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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

#111

Post by MrMorden »

ptero wrote: post #75
topkeker wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

CIA. (Source: Larry Ellison, as quoted in Business Insider: http://www.businessinsider.com/the-cia-made-larry-ellison-a-...)

Which is why the villain in Charlie Stross's _The Jennifer Morgue_ is "Ellis Billington".

Re: The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris

#112

Post by magnawave »

At the end of the day, Sun/Oracle has to be able to make revenue from Solaris for them to keep paying those peoples' salaries.

Is your startup / company deploying on Solaris? Nope of course you aren't - who is?! Pretty much nobody nowadays - w3techs.com shows Solaris at 0.0005% for webservers for example. Everyone talks about how great it is(to be sure there are some small bits that are pretty dang amazing) - yet for some reason nearly no one actually DOES use it! Perhaps there is a reason for that. Lord knows I have many battle scars from the many real world rough edges that never seemed to get less fundamentally shitty(for starters: path_to_inst and smf I'm looking right at you!)

I definitely respect the amazing work of some of the engineers on the Solaris team back in the day. ZFS and DTrace being two that have made the tech world by in large a better place either directly or thru inspiration. And Linux and the BSDs are definitely better for those selective code gifts! But nonetheless, the world voted with their feet, and Solaris didn't make the cut.

Re: The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris

#113

Post by privong »

asveikau wrote: post #70
privong wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. This was my case. I was playing around with Linux, both on my own machine at home as well as with a server at my high school (shell accounts being a perk of joining the computer club). While learning about Linux I also picked up some of the history of…

> I think it would be cool to have an Ultra 5 again. I have an ultra 5 in a closet that hasn't been powered on in the current decade. Was thinking of giving it a spin in light of recent news.

That would be fun. Now you have me wondering if I still have those Solaris 7 disks in a drawer somewhere...

Re: The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris

#114

Post by jtchang »

I remember playing around on a old Sun sparc. It was my first exposure to unix and curiosity got the better of me. I picked up a copy of freebsd and started to tinker with that and read more and more about the unix philosophy.

To this day I still think Solaris was really well thought out. It had a certain rock solidness to it that I can't really describe. Compare to even openbsd or freebsd I always thought or felt it was more stable (regardless of that was actually the case).

I'm sad that so much work went into such a great OS and now it is basically gone to die. These days if you're thinking about creating a piece of software and want it to last open source is probably the only option.

Re: The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris

#115

Post by bhangi »

asveikau wrote: post #70
privong wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. This was my case. I was playing around with Linux, both on my own machine at home as well as with a server at my high school (shell accounts being a perk of joining the computer club). While learning about Linux I also picked up some of the history of…

> I think it would be cool to have an Ultra 5 again. I have an ultra 5 in a closet that hasn't been powered on in the current decade. Was thinking of giving it a spin in light of recent news.

I had an ultra 10 in my bedroom closet and it was impossible to sleep with that thing on. But I don't think it was much worse than HP 9000s or IIRC DEC alphas. Feeling nostalgic now.

Re: The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris

#116

Post by rdtsc »

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.

I watched both movies. Tarkovsky's version is my favorite but I grew up with Soviet cinema so maybe that's why (though one can argue his films are so outside the norm with Soviet cinema that it wouldn't matter).

One of the keys to Tarkovsky's movies is that he is concerned with human relationships primarily. Romantic relationships, parents and children, etc. Even when he directed "sci-Fi" movies, they were never about rockets, aliens, shooting, explosions.

This quote from the movie, illustrates that well I think:

---

We don't want to conquer space at all. We want to expand Earth endlessly. We don't want other worlds; we want a mirror. We seek contact and will never achieve it. We are in the foolish position of a man striving for a goal he fears and doesn't want. Man needs man!

---

I remember watching this movie and being disappointed because I expected more sci-fi stuff. Same thing with Stalker, his other sci-fi film. Only after seeing The Mirror (my favorite of his films) started liking his other movies.

Re: The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris

#117

Post by rodgerd »

StillBored wrote: post #108
rodgerd wrote: post #58

Twenty years ago, if you'd said that the surviving commercial *ixen would be AIX and HP/UX, you'd have been drummed out of the Unix Beard club.

HP/UX is dead too because HP despite apparently having an x86 port won't be porting it off itanium. Random link about it ( http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/06/08/hp_ux_on_x86_project... ). Whether they do a 180 and port it to x86, the fact remains its probably to late, the damage has been done. That leaves AIX, which at least has decent hardware to run on. But its got the OS/2 problem too, you can write your app for…

Ironically HP/UX may nonetheless outlive Solaris - the claim of its imminent demise being the event that provided the excuse to de-support Oracle software on HP/UX.

Re: The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris

#118

Post by nickhalfasleep »

artursapek wrote: post #97
sprayk wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what's in it for Oracle?

some goodwill. Microsoft earned a lot of with all of the open sourcing they've been doing in the last few years.

Microsoft is clawing it's way back into the agile stacks as a way to sell it's cloud services to small shops. I don't think Oracle really aims for startups or less than $10mil/year companies right now.

They sell on the golf course, not the meetup or con presentation.

Re: The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris

#119

Post by cyphar »

syntheticnature wrote: post #41
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.

I figure the connection is probably more about being from a company named "Sun," since it's a Latin word and the source of the English adjective "solar" for 'pertaining to the sun.'

And illumos is similarly named (Latin for illuminate).

Re: The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris

#120

Post by Sir_Cmpwn »

cesarb wrote: post #110
Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hardware support is by far the stupidest complaint that prevails when people talk about operating systems. Choose your hardware for your software, not the other way around. There are so many better things operating system authors have to do than to implement thousands of competing proprietary hardware interfaces. Mature support for even 50% of consumer hardware would take a massive team of full time engineers years t…

When you say "choose your hardware for your software", you are assuming the software has already been chosen by the time the hardware is selected. That's not necessarily the case. I already have the hardware, it's been bought years ago, and it works with the software I use. Now if for instance I wanted to evaluate OpenSolaris, but it didn't run on the hardware I have, I would probably pass it up. I wouldn't invest ho…

I think that this argument holds up, but fails to justify the huge engineering cost of supporting large amounts of proprietary consumer hardware.

If you want to evaluate it but don't have the hardware, try qemu.

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