
The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris - elvinyung
http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc/2017/09/04/the-sudden-death-and-eternal-life-of-solaris/
======
snw
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 only the basic building block of the operating system (but
unlike linux includes kernel + basic userland) one usually runs one of the
distributions:

\- SmartOS, developed by Joyent as a cloud hypervisor. Supports zones, KVM and
lx-branded linux containers. [1]

\- OmniOS CE, a minimal distribution targeted for bare metal server
installations [2]

\- OpenIndiana, similar to the traditional opensolaris. If you care about GUI
this is probably the one. [3]

\- Tribblix, modern components with retro style [4]

Sure, the user base is smaller than Linux. But that is also true for FreeBSD
which is used by Netflix and Whatsapp. Running a different OS than most other
people can give your company an advantage and I know that ZFS and zones have
done that for mine.

[1]
[https://wiki.smartos.org/display/DOC/Download+SmartOS](https://wiki.smartos.org/display/DOC/Download+SmartOS)

[2] [http://www.omniosce.org](http://www.omniosce.org)

[3] [https://www.openindiana.org](https://www.openindiana.org)

[4] [http://www.tribblix.org](http://www.tribblix.org)

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

~~~
mysterydip
A different OS can solve some of the pain points of the mainstream options.
Depending on your business, the features a different OS brings could have a
large impact on performance or stability.

Potential areas for improvement could be anything from filesystem to process
concurrency to virtualization.

~~~
fulminatorz68
I'd see only the pain of migrating applications and learning new
administration tools. Solaris was dead long before oracle killed it -- to me.

~~~
feld
"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.

~~~
sethrin
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.

~~~
fulminatorz68
I'd suggest your experience|expertise is lacking. My first couple of months
were bad but then I learned to appreciate the expressiveness and facility of
even a bad shell language and the open horizon of how things were done. This
comment seems to be classic troll or sour grapes.

~~~
sethrin
It was a joke, actually. The quote I was referencing is, "Democracy is the
worst form of government, except for all the others that have been tried." I
actually wrote a (short) book on the ways of the Unix shell, which hopefully
qualifies me to have an opinion on the matter. Although UHH is quite dated,
there is and has been a great deal of legitimate criticism of Unix, and for
that matter C and Bash as well. You have mistaken my opinion on the matter,
but your eagerness in assigning negative qualities here is something you might
want to examine. To be clear, I do consider Unix and Bash to be imperfect but
essential tools for any programmer.

------
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.

~~~
digitalzombie
> 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.

~~~
magnawave
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.

~~~
remline
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.

------
harry8
Bryan Cantrill give a great lecture. I saw him give an overview of DTrace a
decade or more ago and remain impressed. Check him out.

[https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=bryan+cantrill](https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=bryan+cantrill)

It's sad that we live in a world where a company doing good , innovative and
useful tech is gobbled up by a company like Oracle who should not exist and do
largely on their ability to con ignorant senior management and even more
ignorant boards of directors.

Is there ever a technical reason to use Oracle? If there is what percentage of
Oracle sales does it account for? Ie if it really is non-zero I bet it's a
single digit percentage. Woeful company from the top down is their reputation
and they've earned it.

~~~
ams6110
The Oracle rdbms was at least for a while unmatched. It had programmability,
functionality, and tunability that no other database had. If you needed what
it provided, and could afford it, there was no real substitute.

Today, Postgres has come a long way, and distributed databases are much more
developed. There is probably much less technical justification for using
Oracle than there was 10+ years ago.

Also many companies would pay for Oracle and just use it for CRUD operations.
That was throwing money away, no doubt.

~~~
closeparen
Uh, doesn't everything you do with a database reduce to CRUD?

I understand that sometimes you do the composition of many CRUD operations,
but this is still CRUD.

~~~
0xCMP
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 provide a
programming language neutral way to access the data quickly and efficiently.
They index data to make queries on it faster. They do much of this
automatically so you think it's all simple CRUD operations, but they also
provide ways to explain what they're doing if it isn't working as expected. I
can count the number of programs (not DBs) on my hand that I know of that can
explain themselves accurately without needing a debugger.

Edit: I don't mean to be annoying. Most people on HN knew this and I'm not
assuming you didn't, but while most people just use RDBMS for simple CRUD
operations they're losing out on the power that these databases have been
designed with.

~~~
bpyne
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 expressing data relationships in the RDBMS and using efficiency
mechanisms like indexes and cost-based optimization. However, I now prefer
business rules to be expressed outside the database.

[EDIT: Corrected anarbi to arnarbi.]

~~~
aNoob7000
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?

~~~
bpyne
The answer is almost never because the cost in time is too high for such a
switch. It's the same question I posed 10 years ago. My view changed since
coming to my current employer.

I work for a moderate-sized university. The applications I support require up-
to-date information in order to test modifications. They are read-intensive
with few writes within the database. We can afford only one test database for
the entire university. We refresh the database from production only once a
quarter, at most. My applications would benefit greatly by being able to
switch URL's to the production database in order to test a mod. Since our
code, written in PL/SQL, gets stored in the database that it runs on, we can't
do such a thing without significant effort: dblinks or modifying package names
to store in production for testing or a test schema or whatever else you can
think up.

Another issue is that PL/SQL is not a robust language for modern development.
Its type-system was designed for strictness, which is great in life-critical
systems. But, there is no notion of inheritance and no ability to write
generic collections.

To mimic inheritance, you can create objects backed by tables and inherit one
from the other. It has the feel of being bolted on and yet another tie to
Oracle.

One final issue is that PL/SQL is highly subject to the resource management of
the Oracle kernel. Often, the kernel is extremely efficient. But, there are
times when you need code running in a separate address space, preferably on a
separate server. For instance, one application I wrote is a batch system that
has a lot of processing rules built into it. Our database is tuned for OLTP.
My application is categorized by the DBA's as data warehouse-oriented. Yet my
application has to run hourly throughout the day and compete with resources
necessary for the OLTP stuff. Putting it onto a separate server, away from
Oracle's kernel management, would more than likely help a performance issue we
have.

So, the answer to your question is the one you were looking for. But, my
concern isn't necessarily switching database vendors.

~~~
cmkrnl
I understand the cost of switching now. Was Postgres never an option? Do the
uptime requirements call for RAC etc.?

~~~
bpyne
Our Banner student information system is tied to Oracle. My applications all
go against Banner data. Given the licensing cost for Oracle and our current
round of cost-cutting, if Postgres was an option, we'd probably take it.

~~~
jlgaddis
Several years ago at an .edu I had to deal with an upgrade from our current
system to Banner. I truly feel for you. :)

------
wiremine
> ..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?

~~~
paulmd
> 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 entity in human history with less complexity or nuance to it than Oracle."

[https://youtu.be/-zRN7XLCRhc?t=33m](https://youtu.be/-zRN7XLCRhc?t=33m)

~~~
fasquoika
Oh man, so many good quotes in that talk. "Do not fall into the trap of
anthropomorphizing Larry Ellison"

~~~
_asummers
"There is no need to have an open mind about Oracle. That wastes the openness
of your mind."

------
pavlov
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.

~~~
type0
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.

~~~
oelmekki
I didn't read the book, but being boring is Tarkovsky's touch, so it sounds
pretty safe to say it comes from him.

Also people, please don't downvote parent. It's very fair to say this movie is
boring and confusing, and I think it was the very point. Tarkovsky has this
style of filming around supernatural / sf things but never actually showing
them. Instead, he prefers to explore the anxiety they cause on humans, anxiety
which he often represents through long waiting with deceptive conclusions, so
I would say that feeling annoyed is quite what is expected from people
watching them. It's art, not entertainment.

~~~
bhangi
Tarkovsky's works are generally demanding works of art. They are definitely
slow paced and almost boring, but I've always found myself in a much more
thoughtful frame of mind after watching his films.

As for Solaris, it is worth reading the book as well as watching both versions
of the film -- they ask and explore different questions. The book is about the
nature of intelligence and life whereas the films are more about the human
part of the equation -- what does it mean to be a human as opposed to be a
"replicant"? Tarkovsky is slower paced, but IMHO encourages deep reflection.
Soderbergh's version is definitely more watchable and is actually quite
thoughtful by Hollywood standards.

------
xeeeeeeeeeeenu
I wouldn't call illumos "thriving". Commit activity[1] is low for a project of
this size (compared to e.g. BSDs) and its hardware support is poor.

Probably the biggest problem is the fact that all existing distributions are
undermaintained and unpolished. SmartOS is the only exception, but it's _not_
a replacement for Solaris which was a general-purpose server OS. SmartOS is
merely a bare-metal hypervisor.

I really hope that some of the laid-off developers will start contributing to
the project. It really needs them.

[1] - [https://github.com/illumos/illumos-
gate/commits/master](https://github.com/illumos/illumos-gate/commits/master)

~~~
Sir_Cmpwn
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_ to pull off, and would be wasted
when that team could have been making huge strides and innovations in the
parts of the OS that actually matter.

If your hardware isn't supported and you don't like it, get your ass into the
code and build support for it.

~~~
cesarb
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 hours and hours coding support for it
to run on my hardware, before I were sure I would have a use for it. And
that's assuming I could; I do happen to know how to write a low-level driver,
but many people who would otherwise be interested on the software might not
have that knowledge and/or ability.

Of course, once you already use the software, the situation inverts itself. I
do choose only hardware which is known to work well with Linux, since that's
the operating system I use, and I have even ported a device driver when that
wasn't the case. But that can only happen because, many years ago when I first
tried Linux, it worked perfectly with the hardware I had.

~~~
Sir_Cmpwn
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.

------
runarb
> ..employees who had given their careers to the company were told of their
> termination via a pre-recorded call — “robo-RIF’d”

This sounds awful, and very long from what would be the legal requirements
demanded in the country I live in.

What would such a robot call say?

~~~
m_samuel_l
I'd imagine something like "shutdown -h now" or the solaris equivalent

~~~
gruturo
Solaris would understand that, but Oracle's move was nowhere that gentle.

"uadmin 1 6" was more like it (Immediate poweroff, do not even sync disks)

~~~
fimbulvetr
More like:

lom> poweroff

As that is definitely something the os has no cability to block.

------
DonHopkins
Just ran across this: Scott McNealy's answer to "why didn't Sun sell to IBM":

[https://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/12/07/mcnealy_sun_and_ope...](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/12/07/mcnealy_sun_and_open_source/?page=3)

"One of the issues I had with one of the other suitors was there was a
complete overlap in what they did and what we did, and I could see 100 per
cent of the Sun employees getting fired," McNealy told us. He didn't name
names, but he was referring to IBM's bid for Sun. IBM had competed heavily
with Sun for decades on processors, servers, Unix, Java tools, middleware, and
open source. There weren't too many areas where they didn't overlap.

"At least with Oracle, they weren't in the hardware business, the operating
systems business — the places and spaces where I saw chance for some Sun
employees to keep their jobs, and that for me was an important consideration,"
McNealy said.

~~~
equalunique
i.e., AIX and Power systems

------
tacon
An old, old Oracle joke:

Q: On what hardware does Oracle run best?

A: A 35mm slide projector.

------
exikyut
> _And, it turns out, illumos was born at exactly the right moment: shortly
> after illumos was announced, Oracle — in what remains to me a singularly
> loathsome and cowardly act — silently re-proprietarized Solaris on August
> 13, 2010._

I was very curious about this, and stumbled on further details in
[https://www.usenix.org/legacy/events/lisa11/tech/slides/cant...](https://www.usenix.org/legacy/events/lisa11/tech/slides/cantrill.pdf)
on page 15. But read the entire PDF anyway, it's interesting.

------
pron
_Sudden_ death? Solaris has been dying for at least a decade. An entire
company collapsed after not being able to monetize Solaris-based systems.
Solaris wasn't killed by a company; it was killed by the market. A company
just stopped trying to resuscitate it after years of CPR.

Cantrill blames "executive whims, shareholder demands, and a fickle public,"
but not even a little bit the product designers and engineers who are so
attuned to the needs and desires of the market that they have somehow missed
the collapse of a Fortune 500 company due to their products not selling and
years later are still surprised that the product is being shut down?

------
oxryly1
I hate to be facile, but if Sun and Solaris were so great and Oracle was this
known _bad_ place, why did they let the Oracle people in the door in the first
place?

Maybe sell to someone else?

~~~
mrpippy
Oracle paid $5.6 billion for Sun. If someone else wanted to pay that much they
could have submitted an offer too. The board cares about maximizing
shareholder value, not about the future of any ongoing technologies.

Sun had been in discussions with IBM for months about an acquisition, but I
believe the offer was lower and there were antitrust concerns (they did
compete directly in a lot of markets) [1]. I suspect they would have been a
much better steward of the open-source efforts though

[1]: [http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/06/technology/business-
comput...](http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/06/technology/business-
computing/06blue.html)

~~~
oxryly1
Yeah, mine was little of a leading question certainly.

Oracle seems like bad guys, but it's really the board of Sun that had
priorities other than the health of Solaris and the long term employment of
the engineers. Oracle was a known snake [1].

Also, sale of the entire business of Sun was probably only one of many options
on the table.

[1]:
[http://www.gballard.net/lifes_lessons/girl_rattlesnake/](http://www.gballard.net/lifes_lessons/girl_rattlesnake/)

------
InTheArena
Solaris, hell, I still mourn the death of SunOS (esp verison 4.1.3) at the
hands of Solaris,

~~~
buserror
Ah... I loved SunOS! Fondly remember my Sun Station 3/80, nothing like that
fancy SPARC processor in there, a good solid 68040 like real men used back
then ;-)

Mind you, I still use the 'sun' font when booting my linux kernel on
framebuffers, I always loved that font.

~~~
DonHopkins
"Love your country but never trust its government."

[https://nohats.ca/wordpress/blog/2016/01/24/why-the-sun-
spar...](https://nohats.ca/wordpress/blog/2016/01/24/why-the-sun-sparc2-has-
the-message-love-your-country-but-never-trust-its-government/)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10966571](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10966571)

------
rodgerd
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.

~~~
StillBored
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...](http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/06/08/hp_ux_on_x86_project_kinetic/)).
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 linux, and use the AIX toolbox
for linux apps, and port your app. Although with power8 the move to LE linux,
makes moving applications/data between linux on POWER and AIX on POWER more
difficult.

~~~
rodgerd
I was at an IBM conf in 2014 where they were basically telling the AIX guys to
get familiar with KVM as it would likely be replacing PowerVM sooner or later.
The writing has been on the wall for a while, for better or worse.

------
kristoffer
I'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.

------
z1mm32m4n
As someone who's never used Solaris or looked into its merits I'm curious: can
someone comment on why all the nostalgia for Solaris?

~~~
blinkingled
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 to seriously kick its ass that Sun engineers
took it upon themselves to do some great work and make Solaris interesting
again - I remember they had a policy - if something is slower than Linux it
was a bug. I guess it all came in too late (including the Open Source part )
and people did not like being tied to SPARC hardware and CDDL was a buzz kill
for whatever reasons.

~~~
bcantrill
Ha -- isn't that ever the truth! When I came to Sun in 1996, Solaris was
really good at only two things: scaling on SMP machines and not crashing while
doing it. Morale wasn't necessarily high (the early history of Solaris had
been brutal, and it had only been due to the budding success of 2.5 and
UltraSPARC that engineers were beginning to feel forward-looking), and it took
us several more years just to get the house in order. MDB came out of this
period, as well as important primordial tooling like lockstat(1M).

But as we were getting the OS to work as advertised, we had bigger ideas
brewing. In Bonwick's case, it was ZFS, for me it was DTrace, for Tucker it
was zones, for Casper it was least-priv, etc. I know that it looks like it was
in response to Linux and/or as a result of the dot-com bust (and it's
impossible to say to what degree these were contributing factors), but I can
tell you that from the epicenter it felt much more like a natural evolution
than a competitive response. That said, I know that the competition didn't
hurt, and you're certainly right about Linux finally causing us to take small-
systems performance and system call latency seriously!

~~~
blinkingled
> scaling on SMP machines and not crashing while doing it

Yep - Only ever had one time when it hosed on us (100 people team, many
running JVM based applications and some doing load tests on it - IIRC it was
2.6 days.) And there wasn't a challenger in sight as far as SMP goes(h/w and
s/w both).

------
DonHopkins
To quote the brilliant Jim Morrison:

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

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

------
spilk
Does the death of Solaris have any implications for the future of SPARC?
Seemed like most of the SPARC hardware that Oracle sells/sold exclusively ran
Solaris. I could be wrong about that, though.

~~~
tankenmate
Fujitsu as been the largest manufacturer of SPARC chips for a number of years
now. They make super computers (and mainframes) with SPARC chips although for
how much longer... Their latest major announcement along side Oracle was in
May this year.

~~~
jabl
At least on the supercomputing side, they're switching to ARM:
[http://www.fujitsu.com/global/Images/post-k-supercomputer-
ov...](http://www.fujitsu.com/global/Images/post-k-supercomputer-overview.pdf)

(no idea about whether mainframes will continue using SPARC)

------
brian-armstrong
My only experience with Solaris was on the campus computer lab. It was also
one of the first UNIX experiences I had had.

I think what stood out most was the strongly 90s GUI and focus-follows-cursor,
which seemed very strange at first. It seemed like an interesting OS with its
own quirks

~~~
tyingq
Probably olwm or olvwm. Either supported a -c switch for click to focus.

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icedchai
Very sad. Solaris was my first commercial Unix. Technically it was SunOS 4.x,
on a SparcStation 10. This was probably around the time they renamed SunOS 4.x
to Solaris 1?

I still have an old Ultra 10 downstairs. It hasn't been turned on since 2004
or so. I think it had Solaris 8?

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type0
RIP Solaris, it introduced UNIX to me and I will always remember it fondly.

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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.

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crudbug
Oracle should open source it back, probably donate it to Apache.

~~~
sprayk
what's in it for Oracle?

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

~~~
cyphar
To paraphrase Bryan Cantrill, don't fall into the trap of anthropomorphising
Larry Ellison. Your lawnmower doesn't care about community goodwill either.

~~~
artursapek
What? I'm saying it matters in the community of developers - and it does.

~~~
cyphar
My point is that "showing goodwill" is not something that makes sense within
Oracle (at least that's what I've heard). I agree that acting correctly to a
community is the right thing to do, but that doesn't mean it's something that
Oracle will do.

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ty_a
I'm curious where this leaves things like the ZFS appliances? They aren't
going to use openzfs on oel are they?

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nickbauman
I know of a least one major company (fortune 30) that requires solaris for
several safety critical systems products (think, for example, but not
necessarily, commercial aircraft control systems) with thousands of active
installations all over the world. Without it, they can't maintain these
systems.

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SirLJ
This was the best OS hands down, so sad...

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tannhaeuser
Is there no chance of saving Solaris? If Oracle doesn't have a commercial
interest in it, why don't they transfer it to Apache or other foundation? It's
not an unusual thing to do, and Solaris devs could make a living by support
and maintenance.

~~~
snw
Oracle has been slowly killing Solaris for some time. At the same time the
community has already saved it - this is what illumos is about. It exists and
is open source.

------
titzer
If there is a one phrase takeaway from this excellent essay it would be
Brian's terse and apt characterization of Oracle as a "remorseless corporate
sociopath."

~~~
davidgerard
"Don't make the mistake of anthropomorphizing Larry Ellison!"

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&t=33m](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&t=33m)

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dandare
Just wondering, at what point could the Solaris name be reused for another
Unix distribution?

~~~
perlgeek
Without causing confusion? Probably when all current Solaris users are dead or
don't care anymore.

Reusing names tends to be a terrible idea.

------
dmh2000
just a question: was Solaris making any money? If not, then it should be
shelved.

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smegel
It never seemed quite right that Solaris and all this awesome engineering tech
from Sun ended up as personal playthings of someone like Larry Ellison.

Edit: grammar.

