Brendan, thanks very much for replying to this. It's great to get clarity around it. Your blog and HN posts have been great resources as I've gone down this rabbit hole, and since I've read so many of them, I know that's not the first time you've heard it. Your work has been hugely valuable to this community.

Since the options for illumos employment are and were scant, the story that you were looking for a change of scenery and it just-so-happened to entail Linux is somewhat believable. I appreciate you clearing up the record on that; it seems like now it's clear that you left over doubts and uncertainties about the value of illumos itself.

The real key question is why, as Linux caught up to these features that you've listed, illumos wasn't pushing the envelope even farther, adding more features that you could continue to get excited about and continue to evangelize.

I think that's the key missing piece for me. It seems like that loss of faith had to be pretty momentous if you were willing to shift attention to Linux and spend years helping to develop eBPF, replicating the core featureset that already existed via DTrace.

So I'm trying to understand how to interpret that, and whether your departure + the departure of other key ex-Sun personnel around the same time should be taken as a clear vote of no confidence in illumos and/or other Solaris-derived products (potentially precipitated by a company-internal event that demonstrated this obviously, but which the rest of us don't know about), or whether that's too much to read into it based on associated personal factors.

This is important to me as a potential platform adherent because as awesome as Bryan seems, illumos is a harder sell when he's standing alone as one of its sole prominent proponents, whereas everyone else who was involved with OpenSolaris back in the day has accepted the reality of Linux dominance and moved on.

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EDIT: Hope we don't end up talking past each other in edits, but yeah, the thing that's been hard for me piecing this together is that it doesn't seem like there's any closure. Seemed like in a short period of time, you went from touting illumos frequently to never mentioning it unless it was to tell people that you don't think they should use it anymore. I'm trying to bridge that gap from the breadcrumbs left online, but thus far, coming up without satisfactory answers. There is still a tension here that I haven't been able to resolve.

With the post from last year, you talk about things like it's a forgone conclusion that Solaris and its derivatives are over and done. This makes your position sharper but it doesn't really help with a context or pathway for why that conclusion is so crisp when illumos and Joyent are still apparently viable.

I understand that the tone is conciliatory because you're trying to cheer up the Sun folks who got caught up in the layoff, and show them that there is light on the Linux side of things. But no mention of illumos at all? No "Hey, Bryan has some openings over there if you're still into the Solaris thing, I used to work for him and it was alright, he'll give me 500 smackers if he hires someone and you say you read about it on this blog"? A little weird.

You even do this in the parent comment here, where you describe time spent discussing illumos/Solaris as "down the Solaris drain", i.e., anything Solaris is non-productive. Why is it now "the Solaris drain"? Bryan and Joyent are trying to convince me that it's not a drain.

I know that Linux "caught up", but that doesn't feel like the only explanation here. There's something else. After all, you still speak highly of FreeBSD, which also lags Linux in several significant ways.

If it's just personal, I'm not asking you to get into the details and spread gossip, etc., but would be great to hear from you that "I just personally lost interest in that", "it was just about better employability on the Linux side, Solaris is still cool if that floats your boat, just doesn't float mine anymore", etc. instead of just hearing generic hand-wavy stuff from Bryan, who can't give the real deal as long as he wants to keep his job.

It just feels like there something else here that's not out. I want to know what it is before I start running production applications on these platforms!