James, > > Personally, I am of the view that Sun's original > decision to release Solaris in the form of > OpenSolaris was absolutely the right decision to > ensure Solaris' maintenance and growth as a platform > by making it available to developers and technicians > (thereby encouraging its application in commerce). > Do you have any evidence of this? SunOS and Solaris > had a long history > of third party support (and use 'in commerce') before > that.
All OS platforms benefit from the network effects of wide usage. Consider Windows, iPhone and Linux. Before Sun adopted the open source route and commodity hardware, its customer base was limited to those that specifically required the capabilities of Sun equipment or wanted SunOS. That customer base was no doubt shrinking as companies like Xerox moved from having Sun workstations on desks to having PCs. To the average developer, Solaris (which, in a closed model, you would have to pay for) is no better than Linux so, invariably, developers would adopt Linux as the first platform to support. Support for other platforms, such as Solaris, would be on-demand of customers that, most probably, will already have adopted Solaris hardware. > > I would have said that, by virtue of open sourcing, > both individuals and commercial enterprises have been > significantly more likely to deploy (Open)Solaris > than they have been to deploy such operating systems > as HP-UX, AIX and SCO's OpenServer, all other things > being equal. > While I can't see 'its open source' being a black > mark for anyone, and > hence those people for who its a positive issue would > make it a net win, > you say 'significantly more likely'. What evidence > do you have of this? If we agree that applications often drive the widespread adoption of a platform, then application developers make the primary decision. Sun's decision to make Solaris generally available at nominal or no cost (and by Solaris, I also refer to OpenSolaris) places SunOS (and complementary technologies) in the hands of developers at little cost; similarly when compilers and development tools are given away freely as in Netbeans, JDeveloper and the like. Compare this to HP-UX, and AIX which require access to more specialised technology platforms. As a developer, I do not have access to these platforms and am unlikely to develop software for them unless there is a specific need to. The growth of Windows in the data centre is a prime example of technical folk recommending technologies they are familar with. > There's a big danger we can all talk ourselves into > believing that open > source is somehow necessary. If we can get to a point > where companies > like Nexenta are able to fund significant development > and its rolled > into the core, then that's some evidence in itself. > But their resources > re still limited compared to Oracle. > > Personally I've been using SunOS professionally since > an IPX was a shiny > cool thing to have, and I even bought a twinhead > sparc5 clone. I really > don't care whether Solaris is open source at all - > just so long as > somebody (or somebodies, I don't mind) can make > enough from it to > justify spending money on its development, and it > doesn't bitrot to > oblivion. Oracle could easily make Solaris available for charges comparable to Windows Professional, and Windows Server (circa £100, and circa £800) and attract sales but it would also require Oracle to make a commitment to support (and provide warranties with respect to) non Sun hardware and offer wide driver support which it may not be prepared to or have the resources to do at this time. I am not sure what you paid for your IPX but it would have cost several thousands of pounds in or about 1992. What are you running OpenSolaris on? I run 2009.06 on a commodity AMD64 / Intel workstation costing £300 to £400. Would I buy Solaris (Professional) to run on my commodity box? Maybe. Maybe not. Would I spend thousands more on an Oracle / Sun workstation to use ZFS, zones and crossbow? Probably not when FreeBSD provides some near equivalents in the form of GEOM, jails and new multi-IP jail support. With the Solaris / OpenSolaris combination, at relatively low additional cost, Oracle can be selective in what the company provides support for while making the OS technologies as widespread as possible on hardware that it does not in fact provide warranted support for. Open sourcing allows, to some extent, the company to concentrate on the stuff that matters to it (like the underlying service and infrastructure technologies) to support "big iron" technologies that it can sell to organisations, while reducing its cost of supporting commodity technologies such as graphics cards etc and slick user interfaces on cheap commodity equipment for developers: Xorg, Gnome, KDE etc all of which are open source projects. > I'm not convinced that having something open source > actually helps that > justification (or at least, has helped) - but I do > think we should avoid > assuming the answer when there is so little real > numerical evidence > around, and we should support Oracle in doing > anything and everything > the need to keep Solaris viable. And if that means we > don't get things > we used to get from Sun, then so be it. I'd rather > have a closed > Solaris, and a choice, than a runty abandoned Solaris > that leaves me > using the usual suspects. My personal view is that Solaris is more viable in the long term with the existence and continued development of OpenSolaris, than it would be if OpenSolaris were simply abandoned; the value of the open source model being that those consumers working with OpenSolaris on commodity equipment may be somewhat less demanding than paying customers would be. Granted, Oracle could simply focus on Solaris (with its supported and evaluation / developer licensing model) and abandon OpenSolaris but what would it gain by doing so, and what would it lose? I'm not sure how many people are committed to OpenSolaris distribution development, testing and production and developing and maintaining the community resources (as compared to those working on underlying Solaris technologies, testing etc) but I would question whether the overhead involved is so great as to outweigh the benefits of a widespread and growing developer base, growing deployment and commitment to Oracle technology stack and word-of-mouth within the technical community. -- This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list [email protected]
