[advocacy-discuss] I was thinking...

[Ben Rockwood]

Uros Nedic wrote:
>   ...why SUN, as a global corporation when decided to go to the market of
> operating systems
> for personal computers, laptops, nettops, netbooks, etc., did not make some
> contacts with
> Adobe, Autodesk, Wolfram Research and other software vendors to ask them for
> porting their
> commercial software to OpenSolaris?
>   

Sun used to have strong relationships with these companies.  Photoshop,
AutoCAD, etc were available for SunOS/Solaris on SPARC years ago.  With
the rise in powerful X86 workstations, the UNIX workstation died and
Windows became the platform of choice... such was the cause for SGI's
demise. 

I'm sure a great many UNIX Workstation companies tried to re-kindle
these relationships unsuccessfully and didn't bother trying again when
X86 UNIX became more popular.

The greater demand is to embrace open source equivilents, which is being
addresses.  GIMP instead of Photoshop, Inkscape instead of Illustrator,
Blender instead of 3DMax, etc.

>   I think it will be great bias for people to use OpenSolaris. Maybe, SUN
> should offer them
> to sponsor part of porting costs. It will be good investment for the future.
>   

Greater challenges remain unaddressed, such as getting Oracle 11g on
Solaris/X86.  Sun is having trouble establishing even old alliances on X86.

>   Also, it will be good for SUN, to establish stable lifecycle of
> OpenSolaris (Indiana). It
> has been showed as an good thing to attract more users. Maybe I mentioned it
> before.
>   

OpenSolaris is released on a 6 month release cycle.  The 3rd release is
coming this summer.

>   And for the end of this letter - last observation. Here, we will develop
> drivers for existing
> and old devices, but also, SUN should approach big hardware vendors (at
> least!), and agree
> with them driver support for their future hardware products. As time pass,
> smaller hardware
> vendors will start to write drivers for OpenSolaris without asking them to
> do, because
> market share of OpenSolaris will be bigger. But, initial movements has to be
> done by SUN.
> This should be looked also as investment for future.
>   

Sun has agreements with Intel, NVidia, Dell, Fujitsu, IBM and a
relationship with HP was just announced.  Other white box vendors, such
as SuperMicro already are supported thanks to industry standard
components.  Please refer to the Solaris Hardware Compatability List
(HCL). 

OpenSolaris is being well positioned by Sun.



benr.