[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
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..
Solaris was ported to Power once before, and didn't last long.
Yes I'm aware of that (have a copy of it here) but the world was a
very different place then. :-/
-Dave
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