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I didn't see any trolling. He did a - harsh, but that's his right - meta-review and everyone jumped on him for his anti-Sun attitude rather than addressing points he raised.



I was curious so I googled for "shaman osnews" and found this comment in a thread: http://osnews.com/thread?231568

Have to say it rings true from what I've seen. Myself and many others commenting I'm sure are not Sun haters. Rather we use Sun products, miss the days when Sun stuff was shiny and high-performance and cutting edge and exciting. Sun seems to be falteringly moving in that direction again which is great, but this hostility toward non-Solaris users or anyone that finds something they personally don't like in Solaris is getting tiresome.

From the article linked which started that thread - http://www.regdeveloper.co.uk/2007/04/13/readers_feedback_linux_vs_... - here's a true comment. "Well, one reason that people might choose to miss out on OpenSolaris is because we're (in general) a conservative lot -- once bitten, twice shy -- and a lot of people have had bad experiences with Solaris (and, dare we say it, also with Windows and Linux) in the past. No matter how much software and UI improves, it takes ages for the community to accept this. A reputation that took years to build can be lost with one bad release -- but won't be quickly reinstated with one good one. So there will always be people who resist change -- and why not, if what they have now works for them."

Sun would do well to print that comment up as a poster and put it in the hallways. Sun has been hostile to developers since the first days of Solaris, when they threw BSD under the bus and made everything SysV. POSIX_ME_HARDER indeed. That sure worked out well, look how Sun has retained compatibility with the wide variety of Unixes out there while no one uses Linux or FreeBSD because of their oddness.

Sun's compilers are top-notch and even have a few advantages over GCC in some areas. But they kept it out of the OS for years and years. Now it's free anyway, what was the point? But Sun people complain that this code or that code only builds in GCC, or somebody linked their package against libgcc. What did they expect? GCC may be a least common denominator but if it's available everywhere and Sun won't even let people look at their kit, no one's going to bother. I'm sure people are trying to retarget Sun's compiler now but it's not going to be a high priority and it will take a long time.

Solaris 8 was actually probably the easiest Solaris to build third party stuff against. Because it had nothing. Solaris 9 and 10 include pointless old versions of things to taunt you and screw up the dynamic linker.

X server with no features. No ssh for the longest time and then when it arrived it had no features. Twitchy curses with no features. Inability to even decide what the backspace key does. This may be changing but SunOS has been a desert since > 4.1.4 and perhaps (hopefully) < 5.11. Sun and Sun advocates need to realize this and come to the game with some humility.

Instead we have Sun developers ripping chunks out of third-party software and replacing them with their own code. Their right, but when their own code breaks I have it on good authority that the internal discussion doesn't focus on "should we have replaced this" and "what did we break" but complaining about the original developer, whose code didn't break while Sun's did.

Instead we have Sun mocking Linux for years, Bill Joy taking time out from anti-nanobots rants to mock open source and free software, Sun spreading FUD about the GPL any chance they got, Sun preventing people from even doing their own closed source Java builds for free and thereby providing Sun products to more platforms. Now Sun tries to pretend they have always been #1 open source leader? Please.

Instead we have Sun acting like they are the servant of the Secret Fire, wielder of the flame of POSIX. Any good idea from anywhere else, can't have it, either because it wasn't predicted or because Sun didn't invent it. Well that is a recipe for stagnation and the world moves on, finding new standards. GNU for example: you can build that toolchain anywhere and suddenly the underlying OS is basically irrelevant. I deplore a monoculture and homogenity but much of that is Sun's fault. And tell me this, if compatibility is so important how come Solaris /bin/sh is so broken, have to look in /usr/xpg to conform; how come SMF won't read inetd.conf for legacy, even though it reads /etc/rc* just fine?

Instead we have Sun people giving talks about DTrace at conferences and wasting time making fun of Linux for exploring another competing strategy. If Sun's is so good, just put it out there and let people find it. People found Java despite Sun's best efforts. Sniping from the side implies insecurity.

Anyway. I have Solaris systems. I've liked aspects of Solaris for a long time and always respected the kernel. I hope Solaris 11 when it comes out will meet my needs and those of my users. Sun should focus on retaining and growing its current user base, and on resolving issues from beta users rather than trying to refute them.