[splatter9859]

Wow. Illumos / Solaris is still kicking, eh?

Really too bad Solaris didn’t stick around and was so horribly mismanaged by Sun.

Solaris and Vax/VMS is where I started my career decades ago, and still brings back memories.

[steveklabnik]

It still is!

At Oxide, we have our own illumos (in my understanding, you're supposed to lowercase the i) distribution, discussed on HN a while back https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39178521

[splatter9859]

Very cool! Thanks for sharing that.

I'll keep the small "i" in mind as well. :)

[tracker1]

I think a lot of decisions that eventually lead to the Oracle buyout were all pretty bad and Oracle itself being where good ideas go to die. As bad as MS is at extracting value out of its windows users, Oracle seems to fleece it's enterprise customers far, far worse. I don't think I would ever choose Oracle or IBM for anything.

It would be interesting to see a little more diversity in common operating systems in the wild though. Linux has pretty much taken over the server space, and iOS/Android have split the more common usage outside that, with what's left of desktop still mostly Windows.

I still think there's opportunity for something like Flutter as a cross-platform library that actually works with multiple backing languages.

[ndiddy]

It still is, but at this point I'm not sure why anyone would pick it over Linux for something new. All the killer Solaris features (ZFS, dtrace, zones, SMF) have good enough Linux equivalents (OpenZFS, eBPF, containers, systemd) and I'm not aware of any usecases where illumos outperforms Linux anymore.

OpenIndiana also has the problem that every commercial illumos user is using it for some niche purpose (networking infrastructure, storage appliance, that sort of thing) so it's basically up to a few unpaid volunteers working in their free time to adapt it for general desktop use. I'm not sure what the state of stuff like audio support or accelerated graphics looks like if you're on modern hardware.

[shrubble]

I’m of the opinion that the acquisition of Sun by Oracle was the worst possible outcome; it guaranteed that Solaris would decline.

[SoftTalker]

Solaris was the development OS for Oracle for years. I presume that's now shifted to their own linux distro but for many years that was the case, to the point that if you were a serious Oracle customer you ran it on Solaris (and Sun hardware) because all the bug fixes and updates came out first for that platform.

So from that standpoint it makes sense that they acquired it. They probably just didn't care about any non-Oracle users.

[thevillagechief]

Still mad at IBM for screwing the pooch on that one. They basically handed the company to Oracle.

[pjmlp]

Not only it is still around from Oracle, it is the only production UNIX with hardware memory tagging enabled.

Sadly it is still years away on ARM and x86, Linux and BSD systems.

[fanf2]

Like https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity23/presentat... ?

[geephroh]

It (Solaris) was also the origin of ZFS, if I'm not mistaken.

[spauldo]

And DTrace. And NFS/NIS. And SunRPC. And OpenOffice (sort of - they bought the company that made it and then open sourced it). And... you get the idea.

That's what I loved about Sun, really. They strive for a leadership role in the UNIX world by actually leading, instead of just trying to dominate. No company is perfect, but Sun was better than most.

I was sad to see them go, but with Windows NT taking over corporate and Linux taking over networking, they just didn't have a place. They kept pushing "The network is the computer" at a time when PCs were cheap. If only they'd held out until the cloud craze hit...

[JoshTriplett]

I'm really disappointed that Solaris picked a "let's screw Linux" license, relegating some otherwise interesting technologies to only run on Solaris, on permissive OSes like BSD, and on systems that don't care about license compliance.

[ptribble]

There was nothing about screwing anyone involved in the choice of the license. The license had to be something all the copyright and license holders were prepared to accept (and getting them to accept CDDL was hard enough, not everyone did hence the few closed components).

Our belief was that Linux would be unlikely (and unwise as the overall system architecture is sufficiently different that it would be hard to port) to take the code. We expected - and encouraged - the concepts to be taken (as with the slab memory allocator).

[wmf]

Some Linux people were saying "let's screw Solaris" first and Sun people are only human so that's the result.