On Thu, 17 May 2007, Shawn Walker wrote:
Sun tried that, and failed in my opinion.
Sure, and my opinion is that they didn't do it right. The ironic thing is that the folks that couldn't market Solaris very well, now want to get their hands in OpenSolaris. Scarey thought...:-/
Until they build their market share back up, the fact that you can run it for free, but without updates or support, is a big plus in their resurgence. I know the last company I worked at wouldn't have even considered using Solaris if it wasn't for the ability to legally have it on "don't care about them machines" and then only pay for support for machines "that mattered."
I don't believe this is the audience of Solaris today, but it certainly helps to expand it in that space. The real reason that can happen today is that it now supports running on x86 hardware much better. Prior to that, if you did have the sparc hardware to run it on, you would already have Solaris on it most likely, except for cases where folks loaded bsd or linux on outdated hardware.
Solaris did support x86 for many years, just that it was much more picky about the hardware it would run on (i.e., the "don't care about those systems" would often not run it), and Sun treated it like a beaten step child for the most part.
Today we see a much different landscape. Both AMD and Intel are partners of Sun, and Sun offers quite a few x86 based systems with more coming.
-- Alan DuBoff - Solaris x86 IHV/OEM Group _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
