I don't see a lot of folks moving from Solaris to Linux on Sun equipment, unless they are people who were going to move to Linux anyway, in which case having the choice of staying on Sun gear keeps them in the family.
More significant are those who will be choosing Linux first, hardware second, who will benefit from having a robust, performant option in using Sun hardware.
I don't see the Unix variants the same way you do. We got all these variants exactly because ATT failed in establishing an effective standard, despite it obviously being desirable for everyone, and having each vendor do what they could to make the best use of what they had. Any benefit from lock in of current customers is probably more than offset by lost sales from those who didn't want to convert from another flavor. People don't choose Sun boxes today because they have Solaris software that won't run anywhere else, but because they perceive the box to be the best thing for what they want to do. With a choice of Solaris or Linux, the community of people who can make this choice is broader and, for the Linux user who runs up against the wall because of some limitation in Linux, all that is required is to move to Solaris and keep all the same hardware to break through that wall.
If cost were such a dominant concern in servers, the whole history of the last 15-20 years would have been quite different. How could Sequent, for example, have ever sold a box? For internet applications, cost of acquistion is probably the least important issue, at least for anyone that is serious and has any idea what they are doing. Reliability, performance, and scalability are much more critical issues. |
