My university had some rooms with Sun workstations that we used for certain subjects. I always liked them, but even then (1997-2003) there were already some Linux systems and there wasn't so many objective reasons for using them other than they had some software (Matlab, probably?) that were not easily available to us by other means.
But XP, OS X came more or less at the same time (2001), and desktop Linux also became usable, and finally affordable home computers could run "good" operating systems, ready for the Internet age...
One interesting thing I learned recently is that Sun did a lot of accessibility work (likely to sell desktops for the government? I wish some organization tried this nowadays with Linux) that still lives on.
You can still use the Solaris forks from the brief period where Solaris was OSS. I think there are a few desktop-oriented distributions. But I think it's true that Linux was somewhat of a final nail in the coffin for commercial UNIX.
Linux managed to concentrate vendor resources (unlike the BSDs) without adopting any of the traditional ways of monetizing it (unlike the commercial Unices). Operating systems are now basically impossible to charge money for.
The other nail in the coffin may have been x86. Apple managed to keep its Unix flavor alive because it has a market for its hardware that subsidizes costs, and so does IBM in the corporate space, but that’s about it?
But then end users depend on either Microsoft (Windows), Apple (macOS), or Google (ChromeOS) for desktop OSes (not to mention on phones/tables, where it's just Apple and Google). Which means three large US companies control virtually everyone's computing experience.
Operating systems are now basically impossible to charge money for.
On end-user devices, Microsoft and Apple still make money quite directly from selling operating systems, Google makes money more indirectly.
On servers etc. you are mostly right, of course! (Although a lot of companies still pay for Windows Server or commercial Linux.)
And I think it's looking worse since Android and iOS, who in many ways control things even more than Windows did!
Oh you’re right! Microsoft still charges $139 for Windows 11.
That is less than what a workstation OS like SunOS used to cost in the 1980s (especially after inflation adjustment). In that context, it is less surprising that Microsoft supplements its revenue stream with ads.
As for macOS, that is free now, isn’t it? The way they cover the costs is by selling you the hardware on which it runs.
Depends on how you want to count it, I guess. For Windows OEM licenses (or whatever it's called nowadays), Dell or whomever passes on the cost to you. Sometimes you can choose no OS and get a discount, I guess that tells you how much the license costs.
Of course, it is not possible to buy an Apple computer with no license, nor buy macOS separately. (They used to charge for updates? But I don't think they have done this for a million years.)
Huh, I would have expected SunOS to be free with the hardware, or absurdly expensive- having it cheaper than Windows sounds odd, but well, Sun was a strange company :D
Huh, I would have expected SunOS to be free with the hardware, or absurdly expensive- having it cheaper than Windows sounds odd, but well, Sun was a strange company :D
I meant the opposite: in historical comparison, Windows 11 is cheap!
But I think I mixed something up. The price list I've found is for DEC, not Sun. It listed Ultrix at several hundred dollars in 1985. I'm not super sure how to interpret this table but it looks like a two-user license cost $620 and the installation media cost $608. I'm guessing (but this is really just a guess) that the typical customer didn't need both. So, accounting for 40 years of inflation, they paid the equivalent of $1,700 in today's terms.
(Although this was for the MicroVAX I which was a minicomputer, not a workstation.)
Both iOS and Android are subsidised a lot by the app stores. Apple and Google charge a cut for all software that runs on their devices.
Linux is also funded by datacenter uses. All of the big cloud vendors regard customers being able to get an OS for free that runs well on their servers as a big win and put money into making sure server Linux works well.
The only people really making money from Linux on the client are Valve and Google, and neither of them cares much about the GNOME/KDE types of desktop (Valve does to a degree because they share some common code). Google invests a bit in desktop Linux so that their employees don’t need to use laptops and desktops running a competitor’s operating system.
Even with a fairly small cut, they'd be able to fund a lot of development. This isn't a very new model. A lot of mainframes and so on charged a lot for development tools, so implicitly took a cut from revenue for people selling things.
This was one of the key innovations from Microsoft: they made developer tools cheap (and later free) so that lots of people were adding value to their platform. But they also got revenue from selling Windows. This model doesn't work so well for F/OSS platforms.
For a minute when I started college, '95-96, there were Sun SPARC machines (image searches tell me they were likely SPARCclassic) running SunOS in my dorm and were my entry point to email, the web, remote shell access, and everything UNIX, all of which have of course informed my whole career. Other beefier machines on campus were made by HP, IBM, SGI, and others, but these little things and their OS had a certain aesthetic. I remember especially viscerally the feel of the soft keyboards and the look of black-on-tan terminal windows connected to the campus AFS server.
In my lifetime, there’s been one ecosystem I deeply regret having missed out on: the Sun Microsystems ecosystem of the late 2000s.
I... don't understand. I've brushed against them half a dozen times or so during that time period, in university labs or occasional attempts at making them an (expensive) hobby. My limited experience with Sun kit made it seem very temperamental and overpriced. Compared to a linux or freebsd PC they were very much spending 10x money on a 2x better product, with userland software that was at the time mostly an out of date BSD. Sure it's cool, but...
Gonna make a lot of people upset with this, I'm sure. Sorry. CDE never sparked joy in me. Sun's real progress all happened in the 1990's and was outstripped incredibly rapidly by the internet and the companies who could keep up with it.
I can't speak for Thom but IMO a lot hinges on "ecosystem." We had Sun servers and thin clients in my University - sure, it wasn't as nice as a GNU userland, but it was a true multi-user UNIX system that showed how the classic primitives were supposed to work (cross user file sharing, talk, apache user directories, etc.). Any nostalgia is for the scenarios that were enabled by the configuration, not for the frustration of having to remember to use GNU tar to extract a gzip compressed archive.
Being shared, the setup was hardware constrained, using things like fvwm2 to support as many concurrent sessions as possible. Although Linux had nice desktop environments, hardware constraints would have prevented them. I mean, KDE/Gnome on Solaris existed too.
Agree with the 10x money on a 2x better product point. In our case it meant a 64 bit kernel with 12Gb RAM before x64, but was never going to last in a post-x64 world.
Yeah the party was definitely over by the late 2000s. The entire RISC workstation market evaporated quickly in the early 2000s, especially once AMD's Opteron hit and the combo of ATI and Nvidia graphics pushing past everything else. Linux and Windows 2000/XP offered good enough environments for these workloads so the high price was just extracting from customers who couldn't switch fast enough.
I think a lot of FOSS people came of age when x86/Linux was a given (i.e. 1990s). Talking to some older folks, the magic of Sun was before that, in the 68k and early SPARC days when SunOS was the thing. Between the bug-fixed BSD, and university outreach including SunSites, SunOS was kind of the default OS where you could grab sources online and things would just build. Things started to go down hill with Solaris, but the 1990s were such a boom time Sun did pretty well until the .com crash.
The CS department at my alma mater used real-deal UltraSPARC workstations in most of their labs at least up until I graduated in 2010. NFS home directories so you could just sit down anywhere and have your files. By comparison, working in one of the Windows labs was an exercise in pain.
I'm not some Windows fan but to be fair that was some difference in admin experience/taste. NT had similar capabilities since the mid 1990s with Domain/AD, roaming profiles, group policy, etc.
I remember the nerd rage when my alma mater KTH moved from a Unix-based mail system to one based on Microsoft products sometime in the mid 2000s. But at the time the company I worked for had migrated from a Unix-based mail system designed by what we in Sweden sarcastically call "happy amateurs" to an Exchange system run by pros, so I had bit more nuanced take on the matter.
Reading this gave me flashbacks to a previous job I had for a server host that was making use of Sun hardware at the time.
Their hardware was always nice to work with - even though it tended to be there lowest priced models. I got to play with Solaris, UltraSPARC T2 servers, Infiniband, etc. The icing on the cake was probably contributing to the Illumos/OpenIndiana projects, where I helped get a mirror network set up for the latter. Good times...
My university had some rooms with Sun workstations that we used for certain subjects. I always liked them, but even then (1997-2003) there were already some Linux systems and there wasn't so many objective reasons for using them other than they had some software (Matlab, probably?) that were not easily available to us by other means.
But XP, OS X came more or less at the same time (2001), and desktop Linux also became usable, and finally affordable home computers could run "good" operating systems, ready for the Internet age...
One interesting thing I learned recently is that Sun did a lot of accessibility work (likely to sell desktops for the government? I wish some organization tried this nowadays with Linux) that still lives on.
You can still use the Solaris forks from the brief period where Solaris was OSS. I think there are a few desktop-oriented distributions. But I think it's true that Linux was somewhat of a final nail in the coffin for commercial UNIX.
Linux managed to concentrate vendor resources (unlike the BSDs) without adopting any of the traditional ways of monetizing it (unlike the commercial Unices). Operating systems are now basically impossible to charge money for.
The other nail in the coffin may have been x86. Apple managed to keep its Unix flavor alive because it has a market for its hardware that subsidizes costs, and so does IBM in the corporate space, but that’s about it?
But then end users depend on either Microsoft (Windows), Apple (macOS), or Google (ChromeOS) for desktop OSes (not to mention on phones/tables, where it's just Apple and Google). Which means three large US companies control virtually everyone's computing experience.
On end-user devices, Microsoft and Apple still make money quite directly from selling operating systems, Google makes money more indirectly.
On servers etc. you are mostly right, of course! (Although a lot of companies still pay for Windows Server or commercial Linux.)
And I think it's looking worse since Android and iOS, who in many ways control things even more than Windows did!
Oh you’re right! Microsoft still charges $139 for Windows 11.
That is less than what a workstation OS like SunOS used to cost in the 1980s (especially after inflation adjustment). In that context, it is less surprising that Microsoft supplements its revenue stream with ads.
As for macOS, that is free now, isn’t it? The way they cover the costs is by selling you the hardware on which it runs.
Depends on how you want to count it, I guess. For Windows OEM licenses (or whatever it's called nowadays), Dell or whomever passes on the cost to you. Sometimes you can choose no OS and get a discount, I guess that tells you how much the license costs.
Of course, it is not possible to buy an Apple computer with no license, nor buy macOS separately. (They used to charge for updates? But I don't think they have done this for a million years.)
Huh, I would have expected SunOS to be free with the hardware, or absurdly expensive- having it cheaper than Windows sounds odd, but well, Sun was a strange company :D
I meant the opposite: in historical comparison, Windows 11 is cheap!
But I think I mixed something up. The price list I've found is for DEC, not Sun. It listed Ultrix at several hundred dollars in 1985. I'm not super sure how to interpret this table but it looks like a two-user license cost $620 and the installation media cost $608. I'm guessing (but this is really just a guess) that the typical customer didn't need both. So, accounting for 40 years of inflation, they paid the equivalent of $1,700 in today's terms.
(Although this was for the MicroVAX I which was a minicomputer, not a workstation.)
Both iOS and Android are subsidised a lot by the app stores. Apple and Google charge a cut for all software that runs on their devices.
Linux is also funded by datacenter uses. All of the big cloud vendors regard customers being able to get an OS for free that runs well on their servers as a big win and put money into making sure server Linux works well.
The only people really making money from Linux on the client are Valve and Google, and neither of them cares much about the GNOME/KDE types of desktop (Valve does to a degree because they share some common code). Google invests a bit in desktop Linux so that their employees don’t need to use laptops and desktops running a competitor’s operating system.
Smol correction: they charge a big cut. So does Valve, alas.
Even with a fairly small cut, they'd be able to fund a lot of development. This isn't a very new model. A lot of mainframes and so on charged a lot for development tools, so implicitly took a cut from revenue for people selling things.
This was one of the key innovations from Microsoft: they made developer tools cheap (and later free) so that lots of people were adding value to their platform. But they also got revenue from selling Windows. This model doesn't work so well for F/OSS platforms.
For a minute when I started college, '95-96, there were Sun SPARC machines (image searches tell me they were likely SPARCclassic) running SunOS in my dorm and were my entry point to email, the web, remote shell access, and everything UNIX, all of which have of course informed my whole career. Other beefier machines on campus were made by HP, IBM, SGI, and others, but these little things and their OS had a certain aesthetic. I remember especially viscerally the feel of the soft keyboards and the look of black-on-tan terminal windows connected to the campus AFS server.
I... don't understand. I've brushed against them half a dozen times or so during that time period, in university labs or occasional attempts at making them an (expensive) hobby. My limited experience with Sun kit made it seem very temperamental and overpriced. Compared to a linux or freebsd PC they were very much spending 10x money on a 2x better product, with userland software that was at the time mostly an out of date BSD. Sure it's cool, but...
Gonna make a lot of people upset with this, I'm sure. Sorry. CDE never sparked joy in me. Sun's real progress all happened in the 1990's and was outstripped incredibly rapidly by the internet and the companies who could keep up with it.
I can't speak for Thom but IMO a lot hinges on "ecosystem." We had Sun servers and thin clients in my University - sure, it wasn't as nice as a GNU userland, but it was a true multi-user UNIX system that showed how the classic primitives were supposed to work (cross user file sharing, talk, apache user directories, etc.). Any nostalgia is for the scenarios that were enabled by the configuration, not for the frustration of having to remember to use GNU tar to extract a gzip compressed archive.
Being shared, the setup was hardware constrained, using things like fvwm2 to support as many concurrent sessions as possible. Although Linux had nice desktop environments, hardware constraints would have prevented them. I mean, KDE/Gnome on Solaris existed too.
Agree with the 10x money on a 2x better product point. In our case it meant a 64 bit kernel with 12Gb RAM before x64, but was never going to last in a post-x64 world.
Yeah the party was definitely over by the late 2000s. The entire RISC workstation market evaporated quickly in the early 2000s, especially once AMD's Opteron hit and the combo of ATI and Nvidia graphics pushing past everything else. Linux and Windows 2000/XP offered good enough environments for these workloads so the high price was just extracting from customers who couldn't switch fast enough.
I think a lot of FOSS people came of age when x86/Linux was a given (i.e. 1990s). Talking to some older folks, the magic of Sun was before that, in the 68k and early SPARC days when SunOS was the thing. Between the bug-fixed BSD, and university outreach including SunSites, SunOS was kind of the default OS where you could grab sources online and things would just build. Things started to go down hill with Solaris, but the 1990s were such a boom time Sun did pretty well until the .com crash.
The CS department at my alma mater used real-deal UltraSPARC workstations in most of their labs at least up until I graduated in 2010. NFS home directories so you could just sit down anywhere and have your files. By comparison, working in one of the Windows labs was an exercise in pain.
I'm not some Windows fan but to be fair that was some difference in admin experience/taste. NT had similar capabilities since the mid 1990s with Domain/AD, roaming profiles, group policy, etc.
I remember the nerd rage when my alma mater KTH moved from a Unix-based mail system to one based on Microsoft products sometime in the mid 2000s. But at the time the company I worked for had migrated from a Unix-based mail system designed by what we in Sweden sarcastically call "happy amateurs" to an Exchange system run by pros, so I had bit more nuanced take on the matter.
Reading this gave me flashbacks to a previous job I had for a server host that was making use of Sun hardware at the time.
Their hardware was always nice to work with - even though it tended to be there lowest priced models. I got to play with Solaris, UltraSPARC T2 servers, Infiniband, etc. The icing on the cake was probably contributing to the Illumos/OpenIndiana projects, where I helped get a mirror network set up for the latter. Good times...