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We need to get rid of these gratuitous dependencies.  Merely papering over them with a transaction—making them “safe”—doesn’t do anything to improve the natural parallelism that a program contains.  It just ensures it doesn’t crash.  Sure, that’s plenty important, but providing programming models and patterns to eliminate the gratuitous dependencies also achieves the goal of not crashing but with the added benefit of actually improving scalability too.  Transactions have worked so well in enabling automatic parallelism in databases because the basic model itself (without transactions) already implies natural isolation among queries.  Transactions break down and scalability suffers for programs that aren’t architected in this way.  We should learn from the experience of the database community in this regard

There will always be hidden mutation of shared state inside lower level system components.  These are often called “benevolent side-effects,” thanks to Hoare, and apply to things like lazy initialization and memorization caches.  These will be done by concurrency ninjas who understand locks.  And their effects will be isolated by convention.

Even with all of this support, we’d be left with an ecosystem of libraries like the .NET Framework itself which have been built atop a fundamentally mutable and imperative system.  The path forward here is less clear to me, although having the ability to retain a mutable model within pockets of guaranteed isolation certainly makes me think the libraries are salvageable.  Thankfully, the shift will likely be very gradual, and the pieces that pose substantial problems can be rewritten in place incrementally over time.  But we need the fundamental language and type system support first.

we now build our entire line of storage systems from general purpose server parts, including Solaris and ZFS, our open source file system.

using a general purpose OS allows us to easily embrace specialized components (from flash memory to GPU's)

why am I paying you a million dollars?" I responded, "You can absolutely run it for free. You just can't call me on Christmas day, you'll be on your own." He gave me the PO.

Solaris OEM agreements with IBM, Dell, Intel, Fujitsu and HP are so important to our end customers - they know they'll never be locked in.

These open source platforms generate, alongside the services attached to them, over a billion dollars a year, making Sun by far and away the world's largest open source software company.

Fighting free and open software, like fighting free news or free search, is like fighting gravity - and btw, gravity gets a lot stronger during economic downturns.

There is a robust, well-designed open source PBX Server called SipX that is primarily backed by Nortel (due to their acquisition of the creators, Pingtel).