Things People Hate about Your Open Source Docs - <AUTHOR> http://blog.smartbear.com/careers/13-things-people-hate-about-your-open-source-docs/ <comment><USER2> _Of course, your examples shouldn't just be brief two-line snippets. As Rich Bowen of the Apache project puts it, "One correct, functional, tested, commented example trumps a page of prose, every time."_

If HN allowed signatures, that quote would be mine. I grok libraries and other people's code so much faster when I have a good working example, and the mere existence of that example makes me 10x more likely to use the lib (or, when I have no other option, 10x more likely to complain less).

<comment><USER3> This is 100% true. I am constantly frustrated by incomplete code examples in documentation. The one thing in particular that bothers me the most are when Python snippets don't show the import statements.

do_magic(param, other_param)

Where do I import do_magic from?!?!

<comment><USER4> Same thing in Java -- if there's a class named something commonplace like "Transaction" or "Connection", it's going to be pretty critical to understand whose implementation that refers to.

<comment><USER5> Same in .Net, although Resharper ([http://www.jetbrains.com/resharper/](http://www.jetbrains.com/resharper/)) has made my life a lot easier by giving me much better import/using suggestions, although not 100% foolproof.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Manpages used to be the defacto best source of information, but sometime in the last 15 years they went from great to a hit and miss shambles.

I write this up to GNU's "info" being preferred by some programs, but then that not being installed properly or at all on many system, and people hating manpage syntax, often with good reason.

That said, some systems pay a lot of attention to this. OpenBSD's mandoc is a great example of a modernization of the manpage system, and their manpages are second to none: [http://www.openbsd.org/papers/bsdcan11-mandoc- openbsd.html](http://www.openbsd.org/papers/bsdcan11-mandoc-openbsd.html)

<comment><USER7> Wait, there's programs that use info? o.O

<comment><USER8> Oh yeah. 'man cp' from my Arch Linux machine:

\---

SEE ALSO

The full documentation for cp is maintained as a Texinfo manual. If the info and cp programs are properly installed at your site, the command

                  info coreutils 'cp invocation'

should give you access to the complete manual.

\---

I ran that 'info' command and promptly ran the one emacs command I have memorized: C-x C-c

:)

<comment> m-r-a-m I recently switched to Emacs and started learning it by going through the tutorial (C-h t). Near the end of the tutorial, it refers you to the Emacs manual which uses info (C-h r). After going to the manual I had no idea how to navigate, so I ran the info tutorial (h). I don't really have a point, but I think it's funny that I had to run the a tutorial to get help.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I think I've seen every imaginable "bar" object have every possible "foo" action performed on it. This is the most frustrating thing I find in example code. Yes, I know your library is generalized and will work with any type of object. Please give me a concrete example of where your library might be useful, so I can easily visualize your library's role in my head. I can generalize it myself, thank you very much.

</comment><comment><USER9> The author forgot 'Stale docs'. Once the docs are written, 'that task is done' and new features or changes aren't documented...

</comment><comment><USER10> I hate incomplete docs the most. Most OSS developers would agree that if you're adding a feature to a repository, then you should also be adding a test. There should also be an expectation that you should be adding docs, too.

</comment><comment><USER11> Having offline docs can be quite handy. A few years ago a friend and I put together an iOS app called iCPAN, so that we could have offline Perl docs at our disposal. This kind of thing is particularly helpful because perldoc doesn't work on modules which you have not yet installed. It's also great if you want to read Perl docs on the subway, but I'll admit that's not everyone's cup of tea. :)

<comment><USER12> Now I feel almost obliged to mention having read EmberJS docs while on the crapper. Thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> The biggest sin is not explaining what the project does and the problem that it solves.

I've had people complain to me that no one is using their great open source project. I complain that you don't explain what it does or why its great.

They answer that all you have to do is read the code. I try to diplomatically tell them that there aren't enough hours in anyone's life to read all the code on Github.

The project is not ready to upload if you haven't finished the documentation.

</comment><comment><USER14> Amen. Just amen.

I've worked on at least a couple of open source projects now that have a strong and active core team building everything, and who are talented enough to write great code. But when it's almost time to launch v1.0, the call always goes around: "Who's willing to write the documentation?" And the response is always silence. Documenting just isn't as "fun" as coding, I guess.

But it is, arguably, at least _as_ important if not _more_ , if your goal involves popularity. I recommend open source software projects to groups who are looking for an open source solution, and the ones with an active support community and good documentation, but some sloppy code, win every time over the expertly coded masterpiece that can only really be understood by stepping through the code in a debugger.

</comment><comment><USER15> It's occurred to individuals smarter than myself that projects rise and fall on the strength of their documentation, almost as much as that of their code.

For example, see Django vs. Turbogears or Pylons.

Documentation matters, a lot, despite its relative unsexyness.

</comment><comment><USER16> The great thing about open source documentation is that you can write a patch and attempt to fix it. It would probably take less time to clone a repository and submit a pull request than it did for the author to write that article.

<comment><USER17> Yes, instead of writing an excellent article that explains some principles that could help hundreds or thousands of open source authors improve their projects, he should have taken the approach of shutting up and fixing every one of those projects himself.

Open source should not be about efficiency! It should be about never pointing out anything wrong unless you're willing to change it yourself! Down with feedback! We hate feedback! We're open source authors and we don't have to take it anymore!

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Lack of examples is the major problem, since it is hard to maintain examples in sync with the code. I created tool [https://npmjs.org/package/xplain](https://npmjs.org/package/xplain) that transforms unit tests (javascript) into human readable examples in the API docs. Makes lots of up-to-date examples in the docs possible without any penalty.

</comment><comment><USER19> Not necessary docs, but what I have been observing in a lot of OSS is an absence of one-liner explaining what the project exactly is; especially ones without descriptive project name.

Good "feature list" would probably help, but it's just a pain when reading through 5 paragraphs down only to find that it's not what I think it is.

<comment><USER20> You mean you can't figure it out from an alphabetical list of command line flags? Oh, wait, neither can I.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Very good thoughts. At least there should be a README. I think about creating a template for READMEs.

<comment><USER22> That would be a good open source project!

<comment><USER23> This project sounds sort of promising: [https://github.com/bevry/readme- utils](https://github.com/bevry/readme-utils)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> > _Lack of realistic examples_

So true.

I've frequently had the impression that writers are plain missing the point - with the most dense, clever self-satisfying examples as opposed to verbose, simple and instructive.

</comment><comment><USER25> > 5\. Lack of screenshots

So many GUI libraries do this and it's always frustrating. If you're a GUI library, when I get to your website, the first thing I see should be a screenshot.

</comment><comment><USER26> Things People Hate about Your Docs (there, corrected).

As @coherentpony stated, at least with open source others can pick up the slack.

</comment><comment><USER27> The biggest thing I'd like to see more often are usable example applications. Not just snippets of example code, but working applications which show off some aspect of what your library or tool is intended to do in a complete form. And keep in mind that people looking to see if they want to use your stuff see buggy applications, that reflects on _everything_.

There's a joke to the effect of "Every working Unix program derives from 'Hello, world!' in K&R." There's a similar joke about Windows programs and the first example program in Petzold's book. Write your library or tool's version of a 'Hello, world!', make it tasteful, and keep it working across bug fixes and version changes. That's the testbed; that's what people new to your work will modify stepwise into whatever they really want to build.

The second thing I wish I saw more often are "Theory Of Operation" documents, which document how the developers expect their stuff to be used.

Who is the intended audience? What other stuff do the developers expect the intended audience has seen? If it's a library, what do the developers expect the core of a client application to look like? If it's a tool, what do the developers expect its most common mode of interaction to be? It shouldn't be a listing of what each function does, but something that gives an idea of what the developers think the core functionality is would be very helpful.

Get into the head of your users. What would you want to know going in, if you were a user?</comment>


Secrets of the TechStars method for winning the pitch and getting the girl - <AUTHOR> http://blog.jedwhite.com/2009/08/secrets-of-techstars-method-for-winning.html

<comment><USER2> I usually hate these one-size-fits all outliner type summary of events because they tend to be super dry, middle-of-the-road, not really saying anything type pieces, but this was a nice surprise.

The provided quotes and examples used by the TS companies highlight the importance of pitching concisely and emotionally using narratives.

Since picking up girls and selling in business share a lot of similarities, does TheFunded have a focus on neuro-linguistic programming when it comes to pitching?

</comment><comment><USER3> mr. jedwhite: unless for some reason an intermediary system is distorting this...your domain (blog.jedwhite.com) is resolving to 192.168.31.15 (a private address), and therefore, is not accessible to us. k, tnx.

<comment><AUTHOR> Seems pretty weird. Who runs your DNS and what are they running? The blog is on Blogger, which is Google (the internal address is jedwhite.blogspot.com). Google generally seem to know what they're doing. Has anyone else had problems getting onto Blogger sites?

<comment><USER3> i take back my statement. it seems this network is using opendns and maybe someone _is_ changing things up between, but why your blog? i don't get it.

nslookup blog.jedwhite.com 18.104.22.168 (opendns) => 184.108.40.206

found a discussion of people mentioning this ip as a problem: <http://forums.opendns.com/comments.php?DiscussionID=1320>

nslookup blog.jedwhite.com 188.8.131.52 (ns2.cisco.com) => 184.108.40.206 (what it should be)

looks like an opendns issue, prob same with the other person who couldnt' connect.

<comment><AUTHOR> something strange going on there.

Here's the text of the post for anyone having problems getting to it:

Secrets of the TechStars Method for winning the pitch and getting the girl Posted by Jed White on 7:14 PM in business, FounderInstitute, founders, startups, vc

        "I'm not trying to change the world. I'm not looking for a new England. I'm just looking for another girl. - Billy Bragg"

If I had to find a song to sum up TechStars investor day, this is it.

The companies graduating from TechStars aren't trying to be the next Google. They're focused on smaller targets. They're solving practical problems and have achievable goals. Like Nate and Natty from everlater in David Cohen's techstars.tv prank, they're hoping to get the girl. And, perhaps, the investor.

I went along to TechStars' demo day last week. I'm in a competitive accellerator / incubator from TheFunded called The Founder Institute, and know people in both TechStars and YCombinator. So I thought it would be useful to call out some observations about the TechStars companies and their approach to pitching, and what I would call "The TechStars Method" for accelerating startups... and getting the girl.

Yeah this needs a disclaimer

TechStars is a seed-stage startup incubator/accelerator program based in Boulder CO in its third year, and now also running in Boston. It invests up to $18k in 10 teams and mentors them over 3 months. The Boulder teams presented yesterday. It was a fascinating experience to watch them (thanks to TechStars for having community invites).

I have a natural competitive bias because our startup (code name scribetribe) is in the first year of TheFunded's Founder Institute, an incubator based in Silicon Valley started by Adeo Ressi - terror of VCs and champion of founder rights (I'm only half joking). It has around 75 founders and companies, about 2/3 from the Valley, and is taking a radically different approach to incubating and accelerating startups and founders. But we're going through a similar process of learning to pitch better and explain what we do clearly, and getting "a new one ripped in us" weekly as we go.

At the same time, I know founders in the TechStars program and in both the current and last intake of Paul Graham's YCombinator, which was clearly an inspiration for it. So I've had a good opportunity to "swap notes" with other founders about how the programs work, and what's good and bad about them.

We also made the short list of finalists for TechStars this year, and I know some of the team there. So although I carry some natural competitive bias, I was genuinely interested to see the end results, and cheer on the teams.

Why "The TechStars Method"?

One of the recurrent themes in mentor presentations at TheFunded has been the similarity between pitching startups and "getting the girl". There have been plenty of references to the "Mystery Method", which is a systematic method used by pickup artists to seduce their targets.

Trip Adler from Scribd (a YCombinator launchee that is going gangbusters) presented "The Trip Method" for ideation and concept creation. James Hong from HotOrNot taught us Peacocking and brand differentiation. Peter Pham from Photobucket and Billshrink coached us on the psychology of influence.

James Hong put it best: "In a world full of 6 billion people, how does a female know that you're the one. 'No other dude is wearing this hat' = this dude is getting laid. That's how branding works. You need to differentiate in a way that triggers emotion."

Seeing all ten TechStars pitches, it's clear to me there is a systematic method they followed to "differentiate in a way that triggers emotion". No one in TechStars has told me that this is their method. I don't know whether they articulate a method or not. But it was a clear pattern. I'm outlining it here in the hope it will be useful for other startups, particularly those pitching and anyone evaluating seed programs and incubators.

[NB see David's comment below which he posted on an earlier draft (which must have snuck out onto the interwebs before I was quite done). David makes the point that there is no formula - just feedback from the mentors. In which case there is clearly a very strong pattern in that feedback.]

The "TechStars Method" broken down

The method has six basic principles, and the pitches use a well-defined structure and approach based on those principles:

1\. Investor-focused: There is a clear focus on getting investor interest and making the companies as investor-friendly as possible.

2\. Pitchable products: It's focused on pitchable businesses with a good demo and demonstrable customer traction. Not too big and not too small. They tend to be well developed before the program starts, and suitable for acceleration, often with an existing product. I don't think TechStars likes to risk there being no demo on demo day. (Disclosure: our feedback included that we were too early because we were pre-product compared to other teams. Also please see David's comment below that many of the companies were not well advanced before starting).

3\. Put on a great show: The investor day was held in Boulder Theater. As well as the potential investors attending, there was a packed crowd for atmosphere and to cheer on the teams. It featured humor and presentations on a big stage with a big-screen backdrop. It leveraged Brad Feld's profile, included a speech from Jared Polis, founder and Congressman, and featured the most entertaining of the recent Ignite Boulder presentations. The lead up was effectively promoted through the "startup reality tv" series on techstars.tv. You could have sold tickets. They sort of did (donations for charity raised over $1000).

4\. Engage the community: Andrew Hyde is TechStars' secret weapon on this front. He's their community manager. He's got a rock star profile in Boulder. But the reality is that he works his heart out helping other people in the tech community, with a great supporting network of people from local companies, many of them not anything to do with TechStars. He also started Startup Weekend and VCWear. But community engagement is part of TechStars ethos generally. They support the tech community and the community supports them. TechStars got 500 social media mentions for the pitch day as a result.

5\. Investor mentoring: David Cohen told the audience of investors that TechStars is all about the mentoring - "one-on-one experiences working with the mentors." The most prominent mentoring is from investors themselves. In the videos, high-profile mentoring features investors like Brad Feld from Foundry, Rob Hayes from First Round Capital, Howard Lindzon, Jeff Clavier from SoftTech VC and Dave McClure from Founder's Fund/fbFund (awesome blog btw!).

6\. Work as part of a buzzed up meta-team: Teams appear to have a 2/3 technical skew. Everyone attends the mentoring and group sessions, but most teams had a biz person who focused on the presentation/pitch and mentor relationships, allowing the technical founders to focus on code code code. The TechStars bunker office has a buzz and energy much bigger than any individual team can generate on its own. Mentors drill phrases like "do more faster" that are written on the walls.

The presentation structure

The investor day featured two sets of 5 companies each, broken up by an interlude with a humorous presentation (Googleplex from Ignite Boulder by David Walton) and a more serious talk by Congressman and founder/investor Jared Polis. This broke up the presentations and gave the audience a break. The most interesting companies were in the first five, with a strong final pitch to close. Each pitch was 8 minutes.

Elements of TechStars pitches:

1\. Personal stories: Use personal stories to provide background on why you're solving the problem and why you're qualified to do it. Use a personal story about the frustrations of a specific example customer to illustrate the problem and solution, and to guide the product demonstration.

2\. Visual and engaging: Strong visuals with few bullet points: Very visual slides with lots of transitions within a clear overall structure. Heavy use of images and incremental transitions between slides. Use humor and show a vulnerable side to the audience. A few presentations, like everlater and The Next Big Sound were packed with energy and charisma and stood out as a result.

3\. Strong product demo / illustration focus: At least half of each presentation was spent showing the product and using the demo to talk through the key points of the solution. The biggest focus was on the demo and using the demo to illustrate the solution and its benefits.

4\. Clear and well-articulated common structure and approach. I've outlined this separately below.

The presentation structure applies the principles above to the almost universal deck structure used for the pitches:

1\. Crisp opening: * A succinct one line description of what you do, what problem you solve and who you do it for. * Short introduction to who you are personally. * The slide is clean with just the company logo and a tagline.

Examples: Retel "empowers restaurants and retailers using security cameras". Everlater makes it "easy and fun to share travel experiences". TimZon is "the easiest way to share visual feedback". TakeComics "brings comics into the digital age". The Next Big Sound "measures the popularity of bands across the web". Vanilla is "open source forum software used to power discussions". Good, crisp, concise and you know what they do immediately.

2\. Personalized problem - Identify and personalize the problem: * Use the personal story of a specific customer or your own personal story to describe the frustrations in the market and identify the problem.

Examples: TakeComics opened with "I'm Kevin and I'm a huge comic book fan" and used his personal story of trying to get unattainable comics in small town England. Retel told us "Meet a customer. He's a sad man. The problem - he runs a Dunkin Donuts... workers put food up their nose. He generates 56700 hours of video a month monitoring it."

3\. Illustrated solution - Graphically illustrate the solution in personalized terms: * Use a demo / walk-through to illustrate the solution you have solving the problem you identified. * Use the personal story of the customer you identified as the script for the demo. * Step through the key features and point out how each one contributes to solving the problem for that individual. * Articulate the benefits and value provided to that customer.

Examples: TimZon walked the a day in the life of Barbara using a customer case study with a support team trying to clarify a product feature by email and the miscommunication that resulted. TakeComics walked through a customer buying a particular comic at the "itunes for comics". everlater very cleverly used high-profile VC Fred Wilson's mishmash of recorded travel blogs and photos to show how he could record his travels with their service. He was in the audience and then blogged about it.

4\. Opportunity - Prove the market and economic opportunity * What is the potential market / addressable market * Show how you plan to monetize and the revenue model for the business * Explain how the business can scale

Examples: everlater used this to point out that they weren't relying on travel advertising, as big as that is on the web, but an affiliate model with partnerships such as Tour Operators. TakeComics talked up what looked like a small market by saying comics were a $6b market globally, but that the kicker was that Wolverine makes six times more money for Marvel outside of comics through merchandising, and comics were the hook to get to that.

5\. Competitive advantage * Focus on your advantages over competitors. * Use competitors as proof of the market opportunity. * Articulate your differentiators clearly.

Examples: The Next Big Sound used the phrase "people in the music industry haven't seen this visual data before". As a new service they used the logos of people in the industry used to paying for analytics and that enterprise customers paid $48k/year. Retel pointed out their competitors were surveillance and mystery shopping and articulated their point of difference as "constant monitoring", and that they aimed to partner with competitors. Spry used an effective categorized matrix comparing monitoring services / tools.

6\. Demonstrate why you've got the right team * Keep the slides visual - personalize the team. * Highlight direct experience in the space and why you're uniquely placed to solve the problem. * Outline why you work well together. * Talk about why you'd be a worthwhile investment.

Examples: The Next Big Sound used a very smart single slide that looked like a band cover photo - black and white walking down a back alley with the four of them looking cool, which got a big laugh from the audience. The accompanying talk included a background on each, highlighted direct experience in the music industry, and said we "listen, work efficiently and are 'cheap to keep alive'". Most of the team slides were visuals with no text, and the presenter reinforced the team's experience working together well in a relevant industry.

7\. Show your progress / traction * Milestones and achievements * Slide with numbers of signups, traffic through the system, number of beta users etc * Logos of customers using the product

Examples: TimZon's slide was "Where we are today: Live, 800 registered users, company pilots". Vanilla "300k installations, 450+ plugins, 200+ downloads a day". Next Big Sound was "6 services, tracking 500k artists" and had the logos of the companies that had already signed up on a second screen transition. SendGrid was "100 paying customers, 100m emails sent, 3m emails sent a day".

8\. Say what you're asking for * Ask for a specific amount of money. * Say what you're using it for and what the goals for its use are.

Examples: Spry's slide "We need your help: $350k, 12 month runway, solid sales and marketing, reach $40k/mo revenue". Next Big Sound was "$300k funding, reach 5m artists, provide metrics on specific goals for companies". everlater was "self funding but looking for partners that bring value". TimZon was "seed funding $450k, 12 months, goal of $45k revenue/mo through subscriptions and white labels".

9\. Summary slide * Sum up why you're excited * Include clear contact information * Very visual slide reinforcing logo and key message

Examples: Retel concluded with "Why we're excited: great economics, strong team, a pain killer - the customer can finally smile" that tied the conclusion back to the opening. Next Big Sound used a smart concluding slide which had a small number of their key stats updating in real time on the big screen.

Conclusion

The presentations and charisma and energy of the teams was impressive. It's not a criticism to say this, but TechStars has a skill for picking companies that can benefit from acceleration. And it focuses on making them investor friendly, with investor-focused advice. That makes it different, I think, to The Funded's Founder Institute and Y Combinator, which themselves are also very different.

There are new seed-stage programs springing up in Canada (bootuplabs), Providence, Austin and all round the US that are inspired by YCombinator but seem to me to be copying the TechStars model and driven by the desire to accellerate investable companies as their primary focus. It's for this reason that I think the differences developing between TechStars, YCombinator and TheFunded's Founder Institute are so interesting, and I plan to look at that in more detail in my next post.

Extras

You can check out descriptions and short reviews of the full set of teams in TechCrunch's wrapup.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Great insights, observations and wisdom - thanks Jed. Look forward to more of your Blog Posts! This had some super useful ideas and tips and written well with thought and humor

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Re-posting as I don't think HN liked me submitting with a bit.ly URL Cheers Jed

<comment><USER5> jedwhite.com is down

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey, it's blog.jedwhite.com - or just click on the title to go directly to the post.

I don't know why HN shortens it to the root domain. blogger doesn't seem to work delegating that externally.

Cheers Jed

<comment><AUTHOR> Unless there is some strange problem affecting only some DNS providers not correctly resolving Google/Blogger domains, then blog.jedwhite.com appears to be fine. I just checked on <http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/blog.jedwhite.com> And all is showing fine there too. Hope that helps.,Cheers Jed

<comment> brown9-2 I don't think "downforeveryoneorjustme" is a very definitive source, I'd recommend something like just-ping, which doesn't seem to have any problems for your site:

[http://just-ping.com/index.php?vh=blog.jedwhite.com&c=&#...</a></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


A Minneapolis woman's 'bizarre and surreal' decades-long loan dispute - <AUTHOR> https://www.mprnews.org/story/2019/10/01/a-minneapolis-womans-bizarre-and-surreal-decadeslong-loan-dispute <comment><USER2> Department of Education, enough said.

I'm being forced to pay for student loans even though the college shutdown and no longer exists. Loan forgiveness does not exist for me. Why should I still pay?

The student loan system and process in America needs a re-work. Govt should not be profiting off students that dont have the money.</comment>


The canaries in a coal mine - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/19/the-canaries-in-a-coal-mine/ <comment><USER2> The argument is an interesting one, but advanced in a flawed way. Right off the bat he argues that the lock is "unusable", and does not do so in a very persuasive way. In the consumer smart lock space, August does not seem to be lagging compared to its competitors. (It is available at Home Depot and other hardware stores, and the note by Matt Burns is not cited.) He then argues that the acquisition was primarily for the Wal-Mart deal, which is also questionable- so is the idea that Assa Abloy will switch the contract to use Yale locks, instead? He then jumps to the easy generalized targets against the current irrational exuberance of SV, without naming any other specific cases, except for Fitbit. A more persuasive essay would have tried to quantify the phenomenon, maybe it's specific to IoT, or consumer hardware, but the author only names two companies and dismisses them both.

Overall the angle that an acquisition is the sign of failure is an interesting one during this time of great froth, but this essay doesn't do enough to express it.</comment>


Is this a ship-shipping ship, shipping shipping ships? - <AUTHOR> http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/23913 <comment><USER2> Not visible in that picture is the tugboat that's pushing (or pulling) the ship-shipping ship.</comment>


You're more likely to achieve the American dream if you live in Denmark - <AUTHOR> https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/08/youre-more-likely-to-achieve-the-american-dream-if-you-live-in-denmark <comment><AUTHOR> My favourite Richard Bransons quote says «Clients do not come first. Employees come first. If you take care of your employees, they will take care of the clients.»

For a country, the imhabitants come first. Give the inhabitants higher education and healthcare for free, and the inhabitants will start new businesses that generate income in the years to come. Almost no companies survies past their first hundred years. A new company is nothing more than some people starting a business together.

</comment><comment><USER2> Tyrelort. Er hvad den artikel er.

<comment><AUTHOR> Det er sandt mann.</comment></comment>


Mary Meeker Internet Trends Report 2018 - <AUTHOR> https://www.slideshare.net/kleinerperkins/internet-trends-report-2018-99574140 <comment><USER2> Link to slides off KPCB's site without needing to sign up for an account: [http://kpcbweb2.s3.amazonaws.com/files/121/INTERNET_TRENDS_R...](http://kpcbweb2.s3.amazonaws.com/files/121/INTERNET_TRENDS_REPORT_2018.pdf?1527701640)

[http://www.kpcb.com/internet-trends](http://www.kpcb.com/internet-trends)

<comment><USER3> Link to slides without having to visit kpcb.com or amazonaws.com:

[http://web.archive.org/web/20180530170222/http://www.kpcb.co...](http://web.archive.org/web/20180530170222/http://www.kpcb.com/file/2018-internet- trends-report)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've always been very skeptical at this report. I'm not exactly sure why, but I think because a) it is mainly a collection of a lots of data and b) it is extremely popular with many business people who often have little knowledge on the subject

<comment><USER5> I'm also skeptical of reports where one seems to need 294 slides to identify a trend. But drowning viewers in data and having no conclusions at the end is all the data I need.

<comment><USER4> True. What I don't get though: Why is it sooo popular then?

<comment><USER6> Mary Meeker became popular about seven or eight years ago, and at the time, there was an executive summary: "mobile is much, much bigger than you realize."

At the time, many people didn't realize that Android + iOS shipments had dwarfed Wintel shipments until they saw this dramatic image in her 2012 slide deck. [https://image.slidesharecdn.com/internettrendsstanford120312...](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/internettrendsstanford120312final-121203181402-phpapp01/95/2012-kpcb- internet-trends-yearend-update-24-638.jpg)

Since then, IMO, people keep showing up because they're looking for another major shock. But there hasn't been a major shock like the rise of mobile since then. Mobile is still big. China is still big. etc.

Now her presentations convey a feeling of comfort. "I believed all of this already, because I am a smart, well-informed person, and here's the data to prove it."

<comment><USER7> Mary Meeker became popular in 1995. She was the lead internet equity research analyst at Morgan Stanley and covered the IPO of Netscape. She was one of the top equity research analysts in 1998-2000 covering EBay, Amazon, Drugstore.com amongst others

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Look at her report from five years ago before hyping her predictions. Most successful predictions obvious (mobile, China). Lots of misses (AI, cloud computing), and lots that's wrong (everyone will be using wearables?).

<comment><USER9> If you count Apple Watch and various fitbit items a lot of people are.

<comment><USER10> No. iOS in general has low market penetration, let alone wearable.

<comment><USER11> They have 65% of all the profits: [https://dazeinfo.com/2017/10/06/global- mobile-handset-profit...](https://dazeinfo.com/2017/10/06/global-mobile- handset-profit-q2-apple-samsung/)

Amazing for one company.

<comment><USER12> Profits are not market penetration.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Most of the time, the value I derive from this report is to gain a directional sense of the tech world that can then be combined with other insights to form actionable items.

For e.g. in terms of investing, smartphone shipments are not growing, which means that for companies like Apple that derive a significant piece of their revenue from smartphones will probably have to find growth elsewhere, either further up the stack or by launching newer products. This means that until a significant non-handset source of revenue emerges, Apple would likely not grow dramatically from this huge base.

</comment><comment><USER14> No mention of blockchain or bitcoin or ethereum or cryptocurrencies. Really ?

<comment><USER15> There's a slide on coinbase membership

<comment><USER16> Oh boy. That is one tortured slide. "We must have a hockey stick, find me one".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This was pretty good last year but this year isnt forward looking at all.

Also they missed the 100 mn new internet users which came online in India the past year and the rock bottom mobile data rates which enabled it.

</comment><comment><USER18> On slide 25, she claims Google Voice recognition has reached 95% accuracy, which seems to be human level threshold.

"Google Machine Learning Word Accuracy"

Does this mean anything practical to users?

<comment><USER19> The garbled voice mail translation I still see would beg to differ. Maybe on clean audio sources they have? But they still translate some absolute nonsense that I can easily understand in one listen.

<comment><USER20> I'm not sure all Google products use the same voice recognition tech. Almost sure that they're not.

In the NLP realm for instance, Google translate is (or used to be) based on a much older statistical model rather than the hot deep learning models the cool projects use nowadays.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> "0% new smartphone unit shipment growth in 2017"

<comment><USER10> That, combined with the mobile market growth. Means people are happy with their phones, find no reasons to upgrade.

<comment><USER22> There is no relation between growth and renewal. Say there is 3BN mobile users and 3BN shipment a year. That's each user renewing every year. But next year you only have 3BN shipment.

-> 0% growth + people upgrading every year.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Insane growth of all the messenger apps surprised me.

</comment><comment><USER24> Does anyone here know how her past trends compare? How would one use trends like this to make daily or career choices or strategic decisions?

<comment><USER25> Last 5 years of reports and comments from Hacker News: [https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Mary%20meeker&sort=byPopularit...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Mary%20meeker&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story)

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Pretty light on in the enterprise computing section. I had expected more, enterprise applications are far more than just dropbox/slack/some product I never heard of before this report.

</comment><comment><USER27> No mention of healthcare at least in the TOC this year, perhaps not surprising given Beth seidenbergs recent departure. Anyone know if they're still doing HC stuff?

<comment><USER28> There is definitely mention of health care, including speculation that tech may help bend the cost curve down.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Will there be a presentation or commentary on these slides?

<comment><USER30> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HdjcdZqODoE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HdjcdZqODoE)

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> So, what's the context for this for those of us that don't know? Who's Mary Meeker, and why should I care about her trendspotting? Just wondering if it's worth it to wade through 300 slides.

<comment><USER32> If only there were a way to search for basic information. Sorry :-)

Mary was one of the early financial analysts to focus on the emerging Internet. She's now at KPMG and this report is an annual distillation of a lot of the current trends and data.

<comment><USER33> KPCB, but easy mistake

<comment><USER32> Never make a mistake in a snark :-)

I mess that particular one up all the time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> This report contains a lot of data. Is there a counterpart to it that, for each slide, attempts to answer the question "So what?"

</comment><comment><USER35> Does anyone have the tl;dr (summary)?

<comment><USER14> [https://techcrunch.com/2018/05/30/internet- trends-2018/](https://techcrunch.com/2018/05/30/internet-trends-2018/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> I have to vehemently disagree with slide 36: "It's Crucial to Manage For Unintended Consequences . . . But It's Irresponsible to Stop Innovation + Progress"

I'm afraid that's exactly backwards. It's Irresponsible not to manage for unintended consequences... but it's crucial to keep innovation and progress moving forward.

<comment><USER37> American capitalism vs European capitalism at its best.

<comment><USER4> Can you eloborate on that? Things like "The Lean Startup" (de-risking as principle) originated in the States

<comment><USER38> Irresponsible implies a moral imperative. I think they're saying that "unintended consequences" often harm other people, and therefore business have the responsibility to minimize them. The stereotype is that American business like Uber, Facebook, and Amazon tend to see shareholder value as their one and only duty.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> This report is always interesting, but watch out for Mary's right-wing political views she likes to add in.

<comment><USER40> A section on the US national debt/spending was the only remotely right-wing thing I saw.</comment></comment>


StatPlot Launches: Visualize Sports Stats - <AUTHOR> http://statsheet.com/blog/announcing-statplot

<comment><USER2> Highly addictive. Previously I only used graphs to skew work data in my favor. Now I can finally correlate Duke's ugly cheerleaders with Coach K's wins. Fascinating site.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I'm interested in any feedback about StatPlot.com!</comment>


Ask YC: How can a startup wannabe make the most of an upcoming trip to SF? - <AUTHOR>

I'm going to San Francisco in a few weeks for an extended weekend, partly to do some sightseeing, but partly to check out the startup scene, which I'm pretty sure I want to join in the near future. I've been programming for several years now, and I think it's time for a change. I was part of a sort of "internal startup" at my company, and in the years since I've realized that building that group up was when I felt most excited about my work, and I want to go back to that. So I think I'm at a point where I either take the plunge or stop daydreaming about it.
I'm planning on finding some meetups and tech social events to attend, but I'm a bit worried about, well, not fitting in. I'm 27, not fresh out of college, and by no means a hotshot coder. I don't have much of a web presence, no open source contributions, and (currently) have no non-work projects I can talk about. Maybe it's silly to feel like I might be looked down upon for this, but going by startup job postings I've seen I wouldn't qualify to be an unpaid intern at this point. I guess I'm worried I'll feel like I'm going to Hollywood and don't have a screenplay to talk about. Silly, right? Time is tight between now and my trip, but is it worth it to try and hack together an API mashup so I don't feel like a total poser, or should I just relax?
Any specific suggestions on places I can go to get a slice of startup life? I'm planning on staying in SF since I do want to do some sightseeing and check out some good restaurants, but should I make a trip to Palo Alto or Mountain View? Go to Berkeley or Stanford? Is it possible to even visit any companies? Is there a hacker house I can couchsurf at? <comment><USER2> I wouldn't worry about not having non-work projects or open source contributions. Most startup and Google engineers I know are in the same boat. Don't worry about trying to measure up to the Hacker News image of what a well rounded startup engineer rockstar ninja should look like:)

That being said, check out some hacker spaces, specifically Noisebridge (in the city), and Hacker Dojo on the peninsula.

If you happen to be around for SHDH(shdh.org) or Hackers and Founders (<http://www.hackersandfounders.com/>), go. They're both really stellar events, where you'll meet lots of cool people.

Lastly, if you'd like to meet up for a cup of coffee, send me an email (it's in my profile). I'm down in Palo Alto. I've worked at Google and a few startups, and am now working on my own company. I'd be happy to share any advice that might be helpful.

</comment><comment><USER3> It's going to be difficult to drop-in on companies at work without introductions. People are busy.

Attending events is certainly a good idea. Here's a good list: <http://webwallflower.com/upcoming-events/> It's worth considering a trip to Palo Alto or Mountain View to hit an event.

You should probably figure out at least one semi-technical thing that you can discuss positively. In general it's pretty easy to strike up conversations because people like to talk about what they are up to and there's always good tech news.

</comment><comment> T-R I'm in a very similar situation - I opted to stay at 'Treehouse', and it's been tremendously helpful for making contacts in the area. - <http://www.airbnb.com/rooms/133974>

Glancing through AirBnB, I also see this ad - <http://www.airbnb.com/rooms/65031>

I know there are a few other Hacker Houses in the area, not sure if they rent/sublet, though. It'd also be worth it to check out Hacker Dojo or Noisebridge

</comment><comment><USER4> Introduce yourself to folks at startups you admire via LinkedIn before you go. Have coffee, visit offices, whatever.

Most important? Realize almost nobody is that amazingly more intelligent / driven / insightful / etc that you can't achieve similar results.

</comment><comment><USER5> I just got back from the bay area.

Look for some hacker space near you. If you're in mountain view, that would be "Hacker Dojo".

</comment><comment><USER6> Twitter is a great tool to met new people, and it's not invasive or rude to @mention someone and ask to meet up. Break the ice by saying you're into startups and will be in town. You'll be surprised how many people like to meet up!

</comment><comment><USER7> It's worth dropping by Stanford if only to check out the bookstore.

</comment><comment><USER8> Trying to make a list of people and approaching them in coffeeshops or on the street might be a bit creepy.</comment>


"Solaris being canned, at least 50% of teams to be RIF'd in short term" - <AUTHOR> https://www.thelayoff.com/t/KBEVoB1 <comment><USER2> Both the site and the article seem like the dodgy kind that we typically penalize, and it's not clear that this is more than just a rumor. But the comments below are so good, especially the ones by primary sources, that we've taken off the penalties.

</comment><comment><USER3> Sad in a way, but no surprise. I recently summarized my opinions on hackernews[1] in response to why Netflix uses Linux instead of Solaris, which might be of interest here:

"I worked on Solaris for over a decade, and for a while it was usually a better choice than Linux, especially due to price/performance (which includes how many instances it takes to run a given workload). It was worth fighting for, and I fought hard. But Linux has now become technically better in just about every way. Out-of-box performance, tuned performance, observability tools, reliability (on patched LTS), scheduling, networking (including TCP feature support), driver support, application support, processor support, debuggers, syscall features, etc. Last I checked, ZFS worked better on Solaris than Linux, but it's an area where Linux has been catching up. I have little hope that Solaris will ever catch up to Linux, and I have even less hope for illumos: Linux now has around 1,000 monthly contributors, whereas illumos has about 15.

In addition to technology advantages, Linux has a community and workforce that's orders of magnitude larger, staff with invested skills (re-education is part of a TCO calculation), companies with invested infrastructure (rewriting automation scripts is also part of TCO), and also much better future employment prospects (a factor than can influence people wanting to work at your company on that OS). Even with my considerable and well-known Solaris expertise, the employment prospects with Solaris are bleak and getting worse every year. With my Linux skills, I can work at awesome companies like Netflix (which I highly recommend), Facebook, Google, SpaceX, etc.

Large technology-focused companies, like Netflix, Facebook, and Google, have the expertise and appetite to make a technology-based OS decision. We have dedicated teams for the OS and kernel with deep expertise. On Netflix's OS team, there are three staff who previously worked at Sun Microsystems and have more Solaris expertise than they do Linux expertise, and I believe you'll find similar people at Facebook and Google as well. And we are choosing Linux.

The choice of an OS includes many factors. If an OS came along that was better, we'd start with a thorough internal investigation, involving microbenchmarks (including an automated suite I wrote), macrobenchmarks (depending on the expected gains), and production testing using canaries. We'd be able to come up with a rough estimate of the cost savings based on price/performance. Most microservices we have run hot in user-level applications (think 99% user time), not the kernel, so it's difficult to find large gains from the OS or kernel. Gains are more likely to come from off-CPU activities, like task scheduling and TCP congestion, and indirect, like NUMA memory placement: all areas where Linux is leading. It would be very difficult to find a large gain by changing the kernel from Linux to something else. Just based on CPU cycles, the target that should have the most attention is Java, not the OS. But let's say that somehow we did find an OS with a significant enough gain: we'd then look at the cost to switch, including retraining staff, rewriting automation software, and how quickly we could find help to resolve issues as they came up. Linux is so widely used that there's a good chance someone else has found an issue, had it fixed in a certain version or documented a workaround.

What's left where Solaris/SmartOS/illumos is better? 1. There's more marketing of the features and people. Linux develops great technologies and has some highly skilled kernel engineers, but I haven't seen any serious effort to market these. Why does Linux need to? And 2. Enterprise support. Large enterprise companies where technology is not their focus (eg, a breakfast cereal company) and who want to outsource these decisions to companies like Oracle and IBM. Oracle still has Solaris enterprise support that I believe is very competitive compared to Linux offerings.

So you've chosen to deploy on Solaris or SmartOS? I don't know why you would, but this is also why I also wouldn't rush to criticize your choice: I don't know the process whereby you arrived at that decision, and for all I know it may be the best business decision for your set of requirements.

I'd suggest you give other tech companies the benefit of the doubt for times when you don't actually know why they have decided something. You never know, one day you might want to work at one."

I feel sorry for the Solaris engineers (and likely ex-colleagues) who are about to lose their jobs. My advise would be to take a good look at Linux or FreeBSD, both of which we use at Netflix. Linux has been getting much better in recent years, including reaching DTrace capabilities in the kernel.[2] It's not as bad as it used to be, although to really evaluate where it's at you need to be on a very new kernel (4.9 is currently in development), as features have been pouring in.

Also, since I was one of the top Solaris performance experts, I've been creating new Linux performance content on a website that should also be useful (I've already been thanked for this by a few Solaris engineers who have switched.) I've been meaning to create a FreeBSD page too (better, a similar page on the FreeBSD wiki so others can contribute).

FreeBSD feels to me to be the closest environment to Solaris, and would be a bit easier to switch to than Linux. And it already has ZFS and DTrace.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12837972](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12837972) [2] [http://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2016-10-27/dtrace-for- linux...](http://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2016-10-27/dtrace-for- linux-2016.html) [3] [http://www.brendangregg.com/linuxperf.html](http://www.brendangregg.com/linuxperf.html)

<comment><USER4> Has Linux reached parity with BSD in terms of the TCP stack? My understanding was that it still wasn't as efficient but that info is outdated.

<comment><USER5> Linux has been beating BSD for at least 8-10 years when it comes to TCP. When it comes to new features in TCP-land, Linux easily beats it. Google added Receive Side Scaling / Receive Flow Steering to Linux years ago, and it is still a WIP in FreeBSD as an example. Also take a look at much of the bufferbloat research recently that has been merged into Linux, etc.

<comment><USER4> I guess my information was not just outdated, but clearly wrong.

<comment><USER5> Don't get me wrong, BSD is still absolutely solid, but for anything cutting edge, Linux is spanking the pants off of it.

<comment><USER6> As is often the case it depends on the specifics of the application and on those building a solution. As far as raw performance is concerned FreeBSD performs very well.

Netflix gets nearly 100Gbps from storage out the network on their FreeBSD+NGINX OCA appliances. Some details in the "Mellanox CDN Reference Architecture" whitepaper at [http://www.mellanox.com/related- docs/solutions/cdn_ref_arch....](http://www.mellanox.com/related- docs/solutions/cdn_ref_arch.pdf). The closest equivalent I've found on Linux was a blog post on BBC streaming getting about 1/4 of the performance.

Chelsio has a demo video (with terrible music) using TCP zero copy of 100Gbps on a single TCP session, with <1% CPU usage [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NKTApBf8Oko](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NKTApBf8Oko).

At SC16 NASA had a "Building Cost-Effective 100-Gbps Firewalls for HPC" demo, using FreeBSD and netmap: [https://www.nas.nasa.gov/SC16/demos/demo9.html](https://www.nas.nasa.gov/SC16/demos/demo9.html)

<comment><USER5> You're spot on regarding the app and FreeBSD performing very well. Don't disagree with you one bit. Also, great link on the Netflix CDN work, they're doing some really fascinating stuff. It is nice to see the openness.

I work directly with both of the gents who gave this talk about 100G networking[1] (on Linux) and still find that much of the actual cutting edge research is done on Linux. Perhaps I'm biased! I've also been to one of Mellanox's engineering offices (Tel Aviv) to speak with their engineers at my previous employer 7-8 years ago. They told me they do most all of their prototyping and initial development on Linux, and RHEL to be specific. Then then port to other platforms.

Maybe I was wrong on some of this, but my use case (due to my employer's industry being finance) is lower latency, where Linux absolutely and positively crushes anything else.

        [1] http://events.linuxfoundation.org/sites/events/files/slides/100G%20Networking%20Toronto_0.pdf

<comment><USER7> _Maybe I was wrong on some of this, but my use case (due to my employer 's industry being finance) is lower latency, where Linux absolutely and positively crushes anything else._

Actually, while we're on the subject, SmartOS with CPU bursting from illumos is the leader in low latency trading:

[http://containersummit.io/events/sf-2015/videos/wolf-of- what...](http://containersummit.io/events/sf-2015/videos/wolf-of-what- containers-on-wall-street)

<comment><USER5> That is a slick platform they've built, but I still don't see how it is competitive with Linux for very low latencies. He mentions trading at microseconds, but we're building microwave radio networks to trade at nanoseconds. Unless this has changed extremely recently, Solaris/Illumos and hence SmartOS still don't have tickless kernels. I recall Solaris having a 100hz tick by default which you could change to 1000hz with a special boot flag. Linux has had dynticks since fairly early 2.6 kernels and with the modern 3.x kernels (RHEL7+), you've got full on tickless via the nohz_full options. Without this, the kernel interrupts the application to use cpu time.

Additionally, I don't believe (Experts please correct me if this is wrong) SmartOS has an equivalent to Linux's isolcpus boot command line flag (or cpu_exclusive=1 if you're in a cpuset) to remove a cpu core entirely from the global scheduler domain. This prevents any tasks from running on that CPU, including kernel threads. Kernel threads will still occasionally interrupt applications if you simply set the affinity on pid 1 so that does't count.

These two features, along with hardware that is configured to not throw SMIs, allow Linux to get out of the way of applications for _truly_ low latency. As far as I'm aware, this is impossible to do in Solaris/SmartOS. I'm not even getting into the SLUB memory allocator being better or the lazy TLB in Linux massively lowering TLB shootdowns, etc, etc. There is a reason why virtually every single major financial exchange in the world runs Linux (CME in Chicago, NYSE/NYMEX in New York, LSE in London, and Xetra in Frankfurt), it is better for the low latency use case.

<comment><USER8> You asked for an expert to correct you if you're wrong, so here it is: this is just completely wrong and entirely ignorant of both the capacity of the system and its history.

On timers: we (I) added arbitrary resolution interval timers to the operating system in 1999[1] -- predating Linux by years. (We have had CPU binding and processor sets for even longer.) The operating system was and is being used in many real-time capacities (in both the financial and defense sectors in particular) -- and before "every single major financial exchange" was running Linux, many of them were running Solaris.

[1] [https://github.com/joyent/illumos- joyent/blob/master/usr/src...](https://github.com/joyent/illumos- joyent/blob/master/usr/src/uts/common/os/cyclic.c)

<comment><USER5> Thank you Bryan for the correction, I did after all ask for it :)

One final question while I've got you that your response didn't seemingly address. Does the cyclic subsystem allow turning off the cpu timer entirely ala Linux's nohz_full? If so, I stand corrected.

<comment><USER8> Yes, it does -- the cyclic subsystem will only fire on CPUs that have a cyclic scheduled, which won't be any CPU that is engaged in interrupt sheltering via psradm.[1] This is how it is able to achieve hard real-time latency (and indeed, was used for some hardware-in-the-loop flight simulator systems in the defense sector that had very tight latency tolerence).

[1] [https://illumos.org/man/1m/psradm](https://illumos.org/man/1m/psradm)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> From my perspective, if this rumor is true, it's a relief. Solaris died the moment that they made the source proprietary -- a decision so incredibly stupid that it still makes my head hurt six years later.

Fortunately, Solaris was open long enough that we in the open source world were able to fork it with illumos[1]. And because illumos became the home for many of us that brought Solaris its most famous innovations (e.g., ZFS, DTrace and zones), it should come as no surprise that we've continued to innovate over the last six years. (Speaking only for Joyent, we added revolutionary debugging support for node.js[2], ported KVM to it[3], completed and productized Linux-branded zones[4], added software-defined networking[5] and developed first-class Docker integration[6] -- among many, many other innovations.)

So illumos (and derivatives like SmartOS, OmniOS and DelphixOS) is vibrant and alive -- but one of our biggest challenges has been its association with the name "Solaris": I don't think of our system as Solaris any more than I think of it as "SVR4" or "SunOS" or "7th Edition" or any of its other names -- and the very presence of Solaris has served to confuse. And indeed, it is my good fortune to be working with a new generation of engineers on the operating system -- engineers for whom the term "Solaris" is entirely distant and its presence as an actual (if proprietary) system befuddling.

So if the rumor is true (and I suspect that it is), it will allow everyone to know what we have known for six years: Solaris is dead, but its innovative spirit thrives in illumos. That said, I do hope that Oracle does the right thing and (re)opens Solaris -- allowing the East Berliners of proprietary Solaris to finally rejoin us their brethren in the free west of illumos!

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc)

[2] [https://github.com/joyent/mdb_v8](https://github.com/joyent/mdb_v8)

[3] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cwAfJywzk8o](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cwAfJywzk8o)

[4] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TrfD3pC0VSs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TrfD3pC0VSs)

[5] [http://dtrace.org/blogs/rm/2014/09/23/illumos-overlay- networ...](http://dtrace.org/blogs/rm/2014/09/23/illumos-overlay-networks- development-preview-02/)

[6] [https://www.joyent.com/blog/triton-docker-and-the-best-of- al...](https://www.joyent.com/blog/triton-docker-and-the-best-of-all-worlds)

<comment><USER3> While I'd love to think that illumos will rise and be great like Solaris was again, after several years I now think that's an incredible long shot.

The death of Solaris may well be a death blow to illumos as well. It sounds like Oracle, the owners of the Solaris code and copyrights, aren't seeing a future for it. That's an incredible vote of no confidence from the very owners of the code. And the positive energy they have put into Solaris at large for years (marketing, sales, staff) will cease.

While I loved Solaris and illumos back in the day, in the end I'm glad I left and switched to Linux and FreeBSD. I'm working on similar technical challenges with much bigger impact. It's been more difficult, but also more rewarding.

<comment><USER9> What would we need to see from Illumos for it to qualify as being great like Solaris was?

<comment><USER7> It's already great: SmartOS is the best one can get when it comes to running a cloud, public or private, and if that cloud must, without compromise, function correctly in the face of even the most severe failures, hardware or software wise. Zones + ZFS + fault management architecture (fmadm(1M) / svcadm(1M)) make it possible.

Have a piece of software which must run on GNU/Linux? No problem, it'll happily run inside of an lx-branded zone with zero performance penalty, where both it (/usr) and the illumos native commands will be available (/native), so one can keep one's cake and eat it, too. Otherwise - there are 14,000 packages ready to run, something Solaris never, ever had.

It's not a desktop operating system, it doesn't have that kind of a mass adoption. But on the other hand, when one considers just how Windows-like GNU/Linux became (systemd), it's better that it doesn't: it does one thing and does it well, and that's powering the high performance, massive clouds. For desktop, there's macOS, and that's fine.

<comment><USER10> FWIW the packages are essentially NetBSD and the dependencies can be spectacular (pkgin in git). But lx works really, really well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm actually surprised it took this long. I did unix admin work, including SunOS and Solaris since the early 90's.

I was a big fan of Solaris, and it had an edge over Linux for quite some time...as did the Sparc hardware over 32 bit x86.

The writing on the wall was around 2003, when AMD opteron servers came out. 64 bit Linux on dirt cheap, fast, servers.

<comment><USER12> Sun responded swiftly and justly with OpenSolaris for x86. It's a lot easier to go evaluate this in hindsight and see that cheap x86 was not really a barrier, OpenSolaris could have become another Java level of ubiquity save politics and inertia. I remember how tainted things seemed when reading LWN.net.. which in retrospect were largely FUD around the CDDL and fear of actual competition. The continued rise of Linux was really just inertia at that point, it was largely inferior outside desktop use, but had too much sunk cost investment from IBM, SGI, HP (where a lot of the real scalability culture was imported from - RCU, NUMA, locking refinements in particular).

UNIX rose to prominence because it's what everyone learned in college in the '80s. Linux, because you installed it on your laptop or a VM in high school or college late '90s. Don't underestimate the power of this.

<comment><USER11> I disagree regarding Solaris x86.

There was a lot of commercial software that either didn't have Solaris x86 binaries at all, or only had 32 bit binaries.

It was arguably "better" from a purely technical view, but cheaper beat out better.

<comment><USER13> _It was arguably "better" from a purely technical view, but cheaper beat out better._

The commodity always wins. Never forget that.

<comment><USER11> Steve Jobs might disagree :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Since it took me a while to follow: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Layoff#Common_abbreviations_fo...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Layoff#Common_abbreviations_for_reduction_in_force)

<comment><USER15> I like how the Australians call layoffs "being made redundant"

<comment><USER16> It's actually a legal term. A redundancy in Australia means that the position you fill is no longer required. You're paid out accordingly to be sacked and the company cannot hire for that exact position (title, role, job) for some time.

The determination if a company violates that (as in, they're getting rid of YOU not the position) becomes a whole set of legal arguments.

But essentially/idealistically;

redundancy = getting rid of the position and it can't come back under another name.

firing = getting rid of you as a person.

<comment><USER17> Oddly enough, in the US it's legally advantageous for a company to disguise a firing as a layoff, but not the other way around.

Why? Because if you get laid off, you can collect unemployment, but if you get fired for cause, you can't. But if you think the company pretended they had cause when they didn't, you can appeal, and the company will have to spend considerable resources defending their position that they had cause. As such, many employers legally classify all firings as layoffs because it's often not worth the hassle. And there's no penalties to doing so, either.

So if you get fired but the company officially considers it a layoff, it's a good thing for _you_ : you dodged a bullet.

<comment><USER18> Unemployement benefits, and how they're financed, vary by state. In NC, they keep track of a company's layoff history, and adjust the unemployment tax (levied on the employer) according to that history (hypothetically). There was a series of articles about some companies evading these and other taxes in 2012[0]. I also remember reports about unemployment tax shenanigans in New Jersey, but I can't find them quickly.

[0] [http://www.newsobserver.com/news/special-reports/the- ghost-w...](http://www.newsobserver.com/news/special-reports/the-ghost- workers/article16921211.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Looks like they're doubling down on cloud. Met with an Oracle recruiter yesterday. Shit load of money being paid to poach from AWS/Azure. I think they're too late to start building out a full blow cloud offering.

<comment><USER20> AWS just announced their Postgres RDS is HIPAA compliant yesterday. I imagine the rest of Federal restricted data usages can follow shortly soon after (I think AWS is already certified in some areas?).

Given that, I see no reason why anyone should indulge Oracle or patronize them given their revenue-model.

<comment><USER21> I believe it was already HIPAA compliant (or else I need to go into hiding).

The path to HIPAA compliance in AWS is just arrange to get a business agreement with Amazon.

<comment><USER22> RDS was only HIPAA for MySQL and SQL Server. PostgreSQL certification is brand new and a huge deal for some of my projects.

<comment><USER21> So I suppose this means storing data in Postgres RDS is HIPAA compliant now by default? I am not an expert in this, but I do have to sit through a day of training every year for this.

You should probably be doing a bunch of other things to be HIPAA compliant in AWS, it's not just a box you check off.

In the past you could be HIPAA compliant and use Postgresql RDS by signing a business associate agreement and doing things like using dedicated instances in their own VPC.

<comment><USER22> _So I suppose this means storing data in Postgres RDS is HIPAA compliant now by default?_

At a minimum, you'd still have to sign that BAA with them. I mention that not for you, but for anyone else at home thinking "oh, I can deploy RDS/PostgreSQL and be OK with HIPAA without doing anything else!" That's (still) not the case.

In logic terms, this certification is _necessary_ but not _sufficient_. It's not sufficient by itself, but it is a hard requirement because RDS hasn't been covered under their BAA up until the last day or so. That is, it wasn't covered the last time I checked, maybe a week ago, but it is now today. This was confirmed by our AWS tech reps when we recently talked to them: they absolutely did not HIPAA certify PostgreSQL the last time we asked about it. And oh, how I promise you we talked about it.

 _In the past you could be HIPAA compliant and use Postgresql RDS by signing a business associate agreement and doing things like using dedicated instances in their own VPC._

Citation needed. We were told multiple time by our reps and solution architect that RDS+PostgreSQL was not certified in any way. The only AWS options we had for HIPAA PostgreSQL were 1) hosting our own instance (that is, _not_ using RDS in any way, just plain old EC2) or 2) paying a third party for managed PostgreSQL hosting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Well, if not for this being 2016, it would be the saddest news I've heard in a while, but this came within a week of Ron Glass dying, so I guess it's only the second-saddest news item this week alone.

I guess it'll still live on in Illumos and its distributions like SmartOS, OpenIndiana, etc., but still... Solaris brought the computing world so many innovations (NFS, ZFS, dtrace, etc.), and it's going to take a while for it to fully sink in that it's gone.

<comment><USER23> Solaris was finally done 10 years ago when instead of responding to what market needs, they were touting dtrace (and pouring into it all the dev cycle resources as i could see) as the biggest and shiniest feature. Well, that small and insignificant from market POV feature was really the biggest and shiniest thing (if compare to the rest of things :) in Solaris at the time (and has been since then) ... and that is the issue which did the Solaris. And the easy install, like insert the disk and go, windows and linux style ... i think some people still have PTSD from that.

<comment><USER24> Yeah, Solaris totally should have been focused on actual customer needs, like containers.

<comment><USER25> They did, they were called zones.

<comment><USER24> One of those times where a sarcasm punctuation would be useful.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I suppose it's too much to hope for that Oracle re-opens Solaris.

<comment><USER26> Getcher open-source fork of Solaris here: [http://wiki.illumos.org/display/illumos/illumos+Home](http://wiki.illumos.org/display/illumos/illumos+Home)

It's been around for a while, initially started by some of the people flooding out of Sun in the immediate wake of the Oracle acquisition, in a (very slightly) less messy version of the Hudson/Jenkins split.

<comment><USER27> Would you mind pointing me at the Solaris kernel source code? Directly, please, and not a leaked version of it.

<comment><USER8> It's not Solaris -- it's illumos and has been for a long time. And the source code is available on GitHub.[1]

[1] [https://github.com/illumos/illumos- gate](https://github.com/illumos/illumos-gate)

<comment><USER27> I explicitly asked for a _direct_ link to the _kernel_ source code. Because I never found that online. Your link is basically a pointer to the haystack.

<comment><USER28> Isn't [https://github.com/illumos/illumos- gate/tree/master/usr/src/...](https://github.com/illumos/illumos- gate/tree/master/usr/src/uts) as posted by loeg exactly that?

<comment><USER27> Thank you very much, that seems to be what I was looking for. I had feared, the Solaris kernel hadn't been made publicly available.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> "Oracle says [claims of Solaris being canned] flat out wrong."

[https://twitter.com/TheRegister/status/804451784324366336](https://twitter.com/TheRegister/status/804451784324366336)

</comment><comment><USER30> Sun/Solaris/SPARC and running sunhelp.org was a major part of my life for over a decade.

This is sad to see, but the acquisition of Sun by Oracle pretty much started the downhill slide.

<comment><USER31> One can probably argue the other way, the downward (market) slide is what led to the Oracle acquisition.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Sad to see this happen, but I saw this coming. I set up an OpenSolaris NAS at home just weeks before Oracle closed Solaris 11, and (with the particular exception of ACLs) loved ZFS. Closing Solaris and offering a "free" download under vague, menacing terms sealed its fate. My NAS became an OpenIndiana system for a while, but it's not CentOS 7 + ZoL.

RIP Sun.

</comment><comment><USER33> It amazes me that people still do business with oracle.

</comment><comment><USER34> Thank God we've still got HPUX.

<comment><USER35> And AIX.

<comment><USER36> I can't tell if that's sarcastic.

It used to be said [...] that AIX looks like one space alien discovered Unix, and described it to another different space alien who then implemented AIX. But their universal translators were broken and they'd had to gesture a lot.

\-- Paul Tomblin

<comment><USER11> Grrr. Smit[1]. A non-optional (in many cases) tool to accomplish administrative tasks on AIX boxes. Making it nigh impossible to script common stuff that was easy on any other unixish OS.

[1][https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/aix/library/au- smit/](https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/aix/library/au-smit/)

<comment><USER37> When you're IBM, you want everything to look like AS/400.... or clunky Java Swing apps.

<comment><USER38> I know IBM is weird...but AS/400 or whatever they call it now is still just an amazing platform. it's one of those things that ends up doing things that are super critical. in some ways it doesn't have real competitors. OpenVMS? If there's a infinite amount of money Non-Stop?

<comment><USER39> AS/400 was a multi language VM environment long before Java. It really was/is amazing. I wish there was a way for newer generations to learn about things like this. I'm not sure how that would look. Maybe a History of Systems book or something?

<comment><USER35> There are many retro computing enthusiast groups around (depending where you live - none here around Dublin, it seems) but I'm yet to see one dedicated to midrange or mainframe systems.

It _is_ a shame. Many challenges we find today happen to have been solved in the 60s. Then in the 70s, then in the 80s...

<comment><USER40> Exactly – everyone does know their retro consoles and home computers, I can't find anyone who would have some interest in the systems you mentioned. Bummers.

<comment><USER35> Worst - even platforms that are still in use, such as IBM zSeries and iSeries are very poorly represented in tutorial space.

<comment><USER40> I'd love me some IBM i hands on day.

<comment><USER35> Is there a Hercules for iSeries?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Worked a lot with Solaris 9/10 a few years ago, end of Sun days. Amazing systems. Reliant AF. Zones and ZFS were a delight. The SPARC/Solaris/JVM combo worked great in enterprise apps. We had one server running, with some minor upgrades, with zero issues/reboots, for more than 2 years.

Then... it stopped being great, and a x86 Linux machine running the same JVM costed a fraction, and equally performed, if not better. Difficult to justify the licensing and support costs in Oracle days.

Farewell Solaris.

</comment><comment><USER42> I'd forgotten that Solaris was still alive. I wonder to what extent their IP portfolio will linger on, like the zombie corpse that was SCO being used against Linux.

<comment><USER43> SCO was very much alive (though perhaps suffering a severe case of senility) when it started going after Linux.

<comment><USER32> Here's how I understood it, in a nutshell:

\- SCO decides to sell off it's Unix and becomes Tarantella

\- Established Linux vendor Caldera buys the rights to distribute SCO Unix

\- Caldera changes its name to SCO and subsequently starts filing lawsuits

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Is this the end of sparc hardware? I know Oracle has been supporting Linux/sparc developement, including a distribution: [https://oss.oracle.com/projects/linux- sparc/](https://oss.oracle.com/projects/linux-sparc/).

<comment><USER45> Fujitsu went with ARM instead of SPARC for their new super computer[1][2]. It might be another indicator.

1) [https://www.top500.org/news/fujitsu-switches-horses-for- post...](https://www.top500.org/news/fujitsu-switches-horses-for-post-k- supercomputer-will-ride-arm-into-exascale/)

2) [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12018287](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12018287)

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Let it live through open source. A donation to Apache?

<comment><USER47> That is not the way of the Oracle.

Oracle does not care. Oracle thrives on badwill.

<comment><USER30> Oracle totally and freely threw away every bit of goodwill that Sun had fostered over the years, when they bought the company. Chunked it in the dumpster out back, didn't care.

The "old" Sun: Encouraged hobbyist use of hardware, put out software under a "free unless you need to pay for support" term, open-sourced Solaris [1], was generous with hardware donations [2] to various organizations, and realized that if a sysadmin liked playing with Sun gear at home, they were more likely to recommend it at work.

The "new" Sun: Oracle flips everyone the bird with both hands, won't even communicate with you unless it's about a paid support contract.

[1] I was lucky to be one of the 250 people picked as the OpenSolaris test/release/publicity team; still have my "xxx of 250" poster print on the wall of my home office. [2] They gave a Netra T1 and a disk shelf to us to run the Sun-Managers mailing list with, told me to keep a review-unit T1000 to run sunhelp.org on, and sent me a loaded Ultra 10 after a bit of a "misunderstanding". These are just three examples of many, many instances. [3] [http://www.sunhelp.org/letters/](http://www.sunhelp.org/letters/)

<comment><USER48> Unfortunately, the good-will didn't pay the bills

<comment><USER30> Makes me wonder what would have happened if IBM had been the suitor instead of Oracle, as I saw rumored.

<comment><USER49> Someone in the know at the time claimed to me that IBMs plan was to keep the hardware and customers, and mitigate anti-trust concerns by spinning off the software to Red Hat.

Given RHs compulsive open sourcing of aquisitions it's one of the great tragedies of the software industry that IBM got cold feet over the concerns that Sun were facing violations of anti-bribery laws.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> Great to see that Solaris still generates as much interest at this. Frankly, given how well the OS works, and how far ahead Oracle has taken the SPARC hardware, I can't see them just chucking it all away. The M7 and S7's are freaking awesome.

That, and the whole "Larry like's Larrys stuff more than anyone else's" thing...

@brendangregg: I'll bet ya $10 that neither Solaris nor SPARC are going away any time soon. :)

</comment><comment><USER51> RIF:

 _A generic reduction in force, of undetermined method. Often pronounced like the word riff rather than spelled out. Sometimes used as a verb, as in "the employees were pretty heavily riffed"._

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Layoff#Common_abbreviations_fo...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Layoff#Common_abbreviations_for_reduction_in_force)

</comment><comment><USER52> So, will Oracle open source what they closed after killing OpenSolaris? I'd also appreciate ZFS with GPL compatible license.

</comment><comment><USER53> Prediction: they aren't going to do the decent thing and open-source the whole thing when they stop it.

<comment><USER54> Is there anything interesting left that's not already in illumos?

<comment><USER9> Some of their changes to ZFS that were under development at Sun before OpenSolaris was killed would be useful to the community. Also, there was a ton of driver work that they did that the Illumos community could use.

<comment><USER7> Which drivers? I just looked at a document of theirs which details how they ripped out a whole bunch of drivers on the i86pc platform. For example, if I were crazy enough to upgrade to Solaris 11.3, my cadp160(9D) wouldn't work any more because they ripped it out. All of a sudden, my system could no longer talk UltraSCSI 160. IPFilter - gone. They ripped out a whole bunch of libraries like libpng out. Paravirtualization has been ripped out. Cheap UltraSPARC hardware support like the M3000, T1000, T2000, T5220, T5240, T3-1, all ripped out. /etc/defaultrouter gone. zone archive formats gone. Adobe Flash player gone. sysidtool(1M) gone. smdiskless(1M) gone. SmartCard support gone. lx-branded zones gone and they tell me to use XEN on Linux, no way! PostgreSQL - gone.

[http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/systems/end-of- notices/eon...](http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/systems/end-of- notices/eonsolaris11-392732.html)

No thanks.

<comment><USER9> USB 3.0 for one. Then there is their port of Intel's video driver from Linux and drivers for wireless NICs.

<comment><USER8> xhci for SmartOS is actually code-complete and in its final testing.[1]

[1] [https://www.mail-archive.com/smartos- firstname.lastname@example.com...](https://www.mail-archive.com/smartos- firstname.lastname@example.com/msg04075.html)

<comment><USER9> Awesome. Thanks for letting me know that Robert got this working. It is probably obvious by now that I am behind on reading mailing lists. I'll try to catch up before year's end. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> Oracle is such a destructive force. Getting bought out by Oracle = slowly being ripped apart limb by limb.

</comment><comment><USER7> Hardcore Solaris user here: Solaris 10 on intel is my last Solaris I'm ever going to run. After:

a) Bart Smaalders (with plenty of help from Glynn Foster and Shawn Walker) introduced IPS into Solaris

b) they did away with JumpStart(TM)

c) they did away with compressed Flash(TM) archives

d) they did away with sparse zones

e) Oracle closed the source code

I went to illumos / SmartOS and never looked back. I understand from a fellow engineer who still runs Oracle Solaris that 11.3 is the latest version, and I couldn't care less. I will never accept IPS because it has no preinstall / preremove / postinstall / postremove on purpose. Never, ever. I do my own builds of SmartOS from source code, PXE boot it from the network, and all is well with the world.

</comment><comment><USER56> I wonder what this means for the future of ZFS and it license? Possibly no change.

<comment><USER57> OpenZFS is the only meaningful fork now. Unless Oracle open sources the changes to ZFS from 2010 when OpenSolaris was axed, those changes are lost. And even if open sourced, I expect those changes would be (selectively) merged into OpenZFS.

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> I wonder how this affects Joyent.

<comment><USER7> Joyent won, that's how. If this rumor is indeed true, it means Bryan's vision and perceptiveness beat Larry, albeit indirectly.

Joyent's SmartOS is built on illumos, and illumos is a fork of Solaris Express / OpenSolaris / ONNV, and a whole bunch of former Solaris kernel engineers, who were at key positions at _Sun Microsystems_ , and are now across several successful companies, still commit fixes and features into the illumos source code. For example, illumos has OpenZFS and KVM, two major features Snoracle Solaris doesn't have and can't take back unless they open source the code again, not that anyone cares what they do.

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> Worse than something like this happening is seeing former Solaris engineers rushing to gloat on what would be the mass riffing of their former colleagues (and the remanining Solaris "elders" who helped them become who they are today).

</comment><comment><USER60> This is a baseless rumor. I have flagged this submission. It's just someone trolling the internet.

</comment><comment><USER61> what a brilliant idea for a website. they need to change the homepage to jus be the latest layoff news.

<comment><USER62> wasn't that the whole point behind [http://f*ckedcompany.com/](http://f*ckedcompany.com/) back in the late 90s and early 00s?

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> So what you're saying is that there are a bunch of unix engineers looking for jobs.

</comment><comment><USER64> RIP UNIX

SVR4 / UNIXWARE / SCO / AIX.

Without you Linus would have never been cloned you as his own.

<comment><USER12> Other vendors throwing in the towel interestingly mean AIX will continue on much longer. The UNIX(r) market is shrinking, but high margin. HP-UX and AIX are the only UNIX(r) choices, and IBM is a much more stable entity. IBM has a pretty solid strategy with [Open]POWER embracing Linux while continuing to sustain i and AIX. AIX is both less sticky and compelling than i, but nonetheless 27 years to grab niches like DBs and large sw suites mean it will be around for at least another decade.

</comment></comment><comment><USER64>
       Going the way of UNIXWARE / AIX /

       RIP UNIX .

<comment><USER65> AIX is still around.

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> The difference between Solaris and Linux is mainly scalability. Linux scales well on clusters such as SGI UV3000 scale-out servers, or top500 supercomputers. These scale-out clusters serve one scientist starting HPC number crunching workloads 24-48h. Scale-out workloads are easy to parallelize doing a calculation on the same set of grid points, over and over again. All this fits into a cpu cache and can run on each separate compute node. All SGI UV2000/UV3000 use cases are HPC number crunching, analytics, etc.

OTOH, enterprise business workloads (SAP, OLTP databases, etc) typically serve thousands of users simultaneously. They do pay roll, accounting, etc etc. Such workloads can not be cached in the cpu cache, so you need to go out to RAM all the time. RAM is typically 100ns, which corresponds to 10 MHz cpu. Do you remember 10 MHz cpus? This means business workloads have huge scalability problems because you need to place all cpus on the same bus, in one single large scale-up server. If you try to run business workloads on a scale-out server, performance will drop drastically as data is shuffled among nodes on a network, instead on a fast bus.

Thus, business workloads use one single large scale-up servers, with max 16 or 32-sockets. This domain belongs to Unix/RISC and Mainframes. HPC number crunching use large clusters such as SGI UV3000 which has 10.000s of cores.

The largest Linux scale-up server is the new HP Kraken. It is a redesigned old Integrity Unix server with 64-sockets. The x86 version of the Integrity maxes out at 16-sockets only. Other than that, the largest x86 server is vanilla 8-socket servers by IBM, HP, Oracle, etc.

Linux devs only have access to 1-2 socket PCs so Linux can not be optimized nor tested on large 8-16 socket servers. Which Linux dev have access to anything larger than 4-sockets? No one. Linus Torvalds? No, he does not work on scalability on 16-socket servers. There is no Linux dev working on scalability on 16-socket servers. Why? Because, until last year, 16-socket x86 servers hardly even existed! Google this if you want, try to find a 16-socket x86 server other than the brand new HP Kraken and SGI UV300H. OTOH, Unix/RISC and Mainframes have scaled to 64 sockets for decades.

Look at the SAP benchmarks. The top scores all belong to 32-socket UNIX/RISC doing large SAP workloads. Linux on x86 has the bottom part, doing small SAP workloads. The HP Kraken has bad SAP scores, considering it has 16-sockets. It is almost the same as the 8-socket x86 SAP scores. Bad scalability.

Thus, if you want to run workloads larger than 2-4 sockets, you need to go to Unix/RISC. Linux maxes out at 2-4 sockets or so. The new Oracle Exadata server sporting SPARC T7 (same as the M7 cpu) runs Linux and it maxes out at 2-sockets. If you want 16-socket workloads, you must go to Solaris and SPARC. All large business servers, use Unix or Mainframes. No Linux nowhere.

Linux = small business workloads. Solaris = large business workloads. And the big money is in large business servers. If Oracle kills off Solaris, then Oracle is stuck at 2-4 sockets (small revenue). Only Solaris can drive large business servers (big revenue).

It does not make sense to kill of Solaris, because then Oracle can not offer (expensive) large business servers. Then Oracle will be stuck at small cheap business servers with Linux and Windows.

Regarding Linux vs Solaris code quality: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Linux#Kernel_code...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Linux#Kernel_code_quality)</comment>