From: cross@spitfire.i.gajendra.net   
      
   In article <10chjc5$1s2mr$1@dont-email.me>,   
   Arne Vajhøj   wrote:   
   >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.   
      
   Maybe.  It doesn't make much imagation at all to see that a   
   business built on selling properitary Unix on SPARC doesn't have   
   a long term future.  Don't forget that Sun dove off a cliff.   
      
   >>>>> 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??   
      
   Yes.  Did you?   
      
   |One can't really make a categorical statement like that.   
      
   That is, if a customer has a big investiment in Solaris, which   
   has strong binary compatibility guarantees across versions and   
   guarantees about compatibility at the source level across   
   architectures, then it actually _may_ be more cost effective to   
   pivot to Solaris x86_64 than to Linux.   
      
   This is not rocket science.   
      
   >>                                                          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.   
      
   Again, it really depends on the customer.  illumos is open   
   source; if a customer has deep enough pockets and really wants   
   to stick to that world, they can pay someone to maintain it or   
   do it themselves.   
      
   That's not appropriate for every organization, of course, but it   
   is not totally unreasonable for those that can and want to do   
   it.   
      
   	- Dan C.   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
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