Fork Yeah! The Rise and Development of Illumos

• in the mid-1990s Windows NT was taking over
  • Sun stayed UNIX-only, with Jeff Bonwick as de facto BDFL
  • Sun was the only vendor that wasn’t keeping a Windows NT strategy in its back pocket
  • this made Sun a magnet for enthusiastic OS talent
• Revolutionary ideas thrived within Solaris
  • ZFS
  • Dtrace
  • Zones
  • Fault Management Architecture
  • Service Management Facility
  • FireEngine/Crossbow
  • Least Privilege
• These ideas are reflections of the people, not the organization
  • “they did not come from managers, they did not come from marketeers, they were not table stakes on some requirements document”
  • Each of these projects represented an opinion–borne of experience–of a couple of key engineers about what the OS should be
• Open-sourcing
  • The OS had always just been a loss leader; Sun made money from complementary goods (hardware, support)
  • Certain critical bits couldn’t be made open, frustratingly
  • The worst thing about that is that forking wasn’t actually technically feasible
  • all development requied assigning copyright to Sun, with OpenSolaris being inextricable from Sun
  • So middle managers developed God complex about that and were envisioning all sorts of unfortunate governance ideas: governing boards, elections, constitutions
• The “OpenSolaris missile crisis” – in 2007 when Sun created a new OpenSolaris-based distribution called…OpenSolaris (sorta deflating the OpenSolaris Governing Board)
• Oracle acquisition 2009, closing Feb 2010
  • Within Oracle, it was clear OpenSolaris was not a thing; in fact, there was a move within Oracle to close OpenSolaris
  • “You actually don’t need to be open-minded about Oracle. You are wasting the openness of your mind. Go be open-minded about lots of other things. I mean, let’s face it, it’s work to be open-minded, right. I mean, it’s like, ya gotta constantly discard data, like “I gotta be open-minded about this.”. No, with Oracle, just be closed-minded, it’s a lot easier”
  • “What you think of Oracle is even truer than what you think it is. There has been no entity in human history with less complexity or nuance to it than Oracle. And I gotta say, as someone who has seen that complexity for my entire life, it is hard to get used to that idea. It’s like, surely, it’s more complicated than this. It’s like, wow, this is really simple. This company is very straightforward, in its defense. This company is about one man, his alter ego, and what he wants to inflict upon humanity–that’s it.”
  • as opposed to Sun, Oracle’s motto: “It’s more like ship mediocrity, inflict misery, lie our asses off, screw our customers, and make a whole shitload of money”
  • “Do not fall into the trap of anthropomorphizing Larry Ellison. You need to think of Larry Ellison the way you think of a lawnmower. You don’t anthropomorphize your lawnmower. Lawnmower just does, just mows the lawn. Like, you stick your hand in there, it’ll chop it off–the end. You don’t think, like, “Oh, the lawnmower hates me”. Lawnmower don’t give a shit about you. Lawnmower can’t hate you. Don’t anthropomorphize the lawnmower”
• Talent flight as a result of Oracle closing Solaris
  • The entire {ZFS, Dtrace} team left within {45, 90} days, plus the networking team, plus plus plus
  • IllumOS (not Solaris) became the repo of record for critical OS technologies. Here’s why:
    • IllumOS is under CDDL, but copyright remains with the holder
    • This means that Oracle Solaris cannot merge patches from IllumOS even if it wanted to.