[SunHELP] User fury as Sun puts x86 Solaris to sleep

[Christopher Smiga]

User fury as Sun puts x86 Solaris to sleep
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/53/23598.html

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User fury as Sun puts x86 Solaris to sleep
By Andrew Orlowski in San Francisco
Posted: 09/01/2002 at 09:48 GMT


Sun is putting the Intel version of its Solaris Unix OS in the deep freeze,
citing support and development costs as the reason. There won't be an x86
version of Solaris version 9 this year, but Sun will support existing
versions for seven years, Solaris marketing director Graham Lovell told
IDGyesterday. More charitably - or gullibly if you're being cruel - CNet
interpreted the same news as a "delay".

But as you know, the body's metabolism can be fatally impaired by spending
too long in the cold, and no version 9 this year effectively means the end
of Solaris on x86.

It's been maintained at great expense over the past nine years, and only
last October was refreshed with USB support, for example. But Sun has only
ever seen a miniscule market share as a reward, and of course precisely no
downstream hardware revenue, because Sun doesn't sell Intel servers.

And the expenses keeps piling up. Just ask Be, Inc. There are more chips and
chipsets to support than ever before, and Foster, and the SMT Foster, and
AMD's Athlon XP, and Athlon SMP and Sledgehammers either here or on their
way.

However, users on the busy Solaris on Intel mailing lists were not happy
bunnies last night, pointing out that the x86 version maintains mindshare
and offers a cheap way to bring new recruits into the Sun fold.

"You've killed the dream, Sun. New admins *DON'T* have a way to learn about
Sun on the cheap," wrote one user.

"Mindshare is a terrible thing to waste," punned another. "It's expensive to
develop, hard to measure and difficult to correlate to earnings, yet very
important to long term success. This will be the biggest casualty if Solaris
x86 is abandoned."

And there's already a "Save Solaris on x86" page up and running. Or at least
there was, until somebody interfered with it. We'll repost the link when
it's fixed.

Last post, First post!
All in all, it's a minor historic decision by Sun as it leaves no
proprietary Unix left in active development on Intel hardware.

SCO's OpenServer has been in maintenance mode for some years, and the best
parts of its UnixWare OS seemed to fall out of the removal van over the
Sierras, as the OS made its journey from Santa Cruz to Utah, en route to its
new owners Caldera. They hardly ever mention it now.

So if you want a Unix on x86, you have a choice between the free BSDs or
Linux. Slashdotters rejoice. We just hate to see any good, cheap and
well-supported OS bite the dust.