4 ms·

I'd love to read about this. Do you have anything I can read on the history of Solaris and its development?

by dimgl 4y ago

DonHopkins 4y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20815603 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20815603 Unfortunately Sun won the System-V vs BSD "Unix wars", and then uni(x)laterally capitulated to AT&T. The Day SunOS Died "Bye, bye, SunOS 4.1.3! ATT System V has replaced BSD. You can cling to the standards of the industry But only if you pay the right fee -- Only if you pay the right fee . . ." http://www.poppyfields.net/filks/00070.html http://www.poppyfields.net/filks/00070.html For context, the guy who wrote "The Worst Job in the World" email was Michael Tiemann, one of "open source's great explainers." ;) Now he's pranking IBM executives by installing RedHat Enterprise Linux on their mainframes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Tiemann https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Tiemann >Michael Tiemann is vice president of open source affairs at Red Hat, Inc., and former President of the Open Source Initiative. [...] He co-founded Cygnus Solutions in 1989. [...] Opensource.com profiled him in 2014, calling him one of "open source's great explainers." http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/slowlaris/worst-job.html http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/slowlaris/worst-... >I have a friend who has to have the worst job in the world: he is a Unix system administrator. But it's worse than that, as I will soon tell. [...] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24351695 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24351695 There was a Berkeley Unix software company called "Mt Xinu". (The operating system's name is a recursive acronym, while the company's name is a backwards spelling.) "We know UNIX TM backwards and forwards." -Mt Xinu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MtXinu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MtXinu Famous for the great posters they handed out at Usenix: "4.2 > V" BSD -vs- System V, X-Wing / Death Star Poster https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ashaferian/Drive/master/Mt.Xinu%20BSD%20Poster.png https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ashaferian/Drive/master/Mt... https://www.ericconrad.com/2008/12/ https://www.ericconrad.com/2008/12/ I love all the old telephone equipment in the explosion! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29642203 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29642203 The unbundling of the free C compiler and the high price of the unbundled C compiler and AT&T's shitty bloated C++ compiler was emblematic of what was so bad about Sun abandoning their Berkeley BSD roots and getting into bed with AT&T System V with Solaris. And that provided an opportunity for Cygnus Solutions. [...] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20006186 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20006186 That was a lot later. Michael wrote that story in the early 90's, probably 90 or 91 while I was working there, during the transition from SunOS 4.1.3 to Solaris, when they forced all the engineers to "upgrade". He and Gumby and John Gilmore founded Cygnus Support ("We make free software affordable") in '89, and Michael was consulting at Sun, working on supporting gcc as an alternative to the shitty AT&T C++ compiler. Remember that Sun unbundled the C compiler from Solaris and started charging for it, and AT&T charged for their shitty C++ compiler too. Maybe Gumby can provide some more context! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31665191 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31665191 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cygnus_Solutions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cygnus_Solutions https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1641664 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1641664 http://www.h-online.com/open/features/GCC-We-make-free-software-affordable-1066831.html http://www.h-online.com/open/features/GCC-We-make-free-softw... https://web.archive.org/web/20190212235450/http://www.toad.com/gnu/cygnus/index.html https://web.archive.org/web/20190212235450/http://www.toad.c... Free Software Report, Volume 1, Number 1, 1992 https://web.archive.org/web/20170331165815/http://www.toad.com/gnu/cygnus/fsr/volume1.1.ps https://web.archive.org/web/20170331165815/http://www.toad.c... The Free Software Community Puts A Free Compiler Back In Solaris 2 Sun Microsystems, Inc. decided to unbundle the C compiler from their latest operating system, Solaris 2. Sun users were extremely upset to lose what they saw as an essential component of the system software. Faced with dramatic increases in licensing fees, early Solaris 2 users turned to free software for a reasonable alternative. Spearheading the effort to port the Free Software Foundation’s GNU C compiler was Palo Alto based Cygnus Support, a company that specializes in providing commercial support for free software. To fund the development effort, Cygnus appealed to the early adopters of Solaris 2. They offered a year of technical support for up to 5 users, and a commitment that the compiler would ship with Solaris 2, in return for a prepaid fee of $2,000. To insure wide distribution of the free compiler and debugger, Cygnus negotiated with SunSoft, Inc. to make the GNU C development tools available on CDware. CDware is a free CD-ROM available from Sun and shipped at no cost to over 90,000 Sun users.
- dimgl 4y ago
  Wow, crazy long comment. I'm gonna read through all of this now. Thank you!

I'd love to read about this. Do you have anything I can read on the history of Solaris and its development?

by dimgl 4y ago

I'd love to read about this. Do you have anything I can read on the history of Solaris and its development?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20815603 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20815603 Unfortunately Sun won the System-V vs BSD "Unix wars", and then uni(x)laterally capitulated to AT&T. The Day SunOS Died "Bye, bye, SunOS 4.1.3! ATT System V has replaced BSD. You can cling to the standards of the industry But only if you pay the right fee -- Only if you pay the right fee . . ." http://www.poppyfields.net/filks/00070.html http://www.poppyfields.net/filks/00070.html For context, the guy who wrote "The Worst Job in the World" email was Michael Tiemann, one of "open source's great explainers." ;) Now he's pranking IBM executives by installing RedHat Enterprise Linux on their mainframes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Tiemann https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Tiemann >Michael Tiemann is vice president of open source affairs at Red Hat, Inc., and former President of the Open Source Initiative. [...] He co-founded Cygnus Solutions in 1989. [...] Opensource.com profiled him in 2014, calling him one of "open source's great explainers." http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/slowlaris/worst-job.html http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/slowlaris/worst-... >I have a friend who has to have the worst job in the world: he is a Unix system administrator. But it's worse than that, as I will soon tell. [...] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24351695 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24351695 There was a Berkeley Unix software company called "Mt Xinu". (The operating system's name is a recursive acronym, while the company's name is a backwards spelling.) "We know UNIX TM backwards and forwards." -Mt Xinu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MtXinu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MtXinu Famous for the great posters they handed out at Usenix: "4.2 > V" BSD -vs- System V, X-Wing / Death Star Poster https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ashaferian/Drive/master/Mt.Xinu%20BSD%20Poster.png https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ashaferian/Drive/master/Mt... https://www.ericconrad.com/2008/12/ https://www.ericconrad.com/2008/12/ I love all the old telephone equipment in the explosion! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29642203 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29642203 The unbundling of the free C compiler and the high price of the unbundled C compiler and AT&T's shitty bloated C++ compiler was emblematic of what was so bad about Sun abandoning their Berkeley BSD roots and getting into bed with AT&T System V with Solaris. And that provided an opportunity for Cygnus Solutions. [...] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20006186 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20006186 That was a lot later. Michael wrote that story in the early 90's, probably 90 or 91 while I was working there, during the transition from SunOS 4.1.3 to Solaris, when they forced all the engineers to "upgrade". He and Gumby and John Gilmore founded Cygnus Support ("We make free software affordable") in '89, and Michael was consulting at Sun, working on supporting gcc as an alternative to the shitty AT&T C++ compiler. Remember that Sun unbundled the C compiler from Solaris and started charging for it, and AT&T charged for their shitty C++ compiler too. Maybe Gumby can provide some more context! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31665191 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31665191 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cygnus_Solutions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cygnus_Solutions https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1641664 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1641664 http://www.h-online.com/open/features/GCC-We-make-free-software-affordable-1066831.html http://www.h-online.com/open/features/GCC-We-make-free-softw... https://web.archive.org/web/20190212235450/http://www.toad.com/gnu/cygnus/index.html https://web.archive.org/web/20190212235450/http://www.toad.c... Free Software Report, Volume 1, Number 1, 1992 https://web.archive.org/web/20170331165815/http://www.toad.com/gnu/cygnus/fsr/volume1.1.ps https://web.archive.org/web/20170331165815/http://www.toad.c... The Free Software Community Puts A Free Compiler Back In Solaris 2 Sun Microsystems, Inc. decided to unbundle the C compiler from their latest operating system, Solaris 2. Sun users were extremely upset to lose what they saw as an essential component of the system software. Faced with dramatic increases in licensing fees, early Solaris 2 users turned to free software for a reasonable alternative. Spearheading the effort to port the Free Software Foundation’s GNU C compiler was Palo Alto based Cygnus Support, a company that specializes in providing commercial support for free software. To fund the development effort, Cygnus appealed to the early adopters of Solaris 2. They offered a year of technical support for up to 5 users, and a commitment that the compiler would ship with Solaris 2, in return for a prepaid fee of $2,000. To insure wide distribution of the free compiler and debugger, Cygnus negotiated with SunSoft, Inc. to make the GNU C development tools available on CDware. CDware is a free CD-ROM available from Sun and shipped at no cost to over 90,000 Sun users.

dimgl 4y ago
Wow, crazy long comment. I'm gonna read through all of this now. Thank you!