erik wrote: > The unfortunate thing here is that most of the value in an Operating > System is attributable to ADOPTION RATES. That is, the wider the OS is > used, the more revenue potential there is. Now, the per-instance > revenue potential tends to drop off, but the overall revenue ramps up > very noticably.
amen brother .. but keep in mind you've got 2 completely different operating system strategies colliding .. Sun used software as means to sell hardware, Oracle has traditionally used software functionality as a means to sell licenses - hence the OS is now just a means to offer some degree of functionality in order to gain licenseable revenue now i find that adoption of a particular technology is typically focused on either (a) differentiation for growth or (b) sustaining an existing base .. oracle's license model has grown to primarily function as (b) sustaining after eliminating most of the competition and creating a huge market dependence on their databases and associated technologies. The OS adoption rate is secondary to the degree that the OS is being used to sustain their license revenue .. that's it. You're right about the platform bit, but I think the OS now just a strut to prop up the Oracle DB platform. after i left .. one of the big wakeup calls was on the grand schemes of things - Solaris isn't important to most customers as a standalone OS or as we might have been led to believe. Don't get me wrong - there's a lot of great innovation that's gone into Solaris over the years that leads in many areas the rest of the OS market, but after a year+ of an uncertain future - most places have moved on and are looking at alternatives that are already pretty well established. Adoption rate of Solaris on it's own isn't going to rival that of Linux (and don't get me started on the Centos inspired ripoff that is [un]breakable linux), so I'm guessing their best bet is to try and strongarm existing customers through database FUD and extend the ecosystem there .. now given that oracle db isn't open (nor am i guessing that it ever will be), it's only natural that the surrounding ecosystem would follow suit so that it's essentially shrouded in this mystery of a veiled engineering factory t hat produces the most wonderful and delightful products that mankind has ever experienced .. personally i've found there's far more interesting problems abounding than supporting large query based hash lookups of pointless customer information .. for many of the other problems, linux is good enough and what doesn't exist can easily be extended or built with some custom hardware and a bit of low level code. -- This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
