Re: The future of Solaris?

Greg Smith wrote:
> On Wed, 10 Dec 2008, Liraz Siri wrote:
>
>> Linux may still be behind Solaris in a few areas but I'll wager Linux
>> will catch up and make Solaris completely, utterly obsolete in the not
>> too distant future.

I shouldn't have posted this comment. It's flamebait.

> Great, free money is even better than free code; how much would you like
> to loo...er, wager on that? Could use a new sure thing now that there's
> no more money for me to make shorting SCO stock.

Sorry, I lost all my betting money in the stock market.

> And the biggest thing that used to keep me away from Solaris, how
> painful the packaging made it to get a functional system with the usual
> GNU tools all installed, has been getting better fast lately, and looks
> almost completely cleaned up as of last month's OpenSolaris 2008.11.
> The thing I think a lot of people miss is that most of the value of a
> Linux distribution is not from Linux itself. Remember: Linux is just a
> kernel. Combine a Solaris kernel with the rest of the usual GNU and
> other tools you see on Linux distributions, and most people won't even
> notice the swap. There will be less supported hardware, and it will be
> a bit slower at some things, but at least the kernel will be stable
> moving forward.

I like the Nexenta approach. Debian GNU/Solaris makes so much sense...

>> Besides Sun Microsystems hasn't been a financially healthy
>> organization for quite a few years, as evidenced by its rather dismal
>> stock performance:
>> http://finance.google.com/finance?q=java
>
> Bah, Google Finance makes it hard to refer anybody to a specific chart.
> Stupid AJAX. How about we stare at these three for a minute:
>
> http://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=JAVA#chart1:symbol=java;range=5y
> http://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=rht#chart1:symbol=rht;range=5y
> http://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=novl#chart1:symbol=novl;range=5y
>
> Wait, which one of those was the weak one likely to fail? They all look
> pretty poor to me. Despite its recent fall, Sun still has the largest
> market cap of the three. You say it's been going badly for "quite a few
> years", but the only serious divergence from its competitors was only
> this year. Sun would be doing better right now had they not decided to
> light $1B on fire back in January, that's where their stock really
> accelerated its dive downward.

You have to admit that Sun/Solaris is a different relationship than
Redhat/Linux, or Novell/Linux. The Linux vendors cooperate at the same
time they compete. Much of the work done by engineers from one company
finds its way upstream to the benefit of all vendors. Furthermore, the
failure of any of the largest vendors would be detrimental to Linux
development, but the rich network of vested interests around Linux is
much stronger than any single vendor. It's more messy than the more
cathedral style development of Solaris (which has some obvious benefits
too), but for the same reasons I think it is less likely to fail. If Sun
doesn't make it, or decides that continuing its heroic development of
Solaris no longer makes any financial sense I think Solaris is in a
different situation.

I admit that reality is many orders more complex than the toy-like model
of it I have in my mind, but thats always the case. In Hebrew (my native
tongue) there's an apt phrase - prophecy is given to fools and children.
I imagine if we come back to these posts 10 years from now we'll realize
we were both right and both wrong somehow.

Cheers,
Liraz