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It seems to me that businesses
have been talked into to buying hundreds
of needless applications and services in an effort to be lean and productive.

Most of these businesses if they would have used
good judgement and good pratical sense would have determined that their profits would have been greater and their growth more significant if they would have only spent the money on what they really needed.

Business needs practical consulting by highly competent people that can identify great solutions
for businesses. Computers in business are, at this point just as costly as they are productive so only true systems that usually only make up about 20% of the IT infrastructure in most compaines is where the true productivity gains are made. All the rest are just a finacial black holes brought on by sales people and managers not educated enough to make IT decisions.
It's amazing!

Needless to say LINUX can encompass that 20% that
these companies need. If companies would convert over to LINUX there computing infrastructure would automatically become Lean as in "Lean Manufacturing".

There total productivity would increase simply
because the increased uptime of the Linux desktops and servers not too mention there would be no downtime due to Microsoft viruses.
There would be an enourmous cost savings over time. I do not mean a small cost savings I mean an enourmous savings.

Simply by the fact that with LINUX you cannot
write a simple program in Visual Basic and start selling it to managers that are not educated enough to make decisions. These applications promise much but deliver little and usually after spending much time and money and them get placed on the shelf and forgotten about.

So with Linux you will not have this folly.
Every time a manager, middle manager or employee has some slight problem to solve that usually does not amount to a hill of beans your company will not be purchasing some "solution" from
some slick website or salesman.

Linux is here and it is ready to increase your productivity and your bottom line PERIOD.
It will do that in a way that no other software product ever has. It's jsut that simple.

IT IS PERFECTLY LEAN!

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Ummm... you *do* know that the above article is about Solaris -- a well-regarded, highly stable Unix version -- and not about Windows, right?

- Robin

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And dont forget very expensive.

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You cheapskate.....$20 for Solaris x86 is way cheaper than Redhat linux AS.

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Yeah, and then what about the apps that go along with it ? is that still being cheap. Remember these companies dont make any money from their operating systems. They make their money from the applications that you have to buy $eperately sounds fimiliar(Microsoft).

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Yeah, and then what about the apps that go along with it ? is that still being cheap. Remember these companies dont make any money from their operating systems. They make their money from the applications that you have to buy $eperately sounds fimiliar(Microsoft).

You clearly don't know what you're talking about. You're probably one of those that reflexively bashes anything that's not Linux (or not *BSD, or not GNU, etc.) without ever bothering to consider the details.

Sun has already said they're going to provide almost all their Solaris apps (i.e., Orion and Mad Hatter) on Solaris x86 either for the cost of the media (for non-commericial users) and/or free when bundled with a hardware purchase and/or for a low cost of around $100 to 200 per head for corporate purchasers (full tech support is probably extra, not included, at those prices).

I think only the high-end enterprise developer tools are going to involve big bucks (but no more than what IBM, Microsoft, or anyone else charges for similar tools, i.e., $200-2000 per head). Of course, if you prefer the free tools (e.g., GNU, Eclipse, netbeans) those tools work just as well on Solaris as on Linux, BSD, etc.

Of the non-Sun, third-party, apps that are used on Linux systems, 99% of that stuff is BSD, GPL or freeware apps that are free to Linux users, and also freely available on Solaris x86. In other words, gcc, Apache, MySQL, php, etc. are alread widely in use by Solaris x86 systems and are just as free as the Linux, *BSD versions.

Basically what McNealy has said is that he'll sell you the same x86 hardware Dell will sell you, at a lower price, *and* throw in a butt load of software for almost nothing extra. In other words, if you're willing to pay full sticker price for the hardware he'll throw in floor mats, chrome hub caps, etc. for free since it's all just software which doesn't cost him anything extra to give away. If you're actually interested in an alternative to Windows, rather than simply bashing anything non-Linux, then you should check the details on Sun's web site.

The proprietary, third-party, licensed software is generally (if available) priced the same on Solaris x86 as on Linux (you also have the option in many cases of running the Linux version on Solaris x86 using the "lxrun" option). But that's out of Sun's hands so you can't really blame them for pricing decisions made by third-parties. For example, if Microsoft offered MSWord for Linux for $10 but charged $100 for the Solaris version, whose fault is that?

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ALL GNU apps, Gnome apps, KDE apps, Linux apps work on Solaris x86 the same way as they do on Linux.

What app are you talking about?. Oh let's see, you're probably too cheap to spring for Star Office and just use OO.org. You're probably too cheap to buy the license for Mysql and use the free one, you're probably too cheap to buy a Qt license and use the free one....should I keep going on?.

All apps that run on Linux also run on Solaris (natively or through linux emulation).

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Needs a better installer and boot manager.

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I just don't see the point of Solaris x86. We have GNU/Linux on both 32-bit and 64-bit architectures (x86, AMD64, and IA-64, as well as SPARC). We also have FreeBSD on x86 (soon to be AMD64), and certain 64-bit SPARC boxes, not to mention NetBSD and OpenBSD, which together support nearly everything ever made that's not a mainframe.

When we have Free (as in Freedom) operating systems already, which do the same job, why would anyone use Solaris? From a technical standpoint, both GNU/Linux and *BSD are snappier, have much better hardware support, have better application support, and much more vibrant and active development communities. The important Solaris application support (e. g. Oracle) is pretty much limited to SPARC. I believe that the development community difference is directly attributable to their Free Software status, which, of course, Solaris does not have. Sun would do much better to simply use GNU/Linux on AMD64 architectures if they want to UNIX on x86 and provide an inexpensive, but powerful, platform to sell. I say that because of the currently better support for SMP in the Linux kernel than on FreeBSD (that is supposed to change soon, BTW; the FreeBSD folks are working on this).

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Yep, you don't see the point in having Solaris x86. Neither did Sun, but a huge campaign at http://www.save-solaris-x86.org/ made then sit up and take notice : there's a lot of customers out there who want it, so that's why it's back.

For people wanting a stable environment and no 'rpm dependency hell' problems, Solaris x86 is great, IMHO.

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Solaris is as solid as a rock AND if you use it at work, but don't have the money to purchase your own SPARCstation for home use, you can now use off the shelf parts.

There is also the issue of legacy applications.

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Its all about the choises. Don't want Linux? Use BSD! BSD not to your liking? Use Solaris! The possibilities are out there.

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I just don't see the point of Solaris x86. We have GNU/Linux...

GNU/Linux still lags Solaris in a few areas, e.g. NFS implementation, PostScript viewing (the PostScript code is embedded in xsun).

Solaris just seems to be a bit more stable than Linux, the development environment is a hell of a lot more consistent. I have yet to see any image handling applications under Linux that is as simple to use for cropping/printing as sdtimage (which is also a hell of a lot simpler to control prinitng from than the default Windoze set-up).

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