From: cross@spitfire.i.gajendra.net

In article <10cb37p$1hml$2@dont-email.me>,
Arne Vajhøj   wrote:
>On 10/10/2025 9:30 AM, Lawrence D’Oliveiro wrote:
>> On Fri, 10 Oct 2025 08:14 +0100 (BST), John Dallman wrote:
>>> Oracle wanted to sell proprietary hardware, until they lost interest
>>> in Solaris in favour of cloud.
>>
>> I’m sure the fans of the various OpenSolaris offshoots would love to see
>> Solaris open-sourced again. Surely it would be no loss to Oracle to do
>> this now.
>
>I doubt it would make a difference.
>
>They got a copy years ago. They could not make it a success.
>
>There is no reason to believe that getting a copy again would make
>it a success.

It never _really_ went away; illumos is still around, though at
this point distinct from Solaris itself, which occasionally
causes problems: an issue came up just recently where certain
ELF sections were not merged in the linker because LLVM was
changed to emit a bit defined for Solaris `ld` but absent from
illumos `ld`, but LLVM treats the two platforms as the same.
The result was two distinct sections with the same name emitted
into the linked object, so that Rust programs (and presumably
C++ programs, too) failed to initialize static globals.  Of
course, the GNU linker has its own version of that bit, though
the Solaris one predates GNU here.

Anyway, despite things like that, there's some good engineering
in there; it's actually a very pleasant code base to work in.
But of course engineering doesn't matter beyond the minimum,
hence Linux's domination.

	- Dan C.

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
 * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)