Comment by tw04
10 years ago
Sun is also no more... and it's not at all clear they would've survived had Solaris been open sourced a decade earlier.
Yes, you're absolutely right that there are a ton of startups built on opensolaris (who have proprietary code they haven't and don't intend to ever give back to the community), and there is smartos/omnios/illumos as well. But none of those projects would have in any way contributed to the health of Sun Microsystems, nor provided the funding to get Solaris to where it is today. ZFS may have never seen the light of day if Solaris were open sourced in 1995.
> ZFS may have never seen the light of day if Solaris were open sourced in 1995.
It depends on how that would have affected Jeff Bonwick. If it kept him from deciding that Sun ought to develop a new filesystem, promising Matthew Ahrens a job writing one out of college and working together with Matt on it, ZFS would never have existed.
Some history. I was at Sun and Bob Hagmann was teaching at Stanford and got me to be a TA there. He retired and Stanford asked me if I would teach CS240B so I did. Jeff Bonwick was student and I recognized his ability and recruited him to Sun. He said "I have no experience programming in C" and I said "You are smart. I can teach you C, I can't teach you smart".
I also told him that he'd go way farther at Sun than I did and I was right, I think he made DE, I didn't. He played the game better. Smart guy. Him, Bryan, Bill Moore, those guys were the new Sun in my mind.
In that case, you are one of the guys on whose shoulders much of what I have done stands. Thank you.