Wow, that's a loaded question. One certainly can't sit and become stagnant so development has to go into new hardware, but at the same time what are your majority of users using, not the new hardware, it will be the older hardware. Corporate is out to save a buck so they can keep more bucks, they will push the old stuff until the SYS Admin turns in his resignation (well almost, but you get my point). Of course the software that can save them bucks by keeping their older hardware (big investments) going longest is going to be the clear winner, gee you can even sell support, it's cheaper than the hardware. Good sell, a couple of the *nix distros are advertising and banking on that very same issue. So I think some major development needs to go to the older stuff.
How about the academic world, most students and many of the labs they are in (universities and colledges) are not running the latest hardware, although some do, it's not the normative. So what will they be learning and getting acquainted with for software. Get into your secondary education level your talking old hardware. Remember when Apple practically gave away their systems to get them into academia. Why, the up and coming generation, brainwashed into Apple (it worked). And then you have your poor and under developed countries, not to mention counties and states, etc... You know that old hardware has a REALLY large user base. Should it go ignored? For example why is Windows XP so popular, we know it's not the best, but it has worked for the most part out of the box and two I can run it on practically any system, I have an install of it on a Toshiba that is running a P3 with 64 Mb of ram and a 3 gig drive, old hardware. And again the exodus from Windows now is being driven by hardware. In the long run it doesn't matter where you or I think the effort needs to go because some one else will make that call. But if history is to be considered the *nix's distros have done extremely very well supporting the old and slowly bringing in the new. This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
