[Info-vax] New CEO of VMS Software

[Dan Cross]

In article <unffp5$18nuk$1 at dont-email.me>, chrisq  <devzero at nospam.com> wrote:
>On 1/7/24 19:47, Dan Cross wrote:
>> In article <memo.20240107190811.16260s at jgd.cix.co.uk>,
>> John Dallman <jgd at cix.co.uk> wrote:
>> [snip]
>>> They ended up selling themselves to Oracle, of course. Oracle's plan was
>>> vertical integration: tuning up SPARC and Solaris hardware for Oracle
>>> database so they had a price-performance advantage on their own hardware.
>>> A great plan, except that the tuning had already been done and there was
>>> no unrealised performance available.
>> 
>> Well, when the main reason your systems are sold is to run one
>> program specifically....
>> 
>> It's a shame.
>
>Back in the day, Vax etc, software was optimised and fine tuned
>to match the hw is ran on, so perhaps the Oracle "engineered
>systems" idea was just updating that concept.

The Sun acquisition was based on the observation that many of
Sun's customers were buying Sun machines running Solaris
primarily to run Oracle's DBMS.  By acquiring Sun, Oracle was
able to offer a complete vertical solution, from hardware,
through OS, DBMS, and then layering on top very lucrative
services for custom application development and support.

>If you look at
>the last Sparc release docs, theres's a lot of database and
>high speed comms related included in hw. Far too expensive,
>of course, and perhaps the last gasp of proprietary hardware and
>os's, which can never hope to match the resources available to
>the open source movement.

Agreed.

>To be clear, the Solaris sold by Oracle is not the same as Open
>Solaris, which was independently developed from the original Sun
>source release.

Solaris and OpenSolaris were mostly the same code base; since
the Solaris code was re-closed, they've diverged, but I imagine
most of the code is still common between them.

>Openindiana, in constant development
>and a free alternative to the Oracle offering. Also used as the
>core of Joyent Smartos and other systems.

Not exactly; illumos is the base project.  OpenIndiana, SmartOS,
OmniOS, etc, are all distributions built around illumos-gate.

>Solaris 10 was a major milestone, with the introduction of the
>ZFS filesystem, and lightweight virtualisation via Zones, or
>containers, whatever they are called now. This was a decade or
>more ago.

Yup.  A lot of stuff converged in 10.  Don't forget DTrace!

>The FreeBSD clean room ZFS implementation eventually
>became OpenZFS.

OpenZFS is not a clean-room implementation of ZFS; it's based
on the code from OpenSolaris.  Notice the CDDL header and
copyright notices from Oracle (and others) in e.g.,
https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/blob/master/module/zfs/arc.c

>Finally settled on FreeBSD partly because that too had ZFS, a
>similar lightweight virtualisation implementation, a very
>disciplined development process and more. No systemd either.
>The clean room ZFS implementation eventually becoming OpenZFS.
>All in all, a worthy successor to Solaris...

Yeah, FreeBSD is pretty nice.  I don't know about their
development practices, though.

	- Dan C.