From: arne@vajhoej.dk   
      
   On 10/11/2025 7:50 AM, Dan Cross wrote:   
   > In article <10cb3rt$1hmm$1@dont-email.me>,   
   > Arne Vajhøj   wrote:   
   >> On 10/10/2025 6:14 AM, Dan Cross wrote:   
   >>> Within Sun a lot of senior engineers realized by the mid-1990s   
   >>> that SPARC was going to be a dead end.  They just weren't going   
   >>> to be able to compete against Intel, and the realization within   
   >>> (at least) the Solaris kernel team was that if Sun didn't pivot   
   >>> to x86, they'd be doomed.  And those folks were largely correct.   
   >>> But Sun just didn't want to give up that high margin business   
   >>> and compete against the likes of Dell on volume.   
   >>   
   >> Good decision. The vast majority of Solaris system revenue was   
   >> made after that. And questionable whether they could have made   
   >> the same revenue on x86 due to the competition.   
   >   
   > Good in the short term, perhaps, but bad in the long term.   
      
   Seeing a good long term business for selling proprietary Unix   
   for x86-64 require a very good imagination.   
      
   >>>> And one migration   
   >>>> Solaris/SPARC->Linux/x86-64 is cheaper than two migrations   
   >>>> Solaris/SPARC->Solaris/x86-64->Linux/x86-64.   
   >>>   
   >>> OTOH, if someone is still stuck with Solaris for some reason,   
   >>> they can still buy modern hardware from Dell, HPE, or Lenovo and   
   >>> there's a good chance Solaris 11.4 will work on it.   
   >>   
   >> Yes.   
   >> But it still does not make sense to do a migration that will   
   >> require another migration later compared to just do one   
   >> migration to something with a future.   
   >   
   > One can't really make a categorical statement like that.  It   
   > depends too much on the application, and how much it leveraged   
   > the Solaris environment.  For instance, something that makes   
   > heavy use of zones, SMF, ZFS, doors, the management stuff, etc,   
   > might be much easier to move to Solaris x86 than Linux.   
      
   Did you read what you replied to??   
      
   >                                                          For   
   > that matter, it may be easier to move to illumos rather than   
   > Linux.   
      
   Sure.   
      
   But moving to Illumos is not moving to a well supported platform   
   with a highly likely future.   
      
   Arne   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
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