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James Gosling Grades Oracle's Handling of Sun's Tech
snydeq writes "With the four-year anniversary of Oracle's Sun Microsystems acquisition looming, InfoWorld reached out to Java founder James Gosling to rate how Oracle has done in shepherding Sun technology. Gosling gives Oracle eyebrow-raising grades, lauding Oracle's handling of Java, despite his past acrimony toward Oracle over Java (remember those T-shirts?), and giving Oracle a flat-out failing grade on what has become of Solaris OS."
Yep, they have done so well with it that everyone turns JAVA off in their browsers. Gotta love the lack of security it gives.
Even though it's since transitioned to Apache, Oracle still deserves to be graded on their handling of OO.o.
While I applaud James for his contribution to Java, I am afraid he's of no consequence to its direction now.
It would have been better if he proposed some kind of direction Oracle should have taken with Java.
for ignoring solaris in favor of linux
I admined solars for years and it was always a confusing blend of bsd and system v, it is hard to imagine how much cruft could have built up over the past three decades. It is not difficult to see how focusing on linux would seem appealing
Ignoring their x86 servers in favor of selling pricey sparc gear (because the sales reps made bigger commissions) was part of the reason that sun passed away in the first place
He did propose a direction—the same direction that Oracle actually did indeed take.
Why even read reviews such as this? We know what the pronouncement from the Great Man will be.
As Gaius Marius said, "You all suck!".
Now we know...
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
What I really want to know is, what does Ryan Gosling think about this.
If Sun had sold out to Google, those things would have been in much better shape. Hell, even MS would've been better stewards.
That James Gosling fella is of no consequence...
The views of those that have achieved something great or useful tend to be solicited repeatedly, especially if they had a string of achievements.
Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie? Yep.
Woz? Yep.
Gosling? Yep.
Bogaboga? Unless you are the originator of the "death by booga booga" joke, maybe not. Of course you could be holding out on us.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
People do not seem to notice, is that, whenever oracle tried to acquire some piece of technology specially software wise, that piece of software/tech tends to perish, notable examples are Openoffice (when oracle acquired it, luckilly now that's apache'd), MySQl (luckilly the community revived it through MariaDB). You don't hear much about these anymore. Agreed they did acquire a lot more of software out there that.. well you never hear much of.
I wouldn't be surprised if oracle has a magic algorithm to screw up fine projects, and one would have thought having such huge financial backing will just enhance products, such doesn't seem the case.
To know Oracle is to hate Oracle.
An Oracle Field Engineer shared the secret meaning for the name, "oracle".
One
Rich
Arse
Called
Larry
Ellison
Are three very different things. Java in the server and in the client is alive and very very much healthy. Ugly and slow applets in the browser thankfully are almost dead — Because HTML5 delivered way better. But applets dying off does not in any way mean Java is any less healthy!
I think it's too early to tell, as James Gosling just lacks the experience most people are used to from those like him — there's still a lot left for him to learn from his father, industry veteran Jim Goose. Once his father retires, though, I think James will get to chance to really spread his wings, and we'll probably see some very good ideas of his take flight. For now, though, I think he's just a bit green around the beak.
Thank you, Edward Snowden.
"Arguments from authority are worthless." —Carl Sagan
That MySQL's space was/is being transferred to MariaDB, instead of just dying a relatively quick death.
Why bother with MySQL if you can just migrate over to PostgreSQL? Yes, of course, some of the weirdest bits won't work, and errors will now (for a change!) actually interrupt your work instead of silently losing information. But it seemed like a good way to kill that ugly beast!
SPARC has seen more advances in the 4 years under ORACLE then in the previous 15 years under Sun. I actually enjoy reading about their tech every now and then. But unless they open up Solaris again to attract the open source community the only thing that keeps it alive is backwards compatibility of legacy software.
is totally merited. Solaris was and still is brilliant, one of the best operating systems ever made. The scalability and reliability are legendary. I do not know of any OS that can run on a tiny PC AND on a big-mama cluster with exactly the same code. Solaris is another example of how mergers and corporate acquisitions boil down, most of the time, to sheer destruction of capital. Observed that with tiny companies and start-ups as well as with mega-mergers & acquisitions. Solaris is dead, and I concur with Gosling: I weep.
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
Where is the grade for VirtualBox. As opposed to the others on the list, I would give them an A+ for their stewardship of VirtualBox so far. They have released regular updates and bugfixes. I have run into zero problems running Linux, FreeBSD, and Windows in VMs. The UI has gradually improved. The project is still open source, and they actually provide binaries for every major OS.
Sued Google!
While Solaris itself is no longer relevant outside of some enterprise niches, it has an actively-developed OSS fork named "illumos", developed by former-Sun hackers working at several different private companies. There are several distributions -- I use SmartOS in particular, and OmniTI's OmniOS is also excellent.
It is still there as an optional item in the installer, not selected by default (because that is the way it should be).
Prediction for end of Universe #42: Fencepost error in Quantum_bogosort.cpp
The problem is Java in the client has tainted perception of Java on the server. Many execs (ie the ones the write the cheques) see Java as something untrustworthy and dangerous and really I can't blame them, If they make such braindead decisions on the client side what is to stop them doing equally dumb shit on the server end.
And that line of thought is a fallacy, even recognized in the old Rome. Any idea or argument should be evaluated on its own merits, blindly buying into something because "famous person X" said it have probably lead to more misery than any other human trait in history.
I think the proper phrase is yellow around the beak.
> The "right" ideas of computing like data schemas, transactions, checkpoints,
Haaahahahahaaahahahaha. Gee, you know a couple of buzzwords. Where did you learn those, your first year computer science class?
"Guys, hey guys, listen! I have this awesome idea which I call 'computing done right'. I'm a genius, guys. We'll have schemas and transactions and checkpoints. Bet you didn't think I could come up with something so brilliant, did you?"
What a joke. You really are a master comedian.
I wish java apps would die, along with the people who wrote them, because they NEVER follow the native platform UI. They are all kind of a native app, only a little more sluggish, and the windows don't look quite right, and the menu's aren't organized properly. All in the name of saving a buck making a cross-platform version or using those highly training Indian programming group that only knows java.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
I have had to convert all my Solaris systems to Linux. I weep'.
What has he done - gone w/ Debian? Since Red Hat seems to have stopped supporting the SPARC ages ago, and I'm assuming that Gosling's Solaris systems are SPARCstations or similar. Which makes me wonder - couldn't he have gone w/ OpenIndiana or Schillix? Especially since it seems to have been more recent? I'm assuming that the BSDs were not an option, since he probably wants an SVR4 based Unix.
Sometimes reliability is more important then having a pretty UI.
And that's where Java really shines... ah no, wait...
It reliably dumps a longer stack trace than my scrollback can handle, anyway.
Are you counting 'Sun' as non-Oracle hardware? B'cos the only vendors who really sold Solaris were SPARC based vendors. HP, Dell or any x64 vendor offers only Linux. But the only people who were left high & dry by Oracle's licensing fees were SPARC owners: others could easily go to Linux or any of the BSDs.
Right now, isn't Solaris really a SPARC only OS, since Oracle supports x64 w/ OEL?
Solaris is dead. Long live Solaris!
(Illumos/illumian/Nexenta/SmartOS, that is...)
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
The only thing that (IMO) sucks is the reliance on the sysv style package manager (which they've since replaced with IPS in Solaris 11; not too familiar with it since our company has largely abandoned Solaris thanks to Oracle, but I am of the opinion they should have went with rpm/yum or dpkg/apt).
A better option would have been FreeBSD's combination of Portsng and PBIs
Judging by your replies you meant something but for the life of me I can't work it out. What do you mean by those two statements? They seem to contradict.
AFAIK authors had to fork and rename it to "Jenkins" after Oracle filed for trademark for original name "Hudson".
I hate Oracle with passion, although they seem to be doing OK job with Java.
--Coder
You can have a native platform UI with Java if you use SWT instead of Swing or JavaFX. There is some benefit to be had from Java applications looking uniform across all operating systems, however.
And, apropos of nothing at all... Writing that "InfoWorld reached out to... [Gosling]" is just awful. Can we please all agree to do away with this ugly bit of pretentious jargon?
If anyone at the office says he'll "reach out" to me, I tell him I will defend myself, then call HR.
I'd agree that Java UIs are not as good as native ones. But, in the niches where you typically see Java clients such as enterprise apps, what do you do? You can write web applications, which are often not better if they're anything more than a simple or one-off interaction. You could use Flash/Adobe AIR, which is also not better in UI terms. (My favourite gripe is that neither handle keyboard interaction well, but it's far from the only one). Or you could encourage your IT department to write a native application and get something of similar quality and for Windows only.
What's happening with mobile devices is leaving an interesting situation here because the OS makers seem to be rather discouraging non-native apps. That might water down the advantage of (standard) Java. But I think there's still always going to be high demand from 'enterprise' software developers for a way of writing one client they can run across many devices. I very much suspect that the alternative will be to shove everything in a web app instead.
Since a few years (java 6u10), it's quite easy to have native look-and-feel for everything. No need for SWT, which is an outdated hack. All java apps that I've been used for years (IDE's, various clients) have a native look-and-feel, you can't tell it's not native.
Minecraft, as ugly as it is, is rather popular and written in Java and leveraged the JVM quite a bit. As long the children have a desire to try and find Hero Brine or build their own little words, Java will be around for a while.
Well, back in the old days (late '90s IIRC), when Java 1.1 came out, it was recommended to switch apps' UI from AWT to JFC (aka Swing) because it was much lighter, not to mention it also offered a wider variety of widgets.
Swing had (and still has) it's own "native" L&F, called Metal, but nowadays it's also possible and quite easy to detect the platform the app is running on and switch the L&F to that of the platform...but the devs may need to test and make sure the widgets' sizes do not become a problem with the relative/absolute window and container sizes they're defining, and adjust properly.
I've had buttons (well, JButton) disappear entirely from the UI due to a resize from the user or a change in L&F. But this was back when the best thing we had was GridBagLayout and no IDE that could be actually helpful in making the GUI. Good thing that's a distant memory.
Sometimes reliability is more important then having a pretty UI.
Having a non-standard and unreliable user interface tends to make your application less usable (and in some cases unusable). It doesn't matter if you think java is more reliable than something else if it's not meeting its UI requirements. BTW, crashing less because less people can use your application does not mecessarily mean it's more reliable overall. It just means you've successfully prevented your users from finding all of your bugs.
No. He didn't "reach out to Oracle", he "contacted Oracle" or "asked Oracle". He didn't "reach out" like some emo teenager to their ex girlfriend. It's not as if the phrase "reach out to" is shorter, it's three words where one word will do.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
The problem with products bought by Oracle is that if you're small and they suddenly decide to ask for a lot of money for what was previously free, you're screwed.
Better to take preemptive action and switch away from them as soon as possible.
I apologize for the lack of a signature.
An outdated hack? That sounds mean... SWT was great at the time when it was needed. It is the reason why Eclipse never felt like a bloated, slow memory hog, in comparison to other Java applications of similar scope, like Netbeans. With SWT you had native, memory efficient UI components, whereas AWT/Swing duplicated everything into inefficient Java heap memory with slow Java2D rendering. It is true that now, with all the performance improvements Java and Swing have received, you barely notice a difference, so SWT isn't as essential as it used to be, but I still think it has the nicer API. Today I would probably use JavaFX
Java tainted perception of Java on the server - all those Enterprise program's we're forced to use, they tole us all how good Java is.
The only thing Java has going for it is the salesmen for the shitty consultancies who sell such crap to the management.
Doesn't anybody remember the Oracle Java licensing debacle. We have Oracle to thank for discontinuing the licensing which permitted Ubuntu and other distributions to distribute a non-free version that everybody and I do mean EVERYBODY tested again. While I'm glad Sun released the source code under a free software license it wasn't sufficient. When Oracle discontinued the non-free Java re-distribution license without notice Canonical and others had to quickly react. Because they could not continue to provide security updates from Oracle to its customers they were forced to release an update that removed Oracle's Java. That broke millions of systems and was a huge nightmare for Canonical and other companies supporting GNU/Linux.
I'm in favor of discontinuing Adobe Flash, Java, the ill-fated Silverlight that never really got off the ground, and all other non-free plug-ins (or free ones for that matter in most cases, with maybe a few exceptions, like firebug), but come on- Oracle did the worst possible thing for its customers. It made it near impossible to get it's own product.
Oracle gets no applauds from me. They royally screwed up Sun. Oracle is the exact reason I am so hesitant to allow anyone even a single f'ing share of my (sucessfull) startup.
Personal opinion of course.
We have SPARC gear along with Solaris 10. When we wanted to upgrade the hardware from the T2000's, the cost for Oracle licenses went through the roof. So we stuck with T2000's (still have them). It kept us from purchasing new Sun hardware. No new hardware, no new business for Sun.
After much investigation, we went with Dell hardware and Redhat and have been spinning up Redhat VM's right and left. For the mission critical stuff we're using HP gear and HP-UX. We've been spinning up Informix, MySQL, and PostGreSQL in place of Oracle as well.
[John]
Shit better not happen!
It was a great idea some 10 years ago, probably drove Swing where it is now. I use both Eclipse and Netbeans, and the former is the one looking like the bloated slow memory hog to me ;-)
I wish java apps would die, along with the people who wrote them, because they NEVER follow the native platform UI.
Client side Java would be alive and popular if they'd made the Windows Look-and-feel the default. Or just given up on Metal entirely.
Your other complaints are the fault of the developer, not the platform.
:wq
So what can you program in that those execs will give you a green light for? I mean they really don't make good decisions off of their choices. They really just pick what they think they like.
PHP/Python/Ruby etc... It is those nasty open source freeware programs that may be out of style in a few year, we don't want to use those. (and they don't seem to have those mythical enterprise features that they want, but yet never tell us what they are)
C/C++ Too cumbersome to code in, doesn't allow for Rapid Development
C#/VB.NET Well they are fine for little apps, we want something a little more heavy duty. Sometimes you will get a better debate about needing a more scailable servers then what Microsoft can provide.
COBOL/FORTRAN/FoxPro etc... These old languages.
Unfortunately Java, even with its security problems is seen as the best enterprise choice, because Companies thinks for some ungodly stupid reason that Enterprise software is some how good.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
All fine and good, until you go to your next platform.
Java is nice in although your UI get kinda antiquated, the program will run on Windows, Linux, OS X and some other. So if you have a major upgrade to your OS and it still supports Java, chances are your App will still run.
Unlike say going from Windows XP 32bit to Windows 7 64bit. Where you old app written back for Windows 98 will no longer run.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Or the fact that Java code is married to its JVM. Want to move from 6.x to 7.x? Time to rewrite your code. Want to use a JVM on a Mac? Rewrite your Windows JVM code. Similar with Linux.
Java had a promise of write once, run anywhere. That has been broken. Now, it seems to be install once, get hacked anywhere, because the only breach OS X has ever had in its existance that was widespread was due to JVM insecurity.
All java apps that I've been used for years (IDE's, various clients) have a native look-and-feel, you can't tell it's not native.
Yes, I can.
Pretty much every Java app uses non-native File Open/Save dialog boxes, even when the rest of the app does look correct.
Both were ported to just about every CPU in existence - x64/x86, SPARC, MIPS, PA-RISC, Power/POWER. FreeBSD even exists on Itanic, which NetBSD doesn't support, while support for Alpha has been dropped from FreeBSD. Given that FreeBSD now has a laptop version called PC-BSD, I see little reason why such a solution can't run on a similar range of non-x64 platforms. NetBSD too - given that Minix uses the NetBSD userland, NetBSD could itself run on big servers, while sit on top of Minix for embedded applications.
You can go from java 6 to java 7 or 8 without recompiling your code.
Java is actually a great server side language. Java application servers have tons of features like XA and object pooling that other server infrastructures lack. Frameworks like javaEE and spring are extremely scalable. It also has one of the best communities for open source api's Source: I was the developer and architect for a large telecoms system...5 million users 10 000 tps 50 ms average response time on COMPLEX transactions. I think people who hate java on the server side either dont understand it or prefer to write code thats unmaintainable and inefficient
Java tainted perception of Java on the server - all those Enterprise program's we're forced to use, they tole us all how good Java is.
The only thing Java has going for it is the salesmen for the shitty consultancies who sell such crap to the management.
So your solution on the server side is what, .Net? How is that significantly any better than Java on the server?
Sometimes reliability is more important then having a pretty UI.
Having a non-standard and unreliable user interface tends to make your application less usable (and in some cases unusable). It doesn't matter if you think java is more reliable than something else if it's not meeting its UI requirements. BTW, crashing less because less people can use your application does not mecessarily mean it's more reliable overall. It just means you've successfully prevented your users from finding all of your bugs.
In the enterprise, where JAVA is primarily used, I'm pretty sure you will find that reliability and functionality outweigh UI requirements. The prettiest UI in the world is worthless if the application doesn't do what is needed. Hell, all of those VB apps had crappy interfaces, but people used them all the time. Besides, today, JAVAs primary use is server-side and there isn't any UI requirement.
You can have a native platform UI with Java if you use SWT instead of Swing or JavaFX. There is some benefit to be had from Java applications looking uniform across all operating systems, however.
I would second this (not the SWT part but the uniformity accross operating systems). Look at various apps that run in browsers (regardless of the technology involved). None of them have a native look and feel, but if you are on a PC or Mac or tablet or use IE or Firefox or Chrome, as long as the rendering works, people are happy.
Native look and feel is nice in theory, but the reality is that with the rise of the internet, it is no longer relevant.
An outdated hack? That sounds mean... SWT was great at the time when it was needed. It is the reason why Eclipse never felt like a bloated, slow memory hog, in comparison to other Java applications of similar scope, like Netbeans. With SWT you had native, memory efficient UI components, whereas AWT/Swing duplicated everything into inefficient Java heap memory with slow Java2D rendering. It is true that now, with all the performance improvements Java and Swing have received, you barely notice a difference, so SWT isn't as essential as it used to be, but I still think it has the nicer API. Today I would probably use JavaFX
All true, but let's not forget that SWT was never meant to be used for general applications. From the start, it was created to develop the Eclipse IDE. The fact that other people used it for their own purposes doesn't change that.
wha? .net? me?
I think you have me confused with someone else.....
I do serious software, where my skill with the tools mean I don't have such a productivity hit as others who need java or .net to keep up. I prefer C/C++ but I do turn my hand to quite a few different technologies as appropriate.
wha? .net? me?
I think you have me confused with someone else.....
I do serious software, where my skill with the tools mean I don't have such a productivity hit as others who need java or .net to keep up. I prefer C/C++ but I do turn my hand to quite a few different technologies as appropriate.
Server side programming in C/C++ can be done and many do, but I would question why? Since most server side work is to serve up various web pages, they tend to be constrained by IO not memory or cpu. Not only is there the initial development time, which seems not to be an issue for you, given your sill level, but there is also maintenance work, where the next person might not have your level of expertise in C/C++.
Just like Java can be used for client side programming, although it isn't optimum, it would seem that C/C++ would not be the first choice on server side. As for Anything.Net, I only use it if a client or project requires it. I find that it is good at doing many things, but not great at any of them. The one thing it has going for it is that it is a Microsoft technology, so decision makers who don't necessarily know any better tend to specify it in the requirements. That keeps it alive and kicking. In the 60s and 70s, the old adage was "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM." Today, the old adage still rings true if you substitute "Microsoft" for "IBM" at least at the enterprise level.
Ugly and slow applets in the browser thankfully are almost dead â" Because HTML5 delivered way better.
It's pretty sad when your carefully designed platform-neutral architecture intended to supplant native code, in development for 20 years, can be overturned by an SGML derivative and an ad hoc script language.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
I wouldn't lump C# in with VB.NET. C# is a lot closer to Java and they both hit about the same market segment. Both are equally capable for large projects.
The main advantage of Java over C# is cross-platform compatibility for your business logic / business objects. It's the COBOL of the next 20-30 years. A good read is "Java: The Good Parts" (published in 2010 by O'Reilly).
Use C# and you're stuck running on Microsoft software stacks (or *maybe* Mono, if you are brave).
We spent 2 years looking at various languages as we moved off VB6/VBScript/ASP. Locking ourselves into C# was not an option. PHP and a lot of the other languages fail to scale past 100k lines of code. Ultimately settling in on Java / Spring for anything that was going to be more then 5k lines of code.
Wolde you bothe eate your cake, and have your cake?
Sun's acquisition quickly went down the drain, when Oracle started killing off things, Open Solaris, OpenOffice, MySQL and on and on.
Its a common fallacy that server side stuff if just shuffling disk to network, hence the (current, but fading) popularity of node.js
What I find in all systems that are not trivial is that the middle tier gets a lot of processing bundled into it - read that disk or DB data, and fiddle with it, often combining it with other data sources and then send it down to a client. That fiddling requires quite a bit of processing.
Its one reason why Microsoft went as native-code as it did a couple of years back, their 'Casablanca' project (now released as C++ REST Services) because someone measured how much electricity their cloud services were sucking up with managed code (and to be fair, .NET is less resource intensive than many script-based languages) and they needed something more efficient. (Either that or someone noticed how seriously faster C WWS web services were compared to .NET WCF services :-) )
All the places I've worked that do serious stuff, base their distributed services over 3 tiers - the usual web presentation (or sometimes thick desktop) calling a middle tier business logic layer that calls the DB. The middle tier does all the heavy lifting, so its never just IO shuffling.
I'm sure many websites simply call a web server that calls a DB and does the mapping of data to UI in the client via javascript, but its not the most efficient way of presenting that, especially if there's a lot of data, or it needs processing.
Maybe there;'s a distinction to be made between the "website" devs and the "professional" devs in the type of systems they develop. I think its a shame the "website" style where everything is placed in the web server (bad security choice that) should be designed with 3 tiers from the start, and for these types of system, a C++ based service layer is not any more difficult than any other language to develop for. .NET, its easy to develop for, which is why everyone seems to be using it. Its not nice when it goes wrong (like the bug I struggle with today - reading event log entries returns null on my colleague's box, for no F*** good reason.. damn you Microsoft) but even Microsoft knows its their RAD tool, not the one that should be used for performance or resource efficient systems. To put it another way, .NET is the new Visual Basic - where VB used to be used, .NET fills that gap. The trouble is, it also attempts to fill every other gap (but I guess VB devs back in the day used to do that anyway)
Java.. no need for that anywhere IMHO :-)
Maybe there;'s a distinction to be made between the "website" devs and the "professional" devs in the type of systems they develop. I think its a shame the "website" style where everything is placed in the web server (bad security choice that) should be designed with 3 tiers from the start, and for these types of system, a C++ based service layer is not any more difficult than any other language to develop for. .NET, its easy to develop for, which is why everyone seems to be using it. Its not nice when it goes wrong (like the bug I struggle with today - reading event log entries returns null on my colleague's box, for no F*** good reason.. damn you Microsoft) but even Microsoft knows its their RAD tool, not the one that should be used for performance or resource efficient systems. To put it another way, .NET is the new Visual Basic - where VB used to be used, .NET fills that gap. The trouble is, it also attempts to fill every other gap (but I guess VB devs back in the day used to do that anyway)
Java.. no need for that anywhere IMHO :-)
With regards to .Net, it provides a very good IDE, but overall, it occupies the same use case as Java, at least C# does. C# does do many things better than Java, but if one has to maintain legacy code or is involved with non-Windows platforms, .Net isn't an answer. Ultimately, I think that was Microsoft's purpose of .Net, not to build a better Java, but to lock people in to their products.
With Java or C/C++ or just about any other language, it is platform neutral (that doesn't mean what one develops is cross-platform, though). I can run those on anything from a pc to a cluster to a mainframe. That is not the case, at least not out of the box, with .Net applications. They are microsoft-centric.
Java is still really useful if your middle tier isn't on a Microsoft platform. Java is like COBOL. Everybody wants it to die, but there is a lot of legacy code out there that needs to be maintained and it will be around for a very long time.
Illumos is the kernel/userspace, which AFAIK is platform agnostic. Unfortunately, despite still having sparc64 support, none of the major distros have included a sparc64 port but rather stuck to x86/x86_64.
I was really pissed to find out all the sparc32 hardware/code was taken out right before the opensolaris release. That was the stuff I would've been most interested in (since the old SBUS hardware was really what SPARC was about. Which it's cool to have PCI sparc system support, getting devices that will work with openfirmware during is a huge PITA. The most critical of these components being Ethernet, Video, SATA, and USB controllers, all of which need either boot proms written, or a forth version of the vm86 code from X. Which is probably about to become much messier with 'EFI Only' PCIe devices coming out.)