Ask HN: Should I choose Sun Solaris or Linux?

Re:Ask HN: Should I choose Sun Solaris or Linux? by paol on Thursday August 19, 2010 @07:34AM (#1617057)

My 2 cents: Oracle is going to drive Solaris into the ground (and OpenSolaris doubly so). It's days were already numbered, like all proprietary Unixes, but while before I was betting on Solaris to be the last one standind, now I think it will probably be AIX.

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Re:Ask HN: Should I choose Sun Solaris or Linux? by gaius on Thursday August 19, 2010 @07:39AM (#1617065)

Oracle is going to drive Solaris into the ground

On what do you base this? Larry is spending more on SPARC and Solaris than McNealy ever did! It's possible that Solaris will become less suited to (for example) HPC over time but for anything related to commercial data processing, including Java and web serving, expect for it to continue to occupy a leading position among the Unixes.

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Re:Ask HN: Should I choose Sun Solaris or Linux? by paol on Thursday August 19, 2010 @08:05AM (#1617104)

"a leading position among the Unixes": that's the position that it already occupied: the biggest fish in a rapidly drying pond. The killer combo of free Unixes on commodity (read x86) hardware cannibalized the proprietary Unix market. Where that trajectory will lead has been obvious for quite some time now. Sun's measures to try to make Solaris survive that were a) port to x86 architecture and b) open source the OS. Jump out to a bigger pond, in other words.

Oracle's strategy with Solaris is going to be to squeeze every last penny from it, and when it dies it dies. Killing OpenSolaris and making it clear that open source releases of the code base will be done only "at some point" after the commercial release are just the beginning of that.

They will push Solaris in the same places where they currently push Oracle DB. Those places tend to be of very little interest to 99% of the HN croud. Java and web serving are not the kinds of things that justify stratospherically overpriced software licenses...

As for SPARC, I seriously doubt they will pour significant money into it. Trying to compete with x86 is akin to setting $100 bills on fire at this point. They will no doubt keep the Sun brand alive and use it to sell x86 based machines (which is the strategy Sun itself started of course).

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Re:Ask HN: Should I choose Sun Solaris or Linux? by CrLf on Thursday August 19, 2010 @08:57AM (#1617201)

"As for SPARC, I seriously doubt they will pour significant money into it. Trying to compete with x86 is akin to setting $100 bills on fire at this point. They will no doubt keep the Sun brand alive and use it to sell x86 based machines (which is the strategy Sun itself started of course)."

I believe they will. And they will also tailor it for Oracle DB and change the licensing plans to make SPARC a "wiser" choice, locking the customer both on SW and HW. The competition does it, so why shouldn't they do it also?

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Re:Ask HN: Should I choose Sun Solaris or Linux? by paol on Thursday August 19, 2010 @09:22AM (#1617263)

I still don't see a business case for it, though. Continuing to develop SPARC will cost a lot of money and won't buy them any extra lock-in. As far as DB apps are concerned Oracle is the platform, what it runs on is transparent. Edited to add: and the same goes for Java, which on Unix accounts for 99% of enterprise sw development.

As far as I can figure out the only reason IBM has to keep developing POWER is their mainframe business, which is the king of platform lock-in :)

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Re:Ask HN: Should I choose Sun Solaris or Linux? by gaius on Thursday August 19, 2010 @09:40AM (#1617321)

POWER is bloody good, tho', check out the SPECInt results. If you have a workload you can't parallelize you can get double the performance of the best x64s.

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Re:Ask HN: Should I choose Sun Solaris or Linux? by davidw on Thursday August 19, 2010 @08:03AM (#1617102)

"A leading position among the Unixes" is sort of like "a leading horse-buggy manufacturer" isn't it?

I don't see it "running into the ground" - people will be using it for many years in the future. However, the supply of people picking it for new projects probably just dried up quite a bit. People will 'grow up' knowing how to work with Linux, because that's what they tried at home, at school, what they learned on the job, and what their friends know. Those network effects mean that it'll mostly be sensible to keep switching to Linux over time, gradually, unless Solaris suddenly sprouts something that makes it a must-have, which I don't see.

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Re:Ask HN: Should I choose Sun Solaris or Linux? by gaius on Thursday August 19, 2010 @08:19AM (#1617129)

Well, no, not really. Just one example, Sun developed DTrace, a bit later Red Hat got SystemTap. Who's leading and who's following there? Sun has ZFS and Oracle has BTRFS and SGI released XFS, all of which are well in advance of ext3. So while it is fashionable to bash Unix for being old-fashioned and praise Linux for being "advanced", the reality is a lot more subtle than that.

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Re:Ask HN: Should I choose Sun Solaris or Linux? by davidw on Thursday August 19, 2010 @08:25AM (#1617143)

I never said Linux was more advanced. What it is, is "good enough" and improving all the time: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Disruptivetechnology.gif

Especially since it's easier to find people to work with it, more open, and not driven by a billionaire who wants you over a barrel.

Also, I think that Oracle is quickly putting paid to the sort of environment where innovations like dtrace happen, although I could be wrong.

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