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Sun to Sell Unbundled Solaris 9
An anonymous reader writes "Sun VP John Loiacono told eWEEK that the company is scrapping its plan to limit Solaris 9 support to Sun x86 hardware. Loiacono said the version for non-Sun hardware will retail for $99 for a single CPU and that the company is committed to supporting both Sun and non-Sun hardware in the future. Sun will also publicize the compatibility test suite it used internally, and said it may ultimately open the code for the product to the open source community."
Uh no. Solaris has been designed as a portable OS. It still fully supports lots 32-bit only sparc hardware and it might even boot in 32-bit mode on certain 64-bit sparc systems. Saying that Solaris is optimized for 64-bit hardware is probably wrong. The x86 might not be well optimized but I didn't find that to be a big problem. The biggest problem with Solaris x86 is that driver support is terrible. I looked at the HCL and I mostly see four, three, and sometimes two year old components. If you want to run Solaris on x86 you better plan your hardware purchases extra -carefully-.
I am working as a sysadmin for a huge company.
The reasons we chose Solaris are
Now, the OS itself is quite simplistic, I mean you have to GNU-ize it a lot to achieve a comfortable level of functionalities (Apache, vim, bash -now supplied-, GCC!
I still wonder why they don't provide a decent ANSI C/C++ compiler that we need when it comes to patch/recompile some Apache module (Vignette requires the commercial SUN C Compiler to be rebuilt)...
It's mostly a question of support and feedback from SUN and other developpers (Oracle, Vignette, Broadvision, Silverstream...).
Now, considerig Solaris alone on a lambda/PC, I guess this is not as interesting as you lose functionalities that only Sun's hardware fully provides.
Trolling using another account since 2005.
IIRC, version 5.2 was from Star Division, not Sun. If it was sun, it was released right after the acquisition from Star Division, thus under the Star Division license. StarOffice has always been, AFAIK, free for non-comercial use. The fact that it now costs a little lets those people who need the extras that OpenOffice doesn't offer get them at a REASONABLE price.
/. crowd, *nix isn't a popular desktop platform, and I wouldn't bet the farm that solaris is going to change that.
SUN gave a HUGE contribution to the open source community by opening up OpenOffice. Distributions can now install open office by default with out any license issues. Even hard core GPL distributions such as Debian can have it in their stable branch.
I really doubt that SUN is releasing their x86 version to gain desktop market. Contrary to the
There's a nitche market for users who like or want to learn solars to further develop their careers at places that spend huge money on SUN hardware. There's also 2-3 people who prefer it over other *nix variants but just can't get their hands on the hardware. I've got an ULTRA-5 sitting idle on my desk right now (and 3 in the next cube) because my P2-366 is easier to use. Should I need to prototype a web site in JSP, I guess it's available to save my laptop some ticks.
As far as opening their sources, I don't think it's the solaris sources they're talking about, but the compatibility test sutes. The bread and butter for sun is solaris, hardware and support. By them protecting the internals of solaris (the API is open), they're protecting their support revenue. If they open source solaris, that opens the flood gates for other companies to offer support for their hardware and software. I doubt we'll ever see that from SUN.