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

To: Bill Fischofer who wrote (25111)	12/20/1999 1:25:00 AM
From: paul	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 64865

Seriously a million programmers rarely do anything in lockstep except drive up the price of pizza. Linux is good - keeps smart young programmers from selling their souls to Microsoft to pay the bills but there will Never be one version of Linux or any OS that will run on an Intel PC to a Supercomputer competitively. Since its open source someone who makes system A will optimize it to run on their SMP server and someone else will optimize it to run on their NUMA server and before you know it you have, well...Unix. Solaris takes advantage of many features on SUN hardware like the ability to reconfigure CPU's and Memory dynamically and redirect I/O paths in case of failure. What about clustering - how about Starfire Domains? Are you saying that Linux will cover all of these bases and retain a single ABI port? Rather than being just a "box" I would argue that Solaris and Sun Hardware are tightly integrated and that Suns value as a HW vendor is derived from this integration.

To: Bill Fischofer who wrote (25111)	12/20/1999 1:33:00 AM
From: paul	Respond to of 64865

"..While SUNW might in theory have ported Solaris to run on HWP's PA-RISC or IBM's PowerPC architectures there would be little practical reason to do so other than to undercut SUNW's own SPARC hardware line..." Just to reiterate the same point - Solaris is effectively free as you obtain an unlimited use license when you purchase a server - I would prefer to use Sun's "distribution" vs. HP's or IBM's as they support the Sun hardware features like clustering, domains, etc..There is more to Sun or HP or IBM in maintaining Solaris, HPUX or AIX than just undercutting hardware margins - plus most versions of Unix are extremely similar - there is very little difference between say, NCR Unix and Solaris. Likewise Linux and Solaris. When i was in college we used a version of Unix which ran on god knows what but it wasnt Solaris cause Sun wasnt around then.

To: Bill Fischofer who wrote (25111)	12/20/1999 11:18:00 AM
From: Thomas Mercer-Hursh	Respond to of 64865

I guess we will just have to agree to disagree. There are very few software packages that I know of that are Sun-only or HP-only, so where's the lock-in. Sun is looking to sell you hardware ... Solaris is a way for that hardware to work well. If they can sell you the same hardware and you happen to be satisfied with and prefer Linux, so much the better because otherwise they might have lost the sale to a platform that does support Linux. The differentiation is in the box, not the OS, other than in who has done a better job of making their OS show off their hardware.