Remember The Past, Forging The Future

Abstract:
There is value to remember history and listen to recent great thinkers when considering the future. The following are my highlights of the presentation by Bryan M. Cantrill of Joyent from a little over a half-year ago.

USENIX 2011 Presentation - Fork Yeah! The Rise and Development of illumos

• Introduction of History from SunOS, Solaris, to Illumos - 0:00-1:20
• SunOS 4.x , Solaris 2.0, Solaris 2.1, - 1:20-3:00
• Source Code Control: NSE, NSElite, Bitkeeper, TeamWare, to The Creation of GIT 3:00-4:00
• Solaris 2.3, Solaris 2.4, Solaris 2.5 (almost killed Solaris for BSD) - 4:00-5:20
• BDFL Software Model (Benevolent Dictator For Life) - 5:20-6:00
• The Bonwick Youth - 6:40-7:00; 8:41-10:00
• The Impact of Windows Scalability Day 1997 - 8:00-8:41
• Revolutionary Ideas 2001 - 10:00-12:00
• 1) ZFS - 12:00-12:15
• 2) DTrace - 12:15-13:00
• 3) Kevlar/Zones - 13:00-14:00
• 4-8) FMA, SMF, FireEngine, Crossbow, Least Privilege- 14:45-15:44
• Sun: Feuding Bands of Warlords - 15:44-16:00
• Innovation from Engineers, not Management, Marketing, Customer - 16:45-18:20
• Kiln of unspeakable pain - 17:30-18:00
• People, Not Organizations, Innovate - 18:00-18:20
• OS is a Loss Leader - 18:40-19:00
• Sun was The Open Systems Company (ex. NFS) - 19:40-20:00
• The Open Sourcing of Solaris - 20:00-21:00
• The Crap Code, not Innovative, costs money - 21:00-21:20
• The First Open Source, DTrace - 22:00-22:30
• Proprietary Drivers, CDDL Licensing - 23:15-25:00
• Fork-a-phobic, Boards, Elections, Governance, Politics - 27:00-28:00
• Copyright Assignment Concerns - 29:00-29:30
• OpenSolaris Missile Crisis, independent OGB - 30:00-33:00
• End of an Era, Oracle bought Sun - 33:00-34:00
  Kicked butt, had fun, didn't cheat, loved customers, changed computing forever
• Birth of Illumos - 39:50-41:20
• 2010 Friday 13th memo, Death of OpenSolaris - 41:20-43:50
• Solaris Diaspora - 44:00-45:30
• Illumos Innovation, No Illumos Copyright - 45:30-46:50
• Joint Working Group for ZFS - 47:00-50:00
  Feature flag, compression ratio, estimated zfs send/receive, Zone I/O throttling, ZFS unmap, background destroy, resumable send
• DTrace - 50:00-52:00
  Log-linear quantization, KVM support for vmregs, tracemem(), toupper(), tolower(), etc.
• Zones - 52:00-55:00
  More multi-tenancy under Illumos than Solaris, svcs -Z, svcs -L, per-zone kstat, new rcapd,
• KVM - 55:00-57:00
  Windows, Linux, BSD on near bare-metal speed (ZFS, Dtrace, Zones); KVM in a Zone
• Black Hat: "Break out of QEMU into a more secure cell" - 57:00-57:17
• Illumos Distributions - 57:30-58:00
• Illumos Community Values - 58:00-58:30
  Freedom to Fork; Benevolent Oligarchy; Value Utility
  "We reject: kings, presidents, voting.We believe in: rough concensus, running code" 

Foot Note:
History has consequences - not long after this, Solaris 11 source code was leaked from Oracle... of which, ironically, no one wants to use. Open Sourced Components bundled with Solaris 11 can be found here.