[Info-vax] Should Oracle buy OpenVMS?

[Bill Gunshannon]

In article <49ee74a9$0$90266$14726298 at news.sunsite.dk>,
	Arne Vajhøj <arne at vajhoej.dk> writes:
> 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.

Considering that various flavors of BSD and also Solaris run on the same
cheap hardware and the OS base cost is the same, I think it supports my
hypothesis that it is the hype that has put Linux on top.

bill

-- 
Bill Gunshannon          |  de-moc-ra-cy (di mok' ra see) n.  Three wolves
billg999 at cs.scranton.edu |  and a sheep voting on what's for dinner.
University of Scranton   |
Scranton, Pennsylvania   |         #include <std.disclaimer.h>