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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

#251

Post by ksk »

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…

What kind of domain are you in that allows you to migrate code to random operating systems with such ease? In any case, I would be skeptical if changing OSs mid-business was the common case. More likely, I'd guess people choose the software stack before the hardware, based on their own experience, advice from others and/or other external factors (requirement to run existing applications, etc).

Re: The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris

#252

Post by sethrin »

feld wrote: post #226
fulminatorz68 wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd see only the pain of migrating applications and learning new administration tools. Solaris was dead long before oracle killed it -- to me.

"migrating applications" -- you'd be shocked at how unix software tends to run on... unix OSes with few to no modifications. Things like: * Java * PHP * Perl * Python * Ruby * Apache * Nginx * Varnish * MySqL * Postgres * Node.js * etc all run just fine on a Solaris-clone. Unless your app is using very specific kernel features it will probably work fine.

Ugh. Unix is absolutely the worst development target. It's clunky, ad-hoc, it uses some horrible ancient programming language and an even more horrible ancient scripting language. Like democracy, it's definitely the worst example of its type ever to have been invented.

Re: The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris

#254

Post by mrweasel »

feld wrote: post #226
fulminatorz68 wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd see only the pain of migrating applications and learning new administration tools. Solaris was dead long before oracle killed it -- to me.

"migrating applications" -- you'd be shocked at how unix software tends to run on... unix OSes with few to no modifications. Things like: * Java * PHP * Perl * Python * Ruby * Apache * Nginx * Varnish * MySqL * Postgres * Node.js * etc all run just fine on a Solaris-clone. Unless your app is using very specific kernel features it will probably work fine.

I think you're missing the most important application for Solaris users: Oracle (the database).

The people who is going to suffer the most from Oracle killing of Solaris are largely its own database customers. I honestly doubt many Solaris customers are running an open source stack on top of it. It's the closed source applications that will be trouble some.

Re: The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris

#255

Post by microtherion »

qubex wrote: post #173
fusiongyro wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If you think Solaris is user-hostile, you should really try out IBM's AIX ("Unix by drunk aliens"). I haven't had great experiences with Irix either.

In the late 1990s, when I was writing code that needed to run on an eclectic collection of platforms, the worst of them in terms of weirdness and unreliability was Unicos. Irix was probably second, and HP/UX third. As far as I recall, AIX was weird, but reliable. Solaris was solid, and Linux was pretty good, but still somewhat new at the time.

Re: The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris

#256

Post by reaperducer »

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?

Ask Google.

Re: The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris

#257

Post by tw04 »

mrweasel wrote: post #254
feld wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"migrating applications" -- you'd be shocked at how unix software tends to run on... unix OSes with few to no modifications. Things like: * Java * PHP * Perl * Python * Ruby * Apache * Nginx * Varnish * MySqL * Postgres * Node.js * etc all run just fine on a Solaris-clone. Unless your app is using very specific kernel features it will probably work fine.

I think you're missing the most important application for Solaris users: Oracle (the database). The people who is going to suffer the most from Oracle killing of Solaris are largely its own database customers. I honestly doubt many Solaris customers are running an open source stack on top of it. It's the closed source applications that will be trouble some.

Oracle wants their customers on their exadata appliances which run Linux, not Solaris. They've been pushing customers that direction for years.

Re: The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris

#258

Post by remline »

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…

Fujitsu was interested, US threatened to block any foreign sale. IBM was interested, a loud mouth blocked negotiations and pushed his golf buddy instead..

Sun made some strange moves toward the end, but there absolutely could have been a product line left if the developer market felt neutral about the buyer and the buyer tried to focus on upsells and professional services. The way Oracle tried to sneak this EOL in is very much evidence of there still being support licenses and professional services money for a few years more.

But it was worth it if the Sun curse took down Ellison. May your foot never leave your mouth again, cloud boy. Now go play golf with network's owner.

Re: The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris

#259

Post by remline »

mseebach wrote: post #160
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…

None of the commercial Unixes survived Linux and the BSDs outside of increasingly specialized niches (well, I guess Darwin did). Oracle was the specific mechanism by which Solaris shuffled off this mortal coil, yes, but the last decade of it's life was not a foregone conclusion when Sun folded. The others are just as dead, but in their own ways. Nobody is asking for a round of applause for Oracle, but the scorn poure…

Ellison bought sun then disparaged cloud and killed Sun's cloud ventures only to watch Microsoft recover on selling cloud to a market that no longer wants proprietary desktops..

I was very negative on Sun, but looking at Microsoft fill the gap eventually, I have to assume IBM would have made me eat my shoe if they got the deal instead of Oracle.

Re: The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris

#260

Post by mjcl »

justin66 wrote: post #227
vacri wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't shut the machine down though, right? Just kills all the processes? I remember reading somewhere that solaris-killall was only a part of the shutdown process. I remember having a related problem with an ubuntu cloud server a while back. I'd called 'halt' instead of 'shutdown' - they're not the same, and on this machine 'halt' didn't actually send the 'okay, now power off' bit.

I learned what Solaris killall did in a very exciting and stressful way, but that was long ago and to be honest I'm not 100% sure. I believe I was left with a root prompt on the server itself and nothing else. I remember being disgusted by the various halt, shutdown, reboot commands and so I learned what the various init run levels could do. That worked until I realized that Redhat and Debian set them up differently.…

Yup, I learned that it was different on Solaris than Linux on a remote system. Had to sheepishly call and ask someone to powercycle the box.
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