No Solaris 9 for x86

Jon writes: "Unsurprisingly, LinuxWorld is reporting that Sun is not going to support Solaris 9 on PCs. The article cites a marketing suit who claims that the prevailing economic conditions account for this."

Comments

IDG article is apparently original source

[Jon Chatow]

Found here. But is this good, encouraging the curious to move to free OSes when exploring beyond Windows, or bad, removing a great way of finding out about an OS that is easier to convince your boss to have installed?

Prevailing market conditions...

[ergo98]

The market conditions are that Solaris on Intel machines is a total failure. As another poster in another argument mentioned: The only people who Solaris on Intel machines seem to be just taking it for a test run, and then they go back to their real OS (be it Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, etc.).

Just thought that was a little more honest than claiming it's the recession or Sept. 11th fallout.

The Register's vultures wrong again.

[zak]

UnixWare (now OpenUnix) is still in very active development. Check out the Caldera site.
It's only the best environment to run Linux apps on a multiprocessor, so I see why The Register would ignore it :)

Re:No proprietary unices left on x86

[mpe]

As this article [theregister.co.uk] on The Register points out, there are now no proprietary unices being actively developed on x86.
Linux and the BSDs remain the only options.

I don't see how this is a bad thing. One major problem with proprietary unix systems is that you end up different proprietary addons.Thus incompatabilities between systems.
Also remember that Sun's main business is selling hardware rather than software...

Overdue Decision

[4of12]

From a business perspective, I think this makes a lot of sense for Sun.

A few years back a friend tried to create a "UNIX laptop" for the purpose of having a portable roadshow platoform for a scientific code we have that was developed primarily on Solaris 2.5 and SPARC. At that time he found that Solaris/x86 was a lot of hassle to deal with and that Linux 1.2 was a better solution for him.

I think the resources spent on Solaris/x86 would have been better invested in bringing out the UltraSPARC III sooner and in further expanding utility of their big servers.

Am I missing something obvious in the following observation about the market landscape?

• x86 is further dominating the desktop, even now in the UNIX circles, where Linux/x86 offers price/performance ratios that *NIX/RISC cannot match
• big 64-way 128-way machines with high throughput are safely owned by *NIX/RISC, as IA64 development has been a fiasco (Intel would do better if they just swallowed their pride and brought out the Alpha 21364 under the house brand).

From my perspective, Sun would do well to find as many ways as possible to make Sun servers attractive in LANs of Linux/x86 desktops. The arena of high capacity servers is where x86 falls short and Sun shines. Make the most of it.