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Sun-isms Debunked
Newman writes "We're all aware of the hole-ridden arguments that Sun executives Scott McNealy and Jonathan Schwartz use to attack Linux. This guy at NewsForge really grilled them at the Solaris launch party last Monday, and actually got some straight answers out of them. At the end of the article, both execs have some specific words for Slashdot readers."
Just because you hear something from Schwarz today doesn't mean he'll say the same thing tomorrow. Today: we're going to give the hardware away and charge for support! Tomorrow: we're going to "open source" the OS, give it away, and charge for hardware.
The vultures are circling, and I, for one, can't wait until *something* happens to Sun. Get bought, go bankrupt, develop a *real* open source strategy, just something. I'm tired of the bullshit.
Other GNU/Linux distros may not have military grade security like Trusted Solaris 8, but Security Enhanced Linux (SELinux) was developed by the National Security Agency -- surely that's good enough for government work.
Not really. Many people see different distributions of Linux as different OSes -- sure, under the hood it's the same, but dependencies, packaging systems, etc. etc. feed the perception that different Linux systems are just that -- where as Trusted Solaris 8 sounds to me like it's just a very secure version of Solaris 8. Keep in mind I don't know a whole lot about this stuff, but then, neither will the Execs who ultimately control the money towards paying for these systems.
At least that's the way I understand the masses.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Well, you do have to remember that regardless of the reason, that money still helped those lawsuits.
It almost seems to me like this is a double-whammy on the Linux crowd from Sun:
1. Sun pays fee to SCO to open its code. It's quite apparent that Sun is opening its code to compete on a more level playing field with Linux, regardless of the specifics of GPL vs. Sun code licensing terms.
2. Sun assists in funding SCO's attack on IBM/Linux, giving their position against Linux a further advantage due to Linux being tied up further since SCO has just received more fuel.
I hope Sun reads this. The interesting tension mentioned is that between a server and a client OS. The most interesting promise of Linux is that it might eventually get to the desktop. Why is that important? Because that is how MS is getting to the server. They have a great GUI environment. It's not just the ability to configure everything from a GUI vs. just storing things in files, although that's a big part.
I personally think it's in the whole GUI environment. Whoever has the most advanced GUI technologies will win people's hearts. Look at Apple. They did something different, and thus they have a chance to have their server technologies paid attention to. I write client-side Java for a living and like it a lot, but it just pales in comparison to Microsoft client-side tech. It looks ugly. Even Eclipse doesn't have the polish and jazzy look that something like VS.NET has. Sure, VS may be much less technologically advanced under the covers, but for God's sake, can't we just realize and admit that PEOPLE ARE SUPERFICIAL AND WILL BE ATTRACTED TO WHAT LOOKS BEST. Even when they finally figure out that it was only skin deep, it's just the way it is. When you are the beautiful hot chick you will always get attention. Whoever comes up with whatever dethrones MS will have to be a beautiful hot chick with four PhD's from MIT, whose also a star athelete.
If Sun really went after the desktop computing market beyond just making another window manager, they might have a chance. Looking Glass is a step in that direction, but I think they need to get much, much more serious about it. Turn Solaris/Linux/JDS into the absolute best GUI/gaming/graphics platform there is. *Only* if they do that will they have a chance really to get back into it.
That said, I would prefer to work with Solaris over Linux, assuming it supports my particular hardware. I used to manage a bunch of Sun servers and the stuff was just a cut above, especially with the superior consistency in things like design and documentation. The stuff just worked as documented and promised. There wasn't as much guesswork and fiddling.
That doesn't mean Linux doesn't have tremendous advantages, not the least of which is hardware support.
look at linux but have a hard time switching from solaris because once you realize the cost of, for example, RHE3 support and it's about the same and solaris is a much more mature OS. The linux kernel has some things to iron out still. Plus with solaris you have one vendor to deal with for hardware and software. There are very valid reasons why solaris is still alive.
http://tinyurl.com/3t236
to large extent I agree with you, but have to make a few points:
-Solaris still has many features that are not atlast yet in Linux, like the partitioning of processors.
-Some people also bought the smaller Sun boxes for the same reliability and support.
Indeed, but the thing Sun is worried about is the question: How long? (until linux is mature enough at the speed it is going forward)
We're all aware of the hole-ridden arguments that Sun executives Scott McNealy and Jonathan Schwartz use to attack Linux.
Sun is not anti-Linux, Sun sells Linux, Sun will even sell you a full rack of x86 servers all running Linux. Get over it, Slashdot!
-- "Makes Little Debbie look like a pile of puke!" - Moe Szyslak
Well, IBM did it (with IBM Global Services) at a time when everyone said they were arrogant, inwardly-focused and too tied to their glory days.
*yawn*
Why is sun bothering to position themselves against Linux, when all the market share they're after is running either a Microsoft product, or MVS?
It's like Ford saying that they're going to target Vespa.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
If a tenth of the money spent on making the x86-64 crap work were spent on optimizing the SPARC systems, we'd have have ultra-cheap SPARC CPUs for the commodity market.... SPARC has been 64-bit for a long time now. The x86 is a johnny-come-lately to this arena, and is still playing catch-up.
Oh, it's "squeeze", by the way.
Pick One: http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/~stremler/sigs/sigs.html (Note - disable Javascript first!)
While it made sense 5 years ago to drop ~$500k on an E10k box to get reliability and support, nowadays you can get that same reliability for much less by using piles of clustered Intel hardware and a fairly-competent Linux or BSD admin.
Sure, that's why all those sites survive the slashdot effect.. oh wait, no they don't. We have a mix of Intels, Suns, and xserves. About 50 servers in total, the sun boxes are still the most reliable and powerful. We have 8 year old E220s that can still handle 512 simultaneous mysql threads and 1024 apache processes. The mysql process alone uses 2 gigs of ram.
The last time our main webserver was rebooted was for Y2K patches.
Yes, Intels and xserves make good servers, but we do lose harddrives and ethernet cards on them. We don't worry about the sun hardware.
SUPPORT.
BLAM. That's IT.
You pay half a million for your box breaking to be SOMEBODY ELSE'S PROBLEM.
That money makes your box Sun's priority. Period. They'll FIX IT. Software or hardware. They'll roll you custom Solaris patches, because you're paying for it.
You're paying for a COMPANY to give you some LOVE. Not some snotnosed Admin whose first-line defense is an O'Reilly bookshelf.
There's a definite market for this kind of service. Just because you're not in it doesn't mean it isn't there.
feeding the offtopic troll here buuuut... for many things a 350mhz machine is just fine for daily use. You can do work processing, play music, browse the web, d/l music, etc on it. The machine at home that I SSH into from and other places school to run my (much of the time legal) bittorrent d/ls and to allow secure connections to the web and such from wireless networks is a 350mhz machine (running debian btw) that chugs along quite nicely. It doesnt take much power either, unlike my main desktop with pulls down power like a dog. My old laptop which I still use on occasion is a 300mhz machine and runs fine for most non-games things. so yeah, 350mhz machines are fine. And running gentoo might give it a boost to the preformance of like a 400mhz running something else due to optomization of software (though not a gentoo use myself I dont know).
ok, I'm tired and ranting about the usuability of old computers to feed a troll, I think I'll go to bed now....
--Anubis
"goodbye and hello, as always" ~Prince Corwin, from Zelazny's Amber series
Because they are going to sell cheaper x86 hardware that run Solaris. They're going after the whole solution I think... sell the hardware, give away the OS, sell the support and integration characteristics. It also gives them a way to support their existing Solaris customer base (whcih is still their cash cow, but I'm sure they realize that it's dwindling). I think that with the acceptance of Linux in the marketplace, the OS for server systems became commodity. The dollars had to be made from service. Sun still wants to be a server hardware company (high and low end), but realizes that x86 has beaten the pants off of SPARC (and the chips have become commodity as well). If they can migrate their existing customer base to x86 running Solaris at a low cost, they will get a boost in the service market. They'll try and move in on existing Linux/x86 systems (offering Linux on their x86 hardware), but will push Solaris so they can get the support contract. I'm not sure if it will save them, but I understand what lucrative markets they could be targeting.
*yawn*
Who the fuck cares?
Who the fuck wants to run Solaris in a watch? That's the STUPIDEST FUCKING DUMB FUCKING idea I've EVER heard!
OK, that's an overstatement. Reelecting Bush was worse. Solaris/(shite device) is a close second.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
there is no legal basis for Kodak to sue end users over their use of the JRE or JDK. End users did not infringe upon Kodak's patents -- they downloaded the Java software in good faith that it was perfectly legal, and they presumably abided by the license terms. Kodak would have absolutely no right to try to recover any damages from an end user or anyone else who was not a party to adding the allegedly infringing code to the Java source code.
We probably all wish for it, but that is not how patent law infact works.
Using something in good faith is no defence against a patent-lawsuit. Neither does it save you that the patented algorithm was added to the software you use by someone else, without your knowledge.
If this was a valid defence, then most Linux-users would also be equally safe, afterall they *also* tend to use Linux in good faith, abiding by its license terms, and they *also* had the hypotetical patented technique added by someone else without their knowledge.
Sadly, that's not how patent-law works. There are basically only 3 relevant questions in a patent-infringement-lawsuit:
If the answers to those are yes, yes and no, then you are guilty. Even if you didn't *know* the patent existed. Even if you had absolutely no idea that your software was doing this. Even if the software infringing on the patent was written by someone else. Hell, even if the software is closed-source and you thus reasonably *couldn't* know that it was doing this. Those are all irrelevant.
Oddly enough, while "AD" is a proprietary technology, none of its components are.
Active Directory is a pretty standard LDAP database. The MS-specific stuff is even passed via option fields in queries; that's why my Linux clients can authenticate to an Active Directory domain and receive settings about networking, access control on network resources, etc. from them.
You can't apply GPOs to Linux boxes, obviously, but you can have them in the domain -- and have them work normally.
Well, you beat Sun to the market for top-level security because they are using Solaris for all their highend machines.
It opens doors to new government contracts, which means more hardware sales for IBM.
It would give them the selling point in the industry to take notice, for a big step in the 'linux is good enough for X' medium businesses.
With that level of certification, and hopefully a/some administrative configuration package to maintain and set it up reasonably(geenral purpose linux config/maintenance program), IBM could fully migrate off it's old OSes. Linux does, or is near, support on all the platforms IBM supports, save a few mainframes possibly. Being able to get Linux reviewed for that level of code means that it is superior, and thus replaceable, to AIX and the os/###'s of the world.
It is vindication and approval from the industry. THAT is priceless.
The way it is now, its highly unlikely that linux can seriously threaten that high-end market. Linux, in its current configuration and direction, will never be able to support the threaded processing capability Solaris currently is able to do with its hardware platform. That is, unless Beowulf style cluster computing can match the price/performance of an integrated multi-cpu machine, and I don't see how that's possible with all the hardware redundancy (PS, networking, cases, etc.) and software-bound "cruft". (Convert linux to an L4 based microkernel design, NUMA, and new/better threaded support model, and then non-Sparc may have a better shot...)
Their problem is that they used to have a lock on the low-end server market, the market was taken by linux, and they're not getting it back (without a paradigm-shift level product; its not happening). That means to grow, they have to go beyond its high-end, boutique product market. (In business, if you're not growing a market, you're dying.)
Solaris is not about marketing-driven differentiation. The features in an upscalable, reliable high-end server is only realized (commercially) in Solaris. (IBM may be better in some ways to Sun's product, but its product lines are too wedded to the past to be able to suck market share from Sun (yet).)
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon
I know all of this. Kerb5, LDAP, blah blah. I even know that the field they use in Kerb5 was reserved for "vendor implementations" or somesuch. AD is actually pretty good tech, it's just I don't want to drink the kool-aid unless I have to.
The irksome part is that I need Windows Servers in order to have full functionality with my Windows clients, and my other client and server systems (Mac OS/X, Solaris and Fedora) are then essentially second class citizens - to wit:
You can't apply GPOs to Linux boxes, obviously, but you can have them in the domain -- and have them work normally.
Why the hell can't I use GPOs in Linux? For no other reason than Microsoft wants to own my architecture. IOW, AD is not just a contribution to making my systems work better, easier and more reliably, it's also a marketing tool for the rest of Microsofts software stack. It's like that with every Microsoft product too.
Based on my experience with core MS technologies, Microsoft wants to weedle it's way into being the centre piece of your architecture whether you like it or not, not just another system that you can use at your discretion to do cool things with for all of your systems. That bothers me to no end.
Soko
"Depression is merely anger without enthusiasm." - Anonymous
A few years ago, I attened an SGI conference in Las Vegas. Didn't lose too much that time either... Anyway, the point of this conference was to communicate the SGI vision going forward. This was right about the time SGI got done getting their ass kicked in the win32 / Intel space.
Sgi said they needed to return to their roots too, just like Sun is saying now. For SGI this meant, taking their best tech forward while cutting costs on everything else. Good message, seemed the right thing to do.
Well, how are they going to cut costs? Enter the chief scientist, an Asian GUY Goh, I believe. Very personable, very smart, very excited about --- Linux and OSS.
The SGI plan was very simple. Keep IRIX doing what it does best. At the same time, begin working on Linux. SGI learned they had to accept the community as a partner. This means if they submit something and it gets rejected, they either don't do it that way, or submit again, or maintain it as an add on, until the community catches up with them in that particular area. The idea being that either their solution would be accepted, or the community would evolve one that SGI could use.
(This does have to do with SUN, bear with me!)
So, SGI did go back to their roots, worked with the OSS community, and ended up once again able to do what they do best; namely, low latency, NUMA supercomputing. They are 2nd on the top 500 again, for now, and their flagship machine runs Linux!
At the time, I thought: "uh Oh, there goes SGI..." You can say what you want about IRIX, but it does what it does very very well. Linux looked impossible at the time. But it worked, and worked very well for them. SGI lost a lot of smart people, but obviously kept the ones that mattered. There was one other significant thing: After the banquet, I got a chance to talk with Bishop. Very interesting fellow in that he is totally geeky, but has solid business sense, and a direct line to NASA... He told me SGI was going to commit to this new course no matter what. Half way was not going to cut it. SGI makes the lions share of its money making powerful systems that do things that are near-impossible to do. Anything else would only prolong the death spiral. That meant getting rid of the baggage in measured steps, then build again lean 'n mean.
So, now we look at Sun.
All of SGI was committed to doing one thing, well actually two: Building their Linux / Itanium platform while doing everything they can for IRIX / Mips. To this day, they have not deviated from this vision at all and it is now paying off, just like Bishop said it would.
Sun? Lots of infighting, no core vision to drive forward. Until they fix that, they are doomed to fail because nobody is going to pay for 'almost the greatest' solutions, which is what Sun is selling right now.**
**Please don't flame for that. Sun makes good stuff, but they don't have clear niches where they are the absolute best and where there are few to no alternative solutions.) Massive SGI NUMA, mixed with graphics, insane I/O, and big low latency memory machines solve a class of problems that nothing else solves. There are only a few players, none as mature as SGI is. Ok, back to my points...
Sun needs to cut the baggage. Carrying Solaris forward is not going to be the answer. The cool hardware features, redundancy, hot swap, etc... can be solved in other ways. That means Solaris really does not have anything the market must have and that's the key to this whole thing.
SGI realized this with IRIX. However, some bits were needed on the Linux side, such as their XFS filesystem. The few bits we are clamoring for, Sun wants to keep tight hold of and this is a mistake. The market is not going to rebuild onto Solaris, all the work done with Linux, just to get Java, or redundancy, for example. Instead, they are going to just figure out how to do it with Linux, just as they have everything else.
The SGI approach at least got their technology in wide us
Blogging because I can...
Why not? - for every useful feature that Sun adds in, someone in Linux-land will eventually see that feature as a good thing and work will be done to port that feature to Linux. The porting to Linux of an existing Sun feature can be done faster than Sun can think up and build new features, and as Linux pushes more and more into the enterprise, the focus will become more and more on replicating Sun's advantages in Linux.
That is presuming that realizing that feature will not require redesigning the linux kernel to implement it. (No chance of that happening quickly until IBM can sucessfully fork linux.)
- to a very large extent, you can achieve uptime by scaling "wide" i.e. throwing more boxes at the problem. It's absolutely not a panacea to all uptime issues, but it's an approach that fits particularly well with Linux/Intel due to the low incremental cost of the hardware. Whatever "uptime smarts" Sun can add to their OS, I and many others can achieve the same results (in pure uptime terms) by bolting a bunch of new Intel boxes into a rack
The key to that strategy is that everything Sun can do with its upscalable platforms can be matched by linux running on another box. That is just not the case. You're enhancing reliablity by adding another point of failure? It may be possible to add redundancy to improve uptime, but that doesn't come without a physical cost. And how are those boxes going to consume less power than an integrated server?
Don't be shocked if five years from now, PC's aren't used at server farms. Why have thousands of PCs running linux, consuming all that electricity in computing and air conditioning, and physical space? Instead, have 5 "Sun Server Bazillion"s. You need more computing power, slap in a hotpluggable CPU, rather than another PC machine. No need to implement a networking grid for all those PCs. The only networking needed is the server to the outside world router. Have two-four overpaid sysadmins or a battery of employee salaries to maintain a battery of PCs
In piecemeal ways, webserver companies are already moving this way with low powered CPUs and fiddling with "blade" machines. A smart marketing team with a smart engineering team could easily bring Sun back into the server market. Not the mom & pop ISPs, but the AOLs and Verisigns of the world. Their problem is that their hardware is not quite designed to hotswap CPUs and memory like hard drives, they haven't configured a software product to realize this vision, their OS is still relatively esoteric, and they margin themselves out of profitability. But none of those things are impossible to correct.
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon
Can confirm RH conversions at GS, MSDW, JPM, Citi, UBS, Ameritrade, others. Once first big deployments were made, everybody else in industry had to move too or be at a competitive disadvantage. (Performance-wise).
Sun (as in Solaris) has already lost this market.
In the corporate world there is no such thing as "natural allies". Especially not with competing products. But generally, when a business man/woman shakes your hand, you can bet his/her other hand is behind his/her back, holding a dagger.
People, this is not Tolkien, where the elves are your natural allies for eternity, and the orcs are your natural enemies. In Tolkien's world you know where you stand. It's a simplified world. That's why we like to escape to phantasy worlds: they're a refuge from the madness of the real world.
Real world is nowhere near that simple.
In the corporate world, there are no heroes in shiny spandex, and no villain cackling over death ray blueprints. There's only a bunch of greedy people trying to make a buck. Your buck.
Throughout the history of computing, as little of it as we have, one thing stayed a constant: whoever is in the lead wants proprietary stuff and tries to lock you into their incompatible formats. Whoever is losing badly wants open standards and generally a fair chance to have a go at the big guys' locked-in customers.
Then the wheel turns, companies go from top to bottom and viceversa, and they switch the tune without missing a beat. And things stay the same. The ones who are now winning, try to lock you in, the ones at the bottom suddenly become open-standards evangelists.
That's why IBM and the rest are supporting Linux nowadays, for example. That's why Sun would even give away OpenOffice, even with sources, to try to break MS's file format lock-in.
There are a lot of has-beens in this industry. People who once owned the market, but were too stupid to keep it.
E.g., PCs once had to be "IBM Compatible", then it was "Intel Compatible", while nowadays it's "MS Windows Compatible". Intel doesn't single-handedly decide new architectures any more, but has to beg MS for support in Windows. (And just got refused recently!) IBM had its ass handed to it a longer time ago, when the PS/2 microchannel architecture was basically rejected by everyone else. The company that created the PC was no longer in control of its architecture. Novell once owned the network server market, but thought it could ignore NT and stick to charging outrageous prices. Prices for which you could buy not only 2 NT server licenses, but also 2 high end PCs to run them on. Etc.
And when they still were at the top, neither of them has acted any better than MS does. E.g., although nowadays "FUD" is synonimous with Microsoft, once it was synonimous with IBM: In fact, it was _invented_ by IBM.
Now all those has-beens are suddenly pro-Linux and pro-open-standards, to get their righteous vengeance against MS. But if either got back on top, they'd start doing the same shit all over again.
And Sun is the prime example. Sun is somewhere in the middle, and can't decide if it's losing, or still has a chance of being king. As soon as it thinks it's losing, it starts being a Linux zealot. As soon as it thinks "hey, maybe everyone will convert to Solaris if we port it to the Opteron", it starts openly trying to kill Linux.
And as management perceptions and sales figures fluctuate, pushing them a little up or a little down from that middle position, Sun flip-flops between the two extremes several times a month. Or sometimes even within the same day.
Sad.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
It is clear that for an ISV testing on every minor distribution out there and making sure their application work is not possible. Nor is it very cost effective to spend a lot of time debugging customer issues on the same minor distributions. Which is why ISV's tend to limit their support to a one or just a few distributions. Blaming Red Hat for the world working this way is just stupid, in fact you should instead be glad that it is Red Hat who is in this position, a company who release everything they do under the GPL, and not a distribution who tries to get ahead by keeping stuff proprietary.
Soko, you ask some very good questions here which I think are deserving of comment.
I started to reply in here, but as it started getting longer, I decided that my blog might be a better place for it.
As such, please find my response at Reply to a reply on slashdot "Linux - Sunisms debunked".
Tp.
Ah, yes... Ancient silicon valley proverb: The secret to running old hardware is to run old software. (That might be funny but it's also true!)
I don't think, Therefore I'm not.
Despite all that sun's done for the community, most linux-obsessed slash dotters (who see themselves as the archetypes) fall for the HP/IBM rhetoric against sun. sun started from bsd (tell me that's not "open"). You guys just don't get it, do you?Show me half a line of code that HP's contributed to the community. Ask ibm to open up it's crown jewel- DB2 for starts. And yes, open source solaris might draw some linux developers towards it, but, they(the developers) don't turn into hideous,thieving villians;they're still contributing to open source, still fuelling innovation, still strengthening the original bsd tribe (is that anti-linux now?) and still workin against M$. The 2 (solaris & linux) are under the same umbrella.They're siblings in the *nix family. Yes, running a uname -s on the 2 systems will yield a different name- if that's something you want to hold against solaris (you can laugh, but slashdotters are getting that gullible these days)- but that doesn't mean "Solaris's gonna kill Linux". What crap. The 2 are now part of the same moment. If you still want to "boycott" the new kid in town & shoot yourself in the foot (by selling your soul to HP,IBM & hence M$), no one's stopping you.
The elitism of some Linux supporters is overwhelmingly sick, yes. May I point out, however, that the most vocal among us are not necessarily representative of the most commonly-held opinions in the community? I'm a big Linux supporter, but I use Solaris quite a bit here at work, and I have no problems with it whatsoever.
I think the philosophy behind Linux is probably the best philosophy in software, but I acknowledge that there are things that Linux is not best suited for. Such is true for all operating systems.
All I ask is that everyone (not just you) keep in mind that the zealots for any software/philosophy/whatever are exactly that, and should not be the basis of forming any opinions about a community as a whole.
"You're older than you've ever been, and now you're even older."
It doesn't really matter if it's for legitimate purposes. Everyone would have understood if Sun said 'Well, we could open source Solaris, but we'd have to pay SCO'. Everyone would have said 'Hey, no, that can wait. In fact, it will be a good deal cheaper when we get done with SCO...'.
But no, Sun walked up to people who were paying people to assault other people, and bought a car from them. The people who are getting assaulted with Sun's money are not feeling very nice towards them. It doesn't matter why they did so, it was incredibly stupid at least.
And, when you add in the public attacks on Linux by Sun, it stops looking like random chance.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
It's pretty simple. Most ISVs (Oracle, for example), will only certify their software under RHEL. Most companies will only run software under platforms that are fully certified and supported by the vendors. This makes them locked in to RHEL, and to paying the licensing costs for that system. From that perspective, Redhat and Solaris cost the same, and are direct competitors.
If you saw the video of Jon Schwartz at the Solaris 10 launch, he directly addressed this. He mentions Debian, Gentoo, and Yellowdog by name, and acknowleged that they were not what Sun is targeting.
If this is true, and also, as you posted earlier, that "big financial institutions (or software houses that cater to them) have access to the kernel source so they can add value to the kernel", then wasn't their ability to do that with Linux, and NOT Solaris before now, one of the possible reasons for them to switch to Linux?
Because Linux is not Solaris. It does not support hardware clustering or scale beyond 4 CPUs, it is not as efficient with threaded applications, it is not as reliable as Solaris for transactional processing, etc. etc. The reality is that Linux was hobby kernel, designed ad-hoc, and does not match the quality of a sucessful commercial one (Sun,IBM, etc.). Furthermore, it will not be able to do those cool things that Solaris does without a total redesign. Torvalds, if you been following Linux's evolution, tends to set conservative goals with each kernel change, partial towards monolithic kernel design, and is not predisposed towards favoring commercial vendor's goals. You get a pretty good kernel for a standalone PC, but its unlikely that it will go beyond that until someone big (IBM) forks the kernel towards goals favoring enterprise hardware.
Financial institutions do not want to sink money into something that will have to be redesigned to support big iron features, and sit indefinitely hoping Torvalds will accept their kernel changes. Nor will they want to support an effort which would have them "fork" the kernel and then have to hand over any changes to their competitors (GPL).
You seem to be confusing us saying "compete with Linux in one of Sun's key markets", which Solaris IS NOW doing, with "become exactly like Linux for EVERY market", which Solaris is oviously NEVER going to do.
I can't discern what you claim I am confusing because your statement makes no sense. Provide a context, regurgitate relevant statements.
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon