
The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris (2017) - kick
http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc/2017/09/04/the-sudden-death-and-eternal-life-of-solaris/
======
beefhash
I still kind of wish SunOS (the BSD-based version, before AT&T made them
switch over to System V) had made it out of Sun as an open source version.

Sources for 4.1.4 leaked, but of course that's without official blessing...
And Oracle's lawyers probably make up more than half the company.

~~~
easytiger
The loss of Solaris is a tremendous tragedy to the technology world. I once
welcomed it's demise. But the lack of any and all competing platforms for
Linux has lead Linux down a not entirely happy road

~~~
trasz
Only if you assume OSX or FreeBSD don’t exist.

~~~
Decade
OS X was never a great Unix (other than paying to get the official trademark
that one time), and it’s becoming even less of a Unix over time.

FreeBSD is OK, but very lacking in manpower. Every time I install a desktop
package these days, I see multiple warnings about how this or that dependency
has no maintainer.

With so much attention these days on Docker and other halfway measures
involving namespaces, it’s not really Unix that’s the platform anymore. Linux
is the platform for a variety of network and desktop applications.

~~~
trasz
OSX is the only Unix system actually used in non-microscopic quantities on
desktops.

Regarding Docker - it’s like saying it’s not Linux that’s the platform
anymore, it’s the hypervisor. Linux is just one of the layers.

------
fargle
Yep, old news 2017. But everybody seems to kinda see about the same thing.
Although I'd say it really died when Oracle bought what was left of Sun. And
so then died java (meh), and everything else, btw.

Kinda sad, I think Sun was a fairly innocent victim of the dot-com bubble
bust.

So f _ck larry f_ cking ellison, and I hope the horse he rode in on throws him
and then kicks him square in the nuts (I have nothing against the horse).

~~~
newnewpdro
Sun and SGI both died not because of the dot-com bubble bursting, they died
because commodity PCs became competitive with their extremely overpriced
offerings, then GNU/Linux enabled the PCs to do all the UNIXy things too.

They should have seen the writing on the wall and done something to
differentiate themselves meaningfully before the PC wave washed over them.
They failed to do so, and could barely afford to keep the lights on at the
scale they operated afterwards.

~~~
fargle
Well the other thing was that the surplus market for 6 month old machines
undercut their sales.

It's true that PC's (amd64) became capable workstations around the same time,
or shortly after. And that didn't help.

But for the time, the RISC UNIX Workstation was NOT overpriced. If you compare
your $1500 core-i7 machine of today to a $30,000 RISC machine of 2001, the
later would seem overpriced. But not at all if compared to the $1500 Dell of
2001 running Windows NT 4.0. Remember, things changed very rapidly. And the
dot-com burst before Linux and amd64 really happened.

In a way, both Linux and x86/amd64 have turned the PC into the UNIX
workstation of the 90's and 2000's. And with ONE dominant, excellent, kinda-
sorta SVR4 OS too (Linux).

~~~
ska
No, they were already way overpriced. The Unix workstations were nice, and had
good tools. But you could buy dual cpu intel machines of very roughly
equivalent performance (excepting some specific tasks) for about 1/4 the cost
(or less), and put Linux or BSD on them.

The writing was on the wall you at least 97 , and the Unix vendors looked at
it and just kept doing the same thing. They were already dead, but the dot.com
collapse finished them a little faster I suppose.

~~~
taborj
For reference, I purchased a Micron system with a dual Pentium Pro slot W6-Li
motherboard (but -- and this is crucial -- _only one 180MHz PPro chip_ ), SCSI
internals, 64MB of RAM and a CD writer, for $5200. This was in 1996.

If I recall correctly, adding the second PPro 180MHz chip added around $2k to
the price. Call it $7-8k all in.

The 200MHz PPro had a SPECInt92 value of 366[0]. You can find a list of other
SPECInt92 values here[1]. So it was, indeed, faster than many systems, but not
the fastest. Value for money? Yeah, it had it.

There were x86 versions of SVR4 UNIX available commercially, so it's quite
plausible that you could do an apples-to-apples comparison. I'm sure one is
out there, but I don't have the time to find one.

It's worth noting that in 1994, Eric S. Raymond discontinued his "PC-clone
UNIX buyers guide" because he had switched to Linux, and didn't think that
UNIX had a future. [2]

I think it's still fair to say that the dedicated UNIX workstations had a
certain panache that made "real" engineers want them, badly.

[0] [https://www.hpcwire.com/1995/11/03/200-mhz-intel-pentium-
pro...](https://www.hpcwire.com/1995/11/03/200-mhz-intel-pentium-pro-
benchmarks-at-366-specint92/)

[1]
[http://performance.netlib.org/performance/html/new.spec.cint...](http://performance.netlib.org/performance/html/new.spec.cint92.col0.html)

[2] [http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/clone-unix-
guide.txt](http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/clone-unix-guide.txt)

------
trhway
One of the major aspects of Solaris demise was that it fell victim to the
anti-cannibalization efforts by the extremely politically strong SPARC
division inside Sun. That bound the Solaris fate to the [rapidly falling] fate
of the Sun SPARC and prevented any serious investment into the development of
the x86 version. As Solaris was falling more and more painfully behind in
support of popular x86 hardware a running joke ca. 2002-4 from the Solaris dev
guys was - to have an instance of Linux kernel with its drivers running inside
the Solaris instance and use that Linux instance to proxy requests to the
various otherwise unsupported by Solaris hardware.

------
thinkingkong
This is from 2017 and I hope the title can be adjusted to reflect as much. Its
still a great article.

~~~
mathattack
That would explain why I couldn’t find in Google News.

------
Annatar
That's okay, Solaris lives on as the free, open source software that is the
illumos source code, from which distributions like Tribblix and SmartOS are
made. illumos is being actively developed and it's very lively.

------
cable2600
I used SunOS and Solaris in 1995-1996 as a federal contractor for the US
Military. It seemed to work well for a Unix OS. We used many different types
of Unix.

GNU/Linux, BSD Unix, and MacOSX slowly took marketshare away from Sun/Oracle.
Expensive SPARCStations no longer were affordable.

------
dang
Discussed at the time:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15170378](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15170378)

------
drmpeg
As a homage, I use this wallpaper for my iPhone.

[http://www.w6rz.net/solaris_iphone.png](http://www.w6rz.net/solaris_iphone.png)

------
hapless
It is worth noting how much has changed since this blog post.

ZFS on Linux, the dubiously licensed mess that it is, now drives most of the
bug tracking and patches.

Joyent, once deeply committed to illumos, is now primarily a Linux company,
because Samsung has no particular need to hold onto Solaris.

Solaris is even sadder and deader today than the author foresaw :(

------
m12k
It's fascinating to me that a company like Oracle that I only ever see
ridiculed and despised for its products and business practices, is also so
profitable. I hear so many tales of companies that decline and eventually
become irrelevant when they start being run by MBAs with no product vision,
but it seems that once a company reaches a certain size, it's just par for the
course, and they seem to do fine anyway. Is it just inertia and brand value at
that point?

~~~
mothsonasloth
As someone who has worked in corporate companies, here is a list of reasons
why Oracle, IBM, Microsoft, Google, VMWare, Deloitte etc. are "par for the
course"

* If you are upper level management at Blue Chip company "Initech", the last thing you want to be dealing with is a smaller B2B provider, with a hipster name like "Data Badger". Being smaller means more risk (not necessarily but thats the culture). You want the big safe boring companies.

* Big corporates are still wined and dined by Oracle's sales teams etc. Yes you might have to do your mandatory HR training about bribes and corporate gifts, but this stuff still happens under the table. Its business, it might not be ethical, but its business.

* Cronyism etc. management tends to circulate around companies closely connected with each other. A Microsoft manager might float to Vodafone or JP Morgan. When they get there, they are more likely to throw any of their old MS colleagues a bone when it comes to service contracts etc. This is why networking is so important in LinkedIn for corporate careerism.

* Did I mention sales already, yes, but these big companies have large sales and marketing budgets. Those buzzwords are expensive you know!

* Those sales and marketers target managers and people with a high influence / low technical understand co-efficient. Don't get me wrong there are smart managers out there that know their stuff however they are generally a rareity. So they tend to drink the kool-aid from the big tech corporates e.g. "Hey Bob, I think Microsoft's Foobar Cloud Hypervisor, can streamline our data acquisition and increase synergy in the business".

* When you take your first hit of Oracle's software or services, you are effectively tied into service contracts which make it painful to leave but easy to extend. You might spend £200million for a 5 year contract, then three years in you see a new technology offering for an extra £4million etc. That's relatively pennies to what you've already sunk into the service contract.

* Marketing and branding which you picked up on in your post. There is a reason you see IBM or Oracle advertised a lot in the Financial Times, Economist, New Scientist etc.

Hope this explains why Oracle et al. are dominent in the industry.

~~~
2wrist
> hipster name like "Data Badger"

hahaha! Thats a great name for a company :-)

~~~
emmelaich
[https://www.databadger.net/](https://www.databadger.net/)

:-)

Also, there is the similarly themed [https://dbeaver.io/](https://dbeaver.io/)

A great, open source tool btw.

------
hackerbabz
What did Solaris do that made it a good choice?

~~~
scurvy
Hot swapping CPU and memory boards was pretty dope in 2000. Can't do that in
equivalently priced hardware and servers as easily today.

~~~
robocat
Because the unit of swappability changed to a VM or server... for good
reasons.

~~~
scurvy
If that's the case, why do my VMs in public clouds constantly go down for
hardware maintenance?

We've definitely regressed despite the buzzwords and hype.

~~~
zorked
Most of the "hardware maintainance" is defragmenting the workload so that the
VMs run in fewer physical machines to retire racks of old hardware. Some load
balancing too.

~~~
IcePic
Or an endless line of Spectre/Meltdown patches needing the hosts to reboot in
order to get this weeks firmware into the intel CPUs.

~~~
scurvy
This is what I was getting at. When Sun had issues with CPUs, they sent you
new CPU boards and you could hot swap them live without downtime

~~~
zorked
That was indeed cool, but it also belongs to the "pet" phase of computing and
this is the "cattle" age.

~~~
scurvy
Not really. It was done at scale, too. Hotmail replaced all of the faulty CPUs
live.

