LISA11 - Fork Yeah! The Rise and Development of illumos

[@AerysBat]

"Do not fall into the trap of anthropomorphizing Larry Ellison" hahahaha xD

[@davidweru3134]

@starshipeleven let's get specific... 38:28

[@maxlife459]

more specific: 34:00 is where it starts

[@centerfield6339]

Such a good phrase.

[@TatianaRacheva]

I've watched this talk multiple times, and I'm just making this list as a reference for my future self so I can quickly find these clips: 7:45 - Scalability Day 16:40 - Innovative ideas come from engineers, from individuals: they reflect the people behind them 27:25 - Governance, politics - forkaphobia 29:32 - OpenSolaris sock puppet performance 35:30 - What you think of Oracle is even truer than what you think it is: "Shit mediocrity, inflict misery, lie our asses off, screw our customers, and make a whole shitload of money" 38:28 - Do not fall into the trap of anthropomorphizing Larry Ellison. . .The lawnmower doesn't care about OpenSolaris - the lawnmower doesn't have empathy 43:26 - Because I didn't work at Oracle [anymore], I couldn't quit over this. . .I wanted to quit over it, but I couldn't 56:14 - There is a file system crisis in Linux and KVM. . .it's clown college [btrfs, etc.] 57:05 - If you jailbreak out of QEMU in our KVM implementation, you just find yourself in a zone. Congratulations, you've now burrowed out into a much more secure cell 59:00 - I didn't think this [illumos hackathon] was going to work. Who's gonna hack on an operating system? It's complicated. It's like, "let's go hack on a 747-800!" You don't do that! It might crash! 1:02:30 - Linux has not included DTrace primarily for licensing/religious issues

[@Tedd755]

Still see this talk referenced in the wild today! Significant feat in the fast-evolving world of tech.

[@microcolonel]

Love how they keep the disclaimer on the whole video.

[@RogerBarraud]

Wussies! :-)

[@bcantrill]

Actually, illumos is doing very well. More companies are building out on it (there are now six significant, well-funded companies that have illumos-derivatives at their core) and we're seeing more and more of those folks upstream their work. This work continues to be in the spirit I described in this talk: useful, pragmatic work designed by and for those deploying illumos into production. In short, illumos is not just alive, but thriving!

[@tlpNZ]

I'm privileged to have worked at the same company as Bryan, even if I was not a programmer I sent many years of my life selling the Solaris vision. What was it about Sun that made it such a great place? Why can none of us settle since leaving? I think Bryan sums it up well in this talk. Thank You Bryan and I wish you well at Joyent.

[@GeorgeTsiros]

Sun was a decent company?

[@SuperSmashDolls]

Just coming back here to let everyone know that the lawnmower just choked on Android and spat it out

Honest, pure, lovely, open, passionate, beautiful, inspiring, direct, no-bullshit talk of the year (3 years ago, but who cares, this one is for the history books). SmartOS just keeps on surprising me...

[@swyxTV]

hello from 2020 :)

[@42escapehatch]

@@swyxTV well hey from almost 2022 swyx :)

[@Aaron-p8h5l]

Still rocking in 2024

@@Aaron-p8h5l Damn. I'm too old for this sh...

[@gfrench27]

I have no idea why this is so touching... maybe "I'm old, you're old... WE'RE OLD!"

[@codykonior]

Really beautiful video (even for those of us with no interest in Solaris itself) with a lot of quotable moments. Thanks!

[@Spell01]

I usually watch videos at 1.25x speed. Not with Bryan Cantrill.

[@frostden]

I thought that I was, and literally checked the playback speed.

[@zombiedude347]

I usually watch at 2x speed. I had to go down to 1.5x for him. It'd be nice if more people talked that fast.

[@astarothgr]

Such an amazing presentation, wish I'd seen this way earlier!

[@jraymond40]

LOVE this video every bit as much as I am loving Illumos. Thank you Bryan - appreciate the inside perspective of life after the acquisition.

[@gwojcieszczuk]

This, in my opinion, remains the best technical talk I have ever seen. Right amount of information, context, humor. Pure class.

[@UsenixOrg]

You can access the audio version of this talk on our website at static.usenix.org/events/lisa11/tech/. Cheers!

[@RandomInsano2]

I can't like this enough. Amazing talk, learned a lot. Bryan's my new hero.

[@KennethJaeger]

At 22:37 a small error. I think he means the Firebird database that used to be Interbase, not Ingres. Interbase closed the source after opening it for a while, but Firebird completely forked from the open version.

[@HanifCarroll]

37:19 Is a bit confusing. Oracle donated $300 million to Standford so that Stanford wouldn't say that Oracle did something wrong? If that's right...shouldn't we be mad at Stanford as well?

[@thesurferdude01]

A court allowed him to donate that money to Stanford so he didn't have to admit wrong doing, the insider trading didn't involve Stanford. Although some Stanford professors were involved in evaluating the case, so still sus, lol

[@DaveJacoby]

Honestly hadn't thought of Solaris long after I heard Ian talk about Indiana. Didn't know it still existed until I heard something about SmartOS. If you want to see a long-form slam on Larry Ellison and Oracle, this is the video to watch.

[@DaveJacoby]

Granted, one of the systems I work on is Solaris, but it was off support before I joined up with this outfit. Probably up to Oracle current, but none of the cool things with OpenSolaris. Kinda curious again. Have no spare hardware to throw it at, though.

[@PhilipDurbin]

Try it in a VM?

[@DaveJacoby]

Thinking about it.Certainly would be quick and painless, but do you get the wonder of ZFS that way? Seems like I'd just use it as I'd use Linux, but hate it because it isn't what I'm used to on my Mint or Ubuntu boxes or the RHEL machines at work.

[@PhilipDurbin]

Well, the wonders within the VM, I guess.

[@DaveJacoby]

I hear about Zones and while they sound good, SublimeText exists and I still use vim, out you know what I'm getting at. Will give it a spin, though.

[@JustSomeGuy009]

Bryan Cantrill is my Hero!

[@cybergal99]

As a former SUNWer, this was painful to watch but helpful to understand what happened. Hey, I need to download this Illumous!

[@anderwan]

That was awesome and tremendously informative. I'll be careful not to fall into the trap of anthropomorphizing Larry Ellison.

[@VincentM_01]

"The end of an era' - Brilliant!

[@bloody_albatross]

Is there an update talk on this? Meaning where is illumus now? How is the situation between illumus and oracle now?

[@lale5767]

I don't know if Bryan left Joynet but he's now at a company called Oxide where I guess they're making servers for companies that went to host their servers on site. They made a Rust microkernel for these servers, so I'm not sure if he sees a future for Illumos. By the way, he has a talk on future hardware that I highly recommend if you haven't seen it.

[@AntranigVartanian]

@@lale5767 Oxide's OS is illumos-based :)

[@lale5767]

@@AntranigVartanian did not know that. It makes a lot of sense as they knew SunOs and Illumos inside out. Thanks for letting me know. The spirit of Unix lives on.

[@icantollie]

7:05: “Let history reflect that in UNIX’s darkest hour, only Sun stood by it.”

[@icantollie]

Anyone who went to engineering school in the U. S. in the early 2000s fondly remembers that the “UNIX lab(s)” on university campuses almost invariably meant computer lab(s) filled with Sun SPARC-based workstations and/or servers running Solaris

[@DaZig79]

Reassuring to see that the impressions I was picking up on Oracle were pretty bang on the money! Was sad to see Sun go. Nice talk...

[@GranadaPoet]

I loved the talk and getting his insider view of the development of Solaris. The funniest part of the talk is when he touches on Oracle´s business tactics and ethics, or lack of. Yet it seems that people like Brian have been unable to create a community around project Illumos. And those who tried to create a general pursose illumos-based distro did not get the support they needed. Search google for "OpenIndiana lead Alasdair Lumsden resigns"

[@DartTrevor]

This is why we are working hard to transform it into something awesome with LibreOffice.

[@TannerCh]

34:00 is when it gets really good :)

[@victorskovorodnikov1150]

Interesting. Accidentally stumbled on it.

[@ColbyARussell]

@42:17 I am shocked, SHOCKED, that the company that made it a condition that you agree to let a leopard eat your face went out and got a leopard so it could eat your face.

[@cottreau]

About Oracle and their principles, don't forget, "treat your employees like shit!", they are just cells on the organism that is Oracle.

[@tux1968]

At about 22:37 he mentions the "Firefox database that used to be Ingress". I can't find any information about this anywhere. Ingress was the predecessor to many database systems, including PostgreSQL, but Firefox? Did he misspeak?

[@ColbyARussell]

+tux1968 It seems like bcantrill misspoke here, twice. He probably meant to say Firebird, which is a real piece of database software and the name that Mozilla used for about a year before changing the name a second time to settle on Firefox. The predecessor to Firebird was also InterBase, not Ingres, which itself of course ended up giving rise to Postgres.

[@WarrenPostma]

FireBIRD used to be called Interbase. FireFOX was briefly (badly) named FIREBIRD. The name was changed to FIrefox. Confusing, much?

[@MarkBuffington61]

Awesome! Those of us who cut our teeth on Solaris applaud you!

[@mitchelvalentino1569]

This is fantastic. Thank you.

[@MichaelPohoreski]

Just add a little _prefix_ and _suffix_ and it sounds almost biblical. :-) _The book of the generation of git, the son of Linux, the son of Unix._ _SCCS begat RCS. RCS begat CVS. CVS begat SVN._ @3:37 NSELite (ultimately) begat Teamware. Teamware begat BitKeeper. BitKeeper begat Git. _So all the generations from SCCS to SVN are 4 generations; from NSELite to Git are 4 generations._

[@anwaya]

How on earth did the audience resist the need to applaud the Illumos Innovation Irony slide?

[@ekilfoil]

Man... I'm so glad I jumped ship well before Oracle bought Sun.

[@japrogramer]

Solid burn

[@georgH]

53:34 Sometimes I do feel like that, when at work I spawn a WSL prompt from Windows :D

[@hieroglyph321]

"You stay classsy!!!"

[@DevinPrince]

This is absolutely hilarious.

[@DaneseCooper]

Lovely except it really was decided to explicitly make OpenSolaris incompatible with GPL. That was one of the design points of the CDDL. I was in that room, Bryan and you were not, but I know its fun to re-write history to suit your current politics. I pleaded with Sun to use a BSD family license or the GPL itself and they would consider neither *because* that would have allowed D-Trace to end up in Linux. You can claim otherwise all you want...this was the truth in 2005.

[@balibitten]

I'm just going to leave this here, since this video is still popular, and I'm shocked that this comment hasn't been replied to in 8 years. "Nonetheless she [Cooper] is wrong to characterise the opinion of the Solaris engineering team in the way she does. She is speaking this way because she lost an argument inside Sun, not because her view is representative of the views of Sun or its staff in the way she claims. She, along with many actual engineers, was an advocate of using GPL for OpenSolaris but the need to release rather than wait for one of {GPL v3, Mozilla license revision, encumbrance removal} meant that this was not possible. I am still furious with her for the statement she made at DebConf, which was spiteful and an obstacle to a united FOSS movement." - Simon Phipps, former Chief Open Source Officer, Sun Microsystems; former president, OSI; board member of the Open Rights Group and the Document Foundation; advisor at GNOME Foundation, OpenSolaris, OpenJDK, and OpenSPARC.

[@FeepingCreature]

@@balibitten What is fascinating to me is how this statement somehow manages to precisely avoid saying "what she said is wrong." "She didn't say this because it's representative" - yeah but is it wrong? "She lost an argument." Yeah but is she wrong? "Because we had to release, we couldn't wait for GPL." Yeah but is that the *reason* you didn't use GPL? Barely skims by not answering the question.

[@balibitten]

@@FeepingCreature He explicitly states she is wrong in the very first sentence, there is no "skimming", you are purely making shit up.

[@FeepingCreature]

@@balibitten She is wrong ... *to characterize* the opinion ... *in the way* she does. It's the most weasely way of not quite saying "the specific thing she said is wrong" I can imagine. All the sentences in his statement are like that. "Say it in red! Say 'The fact that the code would not be compatible with Linux was not a factor in our decision!'"

[@timnewsham1]

"not to put too fine a point on it..." ❤

[@Kylelf]

Pretty funny, Sun: Kick butt, have fun, don't cheat, love our customers, change computing forever. Oracle shit mediocrity, inflict misery, lie our assess off, screw our customers and make a whole shitload of money. Funniest (or most painful) part - Sun is out of business and Oracle is doing great. go figure good enough might be the enemy of great but great might be the enemy of success I think that's what's so endearing/compelling about Apple and Steve Jobs : great can win sometimes.

[@skierpage]

kyle Hailey Thanks for the money quote, so great. Except he said "Ship mediocrity"😀. I love how after the audience laughs embarrassedly at his tirade, Mr.Cantrell says "I'm holding back!"

[@adithyareddy6211]

You came here for 33:00

[@automaciej]

LOL @ the description of Oracle's attitude, 35:47

[@zombiefacesupreme]

It really starts at 34:25. So good.

[@danielsaan1976]

Too funny.BC said in one of his vids that USENIX put a disclaimer above his head for the whole talk, and damn me, so they did!

[@blu3h4t]

i will tell you some thing. If by success you mean shitload of money. Then yes Sun is kinda out of business. But if success for you mean making histiry then you cannot erase the influence that Sun has made to the history of computing. Which money cant buy.

[@Tom-kt8lu]

Is there a video where Bryan doesn't mention his age?

[@ilikewebm]

Mp3 / Podcast version?

[@mcspud]

Came here from a Quora post - hilarious. www.quora.com/Whats-so-bad-about-Oracle

[@mjdxp5688]

Fork Oracle!

[@_FFFFFF_]

@7:25 - I'm not sure that Linux vendors were sitting on their thumbs saying "we'll adopt windows nt'. Unless you consider Linux not a UNIX, however Linux and BSD is the only real surviving UNIX these days. So I guess the evolution won.

[@chrystals.4376]

Berkeley wasn’t a Computer vendor and the Linux kernel is at most a clone of MINIX.

[@_FFFFFF_]

@@chrystals.4376 That may have been argueable at one point, but clearly isnt when you look anything more complex than skin deep.

[@ingusmant]

No matter what I hear about oracle it always get worse

[@vicweast]

Minute 35

[@kikulikokuli8260]

Oh come on. Stereotypes _are a thing_ exactly because they're based on truth. Used-car salesmen are sleazy, no? MegaCorps are evil? Lawyers are shady? (The common denominator is psychopathy ofc, but I digress)

[@north2kohala]

Money keeps score, so does age difference with women he deals with. Was 47 years 2010-2016, prob 50 now.

[@NoRace]

Short Oracle

I hate Oracle with a passion. But why do you think would they paid all that money for Sun?

[@regedit33]

For their Java patents (among others) and MySQL

[@FlareGunDebate]

“wasting the openness of your mind” haha

[@MuminovicGoran]

Haha they really shrink you into the tiniest human on screen :)

[@omfgbunder2008]

"The views and opinions expressed in this video are those of the speaker(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the USENIX Association"... LOL poor Bryan.

[@bcantrill]

Sorry; with what claim of mine are you so petulantly disagreeing?

[@ilikewebm]

real cool speech ;D but i still don't like open office :D illumos is the future :D

[@christianoconnell8996]

Lol usenix scared of Oracle

[@Tridd666]

Except stereotypes are almost all true for most of the stereotyped units

[@iamanon4u]

Doth not Oracle sales guy bootless kneel? Speak, T's & C's, for me! Eh Tu, Oracle? Oracle Bucks! No Options! The Sun you knew is dead!

[@AlexM006]

i18n? this sounds like a bad excuse!

[@TheDukeOfZill]

Majority want to see UNIX operating systems become home desktop friendly. Multimedia, gaming, art programs, the works. This almost happened in 2003 kzbin.info/www/bejne/q2KtqJmdd9tomMk won't rest until this comes into fruition. Linux distros have been terribly lazy to make it into the home desktop PC to compete with Windows and OS X, now they have the SJW fiasco that has made Linux one huge joke!!! Only Solaris came that close to getting into the home user's PC... I challenge the lot of devs out there to give Illumos a fork, give it a unique desktop and a revolutionary way to develop programs (or port some over without relying on WINE, else they won't benefit from the magical under the hood workings of UNIX based systems.

[@AlexM006]

od? why not replace it with a os version? you guys at sun f*cked up really hard when you didn't choose a gpl compatible license!