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I really liked Solaris. ZFS, Dtrace, Zones, brilliant hardware. It's a shame Oracle destroyed it (mostly) and Sun. Though some might argue that Linux taking ov

I really liked Solaris. ZFS, Dtrace, Zones, brilliant hardware. It's a shame Oracle destroyed it (mostly) and Sun. Though some might argue that Linux taking over played a part in that. A parallel universe with Sun surviving & properly embracing open source would have been very interesting.

hylaride 6y ago
Solaris 10 really was the pinnacle of UNIX. At a previous company, we were doing with Solaris zones and ZFS snapshots essentially a docker-like development ecosystem. We were really excited about the crossbow networking project, but then the Oracle acquisition happened almost all new and innovative work stopped. In a more perfect world, Joyent would have become bigger than it was. Alas...
- canadian_tired 6y ago
  Oh yeah. I remember The Announcement (sale of Sun to Oracle). Punch to the gut.
- binarycrusader 6y ago
  I'll assume that was a typo and you meant Solaris 11. Solaris 11 has some amazing advancements over 10 in terms of security, packaging, and many other metrics. Also, for the record, it is objectively untrue that all new and innovative work stopped. My primary disappointment was the silent discontinuation of the OpenSolaris project.
  - hylaride 6y ago
    No, I meant 10. The same way you might say that the McLaren F1 is the pinnacle of car engineering, despite higher performing cars being subsequently released. The delta between what you could get between Solaris 10 and most anything else at the time (free or otherwise) was very impressive. Zones/containers had little equal (maybe FreeBSD jails, but so much nicer to manage), ZFS made me almost cry that I’d never have to deal with veritas again, and DTrace allowed safe, live debugging whenever I felt like it. I’d add SMF there somewhere if it wasn’t configured via XML. Sure, IPS is technically superior to apt or yum (well, anything is better than yum), but it’s not ground breaking better than what you have elsewhere. 11’s security is indeed improved as they took what was already done of crossbow, and implemented it, then cancelled the rest. I was using hyperbole, but the general feeling to those of us that were customers was of a large cutback in work. And that was before oracle jacked up the prices. I miss Solaris, but there is no reason I would recommend it to anybody today, even if you had to manage your own hardware and not be on a major cloud vendor.
    - binarycrusader 6y ago
      Then we're going to have to agree to disagree; because the next Solaris release went all the way to 11 ;) As for 11’s security is indeed improved as they took what was already done of crossbow, and implemented it, then cancelled the rest. -- that's shortchanging an incredible amount of work that was done that was not related to crossbow at all. Crossbow, while great, was hardly the largest or most important project that was being worked on although it was certainly one of them.
      - hylaride 6y ago
        I won’t disagree with you about any improvements 11 made, but merely again the delta against competing options available. FYI, I’m verbally harsh because as I said I miss Solaris and miss having an economic reason to use it.
severino 6y ago
For me, the biggest shame is that Linux never got to adopt all these brilliant technologies like ZFS or Dtrace, directing efforts to alternatives that are nowhere near the quality or reliability of the former. Yes I know there's a long time debate about whether the CDDL license is GPL compatible or not. Too bad this came from the Sun era, years before the Oracle acquisition.
- SubjectToChange 6y ago
  Dtrace was GPL'd and it is available on Linux now. Although, it is too little too late as BPF based tools are already here and offer more flexibility.
DrScientist 6y ago
I'd agree - some great stuff, great innovation. The problem was they grew hugely during the dot com bubble - to a size that was never sustainable, and then post bubble, couldn't work out how to make enough money from their offerings in the face of Linux on commodity PC hardware. Not just OS/hardware either - the Java ecosystem and Libre/Open office still live on.

hylaride 6y ago

Solaris 10 really was the pinnacle of UNIX. At a previous company, we were doing with Solaris zones and ZFS snapshots essentially a docker-like development ecosystem. We were really excited about the crossbow networking project, but then the Oracle acquisition happened almost all new and innovative work stopped. In a more perfect world, Joyent would have become bigger than it was. Alas...

canadian_tired 6y ago
Oh yeah. I remember The Announcement (sale of Sun to Oracle). Punch to the gut.
binarycrusader 6y ago
I'll assume that was a typo and you meant Solaris 11. Solaris 11 has some amazing advancements over 10 in terms of security, packaging, and many other metrics. Also, for the record, it is objectively untrue that all new and innovative work stopped. My primary disappointment was the silent discontinuation of the OpenSolaris project.
- hylaride 6y ago
  No, I meant 10. The same way you might say that the McLaren F1 is the pinnacle of car engineering, despite higher performing cars being subsequently released. The delta between what you could get between Solaris 10 and most anything else at the time (free or otherwise) was very impressive. Zones/containers had little equal (maybe FreeBSD jails, but so much nicer to manage), ZFS made me almost cry that I’d never have to deal with veritas again, and DTrace allowed safe, live debugging whenever I felt like it. I’d add SMF there somewhere if it wasn’t configured via XML. Sure, IPS is technically superior to apt or yum (well, anything is better than yum), but it’s not ground breaking better than what you have elsewhere. 11’s security is indeed improved as they took what was already done of crossbow, and implemented it, then cancelled the rest. I was using hyperbole, but the general feeling to those of us that were customers was of a large cutback in work. And that was before oracle jacked up the prices. I miss Solaris, but there is no reason I would recommend it to anybody today, even if you had to manage your own hardware and not be on a major cloud vendor.
  - binarycrusader 6y ago
    Then we're going to have to agree to disagree; because the next Solaris release went all the way to 11 ;) As for 11’s security is indeed improved as they took what was already done of crossbow, and implemented it, then cancelled the rest. -- that's shortchanging an incredible amount of work that was done that was not related to crossbow at all. Crossbow, while great, was hardly the largest or most important project that was being worked on although it was certainly one of them.
    - hylaride 6y ago
      I won’t disagree with you about any improvements 11 made, but merely again the delta against competing options available. FYI, I’m verbally harsh because as I said I miss Solaris and miss having an economic reason to use it.

severino 6y ago

For me, the biggest shame is that Linux never got to adopt all these brilliant technologies like ZFS or Dtrace, directing efforts to alternatives that are nowhere near the quality or reliability of the former. Yes I know there's a long time debate about whether the CDDL license is GPL compatible or not. Too bad this came from the Sun era, years before the Oracle acquisition.

SubjectToChange 6y ago
Dtrace was GPL'd and it is available on Linux now. Although, it is too little too late as BPF based tools are already here and offer more flexibility.

DrScientist 6y ago

I'd agree - some great stuff, great innovation. The problem was they grew hugely during the dot com bubble - to a size that was never sustainable, and then post bubble, couldn't work out how to make enough money from their offerings in the face of Linux on commodity PC hardware. Not just OS/hardware either - the Java ecosystem and Libre/Open office still live on.