Don't make the mistake of anthropomorphizing Larry Ellison
July 1, 2016 10:53 AM   Subscribe

This candid 2011 talk about the history of OpenSolaris fork Illumos doubles as a history of the late Silicon Valley giant Sun, its engineering and corporate culture, its disastrous acquisition by Oracle, and the rise of open source in the 2000's. posted by whir (21 comments total) 14 users marked this as a favorite
 
Bryan Cantrill is a national treasure.
posted by muchomas at 11:15 AM on July 1, 2016 [5 favorites]


How can we subtly suggest a small competition between Larry, Jeff and Elon where the winner creates the post-scarcity society. Winner gets like this special cigar.
posted by sammyo at 11:16 AM on July 1, 2016 [1 favorite]


Oh but seriously there will always be a niche for great OS's but the future just may in OS independent code, containers that can run on anything (Docker) or "serverless" (AWS Lambda), and just about any code will either be embedded (close to the metal) or some flavor of virtual.
posted by sammyo at 11:25 AM on July 1, 2016 [2 favorites]


Solaris is a great OS and Sun made some awesome servers. (I am planning out a product to retire all of ours now. *sigh* I feel kind of dirty.) It was a company that failed in spite of its good products -- or rather, that succeeded for a while despite its worst flaw, its management.

I hate Larry Ellison.
posted by wenestvedt at 11:37 AM on July 1, 2016 [5 favorites]


From today: How Oracle’s business as usual is threatening to kill Java. Oracle is like the Donald Trump of software companies.
posted by boo_radley at 11:39 AM on July 1, 2016 [4 favorites]


Oracle's business culture comes across as adversarial and exploitative in their customer and partner relationships. There are a few other companies in tech that have fallen into this trap. It is unfortunate because they have some really great people.
posted by humanfont at 11:45 AM on July 1, 2016 [1 favorite]


Well, there are few companies that can so neatly and effectively capture a business (by trapping its data and processes).
posted by wenestvedt at 12:04 PM on July 1, 2016


If you spend a little time browsing Oracle's corporate web site, one thing that you will start to notice is that they don't list the prices of any of their products anywhere. The official price of any Oracle product is as much as they can get away with without killing the host.
posted by 1970s Antihero at 12:13 PM on July 1, 2016 [26 favorites]


in my organization we call this "oracle pricing", which is shorthand for "call us and let us know your budget. we'll, uh, come up with a quote."

nice work if you can get it.
posted by j_curiouser at 12:16 PM on July 1, 2016 [5 favorites]


Oracle sucks and all, but not listing prices is pretty typical for managed services, since the variables involved go beyond just how many cores you're running on or etc.
posted by invitapriore at 12:18 PM on July 1, 2016 [1 favorite]


I miss Sun. My first unix command was, literally, su (su sdownard -- as root) -- I'd been volunteering, running tape backups on a little sparcstation 2 with an external 700-something mb external disk the size of a small briefcase, and the sysadmin said she'd let me check my mail, I just had to type this one thing to get into the menuing system I used, as a regular user on our regional FreePort FreeNet. Since then, I've run FreeBSD, BSD OS, SCO (oh how I'd like to forget that), a bit of Digital, SuSE, Debian, RHEL, AIX, you name it...but Solaris was always my favorite. It ... just worked. Okay, okay, 2.4 had "issues." But 2.5.1 and 7 were *solid*. I had a SunOS 4.1.3_U1 box, even, my only SunOS box, and that thing was a *beast*. You couldn't kill it with fire if you tried, the little IPX or whatever you still had would sit there in the flames and laugh in your face while you choked on the smoke. And the hardware was a dream -- I got stuck with a bunch of weird Ross knock-off hyperSPARC clones for a few years, and I threw a party for the entire office the time I finally got budget approval to buy a *real* Sun, because we all knew it was the dawn of a new, no longer randomly crashing daily, era. (What was it -- an Ultra 2, I think? Nothing impressive by normal means, and it was used, but it had that *badge* on it.) I ran E450s, E3k-4500-5500-6500s and finally a pair of 6800s. They were just goddamn good hardware. (We won't speak about the T3s they were chained to. Those were...not great.) I've never run hardware that good since.

But nobody wanted to pay for those hardware contracts -- I used to manage our hardware service and support contract for those 6800s and then some, so I guess I can't really blame them, tbh, although it was worth every penny -- and so for the past ten years or so I've been living in Linux land, and that's fine, it's good, everything's very mature these days and things are pretty reasonable. It's not like when I installed Slackware 1.0 and the liner notes included a warning to actually look up your monitor's refresh rates because if you screwed up your X config you could light it on fire. (Say what you will about CDE, it didn't have to have a fire disclaimer.) And It's not like the bad old days where you'd get everything working well with your server, and then you'd apply patches, and it'd overwrite your custom sendmail (which you had to install because even 2.5.1 shipped with a ridiculously old and insecure sendmail) because you didn't understand the package manager so the best response was OVERWRITE OVERWRITE OVERWRITE. And there were glitches...I mean, I inherited a server on which someone had blown away /var/sadm after a drastic disk shortage, and the poor lobotomized thing was just never the same. But even when Solaris was being weird, it was being weird according to a system. If you just figured out the system, you were golden. And I loved that system. Those were my favorite little servers. I'm glad we only switched to the cattle model after my pets were abandoned by their creators, because I loved my pets and they were brilliant.

And, tbh, I think my been-dragging-it-from-employer-to-employer-for-ages .profile-then-.zshrc still has /usr/xpg4/bin in my PATH, because I'm old and I remember when it made a difference, and I still miss my little pet servers. They were good servers. And Larry Ellison can *die in a fire* for killing them, because I loved them.
posted by sldownard at 2:00 PM on July 1, 2016 [8 favorites]


Say what you will about CDE, it didn't have to have a fire disclaimer.

lp0 on fire

But I recently came across a (gold!) CD-R with "Slackware 0.97" scrawled on the liner paper, and was transported back to the days of trying to get NetBSD running on 68k Macs, or Alsa Sound running on a bulky x86 laptop that was stolen juuuust when I had a useable Linux desktop. (It was easier to switch distress, if memory serves.)

But with Solaris running well on a SPARC chassis, there's nothing I like better. I'm gonna miss those beasts. *sniffle*
posted by wenestvedt at 3:55 PM on July 1, 2016


(Also check out Larry Fan Number One "Jeff B." get knee-capped in the comments.)
posted by wenestvedt at 3:59 PM on July 1, 2016


Live-blogging as an Oracle-hostile Sun Unix admin.

OK, the cattle-rap beats can be applied to this guy. Auctioneers are studying his style.

And Solaris 2.5.1? Yeah. You must realize the transition from SunOS 4.x, something that worked and worked amazingly well, but was BSD based and therefore inferior to the HP, SGI and IBM (IBM's unix-variant, AIX, remains weird to this day, neither fish nor fowl) SVR style Unix. Yet, True64 was BSD even at the end, fueling firebreather DEC Alpha systems. So for reasons and stuff, Sun decided to rip its OS out by the roots, and make a new one. That failed for five point releases, and then a another point release on a point release.

The hardware was initially excellent... but as IBM, HP, DEC and SGI could crank out faster and faster and faster microprocessors, Sun's SPARC began to fade, and then fall behind Intel's desktop chips.

Fujistsu kept the SPARC bad-ass coming, and does to this day. Sun actually gives a shit about their silicon two decades past when they didn't, it's awesome - unfortunately, it's in the service of Oracle.

Also, this dude is pretending really hard NeXT and Apple isn't a thing. (BSD Rules!)

He acknowledges Sun should never have left the Beasties, and how much the modern virtualization takes from them.

Then he sucks bringing in actual political violence as analogy.

He's totally doing the Micromachines Man thing.

Total hard-on for ZFS (YAY!) and x86 (Booooo!)

OK. I have not actually skipped ahead. I know it now. x86 sucks. He wishes this was not so. He wants chic, tony bespoke silicon dealers to fail.

Noooo...

But I'm happy for Open Indiana, seamless Docker-style virtualization that works and smoothly, much more so than its derivative, and also and more importantly virtual networks on a single host.

And now he's BSD licensing apologizing... dude, we get it. BSD Unix is the best Unix.

Not even kidding, I had an ISP fire me as a customer running OpenBSD on a SparcStation LX FOR THINGS.

He's mocking Mozilla, and...

Wow, he talks fast. Wrong, but fast.

Sock puppet. OK.

Les Claypool is syncing a bassline to his voice...

Proper pronunciation of Ubunto, mad props.

Fails at... I mean, yes... Oracle and...

I am very tired. The dude thinks he has something to say, as he coded a lot of it, and worse, his bosses let him think he had something to say. Open Indiana is a thing. Digital Ocean is a thing that uses it as Illumos.

In the meantime the single fastest processor available today is a SPARC chip made by Oracle. It has features on it that will make your database run faster, and there are a few dozen of them in a single server. They do virtualization better and more easily than the Linux-verse, compounded with virtual networks.

This would be terrible and dystopian, except Digital Ocean lives and thrives on their home-rolled Open Indiana derivative.

As a crotchety old... "Should have based your business on Open SunOS 4, as it's more awesome."

Open Source knew this was coming all along. We just did.

Oracle has the literally fastest servers in the datacenters, despite the defections.

Illumos is a derivative of Open Indiana. A very nice one, but immensely user-hostile.

Oracle Solaris is about as bad-ass a Unix-OS coupled with hardware coupled with application-specific hooks (Oracle) and yet have

He pretends Oracle can't somehow take improvements in ZFS and roll it in... as it's Open Source, and that's the point.

I really, really, really like Solaris, and I really, really hate Oracle. Now I want to make Open Indiana a thing, so no one need ever utter the phrase "Illumos."

x86 is part of the disease, and not the cure. On the gripping hand, Linux sucks, too.
posted by Slap*Happy at 8:25 PM on July 1, 2016 [3 favorites]


I mainly just mistake Larry Ellison for Larry Elmore. Every time.
posted by howfar at 2:21 AM on July 2, 2016


In the meantime the single fastest processor available today is a SPARC chip made by Oracle.

Which one's that?

Really enjoyed the video, btw - wish I'd seen it when it came out, as I could have done stuff with that. Now I have to go and read up on What Happened Next, because it's a part of the forest I don't know well. I did for a bit, when ZFS and dtrace first came out, because they were cool and interesting and made for a decent contrast with what was going on elsewhere (not that anything quite like them was), but they didn't do the box-office I was expecting them to so I drifted away. And, yeah, the less I have to do with Oracle the happier I am.
posted by Devonian at 2:56 PM on July 2, 2016


Oh my goodness gracious, OpenIndiana actually has a literal thing "The Hipster Branch"

Anyway, I'll just leave this here..... Gnu Hurd 4eveah.

Oh and just to defend Larry, someone needs to blow his, ah, discretionary on cool sailboats rather than rockets. (I sailed on not this but a much older boat named Oracle that had Larry funding, all carbon fiber and titanium, woo, so much fun)
posted by sammyo at 5:16 PM on July 2, 2016 [1 favorite]


Which one's that?

SPARC M7, clocking in at 4.133 GHz
posted by saeculorum at 8:41 AM on July 3, 2016 [2 favorites]


I actually wish we were staying in SPARC Solaris so I could get a few of those.
posted by wenestvedt at 6:02 PM on July 3, 2016


SPARC M7, clocking in at 4.133 GHz

Shocked the hell out of me, too. IBM and Fujitsu are still making some fire-breathers as well - I'll need to look into this more deeply, as it seems Intel's complete control of its chip design and fabrication is no longer as much as an advantage at either the top end or the low end. Once upon a time, Sun chips were the Poor Sisters of the RISC processors in terms of performance - and then they started to lose against Intel x86 and Sun went deep into the red, allowing Oracle to buy them. That Oracle can in this day and age crank out pure speed demons on the SPARC platform that also have memory security and database acceleration baked in, wow.

I love open source, I hate open source's undying adoration of x86 and its perpetual quest to make a worse desktop than Redmond. If an old-school RISC/UNIX vendor is making hay because Open Source and Intel lack vision and direction, well.

Win me back with something faster, more usable, more programmable, more open and understandable.
posted by Slap*Happy at 8:04 PM on July 3, 2016 [1 favorite]


Hey, I think linux is now installed on more arm chips than x86.
posted by Galaxor Nebulon at 7:46 AM on July 6, 2016 [1 favorite]


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