[rescue] Ultra 5 OS

[Brian Wheeler]

On Mon, 2010-04-19 at 16:17 -0400, Carl R. Friend wrote:
> On Mon, 19 Apr 2010, gsm at mendelson.com wrote:
> 
> > Whatever it says, it has to leave him with the impression that it will
> > make him MORE money, not less. If he thinks that people will use it to
> > avoid paying license fees, or to keep using old hardware instead of new,
> > I'll bet it will do more harm than good.
> 
>     A point that can be readily made is that allowing non-commercial
> use of the product can only help it in the professional workplace by
> ensuring that there remains a steady stream of people who know it,
> understand it, and like it.
> 
>     Linux has the mind-share it does precisely because it's heavily
> used at the hobby layer when folks are first getting their minds
> set on what they like and prefer.  Microsoft play at that very well
> when it comes to the management layer as well -- there's a built-in
> cadre of folks to whom it is a familiar "known quantity".
> 
>     If Solaris is taken completely closed, that mind-share will just
> evaporate.  A chap I work with who is a highly-vocal Linux bigot
> pretty well summed up why he dosn't like Solaris -- it's "elitist"
> and wasn't available at the laymans' (hobbyist) layer when he was
> in his formative years.  Guess which OS is "winning" at $PPOE.
> 

Yep.  There's also another aspect:  Linux and Windows cover both server
and desktop usage fairly well so admins can the same environment on the
back end as well as their desktop:  leading to admins which can learn to
solve gotchas on their own machines before they hit them in a
production/server setting.


I run solaris on some of my SPARC machines at home, but it has always
seemed like an also-ran to me on x86.  Is backspace still broken on the
console?  When I tried solaris 10 last time it didn't like my graphics
card and since the gui didn't come up right you had to use <delete>
instead of <backspace> since the latter would just print out ^H.  Ugh.
It was little things like that which made me happy to leave solaris
behind.


> +------------------------------------------------+---------------------+
> | Carl Richard Friend (UNIX Sysadmin)            | West Boylston       |
> | Minicomputer Collector / Enthusiast            | Massachusetts, USA  |
> | mailto:crfriend at rcn.com                        +---------------------+
> | http://users.rcn.com/crfriend/museum           | ICBM: 42:22N 71:47W |
> +------------------------------------------------+---------------------+
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