From: cross@spitfire.i.gajendra.net
In article ,
John Dallman wrote:
>In article <10camac$nch$1@reader2.panix.com>,
>cross@spitfire.i.gajendra.net (Dan Cross) wrote:
>
>> I also don't think they took Linux seriously enough, and by the
>> time they did, it was too late: had OpenSolaris happened 8 years
>> earlier, maybe it could have been a viable alternative, but as
>> it was, it was too little, too late.
>
>They wasted several years on a fiasco. Since the Linux system calls were
>somewhat Solaris-like in those days, they had the idea of making Solaris
>x86 capable of running Linux binaries. So they hired a bunch of Linux
>people - apparently not very good ones - and set them to work. Those guys
>came back after over a year with a huge pile of changes to the Solaris
>kernel that made it capable of running a RHEL3.0 x86 32-bit userland. But
>only that, not any other distro. The Solaris kernel people weren't
>willing to take on a load of changes that weren't done to their standards,
>and after a lot of arguing, the whole job was abandoned.
Do you mean the LX-branded zone stuff? Or something else?
>Open Solaris seemed to be based on the idea that Linux people would
>prefer to work on Solaris, which is a terrible failure in understanding
>their motivations.
I think that was one of the ideas. The other is that there is
more value in code being open source than in it being closed.
I think McVoy's memo was a lot more influential than he's given
credit for here.
But yeah, it's hard not to see it presenting as, "ok kids, fine,
you got us; we'll let you get out of the kiddie pool now and
come into the grownup pool with us if you stop being so fussy."
At anyrate, the developer community they expected to attract
never actually materialized: it was almost all Sun engineers
working on it.
- Dan C.
--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)
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