Gwennap noted that while Intel-based servers are becoming more of a competitive threat to Sun in the low-end of the market, Sun still reigns at the high end, with much larger configurations where companies are using 16 to 64 processors in a server.
Intel is going after the low-hanging fruit first, so to speak. An Intel box is no match for Sun's high-end servers. Intel is eating away at Sun's UNIX market from the low end.
It won't be too much longer before every engineer will have an Intel box instead of a Sun or HP box. Once Intel has that market wrapped up, they can then go after the high end.
This is what Sun should be worried about. They wil lstill make good money in the high-end, but they need the low-end volume to really do well financially.
As a commercial product, software complete with source might, for some users at least, be a valuable convenience - one which might attract customers and win extra market share - if they had the ability to add site-specific hacks to my code, or if they could recompile it to work around bugs and security holes, or merely so they could see what is going on inside the program.
I think many people and companies would absolutely love having the source code for any commercial program they buy, for exactly these reasons.
But we also need to look at it from the commercial software company's perspective as well.
The employees in the company I work for write perl scripts all the time. I have probably written a couple of hundred myself in the last couple of years alone. Do you know how frustrating it is for somebody to come to you saying that some code you wrote doesn't work, only to find out after an hour of debugging that their changed to the code caused the bug?! It is a support nightmare!
A lot of users and enhancers of code will have the debugging skills to find their own bugs, but many will not...
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Does this have anything to do with the Low-K dielectric yield problems that many (all?) fab vendors have been having in their .13u processes?
Gwennap noted that while Intel-based servers are becoming more of a competitive threat to Sun in the low-end of the market, Sun still reigns at the high end, with much larger configurations where companies are using 16 to 64 processors in a server.
Intel is going after the low-hanging fruit first, so to speak. An Intel box is no match for Sun's high-end servers. Intel is eating away at Sun's UNIX market from the low end.
It won't be too much longer before every engineer will have an Intel box instead of a Sun or HP box. Once Intel has that market wrapped up, they can then go after the high end.
This is what Sun should be worried about. They wil lstill make good money in the high-end, but they need the low-end volume to really do well financially.
I think many people and companies would absolutely love having the source code for any commercial program they buy, for exactly these reasons.
But we also need to look at it from the commercial software company's perspective as well.
The employees in the company I work for write perl scripts all the time. I have probably written a couple of hundred myself in the last couple of years alone. Do you know how frustrating it is for somebody to come to you saying that some code you wrote doesn't work, only to find out after an hour of debugging that their changed to the code caused the bug?! It is a support nightmare!
A lot of users and enhancers of code will have the debugging skills to find their own bugs, but many will not...
kludger