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> 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.

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.

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/

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. ;)

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.

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 and ran on x86, it was picky about hardware. By then it seemed to me that even running BSD was kind of an uphill battle, if you wanted a VPS or something.

I'm not a completely neutral party. Sun totally botched a job interview process with me when I graduated, and I came away feeling that there must be a lot of internal confusion. Their public side certainly gave that impression too. I knew they had cool technology in Solaris, like dtrace and zones, but apart from the names you almost never saw someone who attributed their success to these technologies. And then of course Oracle and the slow death.

Using Linux and GNU (and to some extent FreeBSD) was such a relief after a few years as an ordinary (non-root) Solaris user.

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.

Sure. But AIX is something you are forced to use, not something you opt-in for. All the remaining commercial Unixes are kind of in that boat.

People my age and younger just didn't get much access to commercial Unix environments when we were growing up. Once we got into industry, we found it hard to see the justification for high Unixes when we had experienced good results with low Unixes. So the low Unixes have mostly won the war. This story repeats time and time again in our industry: the freest foo conquers the non-free foo, even if the non-free foo is technically superior.

IRIX was and still is the Bugatti Veyron of operating systems. Any time there was an IRIX 6.5 upgrade, we'd throw a party because the systems were so trivial to upgrade:

inst> keep *

inst> remove incomplete overlays

inst> conflicts

no conflicts

inst> go

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.

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.

Terrifying!

Thank you for being "discrete" as asked in the last paragraph from 1986. That was a good read.

Although less extreme, Solaris multiarch was not exactly always a picnic.

From when it started becoming a lot less insane:

https://www.perkin.org.uk/posts/multiarch-package-support-in...

I'm the one who got in trouble for forwarding that to a mailing list that leaked it to Pyramid, but in my defense, Pete did say: "Tell your friends and loved ones. We are considering calling Pyramid to see if they want in on the action (but we'll only call them after we disable the remote diagnostic port)." Better to ask for forgiveness, after you already assumed you had permission. Maybe Pete was rightfully pissed because he didn't get the remote diagnostic port disabled in time.

What was the winning bid? :)

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 poured on them for this seems misplaced.

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.

> This is a crop out

cop out :)

I always sensed a great tension between the engineers and the business people at Sun, to the detriment of both. The business didn't know how to drive and target sales, and the engineers built brilliant things (ZFS, dtrace, mdb, zones, internal high availability, firewall*) that customers weren't asking for.

[edited to add firewall, that first gen that no-one used because it was so complex]

This is not a good look on the engineers.

Business is fundamentally uncertain, and decomposing failure into avoidable and unavoidable factors is very very hard. This is even harder in industries dominated by network externalities like computer platforms.

On the other hand: if engineering wasn't serving the stated business purpose (things that customers want, at least as far as business can see) but doing semi-academic research on the company dime... well, it's an indirect misappropriation of funds, however cool the results turned out.

Analogy: Sugarcube Industries is in the business of farm built infrastructure and its flagship product is a barn that can comfortably house N horses cutting down on injuries, promoting weight gain by proper thermal environment. I don't know much about horses, bear with me.

Engineering is asked to design such a horse barn. Maybe it's fundamentally impossible to fix heat flows in such and such weather or idiotic in general to try and improve horse health by those means. Maybe business even understood market research wrong, and what people wanted was barns with hooks where farmstaff can hang horse ponchos that will be manually deployed in times of need.

It's a bad look on engineering if instead of delivering the best horse barn on the market, they come up with a three-storey optimized IVF-incubator-horse feeding operation.

----

Unix (a decades-long project whose capital costs are inestimable when considering all the failed companies and free labor) nearly lost to Windows NT because the latter had hooks where sysadmins could hang those needed ponchos.

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 due to their license being incompatible with GPL.

ZoL[1] works fine here on production and LXC+Docker loves it.

[1] https://github.com/zfsonlinux/zfs

ZFS can't be added to the kernel. You need to install the kernel module yourself.

Ubuntu packages it in the default distro, your base install can have ZFS as root with no configuration.

For Debian/Fedora I think you need "non-free" packages added.

> 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 :)

> Is your startup / company deploying on Solaris?

For precisely the reason of Oracle's direction from day1

We are for sure.

We run a number of physical hosts using SmartOS (only 20 or so, but they're quite big (512GB, quads)) and on top of those we use a mix of KVM and zones (both solaris and lx) for various workloads (around 400 zones/vms).

It's easily been the correct choice for us. YMMV.

nobody disputes the capitalist imperative; but it's still worth having the discussion of how messed up the Oracle playbook is.

looking at webserver is silly.

if a company is using solaris, it likely host a Linux kernel and apache in virtualized containers to serve web content.