> I'm sure you're absolutely correct! The question is, > *when* will they > be satisfied?
Now that's the tricky part. You see, someone (incidentally from Sun) once wrote that "your product is only as good as your test suite". So when one thinks about it, how does one design an effective test suite that can cope with, and spot compatibility issues on millions of systems which also span architectures (which is what we're talking about here -- Solaris deployed on customers' systems). Where does one even start with that? > From my > observations so far, Sun seems to be doing a pretty > good job. Now, if > only they would ditch the companion cd and go with > some official > source for third party apps, or keep that thing > updated! :P Here's another angle on this: back in the U.S., I used to work for a SW company, whose product is developed primary on just about every imaginable flavor of UNIX. The said SW company purposely lagged behind in supported OS releases, in fact, I know that their supported Solaris OS release for their product is Solaris 9! Why? The answer was always the same: "We have to consider what most of our customers are running, and since we have to provide support for our product, we have to set a sane base requirements that we can actually guarantee will work and that we can support." And it was always the same issue. Always. For example, they wouldn't let me go from IRIX 6.5.9m to 6.5.14 back in the day, even though I tried to explain that 6.5.14m contained cumulative fixes, and even though "m" is a maintenance release (as opposed to a feature release), because the product the company is developing was certified to run on IRIX 6.5.9 and that's what most customers ran and that's what the product had been certified to run on. So when a customer called for support and ran a rev. higher than IRIX 6.5.9, we had to say, "the product is certified for 6.5.9. That's the requirement." And the kicker was, the primary development platform had been IRIX! To certify 6.5.14 would have cost a tremendous amount of resources, and let's not forget, the company had to pay developers to simultaneously develop the next release and to support an existing one. So you end up also being strapped for resources. Same thing with the companion CD -- on one hand you have Linux freeware whose rev. changes from every morning, on the other hand you NEED resources which you don't have to keep up with it AND you must be able to guarantee it'll work AND that it won't break stuff. It's simply logistically impossible, without tremendous investments... Sun would probably have to have a few thousand more development and support staff just for the Freeware companion CD. We're talking an entire army of highly specialized staff. This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
