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Oracle didn't kill it. It was already dead when they bought it. What Oracle wanted when they bought Sun was Java. Solaris and the hardware just came along wi

Oracle didn't kill it. It was already dead when they bought it. What Oracle wanted when they bought Sun was Java. Solaris and the hardware just came along with the ride. There are a few people that they needed to support for contractual reasons and a legacy install here and there that they could continue to milk, but for everybody else Solaris was dead before 2009. This was just as obvious then as it is now. It is just that Solaris fans refused to see it.

dijit 5y ago
It’s impossible to reply to this because by virtue of thinking that the systems were good you can label anyone a fan. The fact remains: it was widely deployed, and we are still catching up to certain components of the operating system. Dtrace, ZFS and SMF are examples. Calling it dead only tells me that you weren’t in an industry that used it. It would be like claiming windows is dead because most things these days are cloud hosted and windows is very expensive there. It’s true in some sense but extremely blind to the rest of the industry.
- panick21_ 5y ago
  Exactly, had Oracle contuned the deveopment in the open in cooperation with the community it would have been an amazing system to this day.
- prmoustache 5y ago
  Dtrace, zfs and smf were nice but came too late but they are things that appeal the engineer, not the manager that sign the contracts. And Sun was already on life support when Oracle bought them. Sure there was still a lot of companies still using mostly solaris back then - I worked for 2 of them as a Solaris "expert" somewhere during last decade - but all of them already had projects running about replacing Solaris for more cost effective redhat, even those that bought exadata racks. "expert" meaning I was still one of those survivors still young enough to be still willing to work in an operation team and having more than 5 years of experience administrating Solaris and AIX shit. I must say I loved the integration of zfs with gnome2's nautilus back then on opensolaris. I used it for a while as my daily driver at home.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
sidewndr46 5y ago
I was actually rolling out new installs of Solaris as late as 2012.
webmobdev 5y ago
Oracle bought Sun for MySQL. All the rest of the software assets were just icing on the cake.
- mattl 5y ago
  And Java, surely?
  - Tostino 5y ago
    Yeah it's a "why not both" situation. They wanted Java for that sweet Android lawsuit, and they wanted MySQL for the support contracts and to ensure it wouldn't encroach on many of the same use cases Oracle database is still needed for.
- LeFantome 5y ago
  I think the general consensus is that Oracle bought Sun for Java. Databases at Oracle have certainly done better than Solaris though. OracleDB is still a cash cow and MySQL I believe MySQL is still the most popular Open Source relational database ( well, other than SQLite probably ). Monty forked MySQL to MariaDB literally the day after Oracle bought Sun but MySQL remains far more popular.
gruturo 5y ago
> This was just as obvious then as it is now. It is just that Solaris fans refused to see it. Solaris fans (yours truly included) saw it just fine. But Oracle has been a poor steward, and if it had any chance of being rescued, well, they gave it none. And their fame for suing and squeezing their own customers didn't help... every company ran away from it once it was an Oracle property, and suddenly there was no way to run most commercial software on it (My employer was impacted for example).
0x0000000 5y ago
> but for everybody else Solaris was dead before 2009. I worked in the Solaris engineering org. We had new customers at least as late as 2017.
gtirloni 5y ago
This a thousand times. Sun was killing Solaris way before Oracle acquired it. Because Sun was at the beginning of that era, people look at it with rosy colored glasses. It had terrible leadership and didn't understand how to fully embrace open source (speaking strictly about OpenSolaris, they never really wanted share control of anything, form a community, etc).
Beltalowda 5y ago
I ran OpenSolaris on my laptop back in the day; I thought it worked very well. Note I'm not some old-style Unix greybeard who used Solaris back in the 80s: I was just playing around with various systems and ended up sticking with OpenSolaris. To be fair, from my casual observations it didn't seem there was that much inertia around the system, and Oracle killed OpenSolaris before I had a chance to put it on any servers, but I definitely think there was some potential there.
rbanffy 5y ago
> Oracle didn't kill it. What is Solaris without SPARC? A somewhat slower and not-very-compatible OS for apps that are perfectly content with an x86? Oracle killed it by stopping development of new SPARC systems. Linux is a much better fit for x86 boxes than Solaris ever was. Solaris for x86 was not a revenue driver or should never be considered that, but a gateway drug to SPARC workstations and servers. Java was the same - a programming environment where you could develop on Windows and deploy on Solaris. Unfortunately, for them, you could deploy to Linux as easily. > This was just as obvious then as it is now. It is just that Solaris fans refused to see it. Sun was having trouble funding their chip development operation because they tried to be an everything company.

dijit 5y ago

It’s impossible to reply to this because by virtue of thinking that the systems were good you can label anyone a fan. The fact remains: it was widely deployed, and we are still catching up to certain components of the operating system. Dtrace, ZFS and SMF are examples. Calling it dead only tells me that you weren’t in an industry that used it. It would be like claiming windows is dead because most things these days are cloud hosted and windows is very expensive there. It’s true in some sense but extremely blind to the rest of the industry.

panick21_ 5y ago
Exactly, had Oracle contuned the deveopment in the open in cooperation with the community it would have been an amazing system to this day.
prmoustache 5y ago
Dtrace, zfs and smf were nice but came too late but they are things that appeal the engineer, not the manager that sign the contracts. And Sun was already on life support when Oracle bought them. Sure there was still a lot of companies still using mostly solaris back then - I worked for 2 of them as a Solaris "expert" somewhere during last decade - but all of them already had projects running about replacing Solaris for more cost effective redhat, even those that bought exadata racks. "expert" meaning I was still one of those survivors still young enough to be still willing to work in an operation team and having more than 5 years of experience administrating Solaris and AIX shit. I must say I loved the integration of zfs with gnome2's nautilus back then on opensolaris. I used it for a while as my daily driver at home.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

sidewndr46 5y ago

I was actually rolling out new installs of Solaris as late as 2012.

webmobdev 5y ago

Oracle bought Sun for MySQL. All the rest of the software assets were just icing on the cake.

mattl 5y ago
And Java, surely?
- Tostino 5y ago
  Yeah it's a "why not both" situation. They wanted Java for that sweet Android lawsuit, and they wanted MySQL for the support contracts and to ensure it wouldn't encroach on many of the same use cases Oracle database is still needed for.
LeFantome 5y ago
I think the general consensus is that Oracle bought Sun for Java. Databases at Oracle have certainly done better than Solaris though. OracleDB is still a cash cow and MySQL I believe MySQL is still the most popular Open Source relational database ( well, other than SQLite probably ). Monty forked MySQL to MariaDB literally the day after Oracle bought Sun but MySQL remains far more popular.

gruturo 5y ago

> This was just as obvious then as it is now. It is just that Solaris fans refused to see it. Solaris fans (yours truly included) saw it just fine. But Oracle has been a poor steward, and if it had any chance of being rescued, well, they gave it none. And their fame for suing and squeezing their own customers didn't help... every company ran away from it once it was an Oracle property, and suddenly there was no way to run most commercial software on it (My employer was impacted for example).

0x0000000 5y ago

> but for everybody else Solaris was dead before 2009. I worked in the Solaris engineering org. We had new customers at least as late as 2017.

gtirloni 5y ago

This a thousand times. Sun was killing Solaris way before Oracle acquired it. Because Sun was at the beginning of that era, people look at it with rosy colored glasses. It had terrible leadership and didn't understand how to fully embrace open source (speaking strictly about OpenSolaris, they never really wanted share control of anything, form a community, etc).

Beltalowda 5y ago

I ran OpenSolaris on my laptop back in the day; I thought it worked very well. Note I'm not some old-style Unix greybeard who used Solaris back in the 80s: I was just playing around with various systems and ended up sticking with OpenSolaris. To be fair, from my casual observations it didn't seem there was that much inertia around the system, and Oracle killed OpenSolaris before I had a chance to put it on any servers, but I definitely think there was some potential there.

rbanffy 5y ago

> Oracle didn't kill it. What is Solaris without SPARC? A somewhat slower and not-very-compatible OS for apps that are perfectly content with an x86? Oracle killed it by stopping development of new SPARC systems. Linux is a much better fit for x86 boxes than Solaris ever was. Solaris for x86 was not a revenue driver or should never be considered that, but a gateway drug to SPARC workstations and servers. Java was the same - a programming environment where you could develop on Windows and deploy on Solaris. Unfortunately, for them, you could deploy to Linux as easily. > This was just as obvious then as it is now. It is just that Solaris fans refused to see it. Sun was having trouble funding their chip development operation because they tried to be an everything company.