The importance of Solaris 10

TalkBack 1 of 10:

Next »

• Thread View
• Flat View

Plan 9 from Outer Space

Before its death, Solaris was a sales point for Sun's hardware. After its death, Solaris is useful to its prior users without being of advantage to others because of widespread adoption.
Sun did draw inspiration from Ed Wood. With Jonathon Schwartz as Ed's dentist, who played Bela Lugosi by holding a cape around his face.

To give an idea of the confusion of the plot, here's your description of Plan 9:

"Plan 9, you may recall, is a kind of second generation Unix liberated from the single machine focus of the original design to make full use of multiple machines on a network. Originally Sun's marketing people said that 'the network is the computer'; realistically, Plan 9 reverses that to make it: 'the computer is the network' - and that's exactly what's going on with Solaris."

Sun's marketing people were saying that the individual computer becomes an outlet. Your "the computer is the network" says that the outlet loses its connection to the network.

You might want to rephrase that a bit...



You also speak nostalgically of how Solaris might have driven sales of hardware while making money itself:

"From a sales perspective I missed the importance of Sun's effort to integrate and simplify the fault detection and correction stuff - critical in sales pitches to mainframers pretending to 100% uptime, but an absolute pain to work with and much less useful in real life than its adherents like to pretend."

If it's not really important or useful, then you're saying that Sun is making substantial effort to allow people to continue their mistaken attitudes.
So it seems you're saying that Sun is working hard to help people remain misled. That's an accusation.


And finally you're asserting that Sun will benefit from the work of developers who will write "the next great wave of application change".

Okay, except what's going to drive the next great wave of Solaris adoption? The fact that users who had prior versions of Solaris are now getting it free?

Seems a chicken and egg problem to me: no applications for Solaris without a market, and no great market without applications. All that freeing the program accomplished in itself was a loss of revenue.

The only scenario I can see helping is wide Solaris adoption, with the concomitant aggravations of switching to Solaris from something else, by large organizations which can afford their own code readers and writers. Who have expertise in the outfit's existing software.

Should one believe that freeing Solaris is going to cause that rvolutionary change while application writers wait and watch for it to happen?

That's the real revolution.

Quoting the argument:

"What I missed of substance, however, was the importance of the OpenSolaris community and the 'eat your cake and keep it too' licensing model - because that's driving adoption among the thousands of small developers now prepping the next great wave of application change to hit our industry."

Seems that the biggest change on the Unix side is switching to cheaper, easier to maintain software, such as Linux on servers. And finding less expensive ways to do maintenance.

And, as in that HP CIO plan, pushing more discretion to users. Who won't be programming Solaris.

This revolution appears to have a lot of momentum in another direction to overcome.


You could even be right about the possibilities. But I think the first requirement is a plausible scenario for accepting and using them.
Is Plan 9 a plausible enough scenario even for Ed Wood?

Posted by: Anton Philidor   Posted on: 10/06/06 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

Alert moderator to an offensive message

Subscribe to this discussion via Email or RSS

SponsoredWhite Papers, Webcasts, and Downloads

• VMware Infrastructure: A Guide to Bottom-Line Benefits VMware Frustrated by the costs of maintain ever larger data centers?or building ... Download Now
• Why Isn't Server Virtualization Saving Us More? A Few Small Changes May Dramatically Increase Your Efficiency VMware Companies have rapidly adopted server virtualization over the past few ... Download Now
• Five Steps to Determine When to Virtualize YourServers VMware Server virtualization isn't just for big companies. Entry-level ... Download Now