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A comment on Ask HN: Should I choose Sun Solaris or Linux?. Parent comment

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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