> Let`s hope that this will not happen...I personally > doubt, that IBM will slay Solaris in favour of AIX, > Solaris so far is much more architecture-independent > than AIX.
WARNING: speculation. This could go two ways, a) IBM helps the OpenSolaris effort further b) IBM moves in for the kill. IBM stands to profit both ways, but a) is not the obvious way. Solaris has been a thorn in IBM's behind for a very long time; IBM and AIX lost many a contract and sale opportunity to Sun and Solaris. If IBM pays USD $6.5 billion, IBM gets a shot at finally shooting their biggest OS competitor in the head. IBM wants to sell services around GNU/Linux, because IBM is against Microsoft and Linux goes against Microsoft. It is hard for me to see IBM investing considerable reasources to spearhead Solaris in that direction. Solaris on the other hand does not go against Microsoft, and, in quite an ingenious move, Sun has a 10 year contract which allows them to integrate features out of Windows into Solaris, ergo CIFS kernel support. So it is the exact opposite, Solaris has benefited greatly from *cooperation* between Microsoft and Sun, the exact opposite of what IBM has been doing up to this point. Finally, and here is the kicker -- > Everything IBM touches is turned to gold, but loosing > it`s inspiration and, well, unix-way :) Everything? How about a company, named IBM, that pretty much killed their own operating system, AIX, in favor of some hack-job effort called GNU/Linux? Best case scenario, IBM treat AIX as an abused stepchild that they inherited along the way, and are now somehow stuck with an OS they themselves don't believe in: closed, expensive, proprietary, runs only on CHRP PPC, no gratis compilers, no gratis cluster, and definitely NO CHEAP HARDWARE TO RUN AIX ON. They touch everything to Gold? Well, what I described above does not look like they'll be nice to Solaris. But we will have to wait and see how this chapter of computer history turns out. -- This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list [email protected]
