On 2013-07-17 16:11, Garry Taylor wrote:
I'd probably agree Solaris may not last too long on x86, it's commodity hardware, and little profit in it. You may be able to sell billions of dollars worth of x86 gear, but if you're not making any profit, not much point.
Well, beside Oracle Solaris there are also a number of distributions, general-purpose or niche-optimized, based on illumos kernel. Some of them are free, others welcome or require payment... this is not unlike the Linux ecosystem where there are also commercial and free distros with an overall open and free source code. There are also many features in either branch (proprietary and open Solarises) which are unlikely to appear in another in order to avoid legalities... perhaps even more so with the closed Solaris - while the open team can recreate an idea in their own new code, Oracle would have to open up their Solaris to prove that they did not snatch an open implementation (subject to CDDL). Besides, even for Oracle - Solaris x86 drives their ZFS storage boxes, at least. At least until they remake these boxes on SPARC (which might make sense, with encryption capabilities in T-series CPUs and massive multithreading), they will need it. I'd mention customer demand - that there is some non-Oracle software which may be used by customers and only be available for x86... and providing Solaris x86 OS and servers might help vendor-lock-in, but given what happened this week - there's no point in thinking about what customers (or business partners) might want or need, it is irrelevant for Oracle's future business ;-\ So... at least in terms of having a free OS to drive an x86 box, for many cases Linux is not the only answer (from what I hear, OpenSXCE project is busy integrating 2013-based desktop software upstreams), especially in server environments. And indeed, Oracle's Solaris may be irrelevant in the future of this business area - though this does not preclude other Solarises from participating ;) //Jim _______________________________________________ SunRay-Users mailing list [email protected] http://www.filibeto.org/mailman/listinfo/sunray-users
