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The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris

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Re: The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris

#51

Post by inopinatus »

somnium_sn wrote: post #22
z1mm32m4n wrote: post #8

As someone who's never used Solaris or looked into its merits I'm curious: can someone comment on why all the nostalgia for Solaris?

For some Solaris has been one of the first UNIX experiences, as it was one of the most popular unices out there. Most university used it before Linux became popular. For others, like me, who learned Solaris fairly late (2006), Solaris was a testbed for one of the best operating system technologies out there. Modern filesystem (ZFS), dynamic tracing (dtrace), containerization (zones), dependency management during boot…

My 90s university cohort became part of the dot.com boom, and thanks to their ubiquity in the CS labs, ordering Sun kit seemed like the familiar, natural, and obvious choice.

"Get 'em whilst they're young" - I doubt it was an intentional strategy for Sun, but it definitely helped their sales in the bubble.

Re: The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris

#52

Post by richard_todd »

z1mm32m4n wrote: post #8

As someone who's never used Solaris or looked into its merits I'm curious: can someone comment on why all the nostalgia for Solaris?

If you are interested, this talk says a lot about what was cool about Solaris, its place in history, the troubles it encountered, and what was wrong with Oracle's approach, leading to little-known open-source forks.

https://youtu.be/-zRN7XLCRhc (entitled: Fork yeah! The rise and development of Illumos)

Re: The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris

#53

Post by foxhop »

xeeeeeeeeeeenu wrote: post #33

I wouldn't call illumos "thriving". Commit activity[1] is low for a project of this size (compared to e.g. BSDs) and its hardware support is poor. Probably the biggest problem is the fact that all existing distributions are undermaintained and unpolished. SmartOS is the only exception, but it's not a replacement for Solaris which was a general-purpose server OS. SmartOS is merely a bare-metal hypervisor. I really hop…

SmartOS is better then Solaris for servers. It's truly badass. I have an HP DL160 G6 running SmartOS in my basement.

If you learn to use zones (which you should) it can run any workload that Solaris can.

On top of that it also runs native Linux containers and KVM for virtualizing everything else.

It's hands down my favorite operating system.

Re: The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris

#54

Post by michaelbuckbee »

wiremine wrote: post #24

> ..employees who had given their careers to the company were told of their termination via a pre-recorded call — “robo-RIF’d” Every single first person or second hand account I've heard about Oracle makes like a terrible place to work... is this just people being hyperbolic, or is is truly that terrible?

RIF == Reduction In Force

(Saved you a Google)

Re: The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris

#56

Post by topkeker »

harry8 wrote: post #50

Bryan Cantrill give a great lecture. I saw him give an overview of DTrace a decade or more ago and remain impressed. Check him out. https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=bryan+cantrill It's sad that we live in a world where a company doing good , innovative and useful tech is gobbled up by a company like Oracle who should not exist and do largely on their ability to con ignorant senior management and even more…

Unfortunately the world doesn't run off technical ability though. Oracle is a mammoth because it's proficient at extracting value and profit from its businesses. Don't get me wrong, I agree with you in principle, but it's the equivalent of someone destroying artwork and making a gain from it and wondering how they get away with it when the world doesn't care about art, they care about money.

Re: The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris

#57

Post by Vivtek »

foxhop wrote: post #53
xeeeeeeeeeeenu wrote: post #33

I wouldn't call illumos "thriving". Commit activity[1] is low for a project of this size (compared to e.g. BSDs) and its hardware support is poor. Probably the biggest problem is the fact that all existing distributions are undermaintained and unpolished. SmartOS is the only exception, but it's not a replacement for Solaris which was a general-purpose server OS. SmartOS is merely a bare-metal hypervisor. I really hop…

SmartOS is better then Solaris for servers. It's truly badass. I have an HP DL160 G6 running SmartOS in my basement. If you learn to use zones (which you should) it can run any workload that Solaris can. On top of that it also runs native Linux containers and KVM for virtualizing everything else. It's hands down my favorite operating system.

Well, and as of Friday, of course, SmartOS is infinitely better than Solaris.

Re: The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris

#59

Post by ams6110 »

harry8 wrote: post #50

Bryan Cantrill give a great lecture. I saw him give an overview of DTrace a decade or more ago and remain impressed. Check him out. https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=bryan+cantrill It's sad that we live in a world where a company doing good , innovative and useful tech is gobbled up by a company like Oracle who should not exist and do largely on their ability to con ignorant senior management and even more…

The Oracle rdbms was at least for a while unmatched. It had programmability, functionality, and tunability that no other database had. If you needed what it provided, and could afford it, there was no real substitute.

Today, Postgres has come a long way, and distributed databases are much more developed. There is probably much less technical justification for using Oracle than there was 10+ years ago.

Also many companies would pay for Oracle and just use it for CRUD operations. That was throwing money away, no doubt.

Re: The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris

#60

Post by paulmd »

wiremine wrote: post #24

> ..employees who had given their careers to the company were told of their termination via a pre-recorded call — “robo-RIF’d” Every single first person or second hand account I've heard about Oracle makes like a terrible place to work... is this just people being hyperbolic, or is is truly that terrible?

> is this just people being hyperbolic, or is is truly that terrible?

I'm on the outside looking in and don't have any special internal insight, but they didn't just pull this robo-RIF idea out of their ass spur-of-the-moment. Oracle is the kind of place that maintains a robo-layoff system, which pretty much says all you need to know.

"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."

https://youtu.be/-zRN7XLCRhc?t=33m

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