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

To: Jon Tara who wrote (10623)	7/23/1998 1:29:00 AM
From: Charles Tutt	Respond to of 64865

It seems to me that if people "gravitate to Linux/PC" as you say, the transition to Solaris X86 would be fairly easy, especially compared with a transition to NT. From X86, it's again a relatively small step to Solaris SPARC. JMHO.

To: Jon Tara who wrote (10623)	7/23/1998 8:19:00 AM
From: Chung Yang	Respond to of 64865

You can get Solaris source code if you have ties to the universities. The students and researchers can get Solaris for free. Linux/PC is really not a big threat because most Linux users don't worry about making their operating system work with a 64-2048 way system. Linux kernel provides limited multiprocessing capabilty and have not yet migrated to 64 bit. ( except Linux on DEC alpha). But for grass-root support, I agree many people will go to Linux because it is free. But for industry, though there has been a strong push for building commercial engineering apps for Linux, it won't happen in the near future because of the perception of it being an amateurish OS. Though, I personally really like it. I don't see it being using for mission critical data centers anytime soon. - Chung - Chung >>> The smartest thing that Sun could do right now would be to REALLY get behind Solaris/X86. Get it out there at a CHEAP price. In fact, maybe they should GIVE IT AWAY, along with the development tools. This would be the ultimate bold give-away - giving away an OS and the tools to run on a processor that the company doesn't even make. I think it would be crazy like a fox. Sun makes it's money in the high-end server market. They ARE going to lose some of the low-end business to Linux/Intel - that is a fact. Who cares, though? It is a low-margin business. Why not capture future high-end customers while "giving away the store"? I've run Solaris/X86. It was several years ago, and I judged it to be very good. Oh, bitheads will tell you that Linux is much faster. But what I liked is that it was VERY close, both operationally and in terms of software development, to Solaris/Sparc. One can move back and forth very easily between the two environments. I say, hook em' on Solaris on the low-end machines, and when applications grow to the point where they need a powerful server that can't be accomidated with an X86 machine, they will easily move into Sun hardware. Otherwise, people ARE going to gravitate to Linux/PC. When they outgrow that, they will either undergo a painful conversion process to Solaris/Sparc, cursing both Linux and Solaris along the way, or they will just muddle along with Linux/PC until bigger PC servers come along. FREE SOLARIS NOW! FREE SOLARIS NOW! ;) <<<

To: Jon Tara who wrote (10623)	7/23/1998 1:06:00 PM
From: E_K_S	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 64865

Hi Jon - You suggestion for SUNW to release a free ware version of the Solaris/X86 is an excellent idea. Many of the university trained students have experience with UNIX and Solaris but when they hit the street they migrate to Windows NT. One of the reasons is the availability of many shareware programs and utilities available for NT for free download on the net. If SUNW made their Solaris software available more to the main stream, perhaps there would be more shareware type utilities available on the internet. I recently upgraded one of my systems to Windows NT 4.0 so I could prototype applications utilizing new Windows NT utilities and software server applications. Netscape offers demo versions of their servers for Solaris, NT and several other platforms but I choose NT as more of these utilities work on NT. If SUNW can build a loyal group of independent developers who use X-86 Solaris, perhaps many of the new internet software companies would release their applications that work on this platform. These developers may then upgrade to the "pure" SOLARIS Darwin machines before Intel releases their Merced products. Sunw has very little to loose here and quit a bit to gain. This is especially important now as new internet software companies must choose which platforms to support with their limited resources. A move by SUNW to make Solaris, SUNW pure JAVA Virtural machine, Jini and other development tools and utilities would lay the foundation for excellent future growth for SUNW in both hardware and software sales. EKS P.S. I am still looking for a version of Solaris X-86 to use so I can prototype new server software, server applications, e-commerce software, etc. If you know where I can download send me an e-mail.