[Info-vax] Should Oracle buy OpenVMS?

[Arne Vajhøj]

Bill Gunshannon wrote:
> 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.

The above was explicit about Solaris/SPARC, which is not the same HW.

Solaris and *BSD on x86 is the same hardware. It just lacks software,
people and maybe some hype.

Arne