[bahamat]

Companies don't innovate, people do.

All of the technologies that illumos (and Solaris) is now known for (ZFS, Dtrace, crossbow, zones, RBAC, SMF, FMA) were developed by small teams of engineers taking charge. And nearly all of the developers of those technologies are now in the illumos community and notably not at Oracle.

Specifically, Dtrace is primarily the brain child of Bryan Cantrill of Joyent (co-developed with Adam Leventhal of Delphix and Mike Shapiro who left Oracle in 2010) and Jerry Jelinek of Joyent was one of the primary developers of Zones. Matt Ahrens and George Wilson, co-developers of ZFS along with Jeff Bohnwick, are now at Delphix with Adam. Though, as far as I know, Jeff is no longer involved with ZFS development.

All major features of Solaris 11 were developed in OpenSolaris. Solaris 11.1 major features are improvements to SMF, the installer, and the addition of ASLR. Major features in Solaris 11.2 are "kernel zones", OpenStack and SDN [1]. That's very little to show for five years of development.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solaris_(operating_system)

[binarycrusader]

Your response seems to imply that there aren't still teams working on Solaris that can deliver large new pieces of functionality.

You also seem to be unaware that many of the "major features" you talk about in past releases were designed and implemented by people that are still working on Solaris today and sometimes in those same areas.

Also, I have no idea why you place kernel zones in quotes -- kernel zones was actually a massive project. Not a simple variation of existing zones technology. It provides true virtualisation of Solaris on Solaris with minimal overhead compared to alternatives.

Solaris has lots to show for five years of development if you understand the engineering effort required and even more is coming -- just wait until 11.3 and Solaris 12. You'll see things from Solaris you never expected. It's bit insulting to imply that bringing things like OpenStack to Solaris wasn't a significant effort. Many of these technologies are Linux-centric and required significant engineering effort from an architectural and technical perspective to provide an integrated solution.

Solaris also has interfaces and functionality that is not available in other Solaris-based distributions; especially in upcoming releases.

[bahamat]

And illumos has interfaces and functionality not available in Oracle Solaris. That's Oracle's decision, not ours.

I didn't mean to imply that there aren't talented and smart engineers working on Solaris at Oracle. I am, however, underwhelmed by 11.1 and 11.2, which I see as a management problem, not an engineering one. But the point I was making is that when the illumos community talks about Dtrace, zones, ZFS, etc, you can't discount that and say "no, that was Sun" because the people who were the primary developers of those technologies are now with illumos. Saying that Bryan, Adam and Mike can't take credit for Dtrace is just silly.

[geofft]

> Solaris has lots to show for five years of development if you understand the engineering effort required and even more is coming -- just wait until 11.3 and Solaris 12. You'll see things from Solaris you never expected. It's bit insulting to imply that bringing things like OpenStack to Solaris wasn't a significant effort. Many of these technologies are Linux-centric and required significant engineering effort from an architectural and technical perspective to provide an integrated solution.

I think that I can hold the following opinions simultaneously without contradiction:

- It's an impressive amount of technical work.

- It's not really an impressive technical work, per se: OpenStack already works well on Linux, whereas DTrace, zones, ZFS, etc. were and still are innovative. This makes them categorically different. (I definitely admit that my use of the phrase "still being developed" was definitely wrong, but I was replying in the context of the article and of SmartOS in general.)

- If Solaris were still free software, there may well be interest in porting OpenStack to Solaris from anyone other than Solaris engineering. Which, unfortunately, means I'm less inclined to take the hiring rampup positively: I now wonder how much of that work could have been done in the community.

- It's cool for your customers that you're doing this. (I admit I don't understand why someone would be a Solaris customer for any use case other than running other Oracle software, but that's not really relevant; there are quite a few customers, whether or not I understand them.)

- It's not really relevant for people who aren't your customers. Even keeping Solaris closed-source, it's still possible to deliver innovative features. OpenStack isn't one.

This may be less true for other features, but it's why I look at Solaris' current marketing, which is heavily touting OpenStack, and it doesn't cause me to be impressed with Solaris' pace of innovation.

I'm having trouble figuring out what kernel zones are. (Which might be part of the reason that it's not getting the respect it may deserve in general, or why 'bahamat put it in quotation marks, in specific.) It sounds like... KVM or lguest (both using virtio), but plugged into the zone framework and management tools? If so, then again it'd be certainly an impressive amount of work, but less-than-impressive work, compared to Solaris' past glory (DTrace, zones, ZFS, etc., none of which had even remotely comparable features on other OSes for quite a while after their invention by the Solaris team). And since SmartOS has had KVM anyway since its inception, I'm curious how kernel zones in fact stack up.

To be fair, I also work in enterprise software and specifically in systems/OS stuff, and I spend a good chunk of my time doing hard, low-level systems work that's cool for my customers, not really relevant to anyone else, and very rarely innovative in a global sense. I'm reasonably happy with what I do, but I'm also okay with the fact that nobody outside my management or our press releases will ever call 90+% of my work innovative, even though I put a lot of high-quality work into our product. A lot of enterprise software work is making a great product for people who aren't using a different, also-great product because of unrelated reasons. It's an honest and fun way to make a living, but we shouldn't call it more than it is.