Solaris 8 is not free. You have to buy the media kit (last I heard/saw was $75, but I have also heard $40 so I don't know what it is for sure currently).
For most of us, it is nicer to be able to download and load up the OS for free in an afternoon. Those with Sun connections are more likely to use Solaris as you can get copies/isos/media kits for free. I discussed this just last night with a Sun engineer, and he din't even know that you couldn't just download Solaris for free.
And what is Sun's excuse? Their servers wouldn't be able to handle it.
Spare me, I've seen Starfires. They could handle The demand for Solaris a lot easier than the RedHat/. swarms:)
After all, you can always dual boot. I've used RH6.2 on an ultra 5. It's a nice, fast workstation OS on sparc, that can even run Solaris binaries with a little work. Not to mention vt's are very useful for generating X sessions from all over the building on one machine:)
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Solaris 8 is not free. You have to buy the media kit (last I heard/saw was $75, but I have also heard $40 so I don't know what it is for sure currently). For most of us, it is nicer to be able to download and load up the OS for free in an afternoon. Those with Sun connections are more likely to use Solaris as you can get copies/isos/media kits for free. I discussed this just last night with a Sun engineer, and he din't even know that you couldn't just download Solaris for free. And what is Sun's excuse? Their servers wouldn't be able to handle it. Spare me, I've seen Starfires. They could handle The demand for Solaris a lot easier than the RedHat /. swarms :)
After all, you can always dual boot. I've used RH6.2 on an ultra 5. It's a nice, fast workstation OS on sparc, that can even run Solaris binaries with a little work. Not to mention vt's are very useful for generating X sessions from all over the building on one machine :)