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Comment by beefhash | Hacker News Reader

I still kind of wish SunOS (the BSD-based version, before AT&T made them switch over to System V) had made it out of Sun as an open source version.

Sources for 4.1.4 leaked, but of course that's without official blessing... And Oracle's lawyers probably make up more than half the company.

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The loss of Solaris is a tremendous tragedy to the technology world. I once welcomed it's demise. But the lack of any and all competing platforms for Linux has lead Linux down a not entirely happy road

A few of the early startups I worked for were all Solaris shops (mid 90's to early 2000's.) I kind of miss it. I still have an Ultra box at home, but haven't turned it on in over 10 years.

Only if you assume OSX or FreeBSD don’t exist.

OS X was never a great Unix (other than paying to get the official trademark that one time), and it’s becoming even less of a Unix over time.

FreeBSD is OK, but very lacking in manpower. Every time I install a desktop package these days, I see multiple warnings about how this or that dependency has no maintainer.

With so much attention these days on Docker and other halfway measures involving namespaces, it’s not really Unix that’s the platform anymore. Linux is the platform for a variety of network and desktop applications.

OSX is the only Unix system actually used in non-microscopic quantities on desktops.

Regarding Docker - it’s like saying it’s not Linux that’s the platform anymore, it’s the hypervisor. Linux is just one of the layers.

OsX and freebsd are nowhere in global commodity enterprise deployment. Not to mention OsX is awful

Remember how we used to have this dreadful Windows monoculture in the '90's of the past century? Now it's GNU/Linux monoculture...

There is nothing comparable with an open and a closed monoculture though.

And can we even talk of GNU/Linux monoculture when you've got a few working distros - e.g. Void, Alpine - with non-GNU userland, or distros with completely different userspace models - try to compare Ubuntu, Gentoo, Nix, GoboLinux, etc.

Do you have init (systemd-init, sysvinit, openrc), network management (systemd-networkd, NetworkManager, connman), dhcp (systemd-networkd dhcpcd, etc), audio (pulseaudio, pipewire, raw alsa + dmix, etc), graphics (X11, wayland), desktop shell (gnome, KDE Plasma, XFCE, i3) debate in the windows world ? No because except for the last you cannot ever change how it is done yourself on windows, while on the "GNU/Linux" ecosystem everyone is free to come with its own better idea for $SYSTEMCOMPONENT and put it in the open marketplace of competing ideas.

I had no involvement in this, but Sun caused some huge split in their userbase with the switch to SysV Solaris. I had an ISP that never switched off SunOS 4 until they went out of business.

I've always wondered how much *BSD love is SunOS Lost Causeism. I think maybe most younger people (@ my old age) just never really got it.

Sometimes I feel like I'm the only person in the world who has any affection for SVR4 and its derivatives. Everyone seems to hate it, despite it resulting partially in Solaris, XENIX, the universally despised SCO and Unixware, NCR UNIX etc. It ultimately ended up being a huge influence on Linux, which started life as a Minix clone and eventually added more and more interfaces from SVR4 (eg. iBCS2, SysV IPC) as it grew. SVR4 even had a half-decent packaging system for its time as well.

I suppose everybody feels like too much other core "UNIX" stuff came from BSD - vi, TCP/IP etc. Plus the SVR4 vendors typically insisted that you pay separately for C/C++ compilers etc...

Something to keep in mind is that SVR4 is the ATT/Sun joint venture. It was SysV with all those BSD-isms included. Solaris was essentially the reference implementation.

Older SysV and SysIII derivatives were a total crapshoot. Depending on vendor, you could have or not have any number of important things: sockets, tcp/ip, nfs, the list goes on.

SVR4 finally started to heal the rift between ATT and BSD systems. It made Unix applications radically more portable.

> Solaris was essentially the reference implementation.

Interesting, I always thought that AT&T SVR4 was the reference implementation, and that Solaris was the Sun hybrid that was basically AT&T SVR4 with the BSD compatibility added to support legacy SunOS applications.

Yes I was aware that both AIX and HP-UX were originally SVR3 based, and my experience with both of those showed that they were very inconsistent with each other (eg. AIX 4.1 through 4.3, vs HP-UX 10.0, 11 etc).

> SVR4 finally started to heal the rift between ATT and BSD systems. It made Unix applications radically more portable.

Agree and this is one of the reasons that I liked it - it feels like an earlier attempt at creating a "standard" much as Linux is considered today, albeit a fairly closed source one by modern considerations. Of course I wasn't there at the time, but my first UNIX experiences as a teenager were on XENIX, so that probably coloured my perception somewhat.

> AT&T SVR4 was the reference implementation

That is correct. When I was working on one of the early SMP UNIX flavors at Encore, the SVR4 code we used as a base was from AT&T. The only thing we got from Sun was NFS source - for which they'd accept patches, and apply them to their own version of NFS, but then ship the next version back to us with our own changes stripped back out. Such a lovely bunch of people.

You didn't need to get a bunch of extra stuff from Sun, because SVR4 was, itself, a Sun/AT&T joint venture.

e.g. The Sun sockets support was in the base SVR4 kernel and libc.

Sure, but there seems to be somewhat of a gap between AT&T SVR4 release date (1989)[1] and the release of Solaris 2.0 (1992) [2], which was the first SVR4 based version - Solaris 1.0 was merely re-branded SunOS 4.x.

SVR4.2 was not released until 1992 however[1].

Solaris may have been the SVR4 "reference platform" for SPARC hardware, but the other official hardware platform at release was the mainstream x86, which Solaris did not support until 2.1 in 1993.

Also I have a bunch of SVR4 install floppy images here, and for some reason I don't believe it installs TCP/IP support by default. I should go back and check now.

[1] http://www.unix.org/what_is_unix/history_timeline.html

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solaris_(operating_system)

> Solaris was essentially the reference implementation.

That is simply not true. Most of Sun's competitors at the time used an AT&T base augmented with STREAMS-based TCP/IP from Lachman or similar. I worked on one such. My colleagues at Sequent, Pyramid, Masscomp, etc. were all in essentially the same boat. NFS was the only commonly-included piece from Sun.

If you were using SVR4, you already had the AT&T/Sun TCP/IP, and the AT&T/Sun sockets interface in addition to the old SysV TLI.

If you were using SVR3 or earlier, you may have needed extra stuff.

The early versions of Solaris — 2.0, 2.1, 2.2, 2.3 — were basically alpha quality software inflicted on users as if in vengeance for some unknown crime against the vendor.

SunOS 4 was old and crusty but it wasn’t shithouse buggy, and some folks were very reluctant to migrate even after Solaris got a lot better.

I remember the early Solaris 2.x era. Seriously, nobody wanted to run it. We all ran SunOS 4.1 on our SparcStations. Personally I didn't consider Solaris 2 "usable" until 2.5.

SunOS 4 didn't scale to the degree needed for the future, both imagined and real.

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