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