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Technology Stocks : All About Sun Microsystems -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Bill Fischofer who wrote (25098)	12/19/1999 5:18:00 PM
From: paul	Respond to of 64865

Bill, my guess is that Sun wants to make Linux available mostly to satisfy demand for it in the developer community. If someonee wants linux why should it be default for an Intel based machine - linux cant take advantage of a larger Sun machine now but in the future who knows. I understand that 95% of Linux is binary compatible with any svr4 unix variant like Solaris so porting it to Solaris later is simple and can then take advantage of multple cpu's and RAS features in Sun Servers.

To: Bill Fischofer who wrote (25098)	12/19/1999 5:32:00 PM
From: Thomas Mercer-Hursh	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 64865

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.

To: Bill Fischofer who wrote (25098)	12/19/1999 5:40:00 PM
From: cfimx	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 64865

congrads, u got it right. everyone else posting on this topic has it WRONG.

To: Bill Fischofer who wrote (25098)	12/19/1999 11:04:00 PM
From: QwikSand	Respond to of 64865

Remember that proprietary flavors of UNIX arose precisely to avoid commoditizing the UNIX market I'm not sure I understand what that sentence means, but I think I disagree with it no matter what it means. Unix remained fragmented for 20 years because the Unix community remained fragmented for 20 years despite the best efforts by a lot of well-meaning people, including people at all those companies you mentioned. The problems were things like bureaucracy, executive incompetence, AT&T's unsurpassed arrogance, and schedule and revenue pressures among the boxmakers. So you have twenty guys sitting on five glacial committees trying to standardize Unix; you have AT&T playing lawyer games everywhere you turn; you're obliged to show your customers product roadmaps with features that support emerging technologies by any means necessary in order to sell your hardware; and you're worrying which guy who looks better in a vest than you do is going to rob you of your corporate turf. What do you do? You go on your own and release whatever you've got, thereby fcking up Unix. That (in a nutshell) is what happened and that's all* that happened. There were no dark conspiracies at work trying to avoid commoditizing Unix. Quite the contrary; everyone wanted to commoditize Unix but couldn't get their short term interests out of the way. It's still too early to tell whether Linux will finally finish the job. Many of the same fragmentary forces are still at work. Whether the open source movement will unify Unix on anything except desktop hardware remains very much to be seen. Unifying it on desktop hardware it may well do. I don't understand the supposed benefit to Microsoft if it does. Regards, --QwikSand