HotJobs Upgrades to FreeBSD

bsdmike writes "DaemonNews has a link to an news article that reports that Yahoo! has saved something like $470,000 by switching HotJobs from Sun Solaris to FreeBSD. It's really amazing what affordable hardware and great Open Source technology can do!"

Comments

Solaris is slowly dying

[Kiwi]

Ironic that the trolls here post about how the BSDs are dying. Which they are not; all of the BSDs are being actively maintained and will continue to exist as long as the devlopers are dedicated to improving the BSD software.

Sun, on the other hand, has the problem of needing to continue being a viable company. Otherwise, their OS will go the way of BeOS (impossible to maintian and update).

In the last year, Sun has only posted a profit for one quarter. They lost $111 million last quarter alone and had to start another massive round of layoffs. Sun bet the bank on the dot-com boom continuing, and when that ballon popped, Sun found themsleves in a difficult position.

The fact that all of the free OSes continue to improve in quality and scability does not bode well for Sun either. Oracle has recently replaced their very large Sun servers with arrays of Dell machines running a commodity OS.

Sun has made a lot of contirbutions to free software, such as the RPC code, the NFS code, and Open Office. While not the most secure, these were valuable contributions which helped Linux and BSD become viable OSes in the early days of complete free software systems (early 1990s), and are making free *nix boxes more viable desktop machines today (with Open Office, though I use AbiWord myself).

I hope Sun survives this attack; they will need to let go of their arrogance and their "The only real Unix is Solaris; Linux and *BSD are toys" mindset to survive.

- Sam

Re:Solaris is slowly dying

[Anonymous Coward]

The fact that you think free UNIXes are comparable to Solaris is laughable and shows that you've never worked in a high end processing environment.

Re:Solaris is slowly dying

[aphor]

Sun is a HARDWARE company. Their hardware ROCKS. Soon, FreeBSD will run on Sun hardware. When it does, Solaris will not be threatened. Big database vendors will continue to support Solaris because it is the pet OS of the very smart Sun engineers who produce the *Sparc hardware platforms. I use FreeBSD at home, and wherever I can at work, but I use Solaris at work to provide the juice for our big databases. It goes real fast. It goes on boxen with 4-64 processors. FreeBSD has a while to catch up with that.

I'm not sure if this guy is a troll and I should have refrained from this post, but hopefully people will get something out of my response. Turning lemons into lemonade y'know..

most open? or cheapest?

[Sad Loser]

Remember the browser war - cash rich company buying market share to create a monopoly, which they are successfully defending

I think we (the open source zealots) tend to see everything the way we would like it to be, rather than is.

The problem with the companies you list is, as you point out, that they have been attached to the teats of cash cows for too long and are vulnerable to disruptive innovations. You never hear the bullet that kills you.

Part of the problem may be that previously small, nimble companies become bloated, their management structures become unable to prune the dying limbs, usually due to internal politics, and turf wars.

It must be very difficult to fight a competitor (Linux) with no overheads, no fixed costs. Like a hydra - every time you attack it, it grows another distribution.

It is strange that IBM doesn't figure in your list (no I don't work for them), as despite its monolithicity, it managed to see the Linux steamroller, and managed to get on board, rather than view the process from ground level. More credit to them, as it must have been a very courageous leap in the dark at the time.