> What I am about to say is fairly brutal, so if you're > already upset, > don't read further.
I'm certainly not upset; this is a disucssion, and I appreciate contrarian views so long as they're stated in a non-ad hominem manner. > I am an admin on wikipedia, was very active before my > son was born, > and have some 3000+ edits logged there. It's written > in PHP, with > apache and mySQL, and linux (Suse, a few Debian, a > few others). ... > Yet, it's "Good Enough" to generate 4 billion > pageviews per day. I get your point. The numbers speak for themselves, and Linux has results to back it up. However, what you neglected or are perhaps unaware of is that IT/CS field is unlike any other field out there. The problem with IT/CS is that it is inherently comple; extremely complex. Think of it in terms of literacy: there are *very few* people on this planet, out of 6.6 billion population, that are IT / CS literate. It's a strange side effect that stems from the fact that the field is so vast, that it is almost impossible to master it all. To have the insights and to understand what is truly a good technology and what is not, one would have to be involved with it practially since diapers, and also be extremely interested in it, to the point of eating, breathing and sleeping it. And there are indeed very few people on this planet that are like that. My point: Windows is the most widespread platform and has the highest numbers, but what does it prove? It proves that most people *don't care* what runs on the computer -- they want the *damn thing* to just *do stuff* that they want to do. In other words, they expect this extremely complex tool to be as simple to use as a washing machine and they don't know and even don't care that there might be highly advanced washing machines for professionals out there. Actually most "professionals" don't care how much their "washing machine" is capable of. I should know, I have to watch this horror every day of my life, and yes, before you rush out to write back, I'm extremely frustrated by it, because I care. In other words, people don't know any better, and they will use *whatever* as long as it is advertized enough, in one way or another. At least as far as a general consumer and as far as your average IT guy (which are *far away* from pros and engineers based on my experience). Like so many things, it's all about awareness. > For people who have a problem with that, look here: > http://www.google.com/finance?client=ig&q=GOOG > and see that GOOG market capitalization is $147 > Billion. > SUNW's is $23 Billion. > For comparison, IBM's market cap it $149 Billion., > Microsoft's is > $295 Billion, but that only means IBM + GOOG > MSFT > (think about that > for a moment). Don't fall for the Wall Street numbers; the share price sways from one day to another as the wind turns; Google, at the end of the day, has only one useful product, and that's a search engine. Other than that, the "huge" Google has *NOTHING*, and I repeat *NOTHING* *tangible*. And to someone in a 3rd world country that has nothing to eat, is sick, and doesn't even have access to clean water to drink, which is still most of the aforementioned 6.6 billion population, your GOOG is *worthless*. Do you understand that? WORTHLESS. You can't eat it, you can't drink it. The share price is meaningless, as is the market capitalization, if any of those people would even know what market capitalization is. I think you get my point. > What you fail to realize is that Linus does not write > paychecks. > People do it because they "believe". And if you think > the Solaris > codebase is forbidding, you ought to take a look at > Linux and the GNU > userland. It's daunting to most people. Yet they do > it. They go in > and roll up their sleeves and stay up until the wee > hours of the > morning and drink coffee (Hi Dennis) and they Get It > Done. People believe because they are ignorant. In fact, thay are no more enlightened than the serfs were in the middle ages and the church was stuffing religion down their throat, and they believed it, because they didn't know any better. Same scenario is playing out here, just the props and the stage have been altered. And I for one have no fear of yelling "the emperor is naked!!!" > Get off your high horse. Your technology is too > complex, too > slow-moving, too difficult to get running, to > difficult to patch, > change, and too difficult to write applications for. Have you actually looked into writing applications for Solaris? It's actually way easier than for Linux. Let me tell you a real story: when Nvidia started on writing drivers for Solaris, they were suprised when they learned that *one version* of their drivers will work *on all* versions of Solaris, and that they didn't have to develop separate versions for every Solaris release. Linux can only dream of something like that, in fact, the very people you believe in have openly *guaranteed* that Linux will purposely never work like that! So please don't state that Solaris is "too complex" and that it is "too difficult to write applications for". You have pah-lenty or "dirty laundry" over there in the "Linux corner" do deal with first. Solaris requires IT expertise. Yes, sir, it does. It requires one to use his/her *brain*. Yes siree Bob! So I'm not at all surprised what "X-mas tree experts" (and I don't mean you necessarily) whine and complain about Solaris. Like I said, IT/CS is inherently highly complex. And if you can't take the heat, get out of the kitchen. There are pah-lenty of other jobs that people can do, that pay just as well and are not as complex or as demanding. > There is a reason it's free to download and use in > production: it > costs as much to get it running and keep it running > as it provides in > benefit to the user. So in financial terms, it's > value added is zero. This is so untrue. I have my own company. And I've been able to deploy an enterprise-quality, high availability infrastructure on PEANUTS; as much as the hardware cost me, which I either built myself or bought for cheap; I run an infrastructure that any Swiss bank could be envious of, and all thanks to Solaris. Without Solaris, it would have been next to impossible. Linux couldn't do it in such a way, that's for sure. As a former "Linux engineer", I should know. And yes, it does require expertise, proficiency, and understanding of UNIX and Solaris. But it is *ULTRA CHEAP*. Much cheaper than Linux could ever hope to be. > You can flame me all you want. You can say whatever > you want. The > burtal fact remains: your UNIX customers don't pay > your bills. Dump > them. Go with the millions of hackers out there who > can take Solaris > to the next level. I know of at least one "UNIX customer" that could keep entire Sun afloat by the amount of business they do with Sun; in fact, I know of *many* "UNIX customers" that Sun does business with, and which pay money out to Sun almost by the metric ton. You're just moving around in the wrong circles. You should see how the business is done by the big players. This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
