On Fri, Jul 06, 2001 at 05:56:17PM -0400, Jesse Erlbaum wrote:
> Hi Abigail --
>
> > Sun doesn't charge you for the OS. It charges you for the
> > production and
> > distribution costs of the CD, administration costs. Etc. It's
> > in the same
> > price range as you pay for a Red Hat box in a book shop. As you will
> > notice, you don't have to type in license keys when
> > installing Solaris.
> >
> > That's not $$$, and totally insignificant to the costs of the
> > hardware.
>
>
> Hehe... OK. Accepting your assertion, let me re-state my original point:
>
> ---->
>
> Once you open the "Pandora's Box" of Open-Source (by using Perl, for
> instance), dumping SOLARIS in favor of Linux is the next logical step.
>
> [Abigail -- are we cool so far?]
No. I cannot find anything logical in dumping Solaris for Linux. Not
even the price, unless your sysadmins don't cost more than a few
dollars/day.
> Once you dump SOLARIS, you're just a hop, skip and a jump from realizing
> that your US$20k Sun E250 can be replaced with US$5k worth of Intel-based
> equipment from a reputable vendor, such as IBM.
Dream on.
> In conclusion:
>
> Sun knows this, and is arguably more motivated than Microsoft to minimize
> Perl and open-source in general.
Right. It must be for that reason Sun delivers Perl. Even in its most
minimal distribution, Perl will be installed. And that's why certain
utilities are written in Perl. And I bet Suns fear of open source makes
it drop CDE as the preferred desktop to replace it with Gnome. Or that
people taking a Solaris admin course now have to learn bash is one of
the shells coming with Solaris 8.
> BTW: Sun is *barely* in the hardware business. COMPAQ, Gateway and Dell
> are in the hardware business. Sun is in the hardware business only as long
> as they can continue to sell FUD to the Fortune 500. IMHO, Sun hardware is
> unnecessary in all but about 20% of the places it is currently in use. As
> commodity hardware continues to improve, the capabilities of Linux continue
> to improve, and the trend towards clustering more and smaller machines
> persists, Sun hardware (and software) will become more and more unnecessary.
Since you mention clustering, is there an open source equivalent of
Sunguard?
Oh, and which "commodity hardware" running Linux can I buy where I can
hot swap disks, powersupplies, network cards and CPUs?
Abigail
