I went to a Sun conference almost 20 years ago. I remember there was a presentation on Solaris internals and I decided to attend on a whim, since I knew so little about it. I will never forget something the presenter said and how smugly he said it:
"If Linux is better at anything than Solaris then that's just a Solaris bug."
Turns out that, looking back, Solaris must have been full of bugs.
At some point in the past, I attended a Sun security-themed Thang in Los Angeles (small group).
The presenter was talking about a Solaris PAM integration with LDAP auth right before the break for lunch. The auth was done via a "query-username-and-password-strings-from-LDAP-and-compare-locally" method. I pointed out some issues with that - needing a privileged account for the query since the password LDAP attribute is usually protected, password hash on the wire (l0pht was a thing by then, so it felt wrong to sling those around), couple of others.
To their credit, I spent the lunch break with a couple of their engineers in front of a whiteboard working through a 'bind[1]-as-user-to-auth' mechanism instead. I'd like to think this helped their PAM LDAP module become more secure.
Eh, I dunno, sounds like it could've just been a statement of their lofty goals. Here is from mold linker’s readme.
> mold is so fast that it is only 2x slower than the cp command on the same machine. If you find that mold is not faster than other linkers, feel free to file a bug report.
My experience with Sun products was before and after Oracle acquisition extremely bad. Particularly the last times when they started supporting intel and went open source.
Exactly my impression during the OpenSolaris time.
Every time criticism of Sun's open source strategy was raised, people seemed in disbelief that Sun! could be doing anything bad. They were sacred.