Is Solarid Dead? Part 2 The Community on Attack.

Wow, I'm amazed at the out cry of both Linux and Solaris users responding to Zemlin's remarks. Waking a sleeping giant comes to mind.

Check out the comments in these links:
http://www.infoworld.com/article/08/09/24/39NF-linux-killing-solaris_1.html#commentForm
http://www.osnews.com/comments/20324

My favorite here is:

So, the Linux camp: why attack Solaris all the time? If you are threatened by Solaris (but want it's technology), you really dont have to attack. It is not the right way to get it's hot technology. Why not let Solaris be? Why are you being such a great pr*cks all the time? Why is it ok to bully others? Can someone explain the Linux culture of attacking people and companies and OS? Is it because of Linus Torvalds?

Stating that Linux scales badly above 4-8 cpu was not really correct maybe. It is better to state that Linux doesnt scale well above 16 cores:
http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=8769
Unless you do scientic number crunching, then there is a special Linux kernel tailored to that, allowing massively many CPUs, but it can do nothing else than that.


I dont know if you have seen what Andrew Morton says about Linux kernel? It is really buggy (beyond repair?)
http://lwn.net/Articles/285088/


Of course, there are links that showing to migrate from Solaris to Linux is better. But for instance this link, I think doesnt tell the whole picture:
http://searchenterpriselinux.techtarget.com/news/article/0,289142,s...
If you migrated old Solaris 8 Sparc machines to new Solaris 10 machines then you would also see a big performance boost. Possibly even more a boost than going to RHEL as this link shows (Solaris on T1 Niagara CPU being 50 times faster than Linux on AMD opteron):

http://searchenterpriselinux.techtarget.com/news/article/0,289142,s...

I wish that the NY Times allowed comments. So the Community to get there voice heard

Is Solaris Dead? Let's ask Paul Krill

Recently, there seems to have been an attack on Solaris being dead. Two articles here and here make such a claim.

While everyone is entitled to there own opinion, I have a hard time with these articles. Why? because the Authors ask a single person, Who works for the Linux foundation, and takes his word as the truth. There are no facts presented in the articles. Jim Zemlin spends his career talking up Linux. That's his job.

The first big issue I have with the articale, is that he distances Linux from Unix. Last time I checked, when working in Linux, you use ls, chmod, chown, ps, just like every other unix does. So why the distancing? What's wrong with Unix?

Issue two.

Sun officials believe the 16-year-old Solaris platform remains a pivotal, innovative platform. But at the Linux Foundation, there is a no-conciliatory stance; the attitude there is to tell Solaris and Sun to move out of the way. "The future is Linux and Microsoft Windows," says foundation Executive Director Jim Zemlin. "It is not Unix or Solaris."

In the above paragraph, Mr. Krill, states that Sun officials beleive the Solaris is Pivotal and innovative, but the LF sais it's not. No facts, No number, no studies, he takes the words of Jim Zemlin, over the words of Sun's executives. WHY?

Issue Three.

Linux also is less costly to run, Zemlin claims. Sun, he declared, should just move over to Linux. Zemlin also held out little hope for other IBM's AIX and Hewlett-Packard's HP-UX Unix platforms. "It's certainly true that Unix is on the decline," he says.

Less Costly to Run Linux...HMMMM. Let's take a look at that. From here we see a 3+ socket box costs $3,600 dollars list to support for 3 years for solaris x86. I searched for support from the Linux Foundation's website, but couldn't find any. HMMM...Ok so let's use Red Hat's support. From here for 3+ sockets would be $4,047 dollars for 3 years. So, where is the Cheaper part? I'm confused.

Issue three:

Thanks to its strong support of the x86 hardware architecture, "in terms of overall volume, Linux is just a much higher volume product than Solaris ever was," says Al Gillen, an IDC analyst. IDC data show that worldwide Linux shipments in 2006 were about 2.4 million in 2006 and nearly 2.7 million in 2007. By contrast, Solaris shipments totaled 376,000 in 2006 and 371,000 last year.

Where do these people come up with this information? Why did this go down, because we give it away for free so people don't order it anymore. They just download it from the site.

I could go on, but why? Three strikes and your out in my view. Does this make you mad? Do you want your voice heard?

Discredit Paul Krill here and here. Don't let these onesided stories live on...Comment on them!