On 7/7/05, Jim Grisanzio <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > As this discussion gets going, I'd just like to chime in with this: many > of us here believe that both communities, both technologies, and both > licenses have great value and will thrive side by side well into the > future. Technical conversations among peers starting from that > perspective are certainly welcome and would be most helpful to everyone.
Well, I for one could not look into a crystal ball no matter how close I were to look. If this were 1994 and I was still parked in front of a Sparc 10 at Lotus trying to figure out how to get Lotus Notes alpha code running and someone were to walk up and say "This UNIX thing will all be open source soon" I think I would have referred the guy to the HR department for a special stress related holiday and mental help. At the time Linux was not even heard of in most software shops. I clearly remember working on OS/2 2.1 and SCO ODT 3 and I still have the CDs and license key kicking around somewhere. Can I look forward 10 years ? How about 5 years ? There was a nice article that was linked in by Jim ( on his blog ) a little while ago that attempted to explain "what customers want". It is a good read and quite concise. Wish I could find it on his blog but its in there somewhere. Simply put we need to grow up and lose the religious rhetoric and fighting. Maybe wear a suit and tie. To these commercial end users I say that they had better step up to the plate and help us open source people wear a tie and stop being leeches and free loading users. ( They know who they are and they could learn a lot from watching how Sun jumps into the open source world ) Personally I predict a "super-system" that is a bottom layer host for just about anything on top. Within 5 years. We currently see VMWare and Qemu and perhaps others that allow us to 'simulate' an x86 system on top of some other system. I think this is a very cool development and it may get us all away from platform religion. There is a lot of that going on and people seem to waste great piles of energy fighting about the merits or strengths of the Sparc or AMD or DEC Alpha or some other chip or chipset etc etc and on and on ad nauseum ad infinitum. Old thinking patterns. There are reasons why I will want a super-computer class machine stacked full of multi-core Ultrasparc killer chips and there are reasons why the home user or small business user wants to walk up to a SunRay-appliance thingy and just use it as a desk top and he doesn't care where the desktop comes from so long as he can process his purchase order or quote or write a memo. The average user picks up a telephone and gets a dial tone. Does he ask "where is that sound coming from?" Do we turn on the faucet for water and then instantly jump around looking for the cool copper pipes that carry it? No. Chip religion and operating system religion really needs to go away and we need to focus on the bigger issues of delivering functionality to the end user in both the business world and the home user. ( I say think GRID services and ASP models ) This won't happen over night and I feel that within five years there will no longer be discussions about Linux versus UNIX versus Windows or MacOS. Computer technology is way too much of a commodity now to allow for architecture religion. Same is true for the operating system and next comes the entire application layer. That being said I am very much into the PowerPC port of OpenSolaris and I think that a port needs to happen in order for an "open" project to place a notch halfway up the measurement yardstick of success. Could be just my opinion however. But a port allows options that previously did not exist and if we can run the same OS 'thing' everywhere with even more 'things' on top of that inside VMWare style 'things'. As soon as we have GCC running on the OpenSolaris PowerPC port then we can take all the open source software and port it and then move on to the next architecture ( Microsoft X-Box ? ). Then that would be a 'good thing' yes ? Sorry, this has been a long winding post ( as is usual from me ) and I am simply pouring out my thoughts here. Dennis Clarke Director and Admin for blastwave.org [EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
