Sun

Hi,

I received a message 2 days ago from the sunwizard.net webmaster.

The French Sun fan site is closing down after slightly over 10 years of existence. After a peak of frequentation in 2008, the number of visistor kept on decreasing slowly to the point where there is no more justification in running it and paying associated hosting and domain name.

The site included a forum and and for sale/for trade section where Sun and Sgi stuff regularly showed up. It's just sad.

R.I.P.

Michael

^ I am curious (but not yellow).

What do "hobbyists" actually do ?

Several years ago I picked up an IBM death star. At least 4U, four xeons, six disks, 12 hot-swap pci slots, triple redundant power supplies and an electricity appetite to match. This was a hobbyist decision because a 1U Celeron would have done the job. I burned four or five live CD's of different varieties of Linux, FreeBSD, and Solaris because I'd already used OS/2 and (hobbyist again) didn't want to rechew my dogfood. Tried them all out, Solaris stood above the crowd so we went thataway.

The IBM melted, got replaced with a more-prectical V100. It's still running Solaris and there's still about 60,000 things Solaris does and does well that I haven't even touched. There is no way that I will have enough time in this life to learn everything that Solaris has to offer.

But the "hobbyist community" has lost interest ? What do "hobbyists" do, just flit from flower to flower clicking the icons on the desktop ? I'm puzzled.

Dunno. I never owned a Sun or an SGI until after many years of professional use in the workplace. If not for the development environments (SunStudio and Rational Rose) and the 3D apps (Pro/E and Maya) I'd have no idea what to do with them...

Since this thread is about Sun hobbyists, I'd suggest that the loss of interest is a reaction to Oracle's acquisition of Sun Microsystem. The Sun-related newsgroups and mailing lists I read have been universally negative in their reaction to the merger/takeover/whatever-it's-called. Sun was moving towards making Solaris open source and had been making it available at little to no cost long prior to that. Then Oracle seemed to slam that door shut. There's a perception (either rightly or wrongly) that Oracle doesn't care about hobbyists. (Compare their policies to the OpenVMS hobbyist program, for example.)

So in this specific case, I suspect the hobbyists lost interest because of the way they were treated by Oracle.

You are reinforcing my opinion of "hobbyists" as ignorant little twats

Who cares what Oracle does ? Open Solaris exists. It doesn't belong to Oracle. Take it. Use it. Run with it.

IBM shit on OS/2 users for fifteen years, but there's still a group of people who use it and develop for it. (More than Irix, in fact.) SGI shit all over the hobbyist group, we're still here (n-3, riiiight ). Oracle is assholes, Autodesk is assholes, SGI is a bunch of dickwads, all the computer and software companies are assholes. So what ? Hobbyists expect Mummy to hold their hand and brightly applaud their fingerpaintings forever ? It's ridiculous.


Bought at a fire sale. They purchased the assets before Sun management (I use the term loosely) could throw away every last vestige of value in the company. Larry Ellison is a turd in a human suit but if Oracle hadn't bought them, they were going down the toilet just like SGI did. It's easy to see why - just use Solaris for a while. The os works great but if you have to do anything ? If Sun could have made up their minds about anything and stuck to it, they might still be around. You could power Las Vegas with the energy they wasted just on changing window managers.

And to think Sun and SGI were both market capped in the 5 billion range in the mid-nineties...

Tulip bulbs The more things change, the more they stay the same ...

I'm not trying to argue one way or the other. Just trying to share some of the insight I've picked up in various newsgroups and mailing lists.


All of that's true. But what mattered (from what I've read) in the Sun situation was the change in attitude from Sun to Oracle (more than the actual end result). OS/2 and IRIX hobbyist users never had a company who cared about them, so they had nothing to lose. But the Sun enthusiasts did. It went from Sun being a company who tolerated (or even supported) hobbyist use to the appearance of hostility from Oracle. That drove away many (but by no means all) of the hobbyist users. There are still plenty of them out there, just not in the numbers they used to be.

(The same happened with a lot of Sun's paying customers, too, AFAIK. Many of them were driven away by the steep increases in licensing fees for Solaris, and the corresponding change in the cost/benefit equation. The change in ownership didn't just affect the hobbyist community.)

It's very slow because it's been reniced to a value of about 19 and life is eating up processor time, but I am currently hacking IMPACT support into IRIX 5.3+XFS. Value to SGI=$0, but it's something. Others here are porting newer versions of FOSS to IRIX, again value to SGI=$0, but it's something other than taking a few clicks and reaching for the next system.

Don't underestimate the strategic overlooking of SGI either. Before the Hobbyist program there weren't many OVMS users, but because IRIX wasn't nodelocked/LMFed and SGI was ignoring the hobbyist community there were many people running IRISes with perhaps-not-quite-so-legal copies of IRIX (and occasionally IDO) on them.