[brandz-discuss] Re: Centos 5 support?

[Edward Pilatowicz]

On Thu, Apr 19, 2007 at 02:54:24PM -0700, MC wrote:
> > I'm curious
> [...]
> > --DFA
>
> I was curious of the same things as you.  Why would Linux brandz be developed and then left unsupported?  Couldn't you ship Solaris with built-in quasi-native Linux applications, and wouldn't that be great?  Obviously not if they aren't doing it, but I never knew why.
>

i don't think that would be great at all.  if we feel that an application
is important enough for us to ship with some solaris distro then i'd prefer
to see the application ported to be a native solaris app.

i also don't agree with your assessment that the lx brand is being
left "unsupported".  afaik the brandz lx brand -is supported-.  ie, if
customers use the existing lx brand functionality, find problems,
and file bugs, those bugs will be fixed.  that is the definition
of "supported" software that i'm familiar with, which is very different
from your definition, which seems to be the active development of
new features. (ie, adding support for other linux distros.)

> I think some words in this thread expose the truth, however :)  I'm guessing that Linux brandz is simply too expensive to maintain (and not valuable enough to sell) in a world where cheap system virtualization is popping up everywhere.
>

given that sun doesn't have infinite resources, and it is already investing
in xen (which will allow newer version of linux to run on solaris), i'm
not sure it would make sense for sun to commit more resource to develop
support for more distros of linux via brandz.  but that's just my
opinion.  course that shouldn't stop anyone else from doing this work
if they have the desire and resources.

ed