Thomas Poole wrote:
This is an excellent point, but personally I will stand up and
cheer when OpenSolaris runs stably on PPC hardware. Why? Macs beat
up x86 boxes, take their lunch money, and send them home crying to
mommy...much as Solaris does to Linux. To have a G5 on my desk
running Solaris would be, quite simply, heaven to me.
I think that is where we differ. Heaven to me is being home with my wife.
Well I've never met your wife, but I can certainly see your point! ;)
I would prefer to see effort put into features that will add value and
improve Solaris as an operating system. This will ensure the long term
success of Solaris. Porting Solaris to PPC, or any other platform, isn't
going to do that. In fact, I believe it is counter productive.
If the Solaris community focused on improving the OS, we might all get
home to our spouses a little earlier in the evening.
Hmm maybe. The problem is, Sun is a publicly-held company, and
considers itself to be a slave to Wall Street. It's textbook 1st-year
economics that this encourages self-destructive behavior in
companies...the morons on Wall Street have been pressuring sun to "dump
SPARC" for years now, and just be Yet Another PC Company, apparently not
remembering that every company that has done so...dumping their real
computers and playing with PCs...has failed.
If Sun were to ever bend to that pressure, the ONLY thing they'd have
to differentiate themselves from the crowd would be Solaris...and
Solaris on PC hardware simply isn't enough. Many (myself included)
won't put PCs in the data center (because I like to get home on time!),
even if it IS the only way to get Solaris. Solaris on PPC gets us that
much closer to Solaris on IBM's POWER architecture, which are the
fastest processors in existence at the moment...and likely will be for
the forseeable future. If we had that, it'd at least be an alternative
in case Sun decides to take the second step toward suicide...they've
already taken the first by putting commodity PC motherboards (Tyan in
particular...good boards, but still commodity PC hardware) in nice
Sun-labeled boxes.
Solaris on UltraSPARC keeps my networks running...it keeps the mail
flowing, keeps the DNS packets moving, and keeps my customers (and my
boss) very happy. If Solaris went away, I'd probably dump my
twenty-year career in this business and go into veterinary medicine or
something...because it's the last best hope for uptime.
More platforms thins the platform-specific development efforts, sure,
but it also helps in the context of long-term survival.
Just my late-night babbling...hope you see where I'm coming from..
-Dave
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