[hga]

Based on what James Gosling has said, as a Sun Fellow Jeff Bonwick would have experienced a significant compensation cut and loss of autonomy (near total of the latter for Gosling). Which most people will interpret as a lack of respect.

As many others have wondered in this set of comments and others, just what is Oracle's cunning plan to make their purchase of Sun worth the investment???

[Goladus]

Charging more for Solaris support and providing less of it, for starters.

[rbanffy]

And thus making it compete with a product that's freely available.

I don't think that will work.

It would work if Solaris was something people really desired. Right now, it's not. People are very happy with Linux and need some incentive to move to Solaris. Paying more is not a good one.

[Goladus]

There are existing businesses who bet on Solaris and have it widely deployed. Moving to Linux may not be trivial. That is, it may not be beyond the FYO point. [1]

The IBM AS400 isn't something that people really desire, but there are a lot of businesses that rely on it and IBM still gets paid to support mainframes.

[1] http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc/2004/08/28/the-economics-of-soft...

[rbanffy]

> The IBM AS400 isn't something that people really desire

I liked OS/400, you insensitive clod. If I come across a 5250, I'll buy it immediately.

Not sure what I'll connect it to.

But, going back to Solaris and OpenSolaris, it's easy to switch a deployment to "legacy mode". Unix machines are Unix machines and it's not nearly as difficult to move from AIX/HP-UX/Solaris/IRIX to Linux as it would be to move from MVS, unless your binaries insist on running only under Solaris. Legacy mode means no new deployments and no expansion unless justified. It's slow death.

True, in the case of very proprietary platforms (like z and iSeries boxes) it takes very long, but it's death nevertheless.

In order to be kept alive, the Solaris boxes have to be able to perform tricks Linux boxes can't and, to a large extent, this is not the case.

[Goladus]

I'm sure that moving off iSeries, etc. is a much more significant proposition than moving off of Solaris. But the barrier isn't zero. For an installation of any significant size it's almost certainly not going to be as simple as switching a deployment to legacy mode. You've got shell scripts to port, different configurations for core features like kickstart, firewalls, different package management. If you made an "environment standardization" bet on Solaris 10, you've got barriers to overcome.

But I'm not saying that Solaris is going to live. Just that, as someone who uses Solaris 10, Oracle seems to be tightening up. I think that they don't really care that much about Solaris and are just going to squeeze it dry. I'm far more worried what they're going to do with Java.

> In order to be kept alive, the Solaris boxes have to be able to perform tricks Linux boxes can't and, to a large extent, this is not the case.

True, but keep in mind that their competitors are often limited to "enterprise" distributions like RHEL and Ubuntu Server.

[wrs]

You are overgeneralizing. Sun's (and Oracle's) main customer base are "people" who use Solaris/Oracle to manage their millions of customers and billions of dollars. They don't want to mess with it, they want support, and will pay for it. The question is, "how much?" -- and Oracle is very good at getting a profitable answer to that question.

[hga]

And don't forget that no-longer-OpenSolaris is still freely available ... and might even become something now that it's free of the dead hand of Sun (at least for it being a truly "open" project).

I for one am not happy with Linux and would love to run Open/whateverSolaris ... if it has serious driver support. That's been the Achilles heal of x86 Solaris for more than a decade (e.g. something I directly experienced in 1999) and fixing that will likely be a determining factor in its future success.

Unfortunately that's very painful hard work and lots of it, I wouldn't predict success on general principles. But one can hope.