Linked by Thom Holwerda on Thu 15th Dec 2005 19:29 UTC
General Unix A new study on the major players in the Unix server market has declared IBM the clear customer favorite and brought to light some serious issues with Sun Microsystems' product line. Most alarmingly for Sun, the company appears to have lost its cachet as the dominant Unix player and done so while alienating customers. Sun finished last in almost every one of the Gabriel Consulting Group survey's categories, spanning technology performance, customer satisfaction and software tools.
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RE[3]: dont count sun out yet
by on Thu 15th Dec 2005 21:13 UTC in reply to "RE[2]: dont count sun out yet"

Member since:

how many entire operating systems has IBM open sourced?

As many as Sun has..

If IBM setup a website called OpenAIX and gave away a few thousand lines of code they would have done exactly what Sun has.

There are a couple distributions of OpenSolaris, and they may be usable operating systems, but OpenSolaris(TM) is not. It is unusable sourcecode without a compiler, tools and preexisting operating system to build it on.

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RE[4]: dont count sun out yet
by Simba on Thu 15th Dec 2005 21:33 in reply to "RE[3]: dont count sun out yet"
Simba Member since:
2005-10-08

"If IBM setup a website called OpenAIX and gave away a few thousand lines of code they would have done exactly what Sun has."

Oh come on. There is a HELL of a lot more than a few thousand lines there.

"There are a couple distributions of OpenSolaris, and they may be usable operating systems, but OpenSolaris(TM) is not. It is unusable sourcecode without a compiler, tools and preexisting operating system to build it on."

Remind me again when the definition of open source required that pre-compiled binaries be made available by the company releasing the source code?

oh... And please tell me when you figure out how to compile Linux in thin air... ie, build it without a compiler, tools, and pre-existing operating system to build it on.

Your argument is nothing more than a totally illogical strawman because you hate Sun.

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RE[5]: dont count sun out yet
by on Thu 15th Dec 2005 21:43 in reply to "RE[4]: dont count sun out yet"
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Remind me again when the definition of open source required that pre-compiled binaries be made available by the company releasing the source code?

The definition of operating system would require binaries in one form or another that "operate".

OpenSolaris is not functional. It is millions or billions or trillions of lines of source code, just like Linux and BSD, yes. But its useless unless you like looking at algorithms.

Until they make an OpenSolaris Operating System why not just call it source code or package or something non-functional.

Linux is relatively easy to build. When was the last time you tried to build and install OpenSolaris? You begin to run into licensing problems for redistribution around Step #3 because the copyright for the build tools and libraries might prevent redistribution.

But I'm sure its as easy as Gentoo or FreeBSD, and with a company like Sun and a license like the CDDL behind it, we should expect it to replace Linux any day now.

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RE[4]: dont count sun out yet
by on Fri 16th Dec 2005 00:21 in reply to "RE[3]: dont count sun out yet"
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In case someone hasn't pointed out ... Sun indeed made the compilers available for free. Arguably the best compiler, at least when it comes to SPARC. Besides, to bootstrap OpenSolaris you can use either one of the available OpenSolaris distribution, or the one from Sun itself.

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