Posted by: Anonymous Coward
on December 08, 2005 01:02 AM
BSD is fine as long as you're somewhat careful with your hardware choices. GNU/Linux is more hardware-tolerant that way, I must admit.
I agree with you on the point about further adoption of Solaris. They've lost a lot of OS market share to GNU/Linux over the years, which matters to them because they feel that it directly affects their core business, which is hardware sales. I just think it's unfortunate that Sun deliberately crafted a license for Open Solaris that's incompatible with the GPL. Then, both projects could've fed off of each other, Free/Net/OpenBSD-style, and both projects would've benefited.
There was, I believe, a better way for Sun to try to preserve their hardware sales business. What Sun could've, and IMO, should've done, is just GPL Solaris instead of CDDL it. Thus, the best parts of Solaris could've been put into GNU/Linux (which everyone but MS, Apple, and SCO seems to be willing to support), and Sun's value proposition would've been "solid 64-bit (Opteron) hardware, with a solid, super-widely-supported 64-bit OS." Sun's development resources could thus have been directed toward improving that value proposition; IBM is now doing something similar with their POWER on Linux campaign. With Sun's development resources, and their reputation back then, they could've made a killing that way. Red Had just did a software version of that same thing with their GPL'd release of the former Netscape Directory Server, now called Red Hat / Fedora Directory Server (thank you, Red Hat!). In doing so, they just increased the value proposition of their own RHEL offering BIG TIME. They even have binaries of RHDS for Solaris SPARC and HP-UX!<nobr> <wbr></nobr>:-)
You raise an interesting point with the benchmark that you mentioned. I'd like to see that myself, actually; if you happen to have the link handy, could you post it? If not, that's cool; Google knows all, fortunately.<nobr> <wbr></nobr>:-)
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Re:Given GNU/Linux and *BSD, what's the point?
Posted by: Anonymous Coward on December 08, 2005 01:02 AMI agree with you on the point about further adoption of Solaris. They've lost a lot of OS market share to GNU/Linux over the years, which matters to them because they feel that it directly affects their core business, which is hardware sales. I just think it's unfortunate that Sun deliberately crafted a license for Open Solaris that's incompatible with the GPL. Then, both projects could've fed off of each other, Free/Net/OpenBSD-style, and both projects would've benefited.
There was, I believe, a better way for Sun to try to preserve their hardware sales business. What Sun could've, and IMO, should've done, is just GPL Solaris instead of CDDL it. Thus, the best parts of Solaris could've been put into GNU/Linux (which everyone but MS, Apple, and SCO seems to be willing to support), and Sun's value proposition would've been "solid 64-bit (Opteron) hardware, with a solid, super-widely-supported 64-bit OS." Sun's development resources could thus have been directed toward improving that value proposition; IBM is now doing something similar with their POWER on Linux campaign. With Sun's development resources, and their reputation back then, they could've made a killing that way. Red Had just did a software version of that same thing with their GPL'd release of the former Netscape Directory Server, now called Red Hat / Fedora Directory Server (thank you, Red Hat!). In doing so, they just increased the value proposition of their own RHEL offering BIG TIME. They even have binaries of RHDS for Solaris SPARC and HP-UX!<nobr> <wbr></nobr>:-)
You raise an interesting point with the benchmark that you mentioned. I'd like to see that myself, actually; if you happen to have the link handy, could you post it? If not, that's cool; Google knows all, fortunately.<nobr> <wbr></nobr>:-)
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