[Info-vax] Should Oracle buy OpenVMS?

[Arne Vajhøj]

JF Mezei wrote:
> Keith Parris wrote:
>> Having worked as a consultant in a financial-services firm, about 8-10 
>> years ago loyalty for Sun was outweighed by the 10X cost savings of 
>> using Linux on commodity hardware. Web servers went to Linux in a flash; 
>> Sybase database servers on Sun hung on, but they were a much smaller 
>> number of machines.
> 
> Are enterprise customers satisfied with the support/maintenance services
>  associated with Linux, especially when it comes to mission critical
> machines ?  Or does Solaris still hold some value for important
> applications ?

Not much different from support on anything else.

> When Sun changed the pricing to Solaris (to $0), did that greatly reduce
> the TCO of Solaris/Sparc solutions, or did it just shift costs to
> support and TCO remains 10 times higher than for Linux ?

If HW and OS are sufficiently tightly coupled then whether the HW cost
X and the OS Y or the HS cost X+Y and the SW is free does not make
much of a difference.

And it is not x10 compared to Linux, but enough to make many
companies move to Linux.

Arne