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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

#71

Post by SwellJoe »

type0 wrote: post #4
pavlov wrote: post #2

I always thought Solaris was a beautiful and memorable name for an operating system. Any connection with the Stanislaw Lem novel (or Tarkovsky movie) was always a bit unclear to me... But I guess a book about futile interactions with a planet-sized alien brain that doesn't care about you other than mysteriously experimenting with your memories is a reasonable metaphor for the Unix user experience.

Soderberghs version is much more reflective of what happened with the emergence of OpenSolaris and Illumos (not to give away any spoilers but apparently forking is a real thing and it lives on). Tarkovskys movie was such a philosophical drivel that I feel asleep. How is the book - is it worth reading? As I understood it neither of films follow the novel very closely.

The book is better than both films, though I liked the films, too. And, yes, the films diverged from the book in significant ways. Lem is a fantastic writer, and Solaris is one of his best. I definitely recommend it, if you like cerebral sci-fi.

Re: The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris

#72

Post by sintaxi »

bcantrill wrote: post #62
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…

While I'm obviously biased, I think you are succumbing to a kind of cargo culting with respect to both commit activity and hardware support. On commit activity, we in illumos don't necessarily have the same values as other projects: we really want to get it correct the first time -- a trait inherited from Solaris that we call "FCS quality all the time."[1] As such, commits have to be tested, thoroughly reviewed (four…

This is worth pointing out. To me high commit activity is much more an indicator of poorly designed software than a quality project especially when a project has been focused on solving a particular problem for some time.

This Solaris news is disappointing. I feel bad for those of you who have worked on this project for a significant portion of your career. Hope those who have been working on it find a good home somewhere.

Bryan, do you expect this will affect the direction of SmartOS in any significant way?

Re: The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris

#73

Post by mrpippy »

oxryly1 wrote: post #64

I hate to be facile, but if Sun and Solaris were so great and Oracle was this known bad place, why did they let the Oracle people in the door in the first place? Maybe sell to someone else?

Oracle paid $5.6 billion for Sun. If someone else wanted to pay that much they could have submitted an offer too. The board cares about maximizing shareholder value, not about the future of any ongoing technologies.

Sun had been in discussions with IBM for months about an acquisition, but I believe the offer was lower and there were antitrust concerns (they did compete directly in a lot of markets) [1]. I suspect they would have been a much better steward of the open-source efforts though

[1]: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/06/technology/business-comput...

Re: The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris

#74

Post by justin66 »

mjcl wrote: post #23
m_samuel_l wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd imagine something like "shutdown -h now" or the solaris equivalent

Good old killall!

Which behaves differently on Solaris than Linux, of course. Linux killall kills specific processes but on Solaris it forcefully kills everything on the landscape...

Re: The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris

#75

Post by ptero »

topkeker wrote: post #56
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.

IIRC, Oracle got a huge boost from US government as it was the semi-official database engine developed (for the Navy?) with taxpayer funds, then deployed (again with taxpayer funds). I'm not complaining, the US probably needed a better DB engine, but it was partly luck, partly backroom agreements that launched and supported Oracle for years. That said, maybe I got my facts badly mixed up.

Re: The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris

#76

Post by mwnorman2 »

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?

I left a little more than 5 years ago ... I cannot fully explain how much ... lighter I felt after. I went to work with a cloud (ha!) over my head everyday for the previous oh 8 years of an almost 10-stint. I was contacted by an Oracle employee to recruit me back about 3 years after I left - I fired off a two page email explaining the poor ethics, the horrendous ways people were/are treated ... sadly to no avail, I couldn't get him to leave and get his life back.

Re: The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris

#77

Post by sintaxi »

erentz wrote: post #13
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?

It was solid, well laid out, consistent, and it advanced good technology seemingly far ahead of its time. ZFS, dtrace, zones (i.e. containers), FireEngine networking, etc.

I'd add SMF to the list as well which systemd seems to take inspiration from.

Re: The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris

#78

Post by tatersolid »

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 product that built Oracle the company, their RDBMS, is frankly one of the worst pieces of "enterprise" software I've ever encountered.

Oracle's only redeeming quality seems to be free golf at nice country clubs paid for by Oracle salespeople.

Re: The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris

#79

Post by bcantrill »

sintaxi wrote: post #72
bcantrill wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I'm obviously biased, I think you are succumbing to a kind of cargo culting with respect to both commit activity and hardware support. On commit activity, we in illumos don't necessarily have the same values as other projects: we really want to get it correct the first time -- a trait inherited from Solaris that we call "FCS quality all the time."[1] As such, commits have to be tested, thoroughly reviewed (four…

This is worth pointing out. To me high commit activity is much more an indicator of poorly designed software than a quality project especially when a project has been focused on solving a particular problem for some time. This Solaris news is disappointing. I feel bad for those of you who have worked on this project for a significant portion of your career. Hope those who have been working on it find a good home some…

For us, with the exception of the human toil on former colleagues (which shouldn't be minimized), this is a total positive: it eliminates the Solaris confusion (which we've seen recently in Go[1]), and it gives us a new talent pool to draw into illumos. While I don't know how many will matriculate, I can say with confidence that it will be significant in terms of magnitude if not in terms of numbers. So yes, I expect it to affect the direction of SmartOS -- and very much for the better!

[1] https://github.com/golang/go/issues/20603

Re: The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris

#80

Post by cpeterso »

abetusk wrote: post #43
inopinatus wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stanislaw Lem deserves a much wider readership. Well, I say that but actually he has a wide readership, just not so much in English-language markets. Besides Solaris , his meditations on life and society in The Cyberiad remain some of my favourite science fiction of all time.

And "His Master's Voice" is one of my favorite books. I totally agree, Lem deserves a place right along Gibson.

I'm reading The Star Diaries, a collection of Lem's short stories from the 1950s. Their absurdity reminds me of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. I just discovered that there was a 2007 German TV series based on the stories, too:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0978537/

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