On 5/17/07, Alan DuBoff <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
On Thu, 17 May 2007, Ian Murdock wrote:
> Sure, Fedora is a great QA vehicle for Red Hat, but what about the hordes
> of people who are putting Fedora into production (and, yes, there are a
> lot of them--this is a different group of people than the group Solaris
> targets today).
But this is the same group of people that OpenSolaris would target. There
is not much difference. Most enterprise will pony up with RHES, just like
they would want to run Solaris.
Actually, I see them as two very different groups. The difference is
primarily the entry point.
The current market for Solaris 10 (and the market RHEL etc. also target)
is the traditional enterprise, i.e., top-down, pilot-it-for-a-while-
before-making-any-decisions model. The market that prefers Ubuntu, Debian,
Fedora, etc. is much more bottom-up--decisions are much less methodical
and are often made by developers in the trenches to solve short term
problems much more quickly than is possible in the top-down model. Here,
the developers are much more likely to reach for what's available
to them and what they know--which is often Fedora rather than RHEL, etc.
The latter market is what we should be targeting with OpenSolaris--can we
make OpenSolaris the OS those developers will reach for? In terms of
Fedora/RHEL analogies, Solaris will certainly benefit from the QA/testing
advantages of having an open source platform, because OpenSolaris
ultimately feeds into it much as Fedora feeds into RHEL. But how
do we capture the network effect value? Fedora has no network effect value
for RH--where's the upgrade path to RHEL, or the big company to
call when you need support? This is where can do better with OpenSolaris..
I can already hear it: "Oh, that's just WRONG! You should NEVER put an
UNSUPPORTED OS in production!" Perhaps. But that's the way the world has
evolved.. Also note that it's not actually a new phenomenon--this is same
dynamic that got the PC and Linux where they are today. No CIO in the
world said, "I've gotta get me some Linux!", or at least in the late
1990s when Linux was taking off. He woke up one day and realized Linux
was already everywhere. Do you fight the trend or figure out
how to take advantage of it? The answer seems perfectly logical to me.
-ian
--
Ian Murdock
650-331-9324
http://ianmurdock.com/
"Don't look back--something might be gaining on you." --Satchel Paige
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