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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

#201

Post by whyever »

samoright wrote: post #188
snw wrote: post #169

There seems to be a lot of odd nostalgia for Solaris in the comments here and on twitter. I think that's missing the point of the article. Yes, Oracle Solaris is dead. But illumos is better, open source, alive and here to stay. You can use illumos today, right now, and have your ZFS, mdb, DTrace and zones. It really is open source and we're a community using and improving it. For 7 years now already. As illumos is on…

How does running a different OS than most people can give a company an advantage? Can you elaborate this?

I can think of the following reasons:

1. It is less profitable to develop exploits targeting a minor OS.

2. Minor OS may have some specific features that the major OS don't.

Re: The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris

#202

Post by jimktrains2 »

Annatar wrote: post #197
jimktrains2 wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> . Choose your hardware for your software, not the other way around. Oh, look at Mr "I don't need to use what's laying around" over here.

It's a lesson one learned fairly quickly in the late 1980's and early-to-mid 1990's on the Commodore Amiga. Since then, I've always chosen my hardware for my software, because software is infinitely more important than the hardware: even the most powerful hardware is utterly useless without the software to enable one to get work done. Always choose your hardware for your software, never the other way around.

My point is that you often don't get that luxury.

Re: The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris

#203

Post by daemin »

magnawave wrote: post #138
digitalzombie wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Whenever I read about Sun going down, I'm always reminded by the Joel Spolsky article https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/

Re: The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris

#204

Post by marvy »

dozzie wrote: post #168
marvy wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have indeed used Solaris, you could have left a more useful comment. Your creative use of ellipsis is totally cheating by the way: you did not preserve the structure of the sentence.

Oh, but I did preserve the structure. It's OP who doesn't understand how this grammatical construction works, and this particular mistake irritates me so much.

This preserves the structure better:

> As someone who's never used Solaris [...] I'm curious: can someone [...]

Notice that you left out the subject (I), left out the verb (am), and replaced a colon with a comma!

Re: The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris

#205

Post by DonHopkins »

To quote the brilliant Jim Morrison:

"Waiting for the Sun" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A0kypyGSKsE

"The End" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6FMGYycBAMU

And to quote the also brilliant Jim Thompson (whose Levenshtein distance from Jim Morrison is 5):

    We had Joy, we had fun
    We ran Unix on a Sun,
    But the source and the song
    Of Solaris have all gone.

Re: The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris

#206

Post by DonHopkins »

magnawave wrote: post #138
digitalzombie wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I blame System V.

I'm shocked, I say shocked, that it took much longer for System V to kill it than you're shocked, you say shocked, how long it took Java to kill it. ;)

Re: The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris

#207

Post by aNoob7000 »

bpyne wrote: post #100
0xCMP wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Literally everything you do with memory and disks can also be reduced to CRUD, but that is an extreme example to show my point: a DB does a lot more. A well written DB, in this case a good RDBMS, gives you stronger guarantees that data is saved and accessed in certain ways. That by itself is worth using a better one that gives you better guarantees. But they also provide stronger typing and checking of the data. They…

Amen to everything you and arnarbi wrote. However, I've come to dislike building business rules using the proprietary languages of the RDBMS vendors. In particular, I use Oracle and have been making a case with my employer to stop creating ties to Oracle by using PL/SQL as our house language. While it provides some efficiencies and can sometimes make coding easier, it can stifle development as easily. I'm all for exp…

As someone working at a company that decided to write most of their SQL code at the application layer, there are definite tradeoffs. Our application performance suffers because of the fear of vendor lock-in and the flexibility others thought that writing code at the application level would provide.

The question I pose to anyone consider this type of architecture is, how often do you switch database platforms?

Re: The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris

#208

Post by DonHopkins »

fusiongyro wrote: post #145
digitalzombie wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I dunno. I used it a little in college in the early 2000s, along with anything else I could get my hands on, and it seemed to me to be user hostile even by Unix standards. When I worked with Linux, *BSD etc. or Irix, things tended to make more sense. It was difficult to get much experience with Solaris or the other commercial Unixes because you usually had to have particular hardware. Even when Solaris became free an…

I guess you never had the pleasure of using a Pyramid Technology Corporation 90x RISC-based minicomputer running OSx, which supported BSD and System V at the same time in parallel universes, and had patented "conditional symbolic links" to support dynamically switching between the two by changing an environment variable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbolic_link#Variable_symboli...

>Pyramid Technology's OSx Operating System implemented conditional symbolic links which pointed to different locations depending on which universe a program was running in. The universes supported were AT&T's SysV.3 and the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD 4.3). For example: if the ps command was run in the att universe, then the symbolic link for the directory /bin would point to /.attbin and the program /.attbin/ps would be executed. Whereas if the ps command was run in the ucb universe, then /bin would point to /.ucbbin and /.ucbbin/ps would be executed. Similar Conditional Symbolic Links were also created for other directories such as /lib, /usr/lib, /usr/include.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyramid_Technology

...And the hardware wasn't all that reliable either!

http://art.net/~hopkins/Don/text/gymble-roulette.html

At least you could run Space Invaders on the system console while it was down waiting for repairs.

Re: The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris

#209

Post by samoa4 »

bad_user wrote: post #130
magnawave wrote: post #112

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…

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…

> AFAIK DTrace and ZFS can't be used with Linux due to their license being incompatible with GPL.

for debian based: add non-free repo and apt install ...

while installing, there comes a prompt were you have literally no choice but to accept the incompatibility of the licenses (and move on :)

Re: The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris

#210

Post by DonHopkins »

paulmd wrote: post #60
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 en…

And you know somebody had to program the robo-RIF script. Wanna bet they had to run it on themselves when they were done?
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