LISA11 - Fork Yeah! The Rise and Development of illumos
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN points to it as the definitive, entertaining account of Sun's fate under Oracle, and quotes its Ellison lawnmower advice whenever Oracle behaves badly.
What it is
Bryan Cantrill's LISA11 talk on how illumos arose after Oracle closed OpenSolaris. It covers the history of Sun, ZFS, DTrace and Zones, and the diaspora of kernel engineers, with a famous rant about Oracle and Larry Ellison.
Recommended by 9 HN commenters across 9 different months, 2012 to 2026.
What Hacker News said
Strong rec Malic · 2016-10 · on “Ask HN: What's your favorite tech talk?”
grin Here we go... For "laughing at ourselves" and oddities of computer languages, there is "Wat" by Gary Bernhardt: [LINK] For an opinion on the Sun to Oracle transition, there is "Fork Yeah! The Rise and Development of illumos" by Bryan M. Cantrill, Joyent. His Larry Ellison rant makes me smile: [this video]
Strong rec gbrown_ · 2016-12 · on “"Solaris being canned, at least 50% of teams to be RIF'd in short term"”
> not a leaked version of it. It's a fork. If you're interested how it came to be check out this epic talk by Bryan Cantrill [this video]
Strong rec antoncohen · 2018-04 · on “Ask HN: What is your favourite tech talk?”
"Fork Yeah! The Rise and Development of illumos" by Bryan Cantrill [this video] He starts with a nice history of SunOS and Solaris, goes into open source, then midway through (33:00) he goes into a brutally honest rant against Oracle. Even better is that Oracle was one of the sponsors of the conference.
Strong rec jiggawatts · 2020-03 · on “Oracle's history highlights a possible downside to its stance on API copyrights”
Whenever I hear Oracle mentioned it reminds me that it's once again time to re-watch the "Never make the mistake of anthropomorphising Larry Ellison" rant. [this video]
Recommends insaneirish · 2013-06 · on “Linux Performance Analysis and Tools”
DTrace was deliberately licensed in a way to be incompatible with the Linux kernel. This was commented on directly by Bryan Cantrill on HN [1]. You should also watch his "Fork Yeah!" [2] and "Corporate Open Source Anti-Patterns" [3] talks for full context. [1]: [LINK] [2]: [this video] [3]: [LINK]
Recommends TazeTSchnitzel · 2016-09 · on “Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice”
Oracle killed OpenSolaris. They literally moved Solaris back to being closed-source. With no justification, even, beyond Oracle not liking open-source. Undoing the massive amount of work the Solaris team made in order to open-source it in the first place. There's no more source code releases for Solaris now. Unsurprisingly, almost all the core Solaris team walked. This talk is informative: [this video]
Recommends richard_todd · 2017-09 · on “The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris”
If you are interested, this talk says a lot about what was cool about Solaris, its place in history, the troubles it encountered, and what was wrong with Oracle's approach, leading to little-known open-source forks. [this video] (entitled: Fork yeah! The rise and development of Illumos)
Recommends TAForObvReasons · 2019-02 · on “Reflecting on My Failure to Build a Billion-Dollar Company”
The great Scott McNealy quote about Sun really resonated with me: > We kicked butt, had fun, didn't cheat, loved our customers and changed computing forever ... and in many ways, it seems like only a "lifestyle business" can really prioritize those over core revenue and growth metrics. Bryan Cantrill's discussion is also great: [this video]