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The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris
131–140 of 279 posts
Re: The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris
#132As someone who's never used Solaris or looked into its merits I'm curious: can someone comment on why all the nostalgia for Solaris?
I know many people mentioned dtrace, ZFS, mdb.. in describing Solaris' merits but it was not a very good OS in 1997 when I first got my hands on it. It was slow - the SPARC hardware didn't help and ZFS/MDB/Dtrace did not exist back then. But I think back then for Enterprises Solaris was the most easily accessible platform SPARC hardware came with and it had a good run for a short while. It was only when Linux started…
Agreed. When I got into IT professionally in 1990 I tolerated dealing with SunOS. It was still BSD'ish. But then when it went full re^h^h SysV I put a bullet in its head for me personally. Never used it again after that. I think the last time I touched a Solaris box was 2001 @ TWA in KC. Then 9/11 happened. It was never anything special in my eyes. I just remember hating having to try to find things and software for it. No package management, everything had to be compiled from source. Shiver. AND!!! They didn't ship with CC! It SUCKED! They unbundled it. Yeah not many fond memories of it.
Re: The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris
#133An old, old Oracle joke:
Q: On what hardware does Oracle run best?
A: A 35mm slide projector.
Re: The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris
#134At 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…
> 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.
This is a crop out that you're giving on behalf of Oracle.
Oracle does this all the time. It's their modus operandi.
They buy companies/technologies out, milk them for license fees and let it trudge along until it stops making money anymore and either close shop or abandon it to Apache Foundation.
There are anecdotes out there ranging from technologies they've bought to sale representatives having their bonus taken away from selling licenses.
Your statement also just ignore their cowardly act of re proprietrating solaris. They did the same with Java not giving out TCK for Apache open source Java. There are many other instances of hostile actions toward the open source communities.
Re: The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris
#135Twenty 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…
For my work (and the 160-thread POWER8 box I got given to run it on by IBM) AIX didn't even enter the discussion, which was sort of a shame. I had no need for it, but it would've been fun; but Linux on POWER with Docker and everything else is surprisingly nice.
Now to get myself one of those POWER9 workstations for home...
Re: The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris
#136At 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…
If you let the product die with a not giving a fuck attitude, of course nobody is going to use it. For example when was the last marketing campaign that you can remember for Solaris? Besides, they've started killing Solaris since 2010: http://garrett.damore.org/2010/08/hand-may-be-forced.html > And Linux and the BSDs are definitely better for those selective code gifts! AFAIK DTrace and ZFS can't be used with Linux d…
ZoL[1] works fine here on production and LXC+Docker loves it.
Re: The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris
#137At 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…
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Re: The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris
#138At 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…
> 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. This is a crop out that you're giving on behalf of Oracle. Oracle does this all the time. It's their modus operandi. They buy companies/technologies out, milk them for license fees and let it trudge along until it stops making money anymore and either close shop or abandon it to Apache Foun…
Yes Oracle did that to Solaris. You are right.
But it was already pretty dead before Oracle bought Sun. Which was why Sun was for-sale in the first place.
That's not just Oracle's fault. Place blame where blame is due(java) - but blaming everything on Oracle is kinda silly here. Sun mis-stepped pretty hard in the years after the original .com bubble and what we are seeing now the the final result. I'm shocked it took this long.
Re: The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris
#139I 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 also found the films extremely boring and thought the book might be better. It turns out, the films were very good at capturing the book's boringness.
Re: The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris
#140I'm surprised he is surprised. Everybody knew Solaris was dead. I'm more surprised Oracle still had so many engineers working on it. I guess they where waiting out some SLAs.
Of course Oracle is a horrible company and all but Solaris has been dead for a long time.