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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
>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."
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.
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).
>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:
California inspired: from flower power to Silicon Valley;
By Chris Edwards.
How 1960s Bay Area radicalism helped shape the technological powerhouse of northern California.
The operating system is basically irrelevant in Oxide's case, it's relegated to a hypervisor with a few web APIs. But they have a very narrow set of hardware they need to support and a lot of desire to hack on the kernel so it makes some sense that they would pick something they're familiar with.
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.