Hi Everyone, I've complained about the same issues before. I understand the need to move onto Xorg and drop Xsun. At the same time, I understand that Sun really isn't in the SPARC workstation business anymore and is hoping that people will buy a Intel PC from them for running Solaris 10 or OpenSolaris on today. The reality is that only folks who want a complete support contact on the desktop hardware and OS will bother, because it runs on a wide variety of PC hardware. By doing this Sun has killed it's own workstation market which is drying up and obviously pissed off all of it's ISV's, vendors, and integrators that marketed, developed, and resold SPARC workstations. This even forced me to bite the bullet and buy a used Ultra20 to use OpenSolaris. Notice, used.. so no money went back to Sun! Hell, I'll probably just keep the case and upgrade everything inside of it! This is the future Sun has chosen outside of servers and thin clients, limited desktop/workstation sales. Not to mention that Sun has killed the ecosystem for SPARC by making the entry-point extremely expensive.. $12,795 for a T5120 (http://www.sun.com/servers/coolthreads/overview/products.jsp) and $14,795 for a M3000 (http://www.sun.com/servers/midrange/m3000/index.xml).
So you have to wonder what is the thinking here? Are x64 server sales out-pacing SPARC for Sun? Hate to burst the bubble of every Sun employee working on Solaris/OpenSolaris with their x64 laptop.. NO! The lion's share of server sales are SPARC, specifically the T-Series CMT servers! So how does this make sense? The sales are on SPARC, but the majority of the development effort with OpenSolaris has been focused on x64. So Sun has to decide if they want to keep soo much of the development effort with OpenSolaris focused on x64, which brings in little profit or if they want to focus on the needs of their paying customers. Hey, I'm not saying the stuff that has been done on OpenSolaris doesn't matter, it's great work. But focus has been lost on turning that into profit and you have to wonder at the end of the day how Oracle will look at this. They have committed themselves to investing more into SPARC, because they know that's where the money is. Sun/Oracle needs to bring back SPARC workstations and rebuilding the ecosystem. Here's a fun test that shouldn't cost millions for Sun to do today. How about get Nvidia or ATI to build a PCI and PCI-E 3D video card that will work with OpenSolaris Xorg on SPARC. Make it work on UltraSPARC III/IIIi workstations and sell it for under $300. I'm willing to bet that this would sell like crazy and make tons of people happy. It would also let Sun see that there is still a large SPARC workstation market out there that they have been ignoring. This isn't rocket science, look on Ebay and check out the number of SPARC workstations being sold every week! And why? Because businesses and professionals need a SPARC workstation. *-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-* Octave J. Orgeron Solaris Virtualization Architect and Consultant Web: http://unixconsole.blogspot.com E-Mail: unixcons...@yahoo.com *-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-* ----- Original Message ---- From: Jensen Lee <hayd...@haydude.org> To: opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org Sent: Wed, November 4, 2009 8:30:33 AM Subject: Re: [osol-discuss] Sun UltraSparc: XVR-500, Expert 3D, legacy graphic cards > Jensen Lee wrote: > > Certainly I want to keep using my Sun Blade. Will > Sun next commercial release of Solaris at least > support the legacy 3D Labs cards? > Because like every other computer company in the > world, including Sun for > the past 25 years, hardware is not supported forever > and at some point you > must choose between hardware upgrade or software > upgrade? Those cards Let me understand Alan, why in 25 years of computing I never had this problem before. Windoze supports old hardware, Linux supports very old hardware. Now I chose a very expensive platform, let say the Rolls Royce of workstations, 10 years on they decide to stop selling leaded fuel, only green one. Do you think Rolls Royce would tell me my expensive car would no longer run because the fuel standard has changed or would they make it run with the new fuel? I have a 1998 Pentium II laptop that runs the latest versions of both WinXP and Linux! Thanks God I am European and in Europe software patents are illegal, and for a very good reason, they hamper progress and integration to the detriment of the consumer. Now, on the constructive side, I understand the financial problems Sun is going through right now, but there is a large user base who owns workstations with 3D labs based FBs that sooner or later will want to upgrade to OpenSolaris. If Sun keeps supporting their hardware they will remain Sun's customers and may pay for support licenses, a memory upgrade etc. But if you brick their workstations, chances are they will switch to a different hardware supplier as in the Intel/AMD market there is open competition. What about the following options: 1) open the 3D Labs drivers in Europe where software patents even if existing are not enforceable, someone in Europe could pick up the work 2) include a binary package of both drivers (already available I believe) and Xsun, installable on OpenSolaris Sparc. -- This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
