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Sun Microsystems IBM Operating Systems Software Unix

Solaris Coming to IBM's Power Architecture? 419

Posted by CowboyNeal from the and-other-ponderings dept.
johnm writes "Jonathan Schwartz, Sun's pony-tailed number two, dropped this little snippit in his blog where he talks extensively about what he thinks 'open' means: 'For example, as we continue porting Solaris onto IBM's Power architecture (demo coming soon!)...' Does this mean you'll soon be able to ditch OS X and stick on Solaris 10 onto Macs?" While coming off as an ad for Java, Schwartz also raises some valid points about Unix and migration.
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Solaris Coming to IBM's Power Architecture? More

Solaris Coming to IBM's Power Architecture?

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  • I like his definition of open. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 11, 2004 @11:59AM (#9940733)
    For those of you that didnt RTFA here is the best part. Jonathan writes that the definition of open: Only a customer can define the word open.

    • Re:I like his definition of open. (Score:4, Insightful)

      by jayminer ( 692836 ) on Wednesday August 11, 2004 @12:23PM (#9940972) Homepage
      Yes, this is one of the important points we (so called zealots, including myself) do not want to believe when we come home and fire up Konqueror/Mozilla etc. and jump in.

      At work, I'm sure that many other Slashdotters are in communication with customers about open technologies.

      For me, "open" may mean that it's totally hackable, modifiable and should include "fun".

      For Joe, "open" may mean that it's possible to code to make it able to talk with his new XML based ERP system.

      For Jane, "open" may mean that it's possible to save in an spreadsheet of office package X at home and embed it in the word processor of office package Y at work.

      And so on..

      We do have "our" preferences for the meaning of "open", but in the real world, we must achieve the fact that what we call "wide" open, may be restrictive for another person. This is what, at first, we should respect. Then we may have a peaceful settlement to all "open" wars around here or there.

      • Re:I like his definition of open. (Score:4, Informative)

        by leandrod ( 17766 ) <l@dutr[ ]org ['as.' in gap]> on Wednesday August 11, 2004 @12:40PM (#9941130) Homepage Journal
        >
        We do have "our" preferences for the meaning of "open"

        And they are meaningless.

        There are two application of the 'open' term in Informatics.

        Open systems conform to open standards. Solaris is an open operating system.

        Open source, well, you know, Solaris ain't an open source OS.

        • Solaris is an open operating system.

          Yes, it is - as long as you stick to the POSIX specification. As the article points out, as soon as you go past that, Solaris isn't open any more, and neither are any of the other UNIXes. It's not open by the parent's definition (which I like, BTW) because there isn't any open standard for the non-POSIX parts of Solaris.

          Part of the point of the article is that there is a lot of stuff in the "non-POSIX" part of Solaris. And if you use it, you're stuck with Solaris, a

          • >>

            Solaris is an open operating system.

            > Yes, it is - as long as you stick to the POSIX specification. As the article points out, as soon as you go past that, Solaris isn't open any more

            That is not quite what the article said, nor the reality.

            There are lots of other open or de facto standards besides POSIX that an OS can conform to, and Solaris does conform to several.

            For example, LDAP is an open standard, SMTP and TCP/IP are de facto ones.

            Even if you define the MS W16 API as once a 'pro

  • I run Linux even on old world (gray) Macs... It shouldn't matter what os can run on what hardware, yet I know... ...utopia.

  • not really (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 11, 2004 @12:00PM (#9940739)
    porting an OS is more than adding support for a CPU architecture. hardware drivers, for example...

    • Re:not really (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Bobas ( 581631 )
      Not much work there in case that driver stuff is written in a valid and portable C, apart from proprietary hardware specific to said architecture.

  • Ditch OS X For Solaris? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by oscast ( 653817 ) on Wednesday August 11, 2004 @12:01PM (#9940744) Homepage
    Why would you want to ditch OS X for Solaris?

    • Re:Ditch OS X For Solaris? (Score:5, Funny)

      by HungSquirrel ( 790165 ) on Wednesday August 11, 2004 @12:03PM (#9940764) Homepage
      Because having the power of Unix coupled with a pleasing interface and scores of usable desktop applications is a disgusting perversion of everything Unix stands for.

      • Re:Ditch OS X For Solaris? (Score:5, Insightful)

        by divisionbyzero ( 300681 ) on Wednesday August 11, 2004 @12:34PM (#9941067)
        I know you are kidding, but your joke points out somethng interesting. You said desktop applications, not enterprise applications. That's where Sun's time in the sun (haha) served it well. Many enterprise class applications were made to run on Solaris or ported to it. That's where it has MacOS X beat hands down. The other stuff that Solaris can do (e.g. scale to 128+ processors, etc) is important, but not crucial.

        Anyhow, I don't think any of this has anything to do with Apple. It's clearly IBM that Sun is after. First they say they will 'buy Linux' (i.e. SuSe) which is IBM's Linux vendor of choice and now they are saying they will also invade IBM's hardware. Good luck to Sun. Competition is good for everyone, except the losers of course.
        • With Oracle now running on OS X, and the fact that masses of Enterprise Application vendors use Java, that argument is dwindling away--as any enterprise app written using J2EE will run on OS X just fine.
          • With Oracle now running on OS X, and the fact that masses of Enterprise Application vendors use Java, that argument is dwindling away--as any enterprise app written using J2EE will run on OS X just fine.

            But there are some big differences between Solaris and other big time commercial Unices and *BSDs and Linux on the one side and Mac OS X on the other.

            Solaris on Sun hardware has some failover and maintenance jazz that Apple hardware doesn't.

            Solaris and the others can be stripped down to bare bones to co
            • Depending on whether its a new install or an upgrade, the default shell is either bash or tcsh. As for stripping the box down to bare bones, I'm not sure what you mean, but OSX starts with no services running, which is pretty bare bones. You can also disable the GUI environment if it so pleases you (not like it hogs that much sitting at the login screen anyway).
              • What he means is tearing out huge numbers of libraries and system services. For example on Linux we used to do things like:

                a) compile a custom kernel with far fewer services available
                b) Change program locations and links so that random calls by path wouldn't work (i.e. something like ls would be /sdf/sajfs/ysfs/sj while cat would be /uwsius/usiufs/sc etc...
                c) remove dozens of commands entirely

                etc...

                You probably could do this with Darwin, you couldn't think of doing it with OSX

        • Re:Ditch OS X For Solaris? (Score:4, Interesting)

          by Ytsejam-03 ( 720340 ) on Wednesday August 11, 2004 @01:06PM (#9941408)
          First they say they will 'buy Linux' (i.e. SuSe)
          This article [theregister.co.uk] has a more realistic perspective on things. If Sun were going to buy SuSe, they would have done it before Novell bought them. After all, Schwartz himself said that Novell's products are "far less intersting" [zdnet.co.uk] than Suse. Why pay the extra money for a bunch of Novell products that they don't want?

        • Re:Ditch OS X For Solaris? (Score:5, Funny)

          by IPFreely ( 47576 ) <mark@mwiley.org> on Wednesday August 11, 2004 @01:29PM (#9941635) Homepage Journal
          It's clearly IBM that Sun is after. First they say they will 'buy Linux' (i.e. SuSe) which is IBM's Linux vendor of choice and now they are saying they will also invade IBM's hardware. Good luck to Sun. Competition is good for everyone, except the losers of course.

          Yeah, when all those companies start buying IBM hardware just to put Sun Linux or Solaris on it, IBM will be in a world of hurt..... I mean, big hardware sales and service without the cost and headaches of software support. Can it get any worse?

    • Re:Ditch OS X For Solaris? (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Because as far as server technology goes, Solaris is superior to OS-X and far beyond what Linux has to offer. Belief to the contrary simply shows that you are not aware of the full capabilities of Solaris.
      • enlighten us then please... oh wise one.

        • Re:Ditch OS X For Solaris? (Score:5, Informative)

          by mrm677 ( 456727 ) on Wednesday August 11, 2004 @01:37PM (#9941718)
          Scalable to > 100 processors out-of-the-box. I don't need some tricked out kernel build from the folks building special 512-processor Linux machines.

          Compatibility with 64-bit apps written 10 years ago.

          A decent threading model that has been in place for years. Last time I checked there were 2 competing proposals for a new Linux threading system

          CC-NUMA memory allocation.

          Hot-swappable CPUs and consolidation. I can dynamically split single Solaris instance, running on 128 processors, to N instances each running on 128/N processors.

          Mature user/kernel profiling tools.

          Stable device driver model. Drivers from Solaris 2.6 will work fine in Solaris 10. Meanwhile any Linux kernel patch that changes task_struct will require rebuilds of certain Linux device drivers. Yes...not a problem with all open-source drivers, but the world isn't all open-source (ask nVidia)

          The kernel is more modular. I can swap in a different scheduler.

          Trusted Solaris is available if needed

          • Re:Ditch OS X For Solaris? (Score:5, Insightful)

            by jedidiah ( 1196 ) on Wednesday August 11, 2004 @03:12PM (#9942539) Homepage
            > Scalable to > 100 processors out-of-the-box. I
            > don't need some tricked out kernel build from
            > the folks building special 512-processor Linux
            > machines.

            "Those people" are the same people that SOLD Sun it's current NUMA technology.

          • OK, few points:

            Compatibility with 64-bit apps written 10 years ago.

            Bull. 64-bit Solaris started with Solaris 7 which must have been about 98/99; maximum age on a production 64-bit Solaris app is 6 years.

            That said, Solaris has reasonably good binary compatibility with apps from SunOS 4 and any 32-bit app written to comply with the ABI specs of previous Solaris releases.

            Hot-swappable CPUs

            Hot-swappable if (a) you can find documentation to confirm that you can hot-swap system boards and (b) the sy

      • I dunno, I don't see too many solaris based web servers on Netcraft's list of longest uptimes. They're all running FreeBSD - and guess what OSX is based on?

        Doesn't mean it's necessarily as capable as Solaris in the enterprise computing world, but it's probably more secure, and likely more stable.
        • Netcraft's list is just reporting the servers furthest forward, aren't they? You can't tell what app servers or database servers are running, right? So all you're really telling is what Apache et al are running on.

          And Mac OS X is not FreeBSD. Similar? sure. Loosely based on? I'll buy that. But there are some major differences. Take a look at this usenet post (http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF - 8&selm=3CF65A12.9020000%40coldmail.com.invalid ) or search out others.
    • I was wondering the same thing. I can already run OS X and Linux on my Mac why would I need Solaris?

      I would suspect that Sun's intent is to impact AIX on IBM PowerPC's platform and not Mac's.

    • Re:Ditch OS X For Solaris? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by danamania ( 540950 ) on Wednesday August 11, 2004 @12:13PM (#9940876)
      Choice. perhaps that's where all your training lies. perhaps you have a mac at home and you work with solaris in the daytime. perhaps you just have an opinion that solaris is better. Lots of reasons =)

      However, a port of solaris to the POWER architecture doesn't necessarily mean an immediate version for PowerPC machines, or Macs.
    • because the cluster you bought from sun wouldnt even run os x?

    • Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Wednesday August 11, 2004 @01:25PM (#9941591)
      Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Power ? PPC (Score:2, Interesting)

    by macmastery ( 600662 )
    Isn't the power architecture a superset of the designs used in PowerPC-based Macs?

  • Power != PowerPC (Score:4, Insightful)

    by genericacct ( 692294 ) on Wednesday August 11, 2004 @12:02PM (#9940758)
    Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think PowerPC is code compatible with IBM POWER RISC. They are similar, but PowerPC was a joint project with Motorola.

    • Re:Power != PowerPC (Score:5, Informative)

      by 2nd Post! ( 213333 ) <gundbear@@@pacbell...net> on Wednesday August 11, 2004 @12:06PM (#9940797) Homepage
      POWER == PowerPC, but PowerPC != POWER

      POWER is a superset of PowerPC. See here [ibm.com].
      • This is not exactly true. Neither is a subset of the other, however they do share a large common subset. That said, most modern POWER chips can emulate the extra PowerPC instructions in microcode. This same capability could in theory be included on a PowerPC chip (in reverse), but would be more difficult, as several extra registers (such as MQ) are needed for the POWER spec; it has never been done.

        Cain
  • Since this is Sun we're talking about, will we end up with Power Architecture Java [slashdot.org] as a result?

  • Again (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 11, 2004 @12:03PM (#9940770)
    This is not the first time Solaris was ported to PPC. Back when Apple, M$, IBM, Novell, Sun, NeXT, and MOT were all more friendly, Sun had ported Solaris to PPC and the ABI was then became the SYSV 32bit PPC ABI.

    Even M$ had WinNT ported to PPC and IBM even had OS/2 ported too but those were the days.

    • Re:Again (Score:5, Informative)

      by dbirchall ( 191839 ) on Wednesday August 11, 2004 @12:26PM (#9941000) Journal
      WinNT wasn't so much "ported" to PPC as PPC was one of the architectures it originally supported. (Along with x86, of course, Alpha - the world's first 64-bit PC was in 1993, not 2003! - and, if my memory serves without looking at my NT4WKS CD, MIPS?)

    • Re:Again (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 11, 2004 @12:31PM (#9941044)
      Ah! Your memory serves you well. Solaris 2.5.1 was ported to Power. It ran only on an IBM RS/6000 Model 43P, the smallest box IBM made. It actually ran pretty well. It wasn't exactly an academic exercise, but suffice it to say the product never really found a market. They finally took it out of the catalog a few years ago.


      Makes you wonder what they're up to. Could this be a prelude to Sun trying to sell themselves to IBM while they're still worth something? Surely they've seen what has happened to SGI, DEC, and DG. Of those previous Unix Workstation Vendor Flamouts (tm), only DEC could be said to have had a decent burial.


      Don't get me wrong: I'm not saying Sun is going to die tommorow... the revenue off of DoD maintenance contracts alone will keep them on life support for another decade. But this would give them a chance to get out at better-than-firesale prices.


      Could also mean I get to see Solaris on a "fast" machine one last time.

      • Could this be a prelude to Sun trying to sell themselves to IBM while they're still worth something?

        Wouldn't Sun+IBM be like wearing purple pants with a blue sport coat?

      • Re:Again (Score:4, Interesting)

        by IPFreely ( 47576 ) <mark@mwiley.org> on Wednesday August 11, 2004 @01:45PM (#9941790) Homepage Journal
        I wouldm't say they were attempting to sell themselves.
        As processor architecture and performance changes ofer time, it becomes more and more expensive to keep up. Many times before, we've seen companies switch processor and/or hardware because their old basis was not keeping up. Apple switched to PowerPC from 68k. DG switched from 88K (or something older?) to intel. NeXT switched was attempting to switch from 68K to 88K but jumped to intel at the last moment. HP is making the jump to Intel IA64.
        Older processor families dissapeared because they couldn't keep up or were too expensive to keep up. Software moves on.

        I bet Sun is seeing Sparc performance advantage fading away and a cost sink they can't keep up on. IBM is doing a lot of work to make POWER keep up, and they're doing a good job. Porting Solaris to POWER could be a precursor to Sun making POWER hardware themselves rather than just using IBM hardware. Or maybe they will cut back their hardware all together and go software only on IBM hardware. They still have enough software value to make a go of it.

        In either case, it's not necessarily a dying gasp.

    • Motorola licensed NT from Microsoft and ported it to PPC. The arrangement was priced out of Motorola's interests when Intel came to fear how much better even NT ran on a superior processor architecture.

      IBM talked about getting OS/2 on PPC but it never happened.

  • Open is open (Score:5, Insightful)

    by gtrubetskoy ( 734033 ) * on Wednesday August 11, 2004 @12:03PM (#9940772)
    Only a customer can define the word "open." That's my view.

    To me "open" simply means you can figure out what happens, "customer" has nothing to do with it. When I wrote mod_python I did not think of myself as a vendor and I don't think of mod_python users as "customers". You can't just think of everything in terms of "business", it's not like that at all.

    • Re:Open is open, but to who? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by davecb ( 6526 ) * <davecb@spamcop.net> on Wednesday August 11, 2004 @12:14PM (#9940889) Homepage Journal
      I think he's preaching to the business community, for whom the ability to buy a different brand of computer for a new lab is a Real Big Thing.

      Remember "vendor lock-in"? Used to happen with IBM mainframes, then Windows, and now, regrettably, with Unix variants.

      The freedom to be able to chose a vendor is important to businesses and universities, and in principle to anyone who doesn't want to be locked to a particular vendor. Such as Sequent, who sorta doesn't exist any more...

      I used to do a ton of porting for the purpose of unlocking stuff from vendor X or Y and making it run on "stock Unix", which is to say, pretty much anywhere. heck, I still do, on request (;-))

      --dave

    • Re:Open is open (Score:4, Insightful)

      by flaming-opus ( 8186 ) on Wednesday August 11, 2004 @12:27PM (#9941003)
      You might not want to think about everything in terms of business, but one can, and it's important that he does think about things that way.

      Sun is in big trouble. They sell a bunch of decent servers that are not really unique from what the rest of the unix world is selling. They are obviously not able to keep ahead of the competition by making sparc the best processor around, so they have to come up with some other way sell something worth paying for. Solaris, for all its issues, is a reliable, scalable OS that runs a lot of applications. Solaris is a great asset to Sun; If they can leverage it on IBMs processor and make money doing so, it would really help the company.

      Sun has moved beyond the "we can do everything in house" days, and is trying to figure out which battles are worth fighting. If they choose the wrong battles, they might go the way of dec, data general, and Sequent.

  • Hardware compatiblity? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by peterprior ( 319967 ) on Wednesday August 11, 2004 @12:04PM (#9940779)
    Sun produces both the OS and the hardware for their machines. Apple produce the OS and hardware for their machines. Thats what makes things Just Work (tm). Plonking Solaris on a Mac isn't going to do much for hardware compatibility :|
    • ..what this probably just means is that they will be starting to make machines with powerpc cpu and selling them with their os(or selling some ibm made hardware with their own os, knowing fully what hardware it will be running on).

  • Sun == erratic (Score:5, Insightful)

    by hot_Karls_bad_cavern ( 759797 ) on Wednesday August 11, 2004 @12:05PM (#9940788) Journal
    Wow. What are they doing over there? Let me preface this by saying i work with solaris daily, i like solaris (love/hate, you know what i mean if you use it), and well, the ultras i have in the house just will not die (not for my lack of trying though).

    However, after all these "sorta" announcements from different heads of the crew, i'm getting uneasy about Sun. Java open/closed/free/not-free/for-the-love-of-pete-whi ch-jre-j2se-jrs94x-should i get? Solaris open/closed/free/sorta/java-desktop? Heh, okay just poking fun there, but seriously, do they not seem a little like their top guys don't talk all that much and just make random announcements at this con or that? Yesh.

    And i KNOW the roof will raise over the suggestion of dropping osX in favor of Solaris on mac....er, wow, my mind is blown that one might consider doing that for anything other than fun...for a few minutes. Wow, Sun is just makin me uneasy these days - glad i'm not in charge of any huge shops (i assure you that you are glad for that too ;-)
    • The workstation market is proving less and less profitable for sun, and for all the other unix games in town. Since a linux-PC or Mac is so close to a workstation, fewer and fewer people are willing to pay a big premium for a workstation. Thus it's probably not worth sun's engineering time to continue developing workstations. They will continue to develop their higher-end products from the ground up, but use commodity parts at the low end.

      Why they would do this on powerpc when they already have an opteron

    • Re:Sun == erratic (Score:4, Informative)

      by SEE ( 7681 ) on Wednesday August 11, 2004 @02:01PM (#9941956) Homepage
      What you're watching is the flailing of a company that knows its old buisness is doomed.

      The RISC performance crown is POWER. The price-performance crown is x86. SPARC is stuck in a market slice between these two, and is getting squeezed. And SPARC is unlikely to be able to invade the x86-and-PPC-dominated desktop market, which means its development will always have fewer resources behind it than the squeezers. There's life left in the SPARC platform, but the way the wind is blowing is clear.

      So what to do? Well, Sun's trying lots of things, hoping one sticks. If SPARC is in trouble, maybe Solaris can become the universal high-end Unix, running on any machine (that is, x86 and POWER). Maybe the Java Desktop System can secure Sun a slice of the Linux pie, even if Linux (backed by IBM) improves until leaves no room for Solaris. Maybe Java can save the company. Maybe if Sun open-sources key products, it can get the benefits of open development and still be the company people turn to for commercial support of them. Maybe . . .

      Who knows? Maybe something will work. It's worth a shot, at least.

  • Solaris and Gnome over OS X? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Offwhite98 ( 101400 ) on Wednesday August 11, 2004 @12:08PM (#9940827) Homepage
    I wonder if it would be worthwhile. I know that Sun had a close relationship with the Gnome community to help improve the usability of Gnome but I still feel that OS X is a much better total UI than Gnome.

    I could be wrong, but Solaris and Gnome still have some rough edges which need smoothing out. My biggest critisms of of Solaris/Linux/Gnome is they move onto the never version and new features before the round out and polish the last version. That last 5% of effort to make the software shine is really what sets makes the average computer user feel it is 100% better.

  • Easy decision (Score:4, Interesting)

    by tommasz ( 36259 ) on Wednesday August 11, 2004 @12:08PM (#9940828)
    No one in their right mind is going to ditch OS X on a desktop machine for Solaris. No one. It might have a chance as a server OS but given that you can already run Linux on the Power architecture, there's no compelling reason to consider Solaris unless you're already a Solaris shop and want to buy Power machines.
  • Schwartz's blog and just about every press announcement from Sun lately seems to be nothing but smoke-up-my-ass vaporware and/or hollow promises.

    You can consider that sentence flamebait or you can take it is my open letter to Sun to "Put up or Shut up". I, for one, would like to see some more follow-through on many of these announcements, like an open source Java and Solaris.

    • I agree.

      It's almost as if their strategy is "ignore the man behind the curtain! Look at all the shiny things we might do!"

      But: will any of those things keep them from losing $1B every quarter? Unless you can answer that question in the affirmative, and it'll ship soon, and not cost more to develop than it brings in, it's just looks like an attempt to distract from their failing core business.
    • Please define exactly what your definition of "open source" is. As the blog indicated, open source potentially has a different meaning for people. If by open source you mean that you want access to Solaris, check out Solaris Source [sun.com] (although this really just states: "Source code for the Solaris Operating System is available for qualified educational institutions and partners; please contact your Sun sales team [sun.com] for details"). I don't know what disclosure agreements are necessary for the access, but a dete

  • Forget Macs, P series! (Score:5, Informative)

    by telemonster ( 605238 ) on Wednesday August 11, 2004 @12:10PM (#9940843) Homepage
    Who cares about running Solaris on the Mac G5, look at IBM's efforts to convert Solaris/Sun shops over to AIX/RS6k shops! If you browse IBM's page looking at the pSeries servers (the Power series) you will notice ads about migrating from Solaris to AIX. This is a big inititive at IBM.



    From our standpoint, it's goes a bit like "ewww AIX" ... Solaris on the pSeries boxes would definitly be interesting. I believe IBM rebadges quite a bit of commoditiy hardware and marks the price up 900% (Older advanced 3d graphics cards for RS6000s were $30 s3 cards with different PCI identification tags and such)... so it might be easy to pick up support for quite a bit of the peripheral hardware from the Linux world.

    I'm not sure I'd shove it into a production environment, and what if IBM starts to throw curveballs into the works to thwart the people running Solaris. Still totally funny if you ask my opinion. Talk about a comeback to IBM's marketing strategy, but at what cost to Sun's hardware sales.

    • i don't think IBM would want to thwart people running Solaris on IBM hardware. IBM's software divisions make software for Solaris already. i don't think IBM makes money off the OS. they only need an OS like AIX to be able to provide a one-stop total solutions package. if people chose to run Solaris on IBM hardware that's fine, so long as IBM makes money on the hardware and software stacks.

      i don't really think there's money to be made in Operating Systems unless you're planning to be like Microsoft, l

    • Anyone who says "ewww AIX" hasn't run AIX in a production environment. There's a reason why banks and insurance companies run AIX. It's rock solid. And now that IBM's hardware is the fastest in the world, there's no compelling reason to run anything else.
  • Sun is attempting to hijack the UNIX server market served by IBM's AIX server line.

    This could also signal the end of large $ spending on R&D by Sun (why innovate when others are creating the computers that the OS can run on?).
    • This could also signal the end of large $ spending on R&D by Sun (why innovate when others are creating the computers that the OS can run on?).

      Or...This could also signal the end of large $ spending on R&D by IBM (why innovate when others are creating the OS that the computer runs?).

  • Open is... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Offwhite98 ( 101400 ) on Wednesday August 11, 2004 @12:11PM (#9940856) Homepage
    ...leaving the case off because you had tried to install a new hard drive and you got frustrated with it so you just left the PC sit open for a week because you just did not want to deal with it anymore.

  • Contradictory... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by RU_Areo ( 804621 )
    Johnny boy states that "Only the customer can define open" but then proceeds, to define it, not to mention plug Sun's products. This seems contraditory

  • Where do Microsoft come in? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by polyp2000 ( 444682 ) on Wednesday August 11, 2004 @12:15PM (#9940890) Homepage Journal
    Anyone care to speculate on the possible benefits for Microsoft if this happens? Since Sun are now sleeping with the boys from Redmond, there must be an alterior motive here... must there not ?

    Nick...

  • Can we say behind the times??? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Supp0rtLinux ( 594509 ) <Supp0rtLinux@yahoo.com> on Wednesday August 11, 2004 @12:30PM (#9941030)
    Sun just doesn't get it. We already have MacOS X and Yellow Dog for PPC. We have Sun and Linux the SPARC. We have M$ and Linux for the x86. Linux is the common denominator. Why the heck would we care about Solaris on PPC?

    Sun is trying every last ditch effort they can to stay afloat. The company that believed the world revolved around Solaris and SPARC is now supporting X86 and AMD64 and talking about PPC. They're offering Linux solutions. Everyone else sees the sinking ship that is Sun, but Sun themselves. Unfortunately, I can't help but think the old adage of "a day late and a dollar short" is going to apply to Sun very shortly, if not already.

  • You know (Score:2, Funny)

    by shfted! ( 600189 )
    I've used Sun workstations a lot, but they sure felt sluggish. I guess they really could use a little more Power. Heh.

  • Open Standards vs. Open Source (Score:5, Insightful)

    by booch ( 4157 ) <(moc.kehcubgiarc) (ta) (0102todhsals)> on Wednesday August 11, 2004 @12:40PM (#9941126) Homepage
    His main premise is that Open Standards are more important than Open Source. On this point, I completely agree. Conforming to an open standard, which anyone is allowed to implement, is a great thing for customers. As long as they depend only upon the standard, they can choose whichever vendor they want. This is effectively a commoditization of the market.

    What he fails to realize (or admit) is that Open Source has other advantages that build upon Open Standards. Even if an Open Source program doesn't conform to any well-recognized standard, the availability of the source can provide the same advantages. If you don't like the way Ximian is building their free Evolution mail reader, you can find another vendor who will take the existing mail reader and build you a custom version, fully compatible with the old. Also, Open Source programs typically embrace Open Standards with a passion. Look at Mozilla for a good example.

    In addition, Open Source provides new advantages that Open Standards do not. The main advantage is control. If the company goes out of business, and you want to stick with their product, you can do that. If the vendor doesn't want to implement a feature that you want, you can do that. You get the advantages of commoditization, plus the ability to customize and modify things to fit your own needs.

  • Why Solaris on POWER? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by BinxBolling ( 121740 ) on Wednesday August 11, 2004 @12:41PM (#9941140)

    The Mac hardware thing is mostly a red herring, I'm guessing.

    Here's my guess: Sun is considering the idea of dumping SPARC in favor of POWER. As things stand, they're way back in the raw performance game. Why continue investing R&D money into their own line of chips, if this is what it buys them?

    Note that I'm not suggesting that they would become a pure software company -- my guess would be that they still design and build their own systems, just not their own chips.

  • Good kernel, but awful user-space. Outdated utilities (starting with the /bin/sh itself), awfully user-unfriendly "out of the box" install. Linux may not follow the standards either, but, at least, the command-line editing works out of the box... FreeBSD remains my choice, of course...

  • Silly rabbit, Solaris is for Servers! (Score:4, Insightful)

    by nsayer ( 86181 ) <nsayer@kfu.cELIOTom minus poet> on Wednesday August 11, 2004 @12:49PM (#9941214) Homepage
    Does this mean you'll soon be able to ditch OS X and stick on [sic] Solaris 10 onto Macs?

    Ugh, why would you want to?

    Now, Solaris on an XServe [apple.com]... That makes sense... Server class hardware that doesn't suck [intel.com], yet doesn't cost an arm and a leg [sun.com], running perhaps the best multiprocessor Unix ever [sun.com]... Mmmmm.

    The ironic thing in my view is that this is sort of what CHiRP [webopedia.com] was supposed to be - a happy universe where you could buy an RS6000 and run MacOS on it, or a Mac and run Solaris on it, or whatever. But then His Steveness decided that the clones had to go...

  • I like how he starts out with, "Only a customer can define the word 'open.' That's my view.", and then procedes to define the word 'open'.

  • which defintion? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by grocer ( 718489 ) on Wednesday August 11, 2004 @12:55PM (#9941292)
    First line of article:

    "Only a customer can define the word 'open.' That's my view"

    Conclusion:

    "Open as in door, is different than open as in source. Unix, linux, Windows - none are open, I'd argue. There is no agreed upon specification, no neutral test to determine validity, and no guarantee made by vendors other than rhetoric."

    Apparently, Schwartz wants a gatekeeper to insure that all libaries and ancillary programs are standard between Websphere, BEA, and JES. In short, he's complaining that IBM keeps adding features outside of the TCK/AVK "standard" (apparently defined by Sun), pushing Sun out of the market.

    Geesh, here's a novel idea -- innovate! Out-feature IBM, open source the environment and libraries, package support with a linux distribution, and then sell, sell, sell!

  • Competition is Great (Score:4, Insightful)

    by WindBourne ( 631190 ) on Wednesday August 11, 2004 @01:01PM (#9941354) Journal

    Several years ago, Solaris ran on Sparc and x86. Of course, the solaris X86 was the bastard child.

    Likewise, mainstream Windows ran on X86 compatable only (yeah, NT ran on alpha, but that was a decade ago; And yes I saw NT on PA-RISC, but it was never released).

    In addition, Windows will have a a 3'rd world distro that will cost but a fraction of their current stuff, but have 99% of what they currently offer. Historically, Bill Gates encourages theft of Windows as a way to check growth in other areas. That happened to Borland, Sybase, etc. These days MS claims that linux growth in 3'rd world country is so that it can be replaced by Windows. If so, then why do they think that a low cost version will be bought by end customers, when they can have it for free?

    Linux and BSD run on many arch. and the 2 of them are making huge inroads into older OSs. Suddenly Windows and Solaris want to port to everything. Solaris on multiple platforms and low-cost to free windows is simply an attempt to stop Linux from wiping out sales

  • What people fail to see... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by l4m3z0r ( 799504 ) <kevin AT uberstyle DOT net> on Wednesday August 11, 2004 @01:11PM (#9941455)
    Alot of people seem to be saying how awful/useless this is and how sun is dying. Those who don't are talking about the various tech aspects that make solaris a viable thing to use. Both sides are failing to see the main reason why Sun would want to do this IMO. In order to be able to say to potential customers, look you have these architecture machines, our OS can run on them. I know that I would be much more interested in hearing some company pitch a solution if all my various architectures could be supported by one OS. My Power arch machines, my x86 machines, and of course the fancy new sparc stations they are trying to sell me could now all run solaris. I would love to hear that, I'd be say great, I can cut IT costs by having the support team worry about only one OS and the migration would be cheaper because I could reuse the expensive Power machines that we bought a few years back.

    I abhor diversity when it comes to computers its just a pain in the ass. Any chance I can get to have all my equipment running the same software I'd jump at. Jon's arguments apply mostly to the business end, he isnt trying to pitch superior tech, just a superior business/IT plan.

  • Sun is moving away from hardware sales. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by crovira ( 10242 ) on Wednesday August 11, 2004 @02:54PM (#9942373) Homepage
    By spreading their 'industrial strength' OS to every platform and trading on their reputation, they are hoping to survive the shift.

    Actually its a smart move.

    Hardware has been commiditized into oblivion...

  • Sun is wising up. This is a good thing. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by amper ( 33785 ) on Wednesday August 11, 2004 @03:07PM (#9942478) Journal
    It's funny, I was just discussing this with a friend the other day. I really think this is the smartest possible move for Sun. It has been becoming increasingly obvious that Sun is seriously lagging behind in processor development. A move to Power and/or PPC would enable Sun to stop sinking money into the pit that is SPARC.

    Although it has been pointed out several times here that POWER!=PPC (or Apple), I think Sun would be well served to make certain that any port they do runs on at least the Power Macintosh G5 platform (and any later Apple hardware). This would give Sun access to the many, many existing Apple workstations out there so as to provide Solaris with exposure to the Mac community.

    Let's face it, although Mac OS X is a great OS, Apple doesn't really seem to be doing much to chase after the enterprise market, even though they now have what could be an enterprise-class OS (with some better documentation, anyway). The XServe is a fine machine, but it's hardly what I would consider "enterprise", with the possible exception of high-density clustering apps.

    Solaris is a very good OS with a huge amount of support in the community, and good installed base at the higher levels. If Sun could get Solaris running on Macs and IBM RS/6K (or whatever they're calling them these days???), it could open up many more doors for them, while still enabling them to possibly design their own brand workstations and desktops on the POWER/PPC platform to compete with both IBM and Apple. That could also mean Mac OS X support on a Sun box.

    I can't help thinking that this may be a precursor to shopping Sun out to one of the aforementioned competitors. Apple could use Sun, and vice-versa. An IBM+Sun pairing would probably mean the death of Sun.

  • Is it a purchase ploy? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by gamgee5273 ( 410326 ) * on Wednesday August 11, 2004 @03:17PM (#9942577) Journal
    The first thing I thought about Solaris on Power is: "Gee. How hard would it be to integrate Solaris apps into OS X Server or AIX?"

    Not that difficult at all, I assume. I'm not a coder, so I'm not all that certain. But, if Solaris is running on the Power architecture, the PPC is only a few steps away.

    Could Sun be doing this to make itself an attractive acquisition for IBM or Apple (if Apple is truly serious about expanding its place in the enterprise?)?

  • Not Macintosh but IBM's Power5 stuff.... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by FatherOfONe ( 515801 ) on Wednesday August 11, 2004 @03:41PM (#9942768)
    I don't know why everyone is saying Macintosh, no where in the article did he mention Apple. I believe he means running Solaris on IBM's mid range PowerPC systems. The ones that are running AIX now. It is my belief that Sun wants to convince customers that they could standardize on Solaris instead of Linux.

    The meat of the article was that he feels that open means no vendor lock in. His point is that if you use Java and don't use any proprietary junk you could move your code with little effort. I agree in principle, but if I write the stuff in Java, then I am locked in to Java. Not that this is bad, but it would make sense for Sun to change the VM (perhaps open source it and go to the standards body and get it approved as a standard) and then get other languages to run on it. In a way it would be somewhat like .Net, but be open.

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