There aren't going to be 10 zillion developers working on machines with hundreds of processors, multiple terabytes of disk, and who-knows-how-much tape storage. Your average developer isn't going to have access to such a machine.
It may be true that Linux and the BSDs will scale to this level of system in the future, but it will be due to companies like SGI spending lots of money funding that development work.
Personally, I don't see how SGI's new-found Linux enthusiasm is evidence of an economically sound strategy. Re-implementing big iron features of IRIX for for Linux is going to be costly and time-consuming.
But, I think that SGI is after the applications that will run on Linux, and believes that it's worth it to fix up Linux to run on big machines in order to get access to that application base.
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There aren't going to be 10 zillion developers working on machines with hundreds of processors, multiple terabytes of disk, and who-knows-how-much tape storage. Your average developer isn't going to have access to such a machine.
It may be true that Linux and the BSDs will scale to this level of system in the future, but it will be due to companies like SGI spending lots of money funding that development work.
Personally, I don't see how SGI's new-found Linux enthusiasm is evidence of an economically sound strategy. Re-implementing big iron features of IRIX for for Linux is going to be costly and time-consuming.
But, I think that SGI is after the applications that will run on Linux, and believes that it's worth it to fix up Linux to run on big machines in order to get access to that application base.