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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."
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As this article on The Register points out, there are now no proprietary unices being actively developed on x86.
Linux and the BSDs remain the only options.
john
Yes, in terms of actual revenue Solaris on Intel is a complete failure. In fact, it is farcical. But I dont think Sun ever considered it to be a primary business venture - more of a 'loss leader'.
And it has done this admirably. I learnt Solaris largely by playing around on my x86. It was fun - I really learned it like I wouldnt have done with a production system - man, I mangled that f*cker no end. Not that I could really do anything hugely useful with Slowaris that I couldnt do better with BSD/linux, but that wasnt the point. I have taken my experience with x86 Solaris onto using a 4500 workstation, where it is a good option for what we are doing. Who knows, if I hadnt had that first hand experience with Solaris, Sun may have been a few hundred thousand worse off.
On the other hand, I doubt the experiment as a 'tester' was really worth the expenditure. The growing diversty in the x86 world was prolly the big killer, what with all these various chips and chipsets etc.
In some ways, it's a bit of a chicken and egg problem. You won't get more drivers without more people using the OS -- but it's not worth spending thousands of dollars to create a driver that dozens of people are going to use... on the other hand, people aren't going to use the OS unless you have the drivers. . . . .
rinse and repeat as necessary.
Limiting the hardware you support even more than already would make the lack of users problem even more acute -- and the crowd (large handful?) of people using current hardware that would be orphaned by such a move would be up in arms about it. Far better to take your hit and essentially walk away from the X-86 market. Give end of life support to people running solaris 8 on X-86, and wean everybody else either onto real sun boxes (the preferred for Sun), or onto Linux -- which at least keeps them in the UN*X market.
The other issue (as someone else pointed ou) is that Sun's primary interest in Solaris-86 was probably to keep people intersted in Unix-type operating systems, even if they only had commodity Intel boxes -- but Linux now does that so well, that it's easier (and cheaper) to put together Linux -> Solaris migration tools (done!) and Let Linux and the BSDs handle the X-86 market which they serve so well, already.
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
Of course half the software you needed didn't run on x86 and hardware support was abysmal (couldn't get v8 to talk to my 3C905, I mean c'mon here). But damn that was a lot of money you just saved.
Then Sun decided to release their Ultra 5 workstations at 6k a piece or so, IIRC. The market for Solaris x86 went **POOF** in about 4 seconds. The damn things are real live UltraSparcs and they work like a hot damn.
Sun made the usual moves to try and spark interest, gave it away free, devoted new marketing resources to it etc. But it didn't catch on, unless you really needed Solaris on your x86 for some reason most of us tried it for 2 days and ran right back to linux or *BSD as fat as we could.
I mean really, with a nicely setup Blade 100 going for $2,450 at store.sun.com who would ever bother with a half suported stepchild?