I don't know if it was the immediate cause of their lack of success, but they had also brought with them from Sun the Sun attitude of doing stuff that their engineers thought was cool (and it probably was) without paying attention to how much people are willing to pay for it and whether their focus is correct from a market perspective. For example, Bryan Cantrill, Joyent's CTO, liked blaming Oracle's Larry Ellison for the demise of Solaris, on which Cantrill had worked, but by the time Ellison acquired the failing Sun, Solaris, cool technology and all, had been pretty much dead or dying for a while -- at the hands of Linux, and not much helped by the Sun attitude. Cantrill was furious and blamed Ellison of being monomaniacal about making money ("don't anthropomorphize Larry Ellison," he said) but perhaps it was Cantrill who was monomaniacal all along, not keeping his eyes on the market. Then again, luck plays such an important role in these things that nice narratives rarely give the whole picture.
To be clear, I have never blamed Ellison for the demise of Sun or even Solaris -- but I do blame Oracle for re-proprietarizing OpenSolaris, and thereby ripping up the social contract of copyright assignment in an open source project. If it must be said, this wasn't an isolated incident -- and in hindsight, was merely the front of a conga line bad Oracle behavior.
As for my own putative ignorance of market demands, one of Sun's growth areas at the time of acquisition in terms of revenue was the group that I had co-founded within Sun[1][2] -- in part because we had listened carefully to the market, and built a product that it very much wanted.
Finally, if we want to engage in the perennial musing as to the demise of Sun, I think for my part I still broadly stand by my analysis from 2011.[3]
We have an art installation at the corporate campus where I work.
It's a parody of 1984, with inspirational quotes flowing over the entire building (300meters long). But they are not inspirational, rather artsy sometimes edgy and provocative.
The sentences change every day, and are controlled by an artist in California somewhere.
One of the sentences one day was:
"Monomania creates success"
There are 430 statements. Holzer’s work reflects both a political and with a focus on interpersonal relations and a moral perspective. With her fleeting forms – texts that sweep past – she symbolizes aspects of life itself. Holzer represents a melancholic and committed voice in contemporary art.
* Strange section *
In a paradisiac state the basic survival tasks you need to perform all seems clear and your objective is right there in front of you.
There is a period where you know you have gone wrong but continue
Monomania creates success
* Very dark section *
Scream so powerful that it empties all the kindness you could have shown and blackened the entire fabric of your soul
Form a noise so true that your tormentor recognizes it as a sound that can come from his throat
Murder has its sexual side
You are caught thinking about killing anyone you know
Sometimes you have no other choice but to watch something gruesome occur.
Solaris's death at the hands of Linux can be attributed in part not just to "the Sun attitude" but specifically to the attitude of Bryan Cantrill personally. In response to Dave Miller explaining how Linux's networking was technically superior (at that moment) due to more care for things like TLB footprints and system call overhead, and also had more accessible technical support, Cantrill famously decided to respond by making fun of Miller for being a nerd: "Have you ever kissed a girl?"
Admittedly, this was in 1996, and it's possible Cantrill regretted this remark, or the nerd-hating attitude behind it, at some point in the intervening 23 years. But I've never seen him admit it. I see he's participating in this thread, so if you see him not replying to this message, that's him doubling down.
Ha ha -- wow! I had no idea that I possessed such power over time and space! As has already been pointed out to you (and has been pointed out repeatedly on HN over the years), I do regret the remark. So, there's that.
I would also note that the rise of Linux in the late 1990s and early 2000s corresponds with the performance of x86 surpassing the performance of the RISC microprocessors during that same period -- a time when the only other open source Unix was operating under a legal cloud from AT&T. It seems likely that these forces played a greater role than a twentysomething engineer shooting his mouth off on Usenet...
FWIW when I asked the "what's Joyent all about" question I never expected or hoped this would become a "let's blame Bryan Cantrill for random shit" flamefest. I'm not sure where all of that is coming from and I'm sorry if somehow I triggered all that.
You've been a great example to me and many others, in doing open source, in taking a principled stance (even if I subtly disagree with some of your principles) and also in showing that yes, it's totally possible to found a company with an incomprehensible business model, grow it, have it contribute lots and lots to awesome open source, and somehow despite all the free work and the incomprehensibilities, flip it for a profit. One day I hope to do the same and all of HN will be like "huh?"
Hey, thanks for that! The HN comments here today have been full of surprises, not least the intense personalization of it all! I believe that our impact in the world is much more in the people we inspire than in those we rankle -- so in that regard, it's deeply gratifying to know that I have been of service; thank you!
> full of surprises, not least the intense personalization of it all!
I'm surprised you're surprised by this, considering that you have contributed much to the personalization of such matters. The personal "psychologization" of complex social dynamics is pretty much the trademark of many of your talks. If you find psychological explanations attractive, why are you surprised when others do, too?
I think you're right regarding x86 performance being a huge factor. Also my own experience, admining a number of Solaris systems in those days, I just found it more frustrating to use. The first thing I would do was put GNU userland on there to make a Solaris system more usable.
Later on when I had more say in what systems things ran on, I'd reach for Linux because it was easier. It was good enough. I could easily run it at home too, and it ran on cheap hardware.
I sometimes wonder how much that usability factor played a role...
Though AWS seems to be doing fine as a business, so maybe this theory about usability isn't so great.
He has said he regrets it in a Reddit AMA[1]. I find it quite strange that you attribute the death of an entire company to the attitude of a single engineer in an email from 1996 where he made a silly remark. You'd think if Cantrill was that powerful of a king-maker you'd want to be much nicer to him. Not to mention that Cantrill himself is also clearly a nerd, so "nerd-hating" is a bit of a weird statement.
Consider the remark not as the cause of death of the company, but the remark as an instance of a general attitude, and that attitude fitting in quite well at the company.
I have never in my life dealt with engineers so competent, professional and kind as the Sun Microsystems folks were. If they were technologically arrogant, they earned it: their inventions outlasted the company and live on in many products.
I cannot name a single GNU/Linux "hacker" inventing anything. Everything they implemented is a shoddy copy of what the engineers at hp, SGI and Sun Microsystems did. They might have shoddily implemented it by writing the code from scratch, but they blatantly stole everything. For instance, the manual page for chkconfig(8) will even tell one that the command comes from SGI's IRIX.
While I definitely agree that Sun, HP, and SGI had amazing engineering this section of your comment is particularly ridiculous:
> I cannot name a single GNU/Linux "hacker" inventing anything. Everything they implemented is a shoddy copy of what the engineers at [...] did.
If we ignore the obvious counter-arguments (GCC, Apache, nginx, arguably git, and so on), and just look at your statement at face value -- you're saying that nobody from the largest free software community in the world has invented anything new in the past 10-15 years. What possible evidence do you have that this is true? It's not just wrong, it's offensively so.
Heck, ZFS-on-Linux is now the repo-of-record for ZFS -- that's a specific example of the GNU/Linux community implementing things alongside the rest of the free software community (and currently ZoL has more features than any other ZFS port).
It's also the case that those brilliant engineers did the same thing. Zones are arguably a re-implementation of Jails with some slightly different design goals. IOCP is objectively just a copy of kqueue (to the point where Cantrill said he wished they'd just ported kqueue). And so on. I don't think this is a bad thing at all, but it's quite strange to put them up on a pedestal to the point where you effectively say that any engineer who didn't work at Sun/HP/SGI in 2003 hasn't invented anything.
There are obviously plenty of examples of Linux not learning from others (Jails/Zones vs containers, kqueue/IOCP vs epoll, DTrace vs eBPF+bpftrace, and so on). But arguing that nothing innovative has come out of the GNU/Linux community ever is just awful.
> the obvious counter-arguments (GCC, Apache, nginx, arguably git...
...and Wikipedia, BitTorrent, the WWW (open-source, though developed on NeXTStep), the Objective-C compiler that made it possible, Emacs (and its idea of an extensible self-documenting editor), Perl, bash, the dpkg/apt system the app stores ape poorly, the CTAN and CPAN systems it derived from, most aspects of decentralized source control in the form of arch (and then later Mercurial and Git), rsync, Docker, Nix, GNU make, Python 3, gold (the linker), iptables, Enlightenment, the Hurd, MySQL, PNG, Pango, Numpy, IPython/Jupyter, Ruby, the X11 Render extension, LADSPA, Valgrind, asan/ubsan, basically everything on CPAN, all the inventions in x264, ...
I'm not sure Apache belongs in there, though. Rob McCool might take exception to being called a "GNU/Linux hacker", though I don't think Robert Thau would mind.
> There are obviously plenty of examples of Linux not learning from others (Jails/Zones vs containers, kqueue/IOCP vs epoll, ...
Oh c'mon, is the problem that Linux doesn't innovate enough or that Linux innovates too much? Epoll is an example of Linux arguably innovating too much.
There is a counter-argument to git -- namely Sun had TeamWare[1] (the prequel to BitKeeper) and thus you could argue that git is still a "shoddy reimplementation". But this of course ignores the fact that TeamWare was almost completely unknown outside Sun until BitKeeper came along (at which point it was just an element of BitKeeper's history), and that git is objectively superior in many metrics to TeamWare.
Personally I think GCC, Apache, and nginx are much better counter-arguments.
Quite unfortunately for all of us condemned to use GNU/Linux:
- GCC exists because Sun Studio compilers weren't free back then;
- Apache is the next generation NCSA web server;
- nginex is a re-invented Apache wheel.
Do you have any more examples to get corrected on? I'll be glad to set you straight, in the hope that unlike your Linux buddies you are capable of learning.
They are simply amateurs wanting to play engineers, but they never were engineers and never will be, and it shows in just how shitty GNU/Linux based operating systems are. Hacked up together by hackers according to the "hack it 'till it works, man!" motto. And they don't learn from their mistakes or from the mistakes of others, on top of being deeply convicted that they are the best.
Find me one technology invented in GNU/Linux which UNIX did not already invent and I will publicly retract my statement here. Just one.
Okay, here are two examples: rsync and restic[1] (an evolution of borgbackup[2]). You already know what rsync is, but the other two are backup tools that offer encryption and content-based deduplication. There is no distinction between a "full" backup and an "incremental" backup.
Now, I already know that you're going to say that "zfs send" already does these things -- but it really doesn't. First of all, ZoL only recently got encryption support so built-in encryption with ZFS only came around recently (and was developed by someone from the GNU/Linux community, by the way). Also, ZFS's dedup is so expensive that it's very strongly recommended that people don't use it unless they really need it. Deduplication with restic and borgbackup is content-based which means that it's far more resilient to shifting bytes in files and it's effectively free because everything is stored as a CAS (to be fair, it's only mostly free because people don't use it as a filesystem).
Again, I really am not bagging on Sun here. I just think it's quite ludicrous that you're saying that any engineer who didn't work at Sun pre-2010 never invented anything. I refuse to believe that you honestly believe that, purely based on how ludicrous of a concept it is.
Borgbackup is a third party, unbundled application. I don't see what it has to do with people hacking on GNU/Linux like mad.
"I just think it's quite ludicrous that you're saying that any engineer who didn't work at Sun pre-2010 never invented anything."
You didn't get it quite right: I'm saying that professional engineers worked at Sun Microsystems, hp and SGI. That's statement #1. Statement #2 is that people working on GNU/Linux are amateurs who didn't invent anything. Statement #3 is that because they are amateurs who are incapable of learning, they just keep hacking shit together haphazardly and will never be engineers like the people from Sun, hp and SGI. Especially SGI: SGI had the best engineers. Those people were way ahead of their time in every technical aspect imaginable.
"I refuse to believe that you honestly believe that, purely based on how ludicrous of a concept it is."
Believe it. GNU/Linux people are amateurs. They don't have it in them. They want to be thought of as engineers but they aren't. They just aren't capable of it. That's why GNU and GNU/Linux are garbage and will never be anything more than a pile of haphazard, shoddily slapped together hacks. That's the world we live in now, where IT is shit thanks to their shitty, shoddy work.
Dave Chinner is an ex-SGI engineer who has been working on XFS since the beginning of the project and is currently a Linux kernel maintainer. Brendan Gregg is ex-Sun and worked on DTrace and currently is helping improve Linux's tracing capabilities. Are they "amateurs who are incapable of learning" or "professional engineers"?
I've seen comments from you about how GNU/Linux is awful in every respect ever since you created your account ~3 years ago. I really can't imagine being so stuck in a mindset that you feel the need to spend so much of your time being angry about such a large community of people. Honestly, I just don't get it and I earnestly hope that this is just an online persona you have.
Dave and Brendan are former SGI and Sun engineers. They are refugees. They gave up. So once again we're back to what I said: either one came from SGI, or hp, or Sun Microsystems, but one sure as hell didn't come from the GNU/Linux being an engineer, nor will such a thing ever happen. For 20 years they've been hacking furiously on Linux and still the basic things don't work correctly. That's what happens when one hacks instead of system engineering solutions.
"I really can't imagine being so stuck in a mindset that you feel the need to spend so much of your time being angry about such a large community of people."
Computers were my life, my passion, my calling. They destroyed all that passion in me with their GNU and their GNU/Linux. I will not forget. I will not forgive. They made my professional life a living hell. I hate working in IT because of those people and their mentality.
"Honestly, I just don't get it and I earnestly hope that this is just an online persona you have."
You must be the change in the world you wish to see.
And I believe that, deeply. I'm absolutely convicted about it. Even if I single handedly must teach apprentices, I will continue to fight until the last drop of blood against GNU and against GNU/Linux and teach people, person by person if I must, as I have been, showing them one on one how awful it is and how superior and easy a real UNIX like SmartOS is. Either until I die or manage to get out of IT. Because truly awful things like GNU and GNU/Linux deserve to be relegated to dark history of IT, and some good and beautiful, well thought out things like SmartOS are worth fighting for. I will continue to fight against ignorance and trend pandering and for enlightment. I will strain like buddha strained if I must. Some things are just worth fighting for and some things one must make a stand against, no matter the cost to oneself. I am forced to work on and with GNU/Linux because people think like you, but I will fight it and resist it every step of the way and I will continue to teach because working on Linux and with GNU/Linux is more work, not less work for me. That alone is more than enough to motivate me.
If I am not mistaken, Cantrill stole the line from this skit.
"The good old days." I actually went to a Star Trek convention as a kid back in the late 70's/early 80's, don't remember the year.
It was a different time. "Cool" meant something different back then. People really could say "Get a life!" and it was not an insult. It was truth. There was more to life back then than computers.
(There still is, but today this simple truth is being lost on many more people.)
This is patent nonsense. Sun lost because they were not price competitive. They thought they could command outrageous sums and 46% profit margins because they sold UltraSPARC-based servers and in the case of AMD / intel servers because they bore the Sun Microsystems logo. Meanwhile Linux ran on shitty personal computer hardware and was just good enough for enough kids who didn't have a clue about correctness of operation or reliability and still to this day don't, as is often evident from many, many comments on the subject of GNU/Linux here.
Sun Microsystems stubbornly refused to lower prices to undercut the generic shitty personal computer used as a server and that cost them the company. hp and IBM made the same mistake at expense of PA-RISC / HP-UX and POWER / AIX respectively. Oracle corporation is in the process of repeating that mistake. They all thought they could get away with outrageous profit margins and pricing. It's like once they started shipping servers to enterprises they all lost compass. Meanwhile, the whole market commoditized. They all wouldn't accept that. Now they've been reduced to rubble. hp "Enterprise" is missing in action somewhere peddling a server here and there, IBM started whoring itself around as a "re-invented" service company (the next "Computer Associates"?) and other than Exadata I don't know of a single business willingly buying Oracle servers. Yeah, it's very hard to predict how that will end. "Very hard".
At any rate, all of that has nothing to do with Bryan. Zero.
