Good videos, with context.
LISA11 - Fork Yeah! The Rise and Development of illumos

LISA11 - Fork Yeah! The Rise and Development of illumos

USENIX
9 HN recommenders · discussed 2012–2026
Open YouTube ↗

About this video

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 it appears in the archive

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.

AI-generated summary and labels from the source dataset; verify important details against the video. Source & credits.

From the Hacker News discussion

Malic · 2016-10 · strong rec

grin Here we go... For "laughing at ourselves" and oddities of computer languages, there is "Wat" by Gary Bernhardt: [LINK] For an opinion on the Sun to Oracle transition, there is "Fork Yeah! The Rise and Development of illumos" by Bryan M. Cantrill, Joyent. His Larry Ellison rant makes me smile: [VIDEO]

Read original comment ↗
gbrown_ · 2016-12 · strong rec

> not a leaked version of it. It's a fork. If you're interested how it came to be check out this epic talk by Bryan Cantrill [VIDEO]

Read original comment ↗
antoncohen · 2018-04 · strong rec

"Fork Yeah! The Rise and Development of illumos" by Bryan Cantrill [VIDEO] He starts with a nice history of SunOS and Solaris, goes into open source, then midway through (33:00) he goes into a brutally honest rant against Oracle. Even better is that Oracle was one of the sponsors of the conference.

Read original comment ↗
jiggawatts · 2020-03 · strong rec

Whenever I hear Oracle mentioned it reminds me that it's once again time to re-watch the "Never make the mistake of anthropomorphising Larry Ellison" rant. [VIDEO]

Read original comment ↗
insaneirish · 2013-06 · rec

DTrace was deliberately licensed in a way to be incompatible with the Linux kernel. This was commented on directly by Bryan Cantrill on HN [1]. You should also watch his "Fork Yeah!" [2] and "Corporate Open Source Anti-Patterns" [3] talks for full context. [1]: [LINK] [2]: [VIDEO] [3]: [LINK]

Read original comment ↗
TazeTSchnitzel · 2016-09 · rec

Oracle killed OpenSolaris. They literally moved Solaris back to being closed-source. With no justification, even, beyond Oracle not liking open-source. Undoing the massive amount of work the Solaris team made in order to open-source it in the first place. There's no more source code releases for Solaris now. Unsurprisingly, almost all the core Solaris team walked. This talk is informative: [VIDEO]

Read original comment ↗
richard_todd · 2017-09 · rec

If you are interested, this talk says a lot about what was cool about Solaris, its place in history, the troubles it encountered, and what was wrong with Oracle's approach, leading to little-known open-source forks. [VIDEO] (entitled: Fork yeah! The rise and development of Illumos)

Read original comment ↗
TAForObvReasons · 2019-02 · rec

The great Scott McNealy quote about Sun really resonated with me: > We kicked butt, had fun, didn't cheat, loved our customers and changed computing forever ... and in many ways, it seems like only a "lifestyle business" can really prioritize those over core revenue and growth metrics. Bryan Cantrill's discussion is also great: [VIDEO]

Read original comment ↗