[HN Gopher] Solaris 11.4 free for non-production personal use
___________________________________________________________________
Solaris 11.4 free for non-production personal use
Author : nix23
Score : 181 points
Date : 2022-04-13 07:23 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.phoronix.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.phoronix.com)
| thatjoeoverthr wrote:
| I'm confused, didn't they kill Solaris years ago?
| h2odragon wrote:
| Yes. And took the corpse to a taxidermist. So now we can fiddle
| with the dried out crunchy remnants... if we can ignore that
| smell.
| sgt wrote:
| At least the smell isn't coming from the code.
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| They stopped the OpenSourcenversion OpenSolaris but Solaris
| continued to be worked on and used in some niches as commercial
| product.
| mgerdts wrote:
| Between November 2016 and August 2017 pretty much the entire
| Solaris development team was shown the door. I was on the
| Solaris Zones team in August 2017. A small number were allowed
| to stay and they are keeping the lights on. I have no idea what
| happened on the sustaining engineering (support) side.
| lksus wrote:
| This is nice for SPARC hobbyists like me, because now I can play
| with newer packages on my SPARC T4 server. Without this the
| updated packages would be stuck at versions from 2018.
|
| But in 2022, there is not very big need for commercial operating
| systems outside of large enterprises. But still I'm happy that
| Oracle will be supporting Solaris until 2034. I always get sad
| when something is deprecated.
|
| I understand that everyone wants to use Linux and x86 nowdays,
| but it still makes me sad that the diversity in operating systems
| and hardware is decreasing. It feels like everyone is only
| interested in Linux. Many FOSS software doesn't even work or
| compile well on other free operating systems such as BSDs and
| Illumos distros, because the developers use Linux themselves.
|
| I'm mostly a Linux user myself, but I would like to live in a
| world with a lot of different operating systems and CPU
| architectures in use.
| cosmiccatnap wrote:
| That's cool for a bit of nostalgia but sad because...in a world
| with Linux and freeBSD I can't understand why anyone would do
| this for any real reason. If they had done this 10 years ago
| people would be thrilled, but doing it in 2022...well it's kind
| of like saying DOS 6.22 is free for personal use. A not so subtle
| reminder that at oracle for every engineer or developer there are
| two lawyers or managers waiting in the wings.
| [deleted]
| thrownaway561 wrote:
| is there a solid reason for using Solaris over Linux? at this
| point in life, Linux has won in my opinion. i don't see the use
| for Solaris at all.
| eftel wrote:
| I'm too young and missed the Solaris era. Are there still valid
| usecases for Solaris today? Or ist this just to support some
| legacy systems that can't be upgraded?
| [deleted]
| lesgobrandon wrote:
| alsobrsp wrote:
| I managed a bunch of Solaris systems for most of the 2000's. The
| only thing I miss is Live Upgrade, that was pretty clever stuff.
|
| I was still getting recruiter calls for a gig in South Florida
| until about a year ago. I felt like a Fortran programmer.
| smm11 wrote:
| Same, for The Man.
| cryptonector wrote:
| This is rich.
|
| In 2010 Oracle -a company BUILT on MINDSHARE- failed to
| understand that OpenSolaris was an attempt at building MINDSHARE,
| so they killed it over a minor "embarrassment" caused by a minor
| "competitor" using OpenSolaris. Now they must be wondering how to
| re-build MINDSHARE and recoup some of their costs, and they
| evidently think "free for personal use" is going to do it. That's
| NUTS.
| crudbug wrote:
| Although a decade late, Oracle should open source the whole
| Solaris stack with governance model similar to Java Community
| Process (JCP).
|
| They still can make $$$ from support licenses.
| zamalek wrote:
| Or lawsuits.
| smsm42 wrote:
| If they did it 20 years ago, it may have had an effect. Now it
| seems like Solaris is more of a nostalgic memory than anything
| else for most people.
| silon42 wrote:
| Looks like it has the good variant of Gnome desktop.
| Tsiklon wrote:
| According to Oracle Solaris 11.4 uses Gnome 3 in Classic mode.
| nix23 wrote:
| The newest version (the one in the article 11.4.42.111) uses
| Gnome 41.0 "vanilla" -> solaris-desktop
| lazyier wrote:
| I heard that there is thing called "Linux" and "FreeBSD" that is
| also free for non-production personal use.
|
| I have a feeling that Solaris is a bit of a late bloomer.
| chungy wrote:
| > I have a feeling that Solaris is a bit of a late bloomer.
|
| Compared to Linux and FreeBSD? Not a chance, Solaris was
| running circles around them in the 1990s when Linux was still a
| toy operating system and FreeBSD was figuring out their
| infrastructure.
|
| These days, FreeBSD has adopted nearly all of the cool
| technical advantages Solaris has, and Linux seems to be
| actively hostile to adopting such things (ZFS, DTrace,
| ACLs...).
| znpy wrote:
| > Solaris was running circles around them in the 1990s when
| Linux was still a toy operating
|
| Thirty years have passed. I was born in the 1990s and I'm old
| enough to have a house on my name and probably kids in the
| very near future.
| nix23 wrote:
| Response was to that comment :
|
| >>>I have a feeling that Solaris is a bit of a late
| bloomer.
|
| Meaning it was not late but early.
|
| >Thirty years have passed.
|
| And yet you still use unix based systems....
| nix23 wrote:
| I heard that Linux and FreeBSD is also free for production use,
| but maybe you know more....NOT
| ThePowerOfFuet wrote:
| > I heard that Linux and FreeBSD is also free for production
| use, but maybe you know more....NOT
|
| We try to avoid that kind of crappy reply here on HN.
| nix23 wrote:
| >We try to avoid that kind of crappy reply here on HN.
|
| We try to avoid that kind of crappy comment here too, first
| look at yourself...maybe?
| jasoneckert wrote:
| As someone who worked for Sun in the 1990s, Solaris will always
| hold a special place in my memories. It ruled the enterprise UNIX
| world back then and I never would have imagined back then that it
| would ever fade into obscurity (as it is doing now).
|
| Will I install it again? No. Like most everyone else, I've moved
| on to Linux and BSD.
|
| But I'll spin up Solaris 2.5.1 on my SPARCbook or Solaris 10 on
| my Blade 1500 whenever I need a nostalgia kick.
| rbanffy wrote:
| > Will I install it again? No.
|
| I'd give it a chance if it came with CDE or OpenWindows.
| icedchai wrote:
| Yes! People today may not realize how huge Sun was in the 90's.
| Almost all startups ran on Sun gear. Almost all ISPs had a Sun
| system for their "shell account" servers. Also, I had a
| SparcStation 10 at home in 1996 or so (which was kind of
| unheard of!)
| endymi0n wrote:
| Totally honest question: WHY does everyone think it was cool?
| I can still remember running it in Uni on some of the prized
| workstations with everyone raving about it but never got the
| point about it.
|
| Back then I was on Windows and everything I saw on Sun
| systems looked weird, laggy and just super obscure to me. The
| whole UI felt like a mix of enterprise and neckbeard charme
| despite being non-open. It did not seem to run none any of
| the things I cared about back then. Later on I remembered Sun
| mainly in context of their stewardship of Java which also
| didn't help connecting any good feelings to it.
|
| So maybe in 2022 someone could enlighten me about what
| exactly was so cool about Sun?
| ubermonkey wrote:
| In the 90s, commercial Unixes really still ruled the roost.
| Linux was getting traction, but slowly, so for big-biz use
| you were looking at AIX from IBM, Solaris from Sun, HP/UX
| from HP, or something like it.
|
| The Sun hardware was materially better, or so I recall. It
| was also more attractive. I actually still have an Ultra5
| on a shelf in my office that, for a time, ran Oakley's
| online store (which my old company built). It's still a
| good looking machine.
|
| Solaris, too, was widely viewed as better/more
| workable/easier to use than its competitors. It had more
| polish.
|
| If you're looking at Solaris with the latest build of
| Ubuntu or whatever in mind, yeah, it's gonna look
| neckbeardy and hokey. But that's not the world Solaris was
| the king of. Back then, using a commercial Unix meant you
| got a LOT of shit that Just Worked out of the box, and
| generally an easier time getting your shit running.
| icedchai wrote:
| The GUI apps were generally pretty bad. I didn't use the
| default Sun window manager (CDE), which was kind of slow
| and bloated. I installed either WindowMaker or Afterstep. I
| forget which, but it made it look like NeXT. The only GUI
| app I used on my Sun was Netscape. Everything else was done
| in a terminal (xterm window.)
|
| I probably spent most of a week building stuff from source
| and customizing my system. If you wanted a "Unix
| workstation", Sun was the best. SGI looked cooler but often
| getting open source stuff built on it was a PITA.
|
| This was during the Windows 95 / NT 4.0 era, so it was
| definitely a step up on Windows.
| hedora wrote:
| Ironically, Sun invested heavily in user studies and
| development for Gnome 2, which is why is was so user
| friendly. Sun didn't really benefit from it commercially,
| then thanks to thr CADT development model, Gnome 3 was a
| massive regression for normal users (and still was a few
| years ago).
| rusk wrote:
| > everything I saw on Sun systems looked weird, laggy and
| just super obscure
|
| To me this describes what it's like trying to develop
| software for Windows vs Unix
| copperx wrote:
| I had the same experience. The Sun workstations that I was
| able to use were very slow compared to the same era PCs
| running Windows. The keyboard was cool as hell, though. The
| control key was in the correct position (where Caps Lock is
| in the standard layout). I do remember that the font
| rendering was horrible. There was no anti aliasing. Windows
| had just came up with Cleartype.
| rbanffy wrote:
| > Sun systems looked weird, laggy and just super obscure to
| me.
|
| Workstations typically came with fast SCSI disks. Once I
| wanted to find a file after a failed install and used
| `find`. The search came back immediately, empty. I
| concluded I was doing something wrong, did `man find` to
| confirm there wasn't any Sun-specific oddity. Then I tried
| with `find / -name passwd` because I knew that file
| existed. Result came back immediately. It was probably
| caching the whole directory structure in RAM, but the
| instantaneous response really impressed me back then.
|
| Mouse was laggy, because, IIRC, it communicated at 9600 bps
| or something like that. Macs and SGIs were much smoother.
|
| > So maybe in 2022 someone could enlighten me about what
| exactly was so cool about Sun?
|
| The one thing I loved was X and its network transparency. I
| often run NetScape on a beefier box and it was just like
| having it running on my workstation. Same with software
| development and engineering tools. I could reach out to
| multiple computers (and not only Solaris ones, but any
| Unix) from my desktop easily.
|
| The same could be said about any other Unix-based
| workstation with X (NeXT didn't come with it).
| pjmlp wrote:
| I only really cared about GNU/Linux in production around
| 2006, until then it was a means to have a cheap UNIX clone at
| home, while we were deploying Solaris, HP-UX and Aix into
| production.
|
| Most of the deployments were naturally Solaris based.
| icedchai wrote:
| About 2002 here. Some companies were more conservative than
| others. One was okay with Linux for dev systems, but not
| production. Another had a "low end" product ported from
| AIX, which ran on Linux.
| pklausler wrote:
| It wasn't just startups, of course; we used Sun gear at good
| ol' Cray Research in that era and it was our first upgrade
| from dumb terminals on mainframes (& vaxen). Good times.
|
| (I still remember when Sun introduced color systems, and they
| were such status symbols that they went mostly to managers,
| including one who was color-blind. A warning sign in
| retrospect, I suppose.)
| shadowgovt wrote:
| It was good, but a lot of people didn't get to find that out
| because it cost money to play.
|
| Good enough and free will beat out better and expensive almost
| every time (the key part being "good _enough_ ", which,
| granted, makes that rule someone circular ;) ).
| msla wrote:
| And the good enough gets better.
|
| It makes the snobs look a bit ridiculous: "Oh, it only took
| you five years to get to where we were... but we were on
| expensive hardware you couldn't buy without a major contract,
| running fewer applications, and invested in a system that
| would be eaten by the low end so comprehensively now only
| snobs know how good it was."
| StayTrue wrote:
| Solaris is good memories for me too but only nostalgia in 2022.
| First job out of school was writing device drivers for Solaris.
| gotaquestion wrote:
| I worked at Intel from 1988-1998 and when I started we had
| either AIX or SunOS terminals (a few folks had giant HPUX
| boxes). By 1996, everything, and I mean EVERYTHING, switched to
| Linux and VNC. It happened quickly. First we started hearing
| about Linux, then a quarter later all the remote machines were
| Linux, then the quarter after that they took away our
| workstations. There were a few HPUX boxes in the larger pools
| for extremely compute-heavy layout tasks, but everything else
| was RedHat.
|
| Point is: I remember writing scripts for then main environment
| and every script had to work on all terminals. The three
| variations meant constantly armor-plating things with
| HPUX/AIX/SUNOS variable checks. I hated that. I was glad when
| RedHat came along and we stopped doing that.
|
| (Also, back then it was a sign of being cool to have an 8514/A
| monitor, and not the B&W sun terminals.)
| farmerstan wrote:
| I work in enterprise software and around 2000 the combination
| of Solaris and Oracle database was the most rock solid out of
| all the various OS/DB combinations. I vaguely remember the
| threading model was weird and I think limited stack size per
| thread but overall it was my favorite combo because of how
| reliable it was.
|
| The speed with which Linux killed Solaris however was
| astonishing.
| jcims wrote:
| IMHO the relative cost of Linux hardware created a brain
| drain that they didn't see coming and ultimately couldn't
| resolve. The amount of work a single well-equipped E4500
| could do vs a cabinet of x86 gear was remarkable, but that
| E4500 might run $600K and the x86 gear 0-10% of that.
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| I was at university in the late 90s. In exchange for buying
| us all (usually cheap) pizza, companies could come in and
| give an hour long pitch for why we should come work for them
| after graduation. A few big companies wanted more time so
| they'd cater higher end pizza or more elaborate catering as a
| bribe to get students to come to their presentation.
| Microsoft bough a large amount of Mellow Mushroom (the best
| pizza in our little college town) and did a two hour
| presentation on what it is like to work at Microsoft and why
| we should want to work there. Later in the semester Sun came
| to campus and catered their two hour presentation with
| chicken nuggets. But real issue was that the people and
| videos that were part of Sun's presentation didn't tell us
| much about Sun or why we should work there. It was a two hour
| long ranting whinefest about why no one should work at
| Microsoft. This was on the East Coast so these people were
| doing a tour of all of the major engineering schools and
| wasting it on their angst over Microsoft. I was around the
| time of the JVM lawsuit so I understand why Sun was mad at
| Microsoft but it seemed to have broken something in their
| corporate DNA and turned them insane.
|
| Perhaps that was just an isolated incident confined to the
| university recruiters but Sun at that time seemed overly
| focused on fighting Microsoft instead of improving their
| product offerings. Perhaps some of anger ended up turning
| potential users and employees away from Microsoft but I
| suspect lots of those ended up going with Linux or some other
| alternative rather than going with Sun.
| bee_rider wrote:
| I was at a university career fair in, I can't remember the
| exact year, but I think it was like 2008 or 2009. It may
| even have been while Sun was in the process of being bought
| by Oracle? I'm not sure. All I remember was the Sun
| recruiter handing out OpenSolaris CDs (I think) with a vibe
| of "well this is all essentially over but it might be fun
| for you to play with a non-Linux UNIX-like." I'm not sure
| if "this" was the company or the distro, though, it was a
| while ago. Mostly I just recall the interesting ambiance
| of... nostalgia for what could have been, I think...
| chaostheory wrote:
| > Mellow Mushroom (the best pizza in our little college
| town
|
| Atlanta is little? (Not aware of whether or not Mellow
| mushroom is in other states or not)
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| Mellow Mushroom had expanded by then to lots of the
| southeast, including most of the SEC and ACC college
| towns. I made a joke to a friend who had moved to Denver
| that he should start a franchise out there because it fit
| the culture. Turned out someone has already done it,
| making a little island of Mellow Mushroom in the Rockies.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| You've hit the nail on the head, that's a perfect analysis,
| and it wasn't an isolated incident!
|
| But they'd been like that for a long time, since before I
| started there in 1990, long before Java. They DEFINED
| themselves in terms of Microsoft, to the extreme extent
| that when Sun Microsystems fell apart into separate
| divisions, they actually named one of them "SunSoft" to
| directly position it against Microsoft. As if.
|
| The management at Sun didn't consider Java to be a
| programming language or software platform, they considered
| it to be first and foremost their primary weapon of mass
| destruction in their apocalyptic war against Microsoft, and
| they didn't consider Java developers to be loyal cherished
| customers, they considered them to be disposable
| brainwashed mercenaries in their World Wide War against
| Microsoft.
|
| It was funny when Sun proudly and unilaterally proclaimed
| that Sun put the "dot" into "dot com", leaving it wide open
| for Microsoft to slyly counter that oh yeah, well Microsoft
| put the "COM" into "dot com" -- i.e. ActiveX, IE, MSJVM,
| IIS, OLE, Visual Basic, Excel, Word, etc!
|
| And then IBM mocked "When they put the dot into dot-com,
| they forgot how they were going to connect the dots," after
| sassily rolling out Eclipse just to cast a dark shadow on
| Java. Badoom psssh!
|
| https://www.itbusiness.ca/news/ibm-brings-on-demand-
| computin...
|
| Sun totally dropped the ball fighting their true original
| enemy AT&T, and they should have put all that effort and
| energy into improving SunOS and railing against AT&T after
| SunOS finally beat System V in the Unix market, instead of
| capitulating to AT&T AFTER SunOS won the Unix war against
| System V, and then rolling over, giving up, selling out to
| their mortal enemy, and becoming Solaris.
|
| To port my favorite cross platform Apple/IBM joke:
|
| Q: What do you get when you cross Sun and AT&T?
|
| A: AT&T.
| rbanffy wrote:
| > They DEFINED themselves in terms of Microsoft,
|
| Sun completely forgot they were a hardware company. They
| made great hardware, but while Microsoft made it easy to
| develop software for Windows, Sun didn't make it easy to
| do the same for Solaris (maybe out of fear it'd benefit
| their remaining hardware enemies IBM and HP). They didn't
| even try very hard to build low-end machines that could
| do PC tasks at competitive prices.
| mst wrote:
| The SunOS -> Solaris transition was before I joined the
| industry and in spite of multiple attempts at reading
| around the topic I've never found an explanation of what
| happened that actually made sense to me.
| richard_todd wrote:
| I was also at university in 98/99 going to job fairs and I
| was totally sold on the Sun/Solaris/Java future, so I was
| very excited to see the Sun booth and try to get an
| interview. But, of all the companies there, they were the
| least enthusiastic and the least informative. I went to the
| event sure I wanted to work at Sun and left the event
| evaluating my other options. Seeing how it turned out in
| the years that followed, I'm glad I changed my mind!
|
| (Still used a Sun workstation for the next five years at my
| first job, though.)
| ubermonkey wrote:
| I'm still staggered by it, and I watched it happen, too.
|
| Several times in my computing career -- say, from 1990 on --
| I've seen something start to happen that was clearly going to
| be huge, only to be told over and over that the obviously-
| inevitable development was Impossible.
|
| The first example was the ascendancy of the microcomputer.
| "OH, there will ALWAYS be a space for mainframes!
| Corporations aren't going to do their accounting on some
| crappy PC! You're just young and don't see how these things
| really work."
|
| The second was the way Linux completely destroyed the
| commercial Unix market (and, with it, the "fancy Unix
| workstation" market). The power of FOSS is, in my view, very
| very often overstated by idealists, but it's hard not to see
| the wholesale corporate/academic/research shift from Solaris,
| et. al., to Linux on commodity hardware as anything but a
| HUGE win in terms of computing power.
| azinman2 wrote:
| It's hard to beat free that runs on cheap everyday hardware.
| Bluecobra wrote:
| Sun actually made x86 Solaris 10 free and it ran well on
| commodity hardware.
|
| When Oracle bought them, they pulled the rug and demanded
| $1K per CPU per year for the privilege if it was non-
| Sun/Oracle hardware.
| azinman2 wrote:
| Perhaps free as in money but not in source. All the big
| boys who deployed it absolutely wanted the source to
| customize in house. Also too little too late.
| hunta2097 wrote:
| I see this as a huge mistake (quelle surprise, this is
| Oracle after all).
|
| If they had just copied the RedHat model they might have
| been onto a winner.
|
| Free unstable, paid stable.
| pjmlp wrote:
| They already have Oracle Linux for that.
| floren wrote:
| I'm drinking coffee out of an Oracle Linux mug from SCaLE
| 9x, which would have been 2011... note how Oracle Linux
| has absolutely taken over the world since then :)
| hapless wrote:
| Sun tried every combination of free and paid and none of
| them made inroads in x86.
|
| Yes, that includes the Red Hat model (remember
| OpenSolaris?)
| rbanffy wrote:
| It lasted for a very short time. OTOH, OpenIndiana is
| still reasonable if you want a Solaris.
| smsm42 wrote:
| It's not only that. I deployed commercial projects when the
| question "Solaris or Linux" didn't sound ridiculous, and
| there were times where Solaris had been a reasonable
| choice. But that was a long time ago. Since then Linux (and
| the ecosystem) matured a lot, and Solaris didn't have much
| to counter that, so its relative worth declined rapidly.
| rbanffy wrote:
| > It's hard to beat free that runs on cheap everyday
| hardware.
|
| They were a hardware company that designed their own CPUs.
| If a company could pull an Apple and do an M1, it would be
| Sun.
|
| Unfortunately, their low-cost machines performed just like
| PCs and cost the same, without PC software to run on them.
|
| And building x86 boxes that ran with Solaris ensured they'd
| be no better than PCs, without any compelling software.
| sixothree wrote:
| We had SparcStation 1 pizza boxes at my school. Huge black and
| white monitors. Core dumps as large as your disk quota. So much
| fun times.
| SirChainsaw wrote:
| Hopefully they've removed the requirement to have at least a T4
| processor. We can't all afford that :-(.
| gnu8 wrote:
| Outside of this announcement, I think all of the releases are
| available to download for noncommercial evaluation and
| development.
| cbmuser wrote:
| Yes, but you don't get access to the update repositories
| which is what you want to keep the system secure.
| gnu8 wrote:
| I don't think Solaris gets much attention from either the
| blue or red side these days. Patched or not, I would keep a
| Solaris machine segmented off with my other retro crap and
| not use it for anything public-facing where it might be
| exposed to attack.
| lksus wrote:
| Unfortunately, no. I guess it is because Solaris 11.4 was
| originally going to be Solaris 12. It has a lot of new stuff
| and modifications compared to 11.3. I guess they wanted to
| optimize it for the newer SPARC processors (or get enterprises
| to update their old systems).
| rsaxvc wrote:
| T4, FujiSPARC-X/X+/XII, or AMD64/EM64T.
| hestefisk wrote:
| It's not released for x64 anymore?
| blippage wrote:
| I had the pleasure of programming on Sun machines back in the
| late 90's. I loved them. They had humongous screens. I wouldn't
| want one of those falling on me. They had a package management
| system. I occasionally had to update the system, and I found the
| update process a really pleasant one. The guy who did my
| performance appraisals noted that most programmers preferred the
| Unix environment over Windows.
|
| That was the late 90's, though. This is now. Linux won. It was
| great for its time, but I feel that Solaris is too little, too
| late.
| sixothree wrote:
| I worked at a computer shop during school. And I remember some
| time in 1994 a guy coming in very excited about a new operating
| system. "It's like the school operating system, but you can run
| from home". He needed a specific network card, foreshadowing
| the next 20 years of my life, which we did not have in stock at
| the time.
| uuyi wrote:
| I don't share the same memories. Working around commercial
| compilers was horrible. I actually preferred NT for a bit
| around then. Plus I could afford to buy a machine to run it at
| home.
|
| Early days of win32 were quite fun. I can see why it won on the
| desktop and perhaps unfortunately is still doing quite well.
| jjav wrote:
| > I feel that Solaris is too little, too late.
|
| I'd say it was a lot, very early. SunOS and later Solaris were
| awesome before Linux existed and all through the growing-up
| period of Linux. Even by the time of the acquisition (2010)
| when Linux was fairly mature, Solaris was still so much better
| technically (zfs, dtrace, tooling) but just had become niche
| because everyone was running what was free, Linux.
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| Yeah if anything what was too late was solaris' open
| sourcing. It could have had Linux' lunch.
|
| It could have done wish some Linux dev love too, Linux was
| much further ahead in terms of updates.
|
| I remember updating one of our Solaris servers back in the 9
| or 10 days and it was basically just a list of things I had
| to change manually. Almost nothing automated.
| jjav wrote:
| > Yeah if anything what was too late was solaris' open
| sourcing. It could have had Linux' lunch.
|
| I know some disagree but I maintain that the key factor to
| Sun decline was the unbundling of the compiler when Solaris
| came out (vs. SunOS where it was included).
|
| Stepping back to early 90s, open source was generally never
| packaged and prebuilt. You had to download the tarball and
| compile it locally. Installing a new machine meant spending
| a good while building all the tooling to make it useful.
|
| Approximately all of academia and research labs were SunOS
| shops. All open source code built out of the box (tarball)
| with ease on SunOS since its developers were almost
| certainly on SunOS themselves, or at least used it as a
| primary testing platform given the popularity.
|
| In the early days of Linux it was a lot of hard work to get
| open source to compile, since the code mostly assumed
| SunOS. As late as the late 90s, it was still easier to
| compile many things on SunOS than it was on Linux.
|
| But with Solaris in the second half of the 90s[1] the
| compiler was unbundled. Suddenly it was impossible to build
| all the code you needed to make the system useful, without
| jumping through a buch of hoops. Either buy an expensive
| SunCC or go get and install the GNU compiler but then the
| makefiles tended to assume that if the OS was sunos the
| compiler was SunCC so you had to go resolve differences
| between Sun and GNU compilers. Meanwhile, compiling
| packages on Linux was steadily becoming easier.
|
| [1] Well, Solaris came out in the early 90s but was pretty
| bad compared to SunOS initially. So most SunOS shops, like
| the research lab where I was, resisted migrating for many
| years. Solaris 2.5.1 in 1996 was generally considered the
| first version worth upgrading to from SunOS.
| netman21 wrote:
| I remember emailing Scott McNealy in 1995 telling him urgently
| that he should opensource Solaris. If I had persuaded him it
| would be a different world today. We would not have had to live
| through two decades of NT on servers.
| pilsetnieks wrote:
| Was there a meaningful possibility he might have done that? Was
| your relationship close enough that he'd have regarded you as a
| competent authority on the subject?
|
| I know people who have written missives like that to both Bill
| Gates and Steve Jobs. Nothing came of it, obviously, because
| nothing could have come of it.
| Aleksdev wrote:
| Did he ever reply?
| noisy_boy wrote:
| I had luck with Linux when I couldn't get Solaris to install on
| my personal PC in the early 2000's due to compatibility issues -
| me and a colleague tried our best. So about 22 years too late.
| netfortius wrote:
| Last encounter with Sun's commercial version of Solaris: 1995 -
| running on SPARCstation
| jijji wrote:
| a big part of the reason linux became so popular was because of
| the huge dollar amounts Sun, IBM and HP were charging for their
| OS.
| mdaniel wrote:
| I can imagine that, but for me personally it was because I
| could run Linux on the _existing_ machine in our dining room,
| and didn 't need Big Iron(tm) to try it out. I'm sure related
| to that is why the Asus router in my house also runs on Linux,
| and likely my fridge, and _arguably_ my phone
| pjmlp wrote:
| And most likely all of those vendors haven't upstreamed any
| of that.
| mdaniel wrote:
| FWIW, Asus makes their GPL source available to Eric who
| makes the builds actually open source:
| https://github.com/RMerl/asuswrt-merlin.ng#readme
|
| AOSP's middle initials are Open Source, but I'm with you on
| the fridge
| znpy wrote:
| I'm curious to see what bcantrill will say about this.
| Findecanor wrote:
| It might not be full of information, but it could be
| _entertaining_ ...
| znpy wrote:
| <<the lawnmower hasn't got feelings!>>
| pmarreck wrote:
| What about ZFS?
| mgerdts wrote:
| Solaris 11 does not work without ZFS. It is the only supported
| root file system.
|
| Keep in mind that Solaris ZFS is largely incompatible with
| anything that exists in an open source OS. ZFS started out by
| incrementing pool and dataset versions as features were added.
| The pool version that will be created by default in Solaris
| 11.4 cannot be used by ZFS in illumos, FreeBSD, or Linux.
|
| The open source versions of ZFS (found in illumos, FreeBSD,
| OpenZFS, ZFS on Linux, OpenZFS on Windows) use feature flags.
| By default, pools created with these will likely use a pool
| version that says "I have feature flags", which Solaris ZFS
| will no understand and will refuse to import.
|
| All implementations of ZFS should be able to create a pool with
| an explicitly old pool version and be able to be imported
| everywhere. That doesn't mean that pool will be useful for
| everything. For instance, open source ZFS does not have dataset
| aliasing, a feature I added in Solaris ZFS after the
| SoLongAndThanksForAllTheFish commit but before Solaris 11 was
| released. This feature is required for Solaris Zones.
| pmarreck wrote:
| I guess my question was more along the lines of "does this at
| all impact the potential legalities of including ZFS in the
| kernel"? Very interesting details, though!
| a-dub wrote:
| there really hasn't been a compelling reason to run solaris since
| linux fixed its resource scheduling issues in the early-mid
| 2000s. (or freebsd fixed its smp issues around the same time)
|
| it was really expensive.
| awill wrote:
| They're making it free after it's already lost relevance?
| therealbilly wrote:
| A lot of good comments about the Unix market back then. The
| honest truth is that cheap no-name PC's with RedHat and a little
| later, nVidia graphics cards are what killed the Unix vendors.
| The price disparity was stark and a no-brainer for companies
| looking to do big things but with increasingly commodity
| hardware. It was sad to see Unix vendors die off.
| hereforphone wrote:
| Too little too late.
| formvoltron wrote:
| Oh yeah.. Solaris! Almost forgot about you.
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| What's the point? Linux has surpassed Solaris in every way. The
| only possible explanation for this I can think of is: There may
| be some companies stuck with some software that only runs on
| solaris, and they need to keep onboarding new engineers to deal
| with it, and they want those engineers to go through solaris
| training, and this makes the training go more smoothly, since the
| trainees don't have to sync with a license server. But, it's a
| stretch.
| jeffbee wrote:
| ZFS, NFS, iSCSI, and CIFS services are quite superior on
| Solaris compared to Linux. On Linux each of these services are
| a bad joke, but on Solaris they are rock solid.
|
| I think anyone would be a fool to use software licensed from
| Oracle, but if that part doesn't bother you, on the technical
| side there may be benefits.
| znpy wrote:
| > ZFS
|
| X doubt.
|
| All new innovations in zfs happen in openzfs, which is
| licensed in an incompatible way with regards to proprietary
| Solaris.
|
| Your comment smells...
| KingOfCoders wrote:
| How times changed, we were using Linux on our servers in the 90s
| and my boss wanted to use Solaris servers because they were more
| "professional".
| cube00 wrote:
| We were on Solaris and then directed to rebuild everything for
| Windows Server. Now we're being forced on to Linux because it's
| cheaper.
|
| At least our code is now truly cross platform so we have that
| going for us which is nice.
| lizknope wrote:
| When I was in college in the mid 1990's Sun was the dominate Unix
| workstation company. We had a couple of thousand on campus. Then
| I started working in the semiconductor industry in 1997 and every
| had a Sun SPARCstation or Ultra 1/2 on their desk. We had some
| big 16 CPU E4000/5000 class machines in the server room.
|
| All of the EDA / CAD chip design software ran on Unix and some
| companies started porting to Linux/x86. Some of our jobs used
| >4GB RAM so we required a 64-bit machine. AMD released their
| Opteron 64-bit in 2003 and we got a couple right after our tools
| were ported to 64-bit Linux. We never bought another Sun after
| that.
| jandrese wrote:
| Sun ultimately suffered the same fate of all of the Unix
| workstation companies. By selling only expensive "Serious
| Business" hardware to corporations they were able to keep the
| per-unit margins high, but were completely crushed by commodity
| PCs in volume and ultimately total profit. Ultimately those
| huge commodity sales volumes were turned into big R&D budgets
| that allowed them to produce faster and more efficient hardware
| than the big workstations providers. And then the one advantage
| they had: the OS, was undercut by BSD and Linux.
|
| So a company has the option of spending 5 or 6 figures on a big
| Unix box with a 4 figure yearly support contract and pain in
| the ass license management, or they could spend a low 4 figures
| on a PC running Linux that is just as good or better in all the
| ways that matter and doesn't have annoying salesguys to deal
| with or recurring costs.
| rbanffy wrote:
| > By selling only expensive "Serious Business" hardware to
| corporations
|
| This is a mistake IBM is making as well. There is no cheap
| on-ramp for their POWER and mainframe platforms. I doubt
| those machines are running many new workloads. Almost all new
| corporate software is developed for Linux-based commodity
| servers.
|
| It's a shame, really, because they are magnificent machines.
| silverlake wrote:
| Scott McNealy, CEO of Sun, spoke at my biz school ~2000.
| Someone asked about the competitive threat of Dell + Linux.
| He ranted for a long time about Dell being junk and SunOS
| vastly better than Linux. Everyone after felt Sun was doomed.
| They crashed a few years later. It was a textbook Innovator's
| Dilemma case.
| anthk wrote:
| Meh. FreeBSD with jails and Linux with containers will send that
| Sun Solaris wannabe to the trash.
|
| Propietary Unixen are dead at the server space. Nowadays people
| doesn't care, they just keep spawning vm's and jails/vm's as
| nothing in order to scale up things.
|
| The hippies from the MIT/Berkeley won. We have free as in freedom
| hacker OSes and corporation-level setups with ease. Even FSF
| distros work relatively well (fck Radeon blobs). Today tech
| support and configuring services it's where the money lies on.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Which of those hippie OSes does support hardware memory tagging
| in production, today?
| nix23 wrote:
| >FreeBSD
|
| >The hippies from the MIT/Berkeley won.
|
| ????
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Joy
|
| >>He played an integral role in the early development of BSD
| UNIX while being a graduate student at Berkeley
|
| >>He co-founded Sun Microsystems
| unmole wrote:
| > He co-founded Sun Microsystems
|
| Maybe the implication is that he sold out and doesn't count
| as a hippie.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| You know who's a bonafide hard core mega-hippie is Sun's
| "Science Officer" John Gage, who earned his way onto Richard
| Nixon's enemy list! We've done bong hits together, and I was
| incapable of smoking him under the rug, so he's the Real
| McCoy (and also as smart as Spock).
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gage#Political_activity
|
| >Political activity
|
| >Following the Free Speech Movement, Gage became active in
| opposing the war in Vietnam. He worked on the Robert Scheer
| for Congress campaign in 1966, almost defeating a Democratic
| congressman who supported the war. He co-chaired the Robert
| F. Kennedy for President campaign in 1968 in Alameda County,
| and was a Robert Kennedy delegate to the 1968 Chicago
| Convention, representing Berkeley and Oakland.
|
| >At Harvard, he helped form the Vietnam Moratorium Committee
| with Sam Brown, David Hawk, Marge Sklenkar, and David Mixner,
| and co-chaired the New England division. He organized the
| 125,000 person Boston Common Vietnam Moratorium demonstration
| in October. and coordinated the 400,000 person Vietnam
| Moratorium demonstration on the Washington Monument grounds
| in Washington, D.C. Nationwide, the Vietnam Moratorium was
| the largest mass demonstration in US history, with over two
| million people involved.
|
| >He organized a number of major antiwar demonstrations in
| Boston, in New York, in Washington, D.C., and in
| Philadelphia. In 1972, he was named by White House attorney
| John Dean to Nixon's Enemies List.
|
| >He was the first field organizer for students for the
| McGovern Presidential campaign in California, then joined the
| national campaign as assistant press secretary and trip
| director, working for Frank Mankiewicz. In that role, he
| coordinated the day-to-day movement of the press and staff
| from event to event nationwide with John Podesta and others.
| In the 1976 Jimmy Carter campaign, he helped train staff, and
| organized the final rallies in California. In the 1980 Ted
| Kennedy campaign, he was assistant national press secretary
| and trip director, and member of the traveling party.
|
| >In 2008, Gage spent several weeks in Ankeny, Iowa,
| organizing for the 2008 Barack Obama campaign.
|
| >Concert activity
|
| >In 1969, Gage was asked by Bill Hanley, the owner of Hanley
| Sound, the staging and sound system used at Woodstock, and
| the system Gage used in Washington, D.C. for the Vietnam
| Moratorium, to come to Palm Beach, Florida, to take over
| producing the International Palm Beach Music and Art
| Festival. B.B. King, Janis Joplin, the Rolling Stones, Sly
| and the Family Stone, Jefferson Airplane, the Byrds, Sha-Na-
| Na, Country Joe and the Fish, Steppenwolf, Johnny Winter,
| Sweetwater and twenty other groups performed; there had been
| strong opposition from the Governor of Florida, local law
| enforcement, and some local churches. Heavy rain and unusual
| cold did not stop some career-best performances, and crowds
| up to 100,000 people. This Rolling Stone concert just
| preceded Altamont, six days later.
|
| >Subsequently, Gage was called to rescue the Louisiana
| Celebration of Life Festival after two people had drowned;
| produced the New York Shea Stadium Festival for Peace Concert
| with Peter Yarrow, Janis Joplin, Creedence Clearwater
| Revival, Herbie Hancock, Miles Davis, Dionne Warwick, Paul
| Simon, Sha-Na-Na, Johnny Winter, and fifteen more, the
| Philadelphia Peace Concert, and several other events
| involving over 100,000 people.
|
| John Gage clip from Berkeley in the Sixties, on peacefully
| seizing a police car:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xv7xQh_FliI&t=1m8s
|
| California inspired: from flower power to Silicon Valley; By
| Chris Edwards. How 1960s Bay Area radicalism helped shape the
| technological powerhouse of northern California.
|
| https://eandt.theiet.org/content/articles/2017/07/california.
| ..
| nix23 wrote:
| Well now i miss Sun even more! To hell with this Lawnmower
| called Oracle ;)
|
| EDIT: WAIT...you are THAT Don Hopkins? An honor to hear
| from you!
| anthk wrote:
| Hippies->Yuppies.
|
| Still, GNU/Linux and BSD's outlived Solaris.
| nix23 wrote:
| https://oxide.computer/
|
| let's see ;)
| hestefisk wrote:
| How is this relevant to Linux/BSD?
| hobo_mark wrote:
| Their product runs on Illumos and were co-founded by a
| Solaris engineer.
| bjelkeman-again wrote:
| Yeah, but when they switched to System V they lost me.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| "Solaris: So bad I left the company."
|
| 4.2 > V:
|
| https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ashaferian/Drive/master/M
| t...
| kloch wrote:
| If you had to pick an inflection point where Sun's
| dominance in the Unix world began to decline it would be
| this.
|
| Not in terms of total installations, momentum and
| exponential expansion of the entire industry distort that,
| but in terms of it's influence. This is also the exact same
| time that 386BSD/NetBSD/FreeBSD and Linux started
| releasing.
|
| As others have pointed out BSD-based SunOS was the king of
| Unix-like operating systems in the late 80's to early 90's.
| Sys-V based Solaris (1992) was an immediate flop and
| quickly earned the nickname "Slowlaris". Only by version
| 2.4 was it even usable in production. By 2.6 it was a
| decent operating system but anyone who remembered using
| SunOS wished they had never switched.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Michael Tiemann on "The Worst Job in the World":
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Tiemann
|
| >Michael Tiemann is vice president of open source affairs
| at Red Hat, Inc., and former President of the Open Source
| Initiative. [...] He co-founded Cygnus Solutions in 1989.
| [...] Opensource.com profiled him in 2014, calling him
| one of "open source's great explainers."
|
| http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-
| haters/slowlaris/worst-...
|
| >Subject: The Worst Job in the World
|
| >From: Michael Tiemann <tiemann@cygnus.com>
|
| >I have a friend who has to have the worst job in the
| world: he is a Unix system administrator. But it's worse
| than that, as I will soon tell. [...]
| icedchai wrote:
| Early versions of Solaris were terrible. It was a pain to
| build any open source stuff on them. Solaris 2.5 was
| decent, but I think I kept my personal SparcStation on
| SunOS 4.1 (retroactively renamed Solaris 1.1) until
| Solaris 2.6 (aka SunOS 5.6) was out. Sun marketing was
| pretty confusing.
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| It's all context specific.
|
| When you say "people don't care", I think you have a specific,
| but not explicitly defined, set of "people" and "organizations"
| you are presuming.
|
| Proprietary Unixes are still common enough in large traditional
| organizations to stay profitable and developed. They get
| purchased or bundled by non-hands-on people likely using
| different criteria than average hacker news hacker might
| consider.
|
| (Source or disclaimer - probably half the projects I've been on
| in ERP space are on proprietary Unix. My problems are very
| different [not implying better or worse] than those typically
| discussed here)
| syshum wrote:
| While that is true. It is also true that many many companies
| are moving their ERP systems off unix
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| For sure. Not as many as I would've thought though.
|
| A perspective in large number of orgs I've seen (not
| claiming right or wrong) is that Linux is better at
| horizontal scaling while Unix is better at vertical
| scaling. Vertical scaling is out of fashion but still
| powerful for many scenarios. So I've been in many rooms
| where prevalent thought is "Linux is great we love Linux we
| want more Linux, but we want _this_ database to run on 128
| cores and we don 't feel Linux is the right choice". So
| I've seen clean slate ERP implementations on Unix, not just
| legacy upgrades.
|
| And I mean, what some of these things do in firmware is
| impressive. They do on firmware and hardware level what
| we're these days doing in software and software defined
| whatever.
|
| Different worlds though :-)
| znpy wrote:
| that doesn't really make sense.
|
| organizations with enough cash to use solaris for production
| environment probably have enough cash to pay for licenses for
| dev/staging environments too.
|
| this move is likely a (desperate?) try to keep solaris
| relevant among open source developers.
|
| tbh, if I were developing something and somebody asked me to
| support a proprietary operating system I can't run in a VM...
| the least I'd ask for is for them to provide me a licensed
| environment (like at least a virtual machine or something,
| with the license paid by the requestor) for me to run tests
| and stuff.
| uuyi wrote:
| Agree with this.
|
| Who'd have thunk it that proprietary Unix on RISC is doing
| better on the desktop than ever though!
|
| https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/brand3678.htm
| cyberpunk wrote:
| I do know some folks that are still using it (or Joyent's SDC
| Hypervisor offering, which I guess also has numbered days since
| the Samsung aqui).
|
| Sadly, I don't think it's got much time left. I do miss it, it
| was rock solid and the tooling was much better than linux at the
| time.
|
| Containers were implemented properly from the beginning, SMF is
| (still) much superior to SystemD, things like resource limits and
| so on could be applied in a much nicer manner.
|
| And it was fast too, when you had the sun compilers. Oh well.
|
| RIP.
| otterley wrote:
| I'm curious as to why you think SMF is superior to systemd. Can
| you elaborate?
| jmarneweck wrote:
| Joyent SmartOS is now being maintained by MNX and the GitHub
| repositories have moved to https://github.com/TritonDataCenter
| cyberpunk wrote:
| Oh nice. I hadn't heard of mnx.io.
|
| They don't seem to be a huge player like Sun/Oracle,
| Joyent/Samsung though.
|
| I really wish them well, I loved that stack -- but I wouldn't
| bet on that stack anymore. I moved storage to FreeBSD,
| (internet) networking to OpenBSD and VM's live on proxmox
| when I am running actual hardware.
|
| Otherwise, $cloud.
| itomato wrote:
| Oxide has bet the farm on it.
| panick21_ wrote:
| I don't think so. Bhyve with a Rust frontend could run on
| other systems.
| cyberpunk wrote:
| Yeah, but oxide is Bryan Cantrills company, so I mean
| what do you think they were going to use, BeOS? :}
| mattl wrote:
| I was surprised to read recently that Haiku is now being
| used in some commercial products.
| azinman2 wrote:
| What products? That is surprising.
| mattl wrote:
| http://www.tunetrackersystems.com/products.html
| electroly wrote:
| TuneTracker is old school BeOS from the old days, this
| isn't a new development by any stretch of the
| imagination. They just switched to using Haiku.
| gbrown_ wrote:
| I saw the MNX announcement the other day and am still
| confused by it. What did Samsung acquire Joyent for if not
| the software, or did things simply not pan out and Samsung is
| now offloading bit?
| RJIb8RBYxzAMX9u wrote:
| It felt like an acquihiring to build their internal cloud,
| with an hedge that if it's wildly successful, may even be
| offered as a public product.
|
| However, Linux (and containers running on Linux) ate
| everyone's lunch.
| pbowyer wrote:
| There's also https://danube.cloud/ which I think is a fork of
| SmartOS
| ashayh wrote:
| SMF, which is XML based is superior? Really?
| https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/solaris/SMFServiceM...
|
| https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E23824_01/html/E21798/firstboot-2...
| cyberpunk wrote:
| Yep. What's wrong with XML?
| TheAceOfHearts wrote:
| I'd never heard of SMF [0] before, and I'm not very
| familiarized with this problem domain. Maybe this is a dumb
| question, but if it was so great why hasn't anyone tried to
| replicate it for Linux?
|
| It always baffles me that superior tools can be developed while
| still failing to gain traction in alternative ecosystems.
|
| [0] https://www.oracle.com/technical-
| resources/articles/solaris/...
| PAPPPmAc wrote:
| They did, it one of the larger parts of systemd that
| motivated its adoption and ubiquity.
|
| A bunch of commercial UNIXes sprung init
| replacements/extensions with process lifetime management
| systems in the 2000s, systemd is visibly influenced by many
| of their design choices.
|
| OS X natively uses launchd (uses plists for config, has a
| weak dependency system) , Solaris uses SMF (uses XML for
| config). There were also the daemontools/runit family, s6,
| and a couple others that sprung up from open source quarters.
| fmakunbound wrote:
| As I recall, it was a mess of XML files you edit and slow
| Java based tooling.
| hapless wrote:
| I looked at this once, and I seem to recall SMF relies on a
| Solaris-specific IPC mechanism with no simple analog on Linux
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doors_(computing)
| trollied wrote:
| Zones and ZFS were great together.
|
| It was a rock solid OS, sitting on rock solid hardware. I
| enjoyed working with Sun kit back in the day, and it's such a
| shame that Oracle killed yet another great product.
| icedchai wrote:
| Solaris has been a zombie for years. There's a ton of
| enterprises that still need it. If you suggested using it for
| a new project anywhere, you'd be laughed out of the room (or
| the zoom call, at least.)
| lazyier wrote:
| Oracle didn't kill it.
|
| It was already dead when they bought it. What Oracle wanted
| when they bought Sun was Java.
|
| Solaris and the hardware just came along with the ride. There
| are a few people that they needed to support for contractual
| reasons and a legacy install here and there that they could
| continue to milk, but for everybody else Solaris was dead
| before 2009.
|
| This was just as obvious then as it is now. It is just that
| Solaris fans refused to see it.
| gtirloni wrote:
| This a thousand times.
|
| Sun was killing Solaris way before Oracle acquired it.
| Because Sun was at the beginning of that era, people look
| at it with rosy colored glasses.
|
| It had terrible leadership and didn't understand how to
| fully embrace open source (speaking strictly about
| OpenSolaris, they never really wanted share control of
| anything, form a community, etc).
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| I was actually rolling out new installs of Solaris as late
| as 2012.
| [deleted]
| 0x0000000 wrote:
| > but for everybody else Solaris was dead before 2009.
|
| I worked in the Solaris engineering org. We had new
| customers at least as late as 2017.
| Beltalowda wrote:
| I ran OpenSolaris on my laptop back in the day; I thought
| it worked very well. Note I'm not some old-style Unix
| greybeard who used Solaris back in the 80s: I was just
| playing around with various systems and ended up sticking
| with OpenSolaris.
|
| To be fair, from my casual observations it didn't seem
| there was _that_ much inertia around the system, and Oracle
| killed OpenSolaris before I had a chance to put it on any
| servers, but I definitely think there was some potential
| there.
| webmobdev wrote:
| Oracle bought Sun for MySQL. All the rest of the software
| assets were just icing on the cake.
| LeFantome wrote:
| I think the general consensus is that Oracle bought Sun
| for Java.
|
| Databases at Oracle have certainly done better than
| Solaris though. OracleDB is still a cash cow and MySQL I
| believe MySQL is still the most popular Open Source
| relational database ( well, other than SQLite probably ).
| Monty forked MySQL to MariaDB literally the day after
| Oracle bought Sun but MySQL remains far more popular.
| mattl wrote:
| And Java, surely?
| Tostino wrote:
| Yeah it's a "why not both" situation. They wanted Java
| for that sweet Android lawsuit, and they wanted MySQL for
| the support contracts and to ensure it wouldn't encroach
| on many of the same use cases Oracle database is still
| needed for.
| dijit wrote:
| It's impossible to reply to this because by virtue of
| thinking that the systems were good you can label anyone a
| fan.
|
| The fact remains: it was widely deployed, and we are still
| catching up to certain components of the operating system.
|
| Dtrace, ZFS and SMF are examples.
|
| Calling it dead only tells me that you weren't in an
| industry that used it. It would be like claiming windows is
| dead because most things these days are cloud hosted and
| windows is very expensive there. It's true in some sense
| but extremely blind to the rest of the industry.
| panick21_ wrote:
| Exactly, had Oracle contuned the deveopment in the open
| in cooperation with the community it would have been an
| amazing system to this day.
| prmoustache wrote:
| Dtrace, zfs and smf were nice but came too late but they
| are things that appeal the engineer, not the manager that
| sign the contracts. And Sun was already on life support
| when Oracle bought them.
|
| Sure there was still a lot of companies still using
| mostly solaris back then - I worked for 2 of them as a
| Solaris "expert" somewhere during last decade - but all
| of them already had projects running about replacing
| Solaris for more cost effective redhat, even those that
| bought exadata racks.
|
| "expert" meaning I was still one of those survivors still
| young enough to be still willing to work in an operation
| team and having more than 5 years of experience
| administrating Solaris and AIX shit.
|
| I must say I loved the integration of zfs with gnome2's
| nautilus back then on opensolaris. I used it for a while
| as my daily driver at home.
| gruturo wrote:
| > This was just as obvious then as it is now. It is just
| that Solaris fans refused to see it.
|
| Solaris fans (yours truly included) saw it just fine. But
| Oracle has been a poor steward, and if it had any chance of
| being rescued, well, they gave it none. And their fame for
| suing and squeezing their own customers didn't help...
| every company ran away from it once it was an Oracle
| property, and suddenly there was no way to run most
| commercial software on it (My employer was impacted for
| example).
| rbanffy wrote:
| > Oracle didn't kill it.
|
| What is Solaris without SPARC? A somewhat slower and not-
| very-compatible OS for apps that are perfectly content with
| an x86?
|
| Oracle killed it by stopping development of new SPARC
| systems. Linux is a much better fit for x86 boxes than
| Solaris ever was. Solaris for x86 was not a revenue driver
| or should never be considered that, but a gateway drug to
| SPARC workstations and servers. Java was the same - a
| programming environment where you could develop on Windows
| and deploy on Solaris. Unfortunately, for them, you could
| deploy to Linux as easily.
|
| > This was just as obvious then as it is now. It is just
| that Solaris fans refused to see it.
|
| Sun was having trouble funding their chip development
| operation because they tried to be an everything company.
| pjmlp wrote:
| If anything Oracle improved on it, by introducing SPARC ADI
| alongside hardware memory tagging before any other commercial
| UNIX.
| binkHN wrote:
| > Containers were implemented properly from the beginning, SMF
| is (still) much superior to SystemD, things like resource
| limits and so on could be applied in a much nicer manner.
|
| This! Shame they didn't make it free sooner--it might have
| lived longer.
| proxysna wrote:
| Use omniOS, literally next best thing. Zones, smf and all the
| other great things. Amazing stuff.
| nix23 wrote:
| omniOS is absolutely great for servers!!
| webmobdev wrote:
| Why? There is already an active open source fork of Solaris with
| better licensing terms than what Oracle offers - Illumos / OmniOS
| - https://illumos.org/ .
| cbmuser wrote:
| Would be great if Solaris was eventually open-sources again and
| Illumos could merge all the improvements that were made over
| the years by Oracle.
| nix23 wrote:
| Probably the other way around, Illumos made much more
| improvements, but Oracle cannot profit from it (because not
| opensource anymore)
| Findecanor wrote:
| From what I have heard, the core of the OS engineers had left
| when Oracle acquired Sun back in 2010. And those developers
| have continued to be the largest contributors to Illumos.
|
| So, in essence, Illumos is the _real_ continuation of Sun
| Solaris.
| srvmshr wrote:
| This is factually true - The exodus from Sun Microsystems
| started when the takeover news started doing the rounds. The
| OS team was a shell of what was before. Then Oracle further
| squeezed that division ~2015-17. All those remain are the
| switchovers or people who have been promised a lot of TC to
| keep that brand just about alive.
| gtirloni wrote:
| Solaris was a little late in this regard even when OpenSolaris
| was launched.
|
| I've worked with Solaris for many years and really like it but I
| won't even bother to open this page. Thanks, Oracle.
| imoverclocked wrote:
| I remember the Oracle acquisition and the subsequent squelch of
| chatter in #opensolaris and #nexenta on irc. I worked on porting
| a ton of Debian packages to Nexenta and used it in a university
| setting along side Linux and macOS hosts. It was hard to see all
| of that work become somewhat worthless with Oracle's acquisition
| of Sun. It was an extra slap on the face that Sun hardware that I
| personally owned outright had a firmware bug that Sun released
| for free that I then had to pay for an Oracle subscription to
| download.
|
| ZFS, Dtrace, Zones, iSCSI, SMF ... all rock solid and extremely
| usable. I never liked the antiquated package management in
| Solaris thus my involvement in Nexenta.
|
| Solaris being "free" 8 years later means nothing to revive any of
| this. If anything, it signals that Oracle is taking steps to stop
| considering this as a product.
| rbanffy wrote:
| > Oracle is taking steps to stop considering this as a product.
|
| And even then, they refuse to license it under CDDL.
| freedomben wrote:
| I remember that well too. I ran OpenSolaris om my laptop for
| years because at the time it had the best hardware support for
| what I had. I had damn near turned into a fanboy when the
| Oracle acquisition happened and they yanked the rug out. I was
| disappointed at the time and remained so for years, especially
| when I found an old laptop with opensolaris on it a couple
| years back and got super nostalgic.
|
| In hindsight, it was probably the best thing for Linux though.
| When I was hunting for open source OSes there were plenty of
| people like me recommending OpenSolaris to new users. Once that
| happened all the oxygen got sucked out of the room.
|
| Yeah the ship has long since sailed. This isn't going to make
| any difference to reviving Solaris. It's too far behind now and
| even if it weren't, it's a "fool me once" kind of thing.
| blinkingled wrote:
| It doesn't even run on qemu /kvm due to very poor compatibility
| so not sure what Oracle is trying to achieve here - maybe get me
| to buy their x86 servers if they are still selling one? Or find
| specific old h/w in my basememt anf try it on there?
|
| If you needed dtrace or zfs luckily FreeBSD runs fine on most
| hypervisors and real world x86 hardware.
| bahorn wrote:
| It actually does run on KVM! I spent yesterday trying to get it
| to work and found the trick was setting the chipset to i440FX,
| and putting every drive on the IDE bus.
|
| Probably not a reasonable choice for any real usage though.
| fredoralive wrote:
| The specific mention of open source developers makes me think
| "more open source software that works on Solaris" might be part
| of it. Doubt it'll help much, but it might move the needle from
| "they still make Solaris?" to a "guess I'll make sure it at
| least builds" sort of state.
| josephg wrote:
| So does Illumos and OmniOS - which are direct forks from the
| last opensource versions of Solaris. I played around with
| illumos a few years ago before getting into FreeBSD and it's a
| lovely little operating system.
| usrusr wrote:
| "not sure what Oracle is trying to achieve here"
|
| Yeah, this seems weird.
|
| Perhaps they aren't trying to achieve anything at all, and this
| opening is just the small visible part of some internal
| conflict where one participant used to advocate for a grand
| open source Solaris strategy. Resolved by giving that
| participant this partial opening as a token concession.
| sys_64738 wrote:
| There is no internal conflict. This is Oracle you're talking
| about.
| yyyk wrote:
| VirtualBox (owned by Oracle too) will work, and is free to
| download.
| abbbi wrote:
| omnios and solaris11 works nicely on libvirt/qemu. there are
| even vagrant images available, see:
|
| https://app.vagrantup.com/rbrunckhorst/boxes/solaris11.4
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| I assume it runs on virtualbox?
| nix23 wrote:
| Yep:
|
| https://www.oracle.com/solaris/solaris11/downloads/solaris11.
| ..
| krnlpnc wrote:
| My first unix machine in the late 90s was an old sparcststion
| found in the recycling.
|
| Ironically I uninstalled solaris almost immediately and ran
| Slackware on it instead.
| fomine3 wrote:
| Solaris supports OracleZFS rather than OpenZFS (forked from old
| OracleZFS). It's interesting and maybe there are some good
| feature only available on OracleZFS, but I don't want to build a
| new server with Solaris that would not good for recent hardware
| support.
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| Available for x86 and SPARC, but not ARM. An ARM port of Solaris
| would be very interesting.
| andix wrote:
| Why would somebody use Solaris, does it have any real benefits?
| rvnx wrote:
| At some point, Solaris Containers / Zones were a great
| innovation, just outdated now that there is LXC (+ ZFS
| obviously)
| pjmlp wrote:
| For one, it is one of the few UNIXes with proper hardware
| memory tagging, so if one cares about UNIX and security
| critical apps, that is a possible benefit.
| hdjjhhvvhga wrote:
| Solaris used to have some interesting features that were later
| implemented in Linux and FreeBSD. It took years and not all of
| these work perfectly well, but at this point there is no reason
| whatsoever to use Solaris instead of Linux. Unless you want to
| test if your software builds for the dozen or so of existing
| Solaris users.
| pjmlp wrote:
| There is no Linux using something like SPARC ADI, unless we
| are talking about Android, which isn't proper Linux anyway.
| trelane wrote:
| There is, ADI is a feature of the SPARC architecture, not
| Solaris.
|
| https://lwn.net/Articles/678410/ is support for it in
| Linux.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Other than Oracle Linux, which other one does actually
| ship SPARC ADI in production?
|
| None.
| trelane wrote:
| Maybe? I've not looked. It seems likely, probably because
| nobody else really has SPARC boxen anymore.
|
| Regardless, the kernel does support it, a fact that you
| recognize.
| blihp wrote:
| Unless you are part of their existing installed base, don't
| waste your time. It's an attempt to generate interest in a dead
| product. Oracle long ago killed any chance of it remaining
| relevant in the larger software world.
| sgt wrote:
| Absolutely. Solaris is rock solid and you should definitely use
| it, but only if you happen to go 15-20 years back in time.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Solaris with SPARC ADI is still a future that Linux is yet to
| reach.
| monocasa wrote:
| https://lwn.net/Articles/678410/
| pjmlp wrote:
| Contributed upstream by Oracle after being implemented in
| Oracle Linux.
|
| The point was that most Solaris deployments are SPARC
| based, thus it is the only UNIX in production with
| hardware memory tagging at scale.
|
| Linux currently needs a SPARC for it, in which case most
| enterprises will use Oracle Linux anyway.
|
| CHERI and MTE Linux mainstream workloads are far from
| being a common deployment.
| monocasa wrote:
| Sparc with ADI is also far from a common deployment; it
| came out on the M7, and then Oracle cancelled Sparc
| development upon taping out the M8.
|
| And ARM MTE on Linux has millions of deployments in
| Android.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Interesting given that ARM MTE on Android is only
| becoming a thing on Android 13, so I wonder where are
| those millions.
|
| Besides ask Termux guys how much Linux is Android.
| monocasa wrote:
| Linux isn't the user space.
| jlouis wrote:
| Some of the core offerings in Solaris (ZFS, Zones, dTrace, mdb)
| were ahead of their time, arguably. And the implementation is
| far more balanced than what you see in e.g., Linux, with good
| central documentation.
|
| So if you have a system which was built on Solaris, it might be
| smart to keep it operating on Solaris because you happen to
| know the tools and so on.
|
| It's likely any greenfield tech is better built on other
| systems. I'd use Illumos over Solaris, or FreeBSD.
| moron4hire wrote:
| I was just thinking that I used to really like the CDE Motif
| theme, but after looking up screenshots I realized what I was
| actually thinking of was Java's cross-platform "Metal" look and
| feel. I liked how MDI windows looked like they had knurled tool
| handles for the title bars. I liked the little notches on tab
| panel selectors. At the time, I liked it because it was novel
| compared to what I was used to (Win9X), but now I like it because
| everything looks like it _does_ something.
|
| Now that I think about it, Motif is the _least_ favorite of any
| DE theme I 've ever used.
| javajosh wrote:
| There is a cautionary tale here for anyone who wants to write
| great software. Solaris is great software, and yet I wouldn't
| want to run it because I wouldn't want to hire for it. OSes are
| complex enough that you want specialists who "dwell" in the space
| (as opposed to casual things, like libraries), and the community
| is just too small. (That said, sometimes teams pick the outlier
| and win - WhatsApp and Erlang come to mind. But this is really
| rare, I think.)
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| Free until they sneak in some "optional" component that's bundled
| automatically and then sue the shit out of you. Gotta love
| Oracle.. :X
| HstryrsrBttn wrote:
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