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Comment by davewritescode | Hacker News Reader

Sun is a great example of a company that had excellent engineers but a terrible business model. Instead of fixing the business model, they tried to extract as much value out what they had and it ultimately lead to the death of the company.

Terraform is the gateway to Hashicorp and it feels like they're going to lose it.

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I was just a kid when Sun died, reading about all the drama of the buyout and the series of forks on Slashdot whenever I had already finished my work in my high school computer science class every morning.

I didn't really know what or how to think about the mismanagement aspect of it, but I was already a F/OSS enthusiast by that time. I ran Linux at home and used free software everywhere I could. I even eschewed Times New Roman in favor of Linux Libertine (then the font of the W in the Wikipedia logo!) for my school essays because I didn't want to support the hegemony of a proprietary typeface.

What I did understand about Sun was that they had been the caretakers (and sometimes creators) of some of the most important and beloved technology I'd ever used. I didn't know anything about Solaris, Hudson, ZFS or SPARC, but I knew Sun for VirtualBox, OpenOffice, the MySQL database system that seemed to be everywhere in the open-source world, and the Java programming language I was writing in for school.

I remember a sense that something precious had died with that buyout, even though I didn't understand what led up to it. I worried a lot about OpenOffice, which I relied on and advocated to friends, and I practically cheered when I read about the formation of The Document Foundation and LibreOffice.

Yes. Sun became all about extracting rents from vendor lock-in (SPARC, J2ME, SUN DS, etc.). But Sun couldn't maintain that vendor lock-in, so Sun went under. Management just did not or would not see this, much less act on it. OpenSolaris was a good initiative for rebuilding mind-share, but it was a bit too little too late.

But the biggest mistakes Sun made were made in 2002-2004, and they never recovered:

  - the Solaris on x86 "cancellation" (it
    was more putting it on hold, maybe, but
    the market took it as a cancellation)
  - not making a deal with Google for Google
    to use Solaris in their data centers
  - killing off Sun PS (professions services)

The Solaris on x86 "cancellation" killed a lot of mind-share. No one wanted to get locked-in to SPARC.

Making a deal with Google would have reinvigorated Solaris' mind-share at a critical time.

IBM did the opposite of killing off its professional services division. IBM killed off their x86 systems division and beefed up its PS, and IBM went on to make a killing on PS.

The vendor lock-in issues totally compounded these terrible decisions.

After 2002 Sun was always on the back foot.

> not making a deal with Google for Google to use Solaris in their data centers

Wow i had no idea that had almost happened!

Anyone care to elaborate further on that?

I wonder what could have been, if later solaris was open sourced and google could push their improvements… maybe we’d all be running containers based on solaris zones, and would have solaris on our smartphones? Who knows!

The story as I understand it is that Sun wanted to license Solaris on a number of hosts basis while Google considered the number of servers they had to be a critical secret.

> maybe we’d all be running containers based on solaris zones

There were a lot of nice things about Solaris. The Solaris engineering org was amazing, full of visionary giants. ZFS, Zones, DTrace, mdb, SMF (systemd, but done better and ten years earlier), the fault tolerance stuff -- all created by engineers as skunkworks.

Fun fact - some Google servers ran Solaris. I worked on the tape backup team and the machines connected to LTE drives were indeed running Solaris.

TF's excellent plugin ecosystem that is not owned by Hashicorp will teach them a bitter lesson.

On the other hand, for many years they were maintaining most of everyone's plugins on their own repos. It's not like Hashicorp hasn't been an honest servant of the community.

I understand people's dislike of the license change, but Hashicorp isn't Oracle.

It's becoming it though.

Not really. Oracle provides software that does not require any activation cose but will phone home and snitch on you so that oracle can send you threats if you don’t pay license fees.

I’m thinking of some additional virtualbox guest additions.

> but will phone home and snitch on you

Terraform would never do that, would it? Oh, wait... [0]

[0] https://github.com/hashicorp/terraform/blob/v1.5.6/checkpoin...

Not really. I was a frequent contributor to plugins and it was actually incredibly frustrating getting changes merged for many of them. Many you couldn’t test your changes without licenses that cost hundreds of dollars. They controlled the repos, but they didn’t maintain them.

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