> Well duh..! As a community project one of the
> measures of success is definitely community
> participation and how big it is.
Not exactly. Success of a platform is measured by the availability of software
for that platform. Even the most advanced platform in the world is useless if
there is no software for you or me to do what we want with the computer /
supercomputer / cluster / network.
Computer history taught us that lots of software drives platform adoption,
which in turn drives even more software development for the platform.
> If you need reasons - better x86{_64} support, lots
> of drivers (as a testament - I have till now failed
> to install Solaris on any of my 8 x86/64 machines -
> Linux runs just fine there and recognizes most
> hardware thrown at it), quicker resolution of
> people's problems and addition of new
i86pc platform support is the best Solaris has ever seen. Most of the common
hardware is supported. Granted that some could be supported better -- Solaris
isn't perfect, but there are only so many hours in a day.
As for quicker resolution of problems, for circa $365 USD a year, you can get
24x7x365 Solaris Platinum support. Divide that by the number of days in a year,
and you get some rediculously small sum.
And if it's OK to pay money through the nose for RedHat or Microsoft support, I
don't see why paying such a rediculously low amount of dollars would be
unacceptable if one wishes high quality / better support.
> features/improvements (suspend/resume anyone?), new
> architecture support - lots of reasons why
> OpenSolaris needs larger community. No? You think
> what was not possible in last year without community
> participation will be possible going forward without
> community? Do you think Sun engineers are going to
> spend their time fixing Joe Random's problems?
They will, if Joe Random pays the above sum. Then they have to, you see,
because then it will be their job; one effectively hires an entire army of some
of the most ingenious engineers in the computer industry, ever.
We do need more people, but not the Linux hacker kind. All those would want to
do is muck with Solaris so that it looks, works and behaves like Linux.
Unfortunately, Linux suffers from serious lack of engineering and quality
control because everything is implemented ad-hoc by people who think they know
UNIX better than profesional engineers and scientists that have spent the
better 35 years studying and working on computing challenges and problems.
Believe me, that is not what you want for Solaris; the quality would suffer,
and Solaris would no longer be what it is, and what it makes Solaris so great.
I believe that the kind of people Solaris would most benefit from are the BSD
old skoolers. Those guys actually *care* about the quality of their work, even
if they might not necessary always reach it. At the very least, they *strive*,
instead of the "it works for me, that's all I care about, if it doesn't work
for you, you have the source code" Linux hacker attitude; not everyone is a
UNIX programming guru; some people just want to *use* UNIX and get *stuff done*
on UNIX. Not everybody is a programmer, and assuming that everybody would have
to be is just plain wrong ideology. That's why our GNU/GPL/Linux pals don't
really have any long term future, no matter how many *millions* of hackers they
have at their disposal.
In closing, if we want to attract programming talent and expertise, we should
more closely work with, and even help the BSD community, even if we have to put
on hold what we're doing on Solaris. Eventually the two communities might "jump
in" for each other, and both communities would benefit. Friendship and fun
while working at it is always a nice bonus (:-)
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