Re: GPL'ing Solaris won't save SUN

[Christopher Browne]

Clinging to sanity, Richard.L.Hamilton@mindwarp.smart.net (Richard L. Hamilton) 
mumbled into her beard:
> In article <2p58l4Ffh581U1@uni-berlin.de>,
>       Christopher Browne <cbbrowne@acm.org> writes:
>> Centuries ago, Nostradamus foresaw when groenvel@cse.psu.edu (John D 
>> Groenveld) would write:
>>> In article <m3d61fr187.fsf@magma.savecore.net>,
>>> Frank Cusack  <fcusack@fcusack.com> wrote:
>>>>It's already happening (lxrun, and now Janus).  How is more compatibility
>>>>bad?
>>>
>>> Win-OS/2 became an excuse for ISVs to not provide native OS/2 ports.
>>>
>>> If its Sun's intention to capitalize on Solaris x86/Opteron to
>>> expand the entire Solaris ecosystem, then Janus should be seen by
>>> Sun as a good hack in the short term; a bad hack with prolonged
>>> use.
>> 
>> Sun's in the market to sell hardware, not OSes.
>> 
>> Their proper goal is to seek to get people to buy their hardware.
>> If it gives enough "warm fuzzies" to people to have the Sun name on
>> the front and Linux on the login, this is not a "bad hack."
>
> Oh, in the short term it could pay off.
>
> But in the long term, catering to stupid people has its limits, not
> to mention nontrivial adverse consequences (more stupid people, if
> nothing else).

Well, they have had a hard time building SPARC/Solaris hardware that
stays running.

It seems to me that they have to have _some_ kind of fundamental
change in order for there to be _any_ customers that come back.

My employer is in the process of deep-sixing the Sun/Solaris hardware
in favor of IBM/AIX because of reliability issues.  They'd have to do
something pretty tremendous to tempt us back.  

Opteron+Linux happens to be a combination we're interested in where,
at least on the Linux side, we expect better reliability than we've
seen on Sun/Solaris.

There are two servers we're decommissioning in September that numerous
of our sysadmin types would (at least in joke) like to drop on Sun HQ
from 30,000 feet.
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