[TUHS] AIX moved into maintainance mode

[Kevin Bowling]

On Fri, Jan 20, 2023 at 11:39 AM Theodore Ts'o <tytso at mit.edu> wrote:
>
> On Wed, Jan 18, 2023 at 05:09:39PM -0800, Larry McVoy wrote:
> > > I was the person nominally in charge of the OpenSolaris port to z (Neale
> > > Ferguson did most of the heavy lifting) when Sine Nomine built it, having
> > > read the tea leaves and believing that IBM would buy Sun.  And then IBM
> > > tightened the screws a little too far and Larry Ellison grabbed it
> > > instead.  Dammit.
> >
> > Yeah, I'm not a Solaris fan (because SunOS) but there was some good
> > technology in there.  Would have been cool if IBM kept it going.  I
> > never really understood why Sun was up for sale.
>
> From my understanding, Sun was up for sale because of competitive
> challenges with the high-end servers (due to delays in their high-end
> Sparc chips, such as Rock) against products such as IBM's Power
> (pSeries) machines.  These systems had a much better margin, and so if
> you're making money primarily off of hardware, this segment is super
> important.  The x86 servers don't make as much money, which is why IBM
> would end up divesting their xSeries business to Lenovo.
>
> IBM was primarily interested in Sun for the Java business; it was
> super important for IBM Software side of the business, since all of
> its major products (Webshere, Tivoli, etc.) were written in Java.  IBM
> didn't really care about Solaris or the Sparc business; after all,
> IBM's pSeries with AIX was doing quite well from a sales perspective
> in the customer segments that were most important for IBM.
>
> When I was part of the IBM Linux Technology Center, I participated in
> an IBM-wide study about whether or not it made sense to invest in file
> system technologies.  What was interesting about it was that it was
> *purely* from a business perspective; would it drive business to IBM?
> Would IBM customers find it useful enough to pay $$$ for it?  IBM's
> decision to not try to invest in some of the cool technologies like
> those that ZFS was pioneering was purely made as a purely cold-hearted
> business decision.  Whether it was cool technology or not didn't enter
> into the evaluation and decision function.

GPFS (now called Spectrum Scale?) is one of the most featured
filesystems I can think of, I bet it met both definitions?

> I'm not going to say that this way of making technology decisions is
> perfect; it definitely has downsides.  But I *am* sure it reflected
> what IBM was willing to pay for Sun Microsystems the company --- and
> Sun was hoping for more $$$ for its shareholders, which is a
> completely fair attitude.  Was Sun Microsystems worth more to Oracle?
> I'm not sure, especially since Oracle has mostly treated Solaris as a
> program loader for Oracle Enterprise Database.  But at the end of the
> day Larrison Ellison was willing to pay more, whether or not it was a
> principled business decision, or just a desire to take home the Sun
> Microsystems trophy.  And at some level, it really doesn't matter.
>
> Realistically, I'm not sure Solaris would have fared that much better
> under IBM's stewardship.  I'm sure IBM would make Solaris available to
> those customers who wanted to use it, and IBM would have maintained
> Open Solaris as a open source project.  But the decision on how much
> to invest into new technologies like DTrace and ZFS would have been
> made the same way that IBM *declined* to try to create a next
> generation file system for AIX or Linux.  And the DTrace and ZFS
> technologies would have been integrated into Linux (under the GPL
> license) and AIX, thus adding Solaris technological distinctiveness to
> those OS's.  And while Sun's existing customers might still want
> Solaris, IBM's customers would very likely stick with the AIX and
> Linux that they knew.

One bit of anecdote, AIX does have a dynamic tracing system comprable
to DTrace called ProbeVue.  So I think the relative cost of new
engineering on whatever Sun had to offer was never too high.  And that
is congruent with my understanding of the technology business, most
times acquisitions are to gain customers (aka revenue) and seldom
employees (aka aquihire).  Business technology transfers are usually a
sign of something gone wrong, with occasional flukes of success.

> So that would leave Open Solaris competing with Linux as an open
> source project, without necessarily IBM investing much into Open
> Solaris except from a hardware enablement perspective, and with the
> best Solaris features getting cherry-picked into Linux.  So it would
> ultimately depend on how much external investment from other companies
> might make into Open Solaris versus Linux.  And there, a lot of Linux
> investment came because its use in the embedded and mobile space.
> (Linux's ext4 encryption and fsverity features was for Android and
> ChromeOS; it was *not* developed for the data center use cases,
> although there are now some use cases starting to pick up the data
> center world.)  Would Open Solaris been flexible enough to fit on
> wrist watches and handheld phones?  It's definitely an interesting
> question, especially, given Linux would have a head start in those
> worlds.
>
>                                                 - Ted