Gosling on Solaris as Blunder

I found this to be an interesting excerpt from an interview of James Gosling by Eweek, in answer to the question “What would you say has been Sun's biggest blunder in terms of software?”.

As for blunders, boy, one of the ones that has always gotten under my skin is the whole BSD [Berkeley Software Distribution] versus [UNIX] System V Release 4 merge that we did. That marked the transition from SunOS to Solaris. That set our whole OS [operating system] story back like two or three years.

That was a really tough one to do. There were a variety of business reasons why we wanted to do it, but it was really hard for me to believe that the two or three years that it cost us were worthwhile.

But it's the kind of thing that at the time just felt really dumb. Now that we have a bunch of new perspective on that transition, it's worked out reasonably well. But also it sort of worked out to be somewhat pointless because the BSD side of the universe has survived pretty well, and the whole System V universe has pretty much died. And we were trying to make peace between those competing camps.

At some level what we didn't know was one of those sides was going to die, and it was pretty hard to predict which side was going to die. So we tried to do this other grand, unique thing. And we mostly succeeded at that. But in retrospect technologically it was somewhat pointless, and we would probably have been ahead of where we are now. But interestingly we're still pretty far ahead. We lost a bunch of ground, but we gained a lot of ground.