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Comment by digitalzombie | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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 :)

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