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Sun's Linux Killer Examined
gnaremooz is one of several users to mention Thomas Greene's look at Sun's supposed 'Linux Killer'. From the article: "If Sun gets very serious about Solaris 10 on x86 and the Open Solaris project that it hopes will nourish it, Linux vendors had better get very worried. That's because, in the many areas where Linux is miles ahead of Solaris, Sun stands a good chance of catching up quickly if it has the will, whereas in the many areas where Solaris is miles ahead, the Linux community will be hard pressed to narrow the gap." However, he goes on to describe many more difficulties with an install of Solaris than I seem to remember having with just about any recent Linux install.
No, Sun couldn't outright "kill" Linux. But they could still turn around and provide a superior desktop/workstation system. Considering they're a corporation, and they have money, they may be able to convince other hardware providers to write Solaris x86 drivers. That is something that Linux mostly has not been able to do until quite recently.
Of course, you could always get a Sun system and have a system that is nearly perfectly integrated.
Ideally, Solaris could take the best of both Windows and Mac OS X in the workstation/desktop market: it could support existing, non-Sun hardware quite well (similar to Windows), while at the same time also being available as a highly integrated and controlled system (similar to Mac OS X).
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
And if my grandmother had wheels, she'd be a wagon.
You don't seem to understand the basic point: we use Linux/Solaris/HP-UX/AIX because we don't develop for Windows.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
Its closing the gap argument missed some really important issues; for example, developers. There are some things that Linux doesn't do, and will never do because the benevolent dictator doesn't believe in them.
For one, POSIX compliance. OpenSolaris IS compliant, so as a real-time junkie who loves his shared-memory mapped files, I'm bouncing up and down. Linux shared memory stubs some calls, doesn't implement the POSIX suite, while barely implementing older shm. How many MAN pages can you find that tell you "This isn't implemented." in OpenSolaris?
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