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> I'm struck by how much this sounds like a Linux fan ranting back in 1995, when Windows and "real" UNIX was king. The underdog rants were rampant back then (I'm sure I penned a few of them myself).

It sounds like a Linux fan ranting circa 1995 because that is precisely what it is: first came the rants. Then a small, underdog company named "redhat" started providing regular builds and support, while Linux was easily accessible, and subversively smuggled into enterprises. Almost 20 years later, Linux is now everywhere.

Where once there was Linux, there is now SmartOS; where once there was redhat, there is now Joyent. Where once one had to download and install Linux to run it, one now has but to plug in an USB stick, or boot SmartOS off of the network, without installing anything. Recognize the patterns?

One thing is different: while Linux has not matured yet, as evidenced, for example, by GNU libc, or by GNU binutils, or the startup subsystem preturbations, SmartOS is based on a 37 years old code base which has matured and reached operational stability about 15 years ago. The engineering required for running the code base in the biggest enterprises and government organizations has been conditioned by large and very large customers having problems running massive, mission critical infrastructure. That is why for instance there are extensive, comprehensive post-mortem analysis as well as debugging tools, and the mentality permeates the system design: for example, ctfconvert runs on every single binary and injects the source code and extra debugging information during the build; no performance penalty, but if you are running massive real-time trading, a database or a web cloud, when going gets tough, one appreciates having the tools and the telemetry. For Linux that level of system introspection is utter science fiction, 20 years later, in enterprise environments, in spite of attempts to the contrary. (Try Systemtap or DTrace on Linux; Try doing a post-mortem debug on the the kernel, or landing into a crashed kernel, inspecting system state, patching it on the fly, and continuing execution; go ahead. I'll wait.) All that engineering that went into Solaris and then illumos and now SmartOS has passed the worst trials by fire at biggest enterprises, and I should know, because I was there, at ground zero, and lived through it all.

All that hard, up-front engineering work that was put into it since the early '90's is now paying off, with a big fat dividend on top of the profits: it is trivial to pull down a pre-made image with imgadm(1M), feed a .JSON file to vmadm(1M), and have a fully working yet completely isolated UNIX server running at the speed of bare metal, in 25 seconds or less. Also, let us not forget almost ~14,000 software packages available, most of which are the exact same software available on Linux[1]. If writing shell code and the command line isn't your cup of tea, there is always Joyent's free, open source SmartDC web application for running the entire cloud from a GUI.

Therefore, my hope is that it will take less than 18 years that it took Linux for SmartOS to become king, especially since cloud is the new reality, and SmartOS has been designed from the ground up to power massive cloud infrastructure.

> I think the assumption you're making is that people choose Linux out of ignorance

That is not an assumption, but rather my very painful and frustrating experience for the last 20 years. Most of those would-be system administrators came from Windows and lack the mentoring and UNIX insights.

> (and, I think the ignorance goes both ways; folks using Solaris have been so accustomed to Zones, ZFS, and dtrace being the unique characteristic of Solaris for so long that they aren't aware of Linux' progress in all of those areas).

I actually did lots and lots of system engineering on Linux (RHEL and CentOS, to be precise) and I am acutely aware of the limitations when compared to what Solaris based operating systems like SmartOS can do: not even the latest and greatest CentOS nor RHEL can even guarantee me basic data integrity, let alone backwards compatibility. Were we in the '80's right now, I would be understanding, but if after 20 years a massive, massive army of would-be developers is incapable of getting the basic things like data integrity, scheduling, startup/shutdown or init subsystem working correctly, in the 21st century, I have zero understanding and zero mercy. After all, my time as a programmer and as an engineer is valuable, and there is also financial cost involved, that not being negligible either.

> Linux has a reasonable container story now; the fact that you don't like how some people are using it (I think Docker is a mess, and I assume you agree)

Yes, I agree. The way I see it, and I've deployed very large datacenters where the focus was operational stability and data correctness, Docker is a web 2.0 developer's attempt to solve those problems, and they are flapping. Dumping files into pre-made images did not compensate for lack of experience in lifecycle management, or lack of experience in process design. No technology can compensate for lack of a good process, and good process requires experience working in very large datacenters where operational stability and data integrity are primary goals. Working in the financial industry where tons of money are at stake by the second can be incredibly instructive and insightful when it comes to designing operationally correct, data-protecting, highly available and secure cloud based applications, but the other way around does not hold.

> Are you really complaining about being able to gzip and tar something in one command? Is that a thing that's actually happening in this conversation?

Let's talk system engineering:

gzip -dc archive.tar.gz | tar xf -

will work everywhere; I do not have to think whether I am on GNU/Linux, or HP-UX, or Solaris, or SmartOS, and if I have the above non-GNU invocation in my code, I can guarantee you, in writing, that it will work everywhere without modification. If on the other hand I use:

tar xzf archive.tar.gz

I cannot guarantee that it will work on every UNIX-like system, and I know from experience I would have to fix the code to use the first method. Therefore, only one of these methods is correct and portable, and the other one is a really bad idea. If I understand this, then why do I need GNU? I do not need it, nor do I want it. Except for a few very specific cases like GNU Make, GNU tools are actually a liability. This is on GNU/Linux, to wit:

  % gcc -g hello.c -o hello
  % gdb hello hello.c
  GNU gdb (GDB) Red Hat Enterprise Linux (7.0.1-45.el5)
  ...
  ...
  ... 
  Dwarf Error: wrong version in compilation unit header (is 4, should be 2) [in module /home/user/hello]
  "/home/user/hello.c" is not a core dump: File format not recognized

  (gdb)

Now, why did that happen? Because the debugger as delivered by the OS doesn't know what to do with it. Something like that is unimaginable on illumos, and by extension, SmartOS. illumos engineers would rather drop dead, than cause something like this to happen.

On top of that, on HP-UX and Solaris I have POSIX tools, so for example POSIX extended regular expressions are guaranteed to work, and the behavior of POSIX-compliant tools is well documented, well understood, and guaranteed. When one is engineering a system, especially a large distributed system which must provide data integrity and operational stability, such concerns become paramount, not to mention that the non-GNU approach is cheaper because no code must be fixed afterwards.

[1] http://www.perkin.org.uk/posts/building-packages-at-scale.ht...