Roger Bisson wrote:
James,
All OS platforms benefit from the network effects of wide usage.
I agree, but 'free as in beer' helps here more than 'free as in source'.
To the average developer, Solaris (which, in a closed model, you would have to
pay for)
I think you are confusing 'free source' with 'free download'. I do think
its in Oracle's interest to allow hobbyists and micro-companies to have
a very low-cost solution and the admin costs may mean that 'free as in
beer' is no worse than a low cost license.
If we agree that applications often drive the widespread adoption of a
platform, then application developers make the primary decision. Sun's decision
to make Solaris generally available at nominal or no cost (and by Solaris, I
also refer to OpenSolaris) places SunOS (and complementary technologies) in the
hands of developers at little cost; similarly when compilers and development
tools are given away freely as in Netbeans, JDeveloper and the like.
I agree. I think making it widely available (and 'supported' on
non-Oracle hardware) is very important. But the number of developers
who need or even want the Solaris source code is rather small and making
it (the source) available doesn't necessarily have any impact at all on
whether ISVs can or do use it. To some extent ISVs will do whatever they
need to target their market anyway and if big companies use Solaris and
want software for it then ISVs will supply it.
Personally I'd like to see a product priced at OS/X but without the
nasty legalese - but the big issue there is really that Sun never
managed to leverage the binary interfaces and their industry position to
get a better hardware supportstory on modern motherboards than Linux. (I
don't want support for basket case old hardware - but good support for
what's on the boards now, including embedded graphics, gig-e and RAID
chipsets).
Compare this to HP-UX, and AIX which require access to more specialised
technology platforms. As a developer, I do not have access to these platforms
and am unlikely to develop software for them unless there is a specific need
to. The growth of Windows in the data centre is a prime example of technical
folk recommending technologies they are familar with.
Indeed, though in fairness Windows is a rather good server platform and
works well, and has particular advantages with Windows clients, not
least with the integrated security. Also from memory you can sign for
access to remote dev hosts for both HP-UX and AIX so you can beetstrap
to the platform without buying your own.
Oracle could easily make Solaris available for charges comparable to Windows
Professional, and Windows Server (circa £100, and circa £800) and attract sales
but it would also require Oracle to make a commitment to support (and provide
warranties with respect to) non Sun hardware and offer wide driver support
which it may not be prepared to or have the resources to do at this time.
Indeed. But i don't think 'open source' will fix that. The sort of
hardware that's very attractive as a user is often only supported
marginally on Linux and really needs the hardware vendor to provide
timely support.
I am not sure what you paid for your IPX but it would have cost several
thousands of pounds in or about 1992.
It cost a small fortune. Worse, the crappy C++ compiler cost as much as
MSDN Universal and didn't come with a year's worth of support and upgrades.
What are you running OpenSolaris on?
VBox and native on a PC. But I have some E420Rs and E280Rs I'd like to
run it on too. Shame they're so noisy.
Open sourcing allows, to some extent, the company to concentrate on the stuff that
matters to it (like the underlying service and infrastructure technologies) to support
"big iron" technologies that it can sell to organisations, while reducing its
cost of supporting commodity technologies such as graphics cards etc and slick user
interfaces on cheap commodity equipment for developers: Xorg, Gnome, KDE etc all of which
are open source projects.
Here we disagree. I don't want crappy partial support of modern nVidia
and ATI graphics - I want the realy full-fat blob that also runs the
card on Windows 7, and that needs core engineering and will be easier to
organise with NDAs and joint engineering resources. I'd rather pay for
a consumer product and have that support than the sort of support that
you get with 'freedom first' Linux solutions.
My personal view is that Solaris is more viable in the long term with the
existence and continued development of OpenSolaris, than it would be if
OpenSolaris were simply abandoned; the value of the open source model being
that those consumers working with OpenSolaris on commodity equipment may be
somewhat less demanding than paying customers would be.
I agree, but I remain unconvinced that the availability of source for
the kernel is very important. This isn't Linux - the kernel interfaces
are more stable. Granted there is pain trying to keep up with Linux with
'me too' changes to the way graphics cards are handled but I think the
key there is probably not to run in that race at all but to stabilise a
framework that is not necessarily playing catchup with Linux but does
support what the graphics card vendors want. If you could make a
graphics card host env that hosts WDM drivers then life would be dandy.
Granted, Oracle could simply focus on Solaris (with its supported and
evaluation / developer licensing model) and abandon OpenSolaris but what would
it gain by doing so, and what would it lose?
I'm not sure how many people are committed to OpenSolaris distribution
development, testing and production and developing and maintaining the
community resources (as compared to those working on underlying Solaris
technologies, testing etc) but I would question whether the overhead involved
is so great as to outweigh the benefits of a widespread and growing developer
base, growing deployment and commitment to Oracle technology stack and
word-of-mouth within the technical community.
I agree - I just think having a working freely available 'hobby and
non-commercial use' version is important, and being able to download the
source is rather less so.
For most of us anyway. So I find it irksome that such a small minority
of users can make so much noise about source availability when the big
picture is 'how much will Oracle care about improving Solaris and
keeping it running on hardware I can afford?' (Which is: shiny new
white box x64 and ebay old crocs that doesn't need 3-phase power)
James
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