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LISA11 - Fork Yeah! The Rise and Development of illumos

USENIX · talk · Watch on YouTube

Operating systems & kernelsLinux & open-source ecosystemsTech company stories & documentaries

What it is

Bryan Cantrill's LISA11 talk on how illumos arose after Oracle closed OpenSolaris. It covers the history of Sun, ZFS, DTrace and Zones, and the diaspora of kernel engineers, with a famous rant about Oracle and Larry Ellison.

Why Hacker News recommends it

HN points to it as the definitive, entertaining account of Sun's fate under Oracle, and quotes its Ellison lawnmower advice whenever Oracle behaves badly.

  • 9 people recommended it
  • 9 different months
  • 4 strong recommendations
  • first 2012, last 2026

What HN commenters said

  1. “His Larry Ellison rant makes me smile”

    Opinion on Sun to Oracle transition with an amusing Ellison rant

    Malic, 2016-10 · Strong recommendation · in “Ask HN: What's your favorite tech talk?”

  2. “If you're interested how it came to be check out this epic talk by Bryan Cantrill”

    Explains how the illumos fork came to be

    gbrown_, 2016-12 · Strong recommendation · in “"Solaris being canned, at least 50% of teams to be RIF'd in short term"”

  3. “goes into a brutally honest rant against Oracle.”

    SunOS/Solaris history then a brutally honest rant against Oracle

    antoncohen, 2018-04 · Strong recommendation · in “Ask HN: What is your favourite tech talk?”

  4. “it's once again time to re-watch the "Never make the mistake of anthropomorphising Larry Ellison" rant.”

    Commenter rewatches the Larry Ellison lawnmower rant regularly

    jiggawatts, 2020-03 · Strong recommendation · in “Oracle's history highlights a possible downside to its stance on API copyrights”

  5. “You should also watch his "Fork Yeah!" [2] and "Corporate Open Source Anti-Patterns" [3] talks for full context.”

    Context on Solaris, illumos and Oracle

    insaneirish, 2013-06 · Recommendation · in “Linux Performance Analysis and Tools”

  6. “This talk is informative”

    Informative account of Oracle closing OpenSolaris

    TazeTSchnitzel, 2016-09 · Recommendation · in “Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice”

  7. “this talk says a lot about what was cool about Solaris, its place in history, the troubles it encountered”

    Solaris history, its troubles, Oracle's approach, and open-source forks

    richard_todd, 2017-09 · Recommendation · in “The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris”

  8. “Bryan Cantrill's discussion is also great”

    Cantrill's discussion on Sun's legacy

    TAForObvReasons, 2019-02 · Recommendation · in “Reflecting on My Failure to Build a Billion-Dollar Company”

Excerpts from Hacker News comments, linked to the originals. Summaries and labels were written by a language model from those comments.

Topics: illumos, opensolaris, oracle, sun microsystems, bryan cantrill, open source

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