Hacker News Reader

Comment by luckydude | Hacker News Reader

I know Bryan pretty well (we're both ex Sun people). He's not as bad as he can sound (coming from me that's sort of amusing, I've got a bit of a rep as being annoying :)

Bryan is a really smart guy, a lot of depth in systems, both software and hardware. He was also incredibly pro-Sun. I remember spending a day with him in San Francisco, he was still at Sun, I was elsewhere. We had a long discussion about operating systems and hardware that was a lot of fun.

Until we got to Solaris and SPARC. He just refused to hear anything negative about either. I tried to point out that Intel was ahead and he just wouldn't hear it.

I think he let loyalty to his company get ahead of the truth and that was weird.

View on HN

Not that you aren't frequently a victim of the same, but you're rewriting history a bit here -- I was actually one of the most vocal proponents of x86 within Sun, especially with respect to trying to get the SPARC guys to understand just how deeply non-competitive their microprocessors had become. And to give you my decades-old Rashomon-like account of the day you're referring to, it is my recollection was that I tried to convince you that technologies that we were developing like ZFS and DTrace had technological merit, but you felt so venomous towards Solaris that you simply couldn't hear it. So perhaps we each heard what we thought we wanted to hear. ;)

Hey Bryan, you could be right, I never really got over the Solaris thing. It was such a step backwards (at the time, it had none of the Sun goodness that was in SunOS). So maybe I heard it wrong. But at the time it seemed like you had a blind spot for anything Sun. Which resonated with me on the passion part but not so much on the lets make things better part. Sounds like you got past that.

I can only imagine the fury over the stupid decision to replace SunOS with Solaris: it was corporate wrong-headedness at its absolute worst, and the company was lucky to have survived it at all. I did love Sun[1] (the good parts, anyway) -- and I'm eternally grateful that we managed to get the system open sourced before the ship went under the waves. I still use DTrace, ZFS, zones, etc. every day[2], and that is thanks in no small part to your vision -- had it only been heeded in a more timely fashion!

[1] http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc/2010/07/25/good-bye-sun/

[2] https://smartos.org/

If I'd not been able to run Sun OS 4.3 was it? for a long time, until Solaris was tolerable, a lot of future Sun purchases influenced by myself would not have happened.

What was most galling was that guinea pig advertisement, crowing about a rather broken current version of Solaris in comparison to the still not yet ruined and much less buggy Windows NT of the time. To those of us with a foot in both ecosystems ... it really rubbed us raw when struggling with Solaris.

Fine, I assume he'll apologize for the treatment of Ben Noordhuis then.

EDIT: And the ministry of truth voting is on the side of some rich silicon valley guys again.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com