Is Solaris really the underdog?

Published 01 December 04 10:26 AM | jvast 

So from a lot of recent blogs and according to Open Source news sites like OSNews, the release of X86 Solaris as Open Source has Solaris about 4 years behind Linux.  I'm trying hard not to laugh outright, but giggles are still escaping me....

Now, I should say that for most of my career I used primarily Solaris in the workplace and had several smaller development SPARC boxes at home most of that time.  As far as Linux, I used it as my home network firewall and on my laptops, while maintaining tadpole envy most of that time. 

I think the biggest issue I have with many Open Source pundits, but not the OSNews article, is claim about the great number of applications available for Linux.  If an application runs on Linux, I can quickly recompile it for Solaris.  Why you ask?  Pardon my lame Star Wars pun, but because I have access to the source, Luke. 

This then brings discussion to the Intellectual Property discussion, which I won't even attempt broach.  Why you ask again, because I think the contest then boils down to customer relationships and marketing muscle.  Of course you can't discount from the equation who has the best kernel programmers and who can scale.  I'm betting my money on Daniel Price and team over at Sun.

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# Joshua Prismon said on December 1, 2004 11:14 AM:
Who maintained Solaris x86 boxes for years and years, you should have seen the party when we got rid of the last x86 box and replaced with with a redhat server. The boxes were finniky, never matched the performance of our apps under linux and made it so I had to maintain two platforms rather then one.

There is a reason S-x86 has the bad reputation it does. Vary even slightly from the hardware requirements and you are done.
# James said on December 1, 2004 11:51 AM:
Add to the fact Sun only put X86 out there to compete with SCO and BSDI originally and then never really supported it becuase they made their money selling SPARC hardware. I understand your point.

I feel I should remind everyone that hardware requirements used to be problematic with Linux as well. I recall running freebsd primarily until about '96 because of hardware issues.

This is also a diffrent time and different environment. The money is no longer exculsively in the hardware.

And since Open Source levels the playing ground.... I think any and all points about performance or hardware requirements become mute.

This is a new race and its just getting started. Else why would it have generated the flap it has....

# James said on December 1, 2004 12:05 PM:
As I thought about it more, I felt should explain why I say performance and hardware support doesn't matter. I noticed I probably didn't state it clearly enough in my post and the previous comment.

Because the Linux kernel is GPL and the device drivers for supporting hardware are GPL as well, the field is completely leveled. It becomes only a matter of time and a very short one in my opinion.

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