Sun, The End Of Something Good And Something Bad

The press has been alight with the Oracle buying Sun Microsystems. Its a bit of a moment for me as I took some of my first steps as a Systems Administrator on sun hardware. I still remember fondly my first E220R machines and how cool those machines were. Neatly organised, well packaged and reassuringly expensive these machines epitomised a serious dot com attitude. You bought Sun if you could show you were going to have a lot of traffic. The unboxing of these machines was an almost religious experience. Those machines were grunty, when powered up they sounded like a purring Barry White... lovely. Solaris was the big boy of the UNIX world and along with Oracle they made a powerful combination. When compared to the Microsoft offerings of the time there was no mistaking the raw power. Even years afterwards I still recommended buying Sun hardware. You knew it was good kit, you knew it was well supported and if you needed more grunt you simply bought the next rung up the ladder. The ladder took you right the way up to mainframe class performance. Whatever happens now, another player from the old days of UNIX has fallen by the wayside.

The downside of that was Sun's approach - they charged like the proverbial wounded bull for all spares (the drives were a particular favourite of mine - a $1 metal tab and latch were enough to double the price of a hard disk); their insistence on trying to compete with Linux when it had become obvious to others that Solaris was dying; charging for their C compiler when GCC was free; buying MySQL and promptly seeing its founders up sticks and leave. When you write down the list of mistakes it starts to become monotonous... were we that well off? While re-reading The Art of UNIX Programming the second chapter reminded me of how bad things had been. The promise of UNIX that lay so un-fulfilled by Sun and the other big UNIX vendors was ubiquity. Changing vendors was excruciating, expensive and perilous as a project. If my list of Sun's mistakes is lengthy, the other players were as bad if not worse. For instance can anyone forget SCO and their crackpot legal theories?

So maybe this hastens the point at which open-source UNIX clones take their place at the top of the operating systems tree. I just hope we learn the lessons that Sun taught us.