Re: The future of Solaris

John L wrote:
"Jakov Sosic" <jsosic@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:6bmpb6-m93.ln1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Hi!

I wonder, what do you think, will Solaris really slowly die, and be
replaced with GNU-izied OpenSolaris? As far as I can see from
opensolaris developers and Sun personel, that is the intended way for
the future...

What do you think about that? I'm sad to see it happening, but with Ian
Murdoch being the chief, it seems inevitable...



Sun needs urgently to reconsider its enterprise customers, and
slow down the pace of change. Ironically, the linux vendors realised
this years ago so, for instance, Red Hat has Fedora to trial the cutting
edge stuff, and RHEL which changes at a more glacial pace.

You might say OpenSolaris leads Solaris but Solaris 10 still has
too many changes in my view, both from Solaris 9 and between
releases.

Sun could also learn from Microsoft, and ensure that before something
is released, it is checked for usability and consistency. Quick: what
is the name of that SMF service you need to start: is it named after
its functionality, its daemon, or something a bit like it?

Sun's hardware range too has long been an incoherent mess, and
why do they keep mucking around with the names? The successor
to the 880 was the 890, which begot, what, the M5000?
Whereas HP Proliant 580 went from 580 G3 to 580 G4 to 580 G5.

The problem for Sun is that it has been forced into the most competitive market having to sell against HP and Dell in the x64 server and workstation arena. Not only that it has an operating system Solaris which can run on its competitor's computers. Sun hardware too expensive then use HP, Dell or local company which uses Gigabyte, ASUS or Supermicro motherboards. Sun needs to generate a revenue stream from support on the x64 platform.
Sun should have in my opinion been pushing the 64bit capabilities of Solaris. I found it very funny that while running a 64bit desktop for years, it was only last year that my Windows colleagues migrated in XP x64 and even then driver support was very patchy.
The problem for Sun is that they are heavily reliant on the sales of Sparc based hardware but they are not producing a T series workstation for developers to work on. So developers either have to switch to Solaris x86 or Windows or Linux not a particularly good position for Sun to put its customers in. Some companies will switch to Windows as they see it as an opportunity to get rid of Solaris, some switch to Linux and a few might switch to Solaris/OpenSolaris. Where companies are reliant on 3rd Party libraries paying for Solaris/OpenSolaris x86 support requires effort but they probably already have a Linux port so the decision could made on cost.
For Sun and Solaris/OpenSolaris to survive, applications need to be easily ported. Having tried to build a few applications, it has been a long annoying process. The situation has definitely improved compared to three years ago but it would be good to be able to download prebuilt libraries that are part of Solaris/OpenSolaris and were selectable.
I have used sunfreeware, blastwave and opencsw but if I am building an application I would have to libraries available as part of the core OS.
It is a pity that the maintainers of these sites could not provide the libraries though the Software Management facility as part of OpenSolaris.


It ought to be easy to buy Sun, and it isn't.

Sun has a lot of resellers which have traditionally provided presales and postsales support.

And what is the point of restricting information about bugs, patches
and so on? Who gains from Sun system administration getting harder?
IBM? HP? Certainly not Sun because if problems are harder to
solve, perceived reliability goes down and cost of ownership rises.
They need to make money from support.

And it is very nice that Sun has spent billions of dollars so we can run
MySql on Solaris 10 on laptops in our bedrooms but, really, that is not
where the money is.
MySQL was a ill thoughtout purchase unless Sun is actually making money from it.


.

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