[cdf]

Even though I worked for companies that killed Sun, I never stopped admiring the foundational work the company was doing, which was not just cool, but critical for technological progress, and was very sad when the company sold out to Oracle and was gutted alive. HPC stuff Sun pioneered is still very relevant today. In an alternate timeline, Sun fully embraced Open Source and became a key pillar of the internet today.

Unfortunately, while we are well aware of cool tech companies that were ran aground by the finance/sales/management consulting types, Sun felt like a company ran aground by engineers.

Zuck famously kept the Sun logo up for quite a while when Facebook bought Sun's HQ campus, as a warning to the employees of what they could become. In some ways, Facebook/Meta is the spiritual successor of Sun, just like Google became the spiritual successor of SGI when they bought the SGI campus.

But these two ad driven companies never quite became the new Sun/SGI, for better and worse.

[bcantrill]

I don't disagree that Sun was a company run aground by engineers -- though I certainly like to think of myself as one of the engineers trying to navigate us around the rocky shoals! For whatever it's worth, I broadly stand by my analysis on HN fourteen years ago (!!) of Sun's demise[0] -- which now also stands as clear foreshadowing for Oxide eight years before its founding.[1]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2287033

[1] https://bcantrill.dtrace.org/2019/12/02/the-soul-of-a-new-co...

[hylaride]

There's a world where Sun did what you hoped (became a systems company) and created Joyent in-house. However, hyper-scaling means going fast and cheap before good comes along. Sun's habit was fast and good and that's an extremely difficult hurdle to overcome culturally. (By fast I mean growing a platform, not raw performance, FWIW).

Solaris 10/11, with all its technologies (zfs, zones, crossbow, dtrace, etc), was the pinnacle of UNIX that came out just when the world changed. At a company I worked at circa 2008-12 (that was a solaris shop) we essentially created a proto-docker with containers and ZFS that allowed rapid deployments and (re)building of our systems. It was a game changer for on-prem.

[ghaff]

Bryan,

I'm not sure what Sun could realistically have done to come out the other side of the dot-com carnage. Other companies in roughly equivalent situations come to mind. You start looking at doing a hard reboot when the margins for that reboot aren't there and it's difficult to see the light at the end of the tunnel. Maybe an earlier reinvention involving more open source and alignment with where hardware was headed. Don't know.

[kaladin-jasnah]

Honestly, it's because of what Sun's innovations in systems software that I look so fondly on their work.

I do ask myself after reading the HN comment you linked, how often is the limiting factor of systems software the hardware? Potentially a case of this with consumer hardware is ACPI issues, like [1] and [2]. You could design the best software, but if your underlying firmware or hardware is faulty, then you would have to design your software around the faults instead of improving the lower layers or accept bugs.

Oxide describes on their website issues with "vendors pointing fingers with no real accountability, even when teams need it most," and I have seen this point discussed online in regards to Oxide's work on designing their own hardware and firmware. Incidentally, I applied to Oxide recently; I think they're cool for the reasons I thought Sun was cool.

[1] https://triangulatedexistence.mataroa.blog/blog/i-uncovered-...

[2] https://github.com/Zephkek/Asus-ROG-Aml-Deep-Dive

[chris_wot]

“ Believe me that some of us understood this: I worked extensively on both Solaris x86 and with the SPARC microprocessor teams -- and I never hesitated to tell anyone that was listening that our x86 boxes were starting to smoke the hell out of UltraSPARC.”

Was that before or after you realised the Linux kernel devs were better at squeezing performance efficiencies out of x86 than you guys were?