Comments by "Lawrence D’Oliveiro" (@lawrencedoliveiro9104) on "When Kindness Backfires - The Tragic Tale Of Sun Microsystems" video.

  1. Unix workstations were a big market up until Windows NT came out. Which was interesting because Windows NT “Workstation” was actually crippled in many ways compared to the Unix OSes that those workstations had been running. But it ran on cheaper hardware, and that helped. Even after its workstation business dried up, Sun was able to continue being profitable for a few more years selling servers for this new-fangled “Internet” thing. Until this brash upstart “Linux” thing came along and gobbled up all that business as well.
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  2. ZFS is to filesystems as Java is to programming languages. It will happily chew all the RAM on your system if you let it. I always thought it was best suited to special-purpose filesystem appliances, rather than multifunction servers.
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  3.  @21nickik  Linux wasn’t the problem, it was the solution. The problem was the fragmentation of proprietary Unix.
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  4. SGI was a different company.
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  5. ZFS on Linux is a case in point. The Linux kernel includes a filesystem cache, which is part of the common architecture across all its filesystem support. But ZFS doesn’t use that common cache, it insists on implementing its own, which needs to be managed separately. This has implications. The Linux filesystem cache has lower priority than regular applications trying to make use of RAM; this means that, if apps need RAM, parts of the cache will be dumped as necessary to make room. This is why, in the “free” and “top” commands, the amount of available RAM has to be taken as the sum of both the “free” and “cache” amounts, so don’t worry if the former looks low, if the latter is high--that’s just your system working efficiently. ZFS doesn’t play nicely with this. Which is why I would not recommend using it on a general-purpose machine.
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  6. Judge Alsup made a point of teaching himself programming so that he could rule in an informed way on the case. He concluded that APIs could not be copyrighted, and carefully wrote up his reasoning in his verdict. Unfortunately, the appeal went to the Court of Appeals of the Federal Circuit, which is a notoriously copyright/patent-friendly body. So they simply disregarded his verdict, directed him to find that APIs could be copyrighted, and told him to take another look. And then the jury came back and said OK, if APIs are copyrightable, then this was fair use anyway, so the copying was all right.
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  7. Would you consider Facebook to be “enterprise-grade”? They are built on PHP, and also Python.
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  8. You could have used GNU Autotools for your build system. That was full of workarounds for quirks in various proprietary Unices that didn’t quite conform to the specs. Also, the first thing any seasoned Unix admin did with a new box was install the GNU userland tools on it anyway. They usually worked a lot better than the vendor-provided proprietary equivalents.
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  9. Unfortunately, thanks to Oracle closing it up again, open-source Solaris has to work off an obsolete Solaris code base.
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  10. 1:00 The lawsuit wasn’t over copying Java code, it was over copying APIs. Up to that point, it was generally understood (particularly among open-source developers) that APIs were not copyrightable, only implementations of them were. But by spending huge amounts of money on legal fights, Oracle was able to get a court decision to the contrary.
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  11. I remember a mention from the time that Linux actually performed better on Sun’s own hardware than Sun’s own OS.
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  12. Java was meant to be something like C++ but simpler (leaving out some features) and easier to use (integrated garbage collection). I don’t think it would have become popular without Sun’s massive hype machine behind it. And in the end, some of the features it left out turned out to be rather important (e.g. generics, typedefs, unsigned integers). And you’d think that garbage collection would ensure no memory leaks, but it doesn’t. And so in language complexity it saves very little compared to C++.
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  13. Linux was still playing catch-up to Solaris back then, but it didn’t take long to find itself in front of the pack.
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