Hi all
On Wed, 31 May 2006, Stefan Teleman wrote:
On 5/31/06, Joerg Schilling <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Glenn Weinberg <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> If I'm reading the articles correctly, when they made the decision two
> years ago the information was, unfortunately, valid.
They did make the final decision last year.
The process did start in autumn 2000 when the Linux Verband Deutschland"
did aproach the OFD Niedersachsen and did tell them that Sun will shut down
Solaris x86 support. The final convincing work did start in autumn 2004.
This is wy I did aproach Sun marketing at that time when I was in Menlo
Park.
>From the information I have, the final decision must have been made
recently.
Noone from OFD Niedersachsen has contacted KDE Solaris to at least ask
a generic question about whether or not KDE is supported on Solaris
X86.
As other already said: a number of mistakes were made some years back
which really confused the not too many Solaris x86 people out in the wild.
Nevertheless we should complain about but focus on what's ahead.
Before S10 and OpenSolaris came along Solaris simply wasn't ready for a
mass market. Maybe for a customer as the mentioned one but it simply
lacked a lot of things people just want to have. More on this further
down.
Another point mentioned in the refered article targets the support for the
latest greatest hardware. In my opinion this is a valid and severe point
for the OS. Customers like the fiscal authorities usually have to do
tenders to get a large number of almost identical PC style hardware. I'm
not talking servers but desktop clients. This means that they most likely
for most of the time end up with big vendors such as Dell, IBM, Fujitsu
Siemens, HP and so on. If you look closer up till recenty ALL of those
business boxes came with the latest Intel chipset and CPU. 95% still do as
it seems no one dares to put AMD in "business PCs" at a large scale.
Working for the infrastructure department of a german university we also
go through this once in a while. OS hardware support for this latest dies
is always given for Windows as but looking at the UNIX side it gets much
harder and Linux distros and developers to a pretty good job there. Even
FreeBSD and the others are behind so no wonder that the small but very
enthusiastic OpenSolaris community cannot really keep up coding for new
chipsets and on-board devices. Even if they could I doubt such customers
would go for it as Linux is just more hip and decision makers for sure
don't get grilled for picking it. Maybe those people would even consider
OpenSolaris "not ready for business".
Back to Sun itself: in my opinion they dropped the desktop many years ago
during the dot-gone era. They forgot about their own roots and the
university kids at the time didn't learn Solaris but Linux and those are
the ones to drive decisions today. Actually I do not believe that Sun as a
company really changed it's attitude. Sure they support AMD/Intel and have
nice servers and some workstations based on. Sure Solaris is a great OS
and in the meantime the compilers are superb. Also lots of old friends
such as Oracle are loyal to x86 but too many of the smaller ISVs didn't
really start yet supporting s10x86. They are either "Linux addicts" or are
still scared the Sun folks may change their mind again. This leads to a
situation where schools such as universities and others cannot provide
solutions to their customers, students and staff, not because of the OS
but because of a lack of supported applications.
Sounds like a Catch 22 to me
As long as this problem isn't solved or at least aggresivly addressed we
will be in a similar postions as the BSDs and Apple used to be. The
solution? I don't really know but have a new project/community for
OpenSolaris every other day and already 3 (4?) distributions creates a lot
of "friction". Maybe we, the OpenSolaris supporters, should ask the people
capable of kernel developing, to put more focus on the desktop by
supporting new commodity hardware. The more poeple you meet running
Solaris on their laptop/desktop the more others become aware of the choice
they have. The choice named *BSD is around for a decade but they also
just didn't manage or didn't want to make it 'sexy' enough. We should
make sure to be ready when people recognize that choices are important and
that stability and backwards compatibility are key. A hard way and tough
job but times were never better then today.
Well, sorry for a long comment on a tiny headline
Thomas
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