.

mathattack 7y ago
That would explain why I couldn’t find in Google News.

beefhash 7y ago

I still kind of wish SunOS (the BSD-based version, before AT&T made them switch over to System V) had made it out of Sun as an open source version. Sources for 4.1.4 leaked, but of course that's without official blessing... And Oracle's lawyers probably make up more than half the company.

flomo 7y ago
I had no involvement in this, but Sun caused some huge split in their userbase with the switch to SysV Solaris. I had an ISP that never switched off SunOS 4 until they went out of business. I've always wondered how much *BSD love is SunOS Lost Causeism. I think maybe most younger people (@ my old age) just never really got it.
- nineteen999 7y ago
  Sometimes I feel like I'm the only person in the world who has any affection for SVR4 and its derivatives. Everyone seems to hate it, despite it resulting partially in Solaris, XENIX, the universally despised SCO and Unixware, NCR UNIX etc. It ultimately ended up being a huge influence on Linux, which started life as a Minix clone and eventually added more and more interfaces from SVR4 (eg. iBCS2, SysV IPC) as it grew. SVR4 even had a half-decent packaging system for its time as well. I suppose everybody feels like too much other core "UNIX" stuff came from BSD - vi, TCP/IP etc. Plus the SVR4 vendors typically insisted that you pay separately for C/C++ compilers etc...
  - hapless 7y ago
    Something to keep in mind is that SVR4 is the ATT/Sun joint venture. It was SysV with all those BSD-isms included. Solaris was essentially the reference implementation. Older SysV and SysIII derivatives were a total crapshoot. Depending on vendor, you could have or not have any number of important things: sockets, tcp/ip, nfs, the list goes on. SVR4 finally started to heal the rift between ATT and BSD systems. It made Unix applications radically more portable.
    - nineteen999 7y ago
      > Solaris was essentially the reference implementation. Interesting, I always thought that AT&T SVR4 was the reference implementation, and that Solaris was the Sun hybrid that was basically AT&T SVR4 with the BSD compatibility added to support legacy SunOS applications. Yes I was aware that both AIX and HP-UX were originally SVR3 based, and my experience with both of those showed that they were very inconsistent with each other (eg. AIX 4.1 through 4.3, vs HP-UX 10.0, 11 etc). > SVR4 finally started to heal the rift between ATT and BSD systems. It made Unix applications radically more portable. Agree and this is one of the reasons that I liked it - it feels like an earlier attempt at creating a "standard" much as Linux is considered today, albeit a fairly closed source one by modern considerations. Of course I wasn't there at the time, but my first UNIX experiences as a teenager were on XENIX, so that probably coloured my perception somewhat.
      - notacoward 7y ago
        > AT&T SVR4 was the reference implementation That is correct. When I was working on one of the early SMP UNIX flavors at Encore, the SVR4 code we used as a base was from AT&T. The only thing we got from Sun was NFS source - for which they'd accept patches, and apply them to their own version of NFS, but then ship the next version back to us with our own changes stripped back out. Such a lovely bunch of people.
        hapless 7y ago
        You didn't need to get a bunch of extra stuff from Sun, because SVR4 was, itself, a Sun/AT&T joint venture. e.g. The Sun sockets support was in the base SVR4 kernel and libc.
- hapless 7y ago
  The early versions of Solaris — 2.0, 2.1, 2.2, 2.3 — were basically alpha quality software inflicted on users as if in vengeance for some unknown crime against the vendor. SunOS 4 was old and crusty but it wasn’t shithouse buggy, and some folks were very reluctant to migrate even after Solaris got a lot better.
  - icedchai 7y ago
    I remember the early Solaris 2.x era. Seriously, nobody wanted to run it. We all ran SunOS 4.1 on our SparcStations. Personally I didn't consider Solaris 2 "usable" until 2.5.
  - jiveturkey 7y ago
    SunOS 4 didn't scale to the degree needed for the future, both imagined and real.
easytiger 7y ago
The loss of Solaris is a tremendous tragedy to the technology world. I once welcomed it's demise. But the lack of any and all competing platforms for Linux has lead Linux down a not entirely happy road
- Annatar 7y ago
  Remember how we used to have this dreadful Windows monoculture in the '90's of the past century? Now it's GNU/Linux monoculture...
  - jcelerier 7y ago
    There is nothing comparable with an open and a closed monoculture though. And can we even talk of GNU/Linux monoculture when you've got a few working distros - e.g. Void, Alpine - with non-GNU userland, or distros with completely different userspace models - try to compare Ubuntu, Gentoo, Nix, GoboLinux, etc. Do you have init (systemd-init, sysvinit, openrc), network management (systemd-networkd, NetworkManager, connman), dhcp (systemd-networkd dhcpcd, etc), audio (pulseaudio, pipewire, raw alsa + dmix, etc), graphics (X11, wayland), desktop shell (gnome, KDE Plasma, XFCE, i3) debate in the windows world ? No because except for the last you cannot ever change how it is done yourself on windows, while on the "GNU/Linux" ecosystem everyone is free to come with its own better idea for $SYSTEMCOMPONENT and put it in the open marketplace of competing ideas.
- trasz 7y ago
  Only if you assume OSX or FreeBSD don’t exist.
  - Decade 7y ago
    OS X was never a great Unix (other than paying to get the official trademark that one time), and it’s becoming even less of a Unix over time. FreeBSD is OK, but very lacking in manpower. Every time I install a desktop package these days, I see multiple warnings about how this or that dependency has no maintainer. With so much attention these days on Docker and other halfway measures involving namespaces, it’s not really Unix that’s the platform anymore. Linux is the platform for a variety of network and desktop applications.

fargle 7y ago

Yep, old news 2017. But everybody seems to kinda see about the same thing. Although I'd say it really died when Oracle bought what was left of Sun. And so then died java (meh), and everything else, btw. Kinda sad, I think Sun was a fairly innocent victim of the dot-com bubble bust. So fck larry fcking ellison, and I hope the horse he rode in on throws him and then kicks him square in the nuts (I have nothing against the horse).

codesushi42 7y ago
Genuine question, what was so bad about Larry Ellison?
- kick 7y ago
  "As you know people, as you learn about things, you realize that these generalizations we have are, virtually to a generalization, false. Well, except for this one, as it turns out. 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. And I gotta say, as someone who has seen that complexity for my entire life, it's very hard to get used to that idea. It's like, 'surely this is more complicated!' but it's like: Wow, this is really simple!" "This company is very straightforward, in its defense. This company is about one man, his alter-ego, and what he wants to inflict upon humanity -- that's it! ...Ship mediocrity, inflict misery, lie our asses off, screw our customers, and make a whole shitload of money. Yeah... you talk to Oracle, it's like, 'no, we don't fucking make dreams happen -- we make money!'" "You need to think of Larry Ellison the way you think of a lawnmower. You don't anthropomorphize your lawnmower, the lawnmower just mows the lawn, you stick your hand in there and it'll chop it off, the end. You don't think 'oh, the lawnmower hates me' -- lawnmower doesn't give a shit about you, lawnmower can't hate you. Don't anthropomorphize the lawnmower. Don't fall into that trap about Oracle." -- Bryan Cantrill https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc
  - armitron 7y ago
    Bryan Cantrill went on to peddle Node.js to the clueless shortly after that rant so I wouldn't put much weight on what he says.

hackerbabz 7y ago

What did Solaris do that made it a good choice?

kick 7y ago
Zones, DTrace, leastpriv, ZFS, a bunch of innovations and concepts that influence system development to today.
asveikau 7y ago
Another one not mentioned by the sibling comment: they tried to improve upon the poor scalability of poll(2) before epoll was a thing. Also a bunch of random things in section 2 of your Linux manpages started out as Sun-introduced APIs back in the day. But a bunch of stuff has been ported or integrated elsewhere. Zfs runs well out of the box on freebsd and as a module on linux. "Containers" are a big thing now where zones might have applied. Etc.
scurvy 7y ago
Hot swapping CPU and memory boards was pretty dope in 2000. Can't do that in equivalently priced hardware and servers as easily today.
- robocat 7y ago
  Because the unit of swappability changed to a VM or server... for good reasons.
  - scurvy 7y ago
    If that's the case, why do my VMs in public clouds constantly go down for hardware maintenance? We've definitely regressed despite the buzzwords and hype.
    - zorked 7y ago
      Most of the "hardware maintainance" is defragmenting the workload so that the VMs run in fewer physical machines to retire racks of old hardware. Some load balancing too.

armitron 7y ago

Let's face it, Solaris was a pile of crap. Security-wise alone, it was a disaster. I'm glad Linux (and not Oracle) killed it, for all its faults, it's a much better foundation for the future. I never liked dtrace either, and much prefer the direction eBPF is going. ZFS I'm ambivalent about, but I find that on average it's more trouble than it's worth.

geofft 7y ago
> Let's face it, Solaris was a pile of crap. Security-wise alone, it was a disaster. Huh, that wasn't my impression at all - for a long while wasn't it much safer to have unprivileged untrusted users on Solaris than on Linux? (that is, Linux quite frequently had local privilege escalations, I thought Solaris didn't?) I guess "security" is a broad term, what sort of security?
- armitron 7y ago
  https://www.cvedetails.com/product/19755/Oracle-Solaris.html?vendor_id=93 https://www.cvedetails.com/product/19755/Oracle-Solaris.html... https://www.cvedetails.com/product/32658/?q=Suse+Linux+Enterprise+Server https://www.cvedetails.com/product/32658/?q=Suse+Linux+Enter...
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - geofft 7y ago
    Both of those only show data from after 2013, which is well after Solaris lost. I'm afraid I don't understand your point? The code execution vulnerabilities from 2013 seem to be from third-parry products (pip, squid, etc.) What part of these links should I be looking at?
- evanweaver 7y ago
  I remember Irix as the bad one. SunOS/Solaris was ok. Linux/BSD was worse, until it was better.

lngnmn1 7y ago

Why, I used to be down-voted into oblivion by declaring Joyent's OS a bullshit.

dang 7y ago

Discussed at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15170378 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15170378

cable2600 7y ago

I used SunOS and Solaris in 1995-1996 as a federal contractor for the US Military. It seemed to work well for a Unix OS. We used many different types of Unix. GNU/Linux, BSD Unix, and MacOSX slowly took marketshare away from Sun/Oracle. Expensive SPARCStations no longer were affordable.

Annatar 7y ago

That's okay, Solaris lives on as the free, open source software that is the illumos source code, from which distributions like Tribblix and SmartOS are made. illumos is being actively developed and it's very lively.

trhway 7y ago

One of the major aspects of Solaris demise was that it fell victim to the anti-cannibalization efforts by the extremely politically strong SPARC division inside Sun. That bound the Solaris fate to the [rapidly falling] fate of the Sun SPARC and prevented any serious investment into the development of the x86 version. As Solaris was falling more and more painfully behind in support of popular x86 hardware a running joke ca. 2002-4 from the Solaris dev guys was - to have an instance of Linux kernel with its drivers running inside the Solaris instance and use that Linux instance to proxy requests to the various otherwise unsupported by Solaris hardware.

drmpeg 7y ago

As a homage, I use this wallpaper for my iPhone. http://www.w6rz.net/solaris_iphone.png http://www.w6rz.net/solaris_iphone.png

m12k 7y ago

It's fascinating to me that a company like Oracle that I only ever see ridiculed and despised for its products and business practices, is also so profitable. I hear so many tales of companies that decline and eventually become irrelevant when they start being run by MBAs with no product vision, but it seems that once a company reaches a certain size, it's just par for the course, and they seem to do fine anyway. Is it just inertia and brand value at that point?

mothsonasloth 7y ago
As someone who has worked in corporate companies, here is a list of reasons why Oracle, IBM, Microsoft, Google, VMWare, Deloitte etc. are "par for the course" * If you are upper level management at Blue Chip company "Initech", the last thing you want to be dealing with is a smaller B2B provider, with a hipster name like "Data Badger". Being smaller means more risk (not necessarily but thats the culture). You want the big safe boring companies. * Big corporates are still wined and dined by Oracle's sales teams etc. Yes you might have to do your mandatory HR training about bribes and corporate gifts, but this stuff still happens under the table. Its business, it might not be ethical, but its business. * Cronyism etc. management tends to circulate around companies closely connected with each other. A Microsoft manager might float to Vodafone or JP Morgan. When they get there, they are more likely to throw any of their old MS colleagues a bone when it comes to service contracts etc. This is why networking is so important in LinkedIn for corporate careerism. * Did I mention sales already, yes, but these big companies have large sales and marketing budgets. Those buzzwords are expensive you know! * Those sales and marketers target managers and people with a high influence / low technical understand co-efficient. Don't get me wrong there are smart managers out there that know their stuff however they are generally a rareity. So they tend to drink the kool-aid from the big tech corporates e.g. "Hey Bob, I think Microsoft's Foobar Cloud Hypervisor, can streamline our data acquisition and increase synergy in the business". * When you take your first hit of Oracle's software or services, you are effectively tied into service contracts which make it painful to leave but easy to extend. You might spend £200million for a 5 year contract, then three years in you see a new technology offering for an extra £4million etc. That's relatively pennies to what you've already sunk into the service contract. * Marketing and branding which you picked up on in your post. There is a reason you see IBM or Oracle advertised a lot in the Financial Times, Economist, New Scientist etc. Hope this explains why Oracle et al. are dominent in the industry.

hapless 7y ago

It is worth noting how much has changed since this blog post. ZFS on Linux, the dubiously licensed mess that it is, now drives most of the bug tracking and patches. Joyent, once deeply committed to illumos, is now primarily a Linux company, because Samsung has no particular need to hold onto Solaris. Solaris is even sadder and deader today than the author foresaw :(