[Info-vax] Should Oracle buy OpenVMS?

[Arne Vajhøj]

Bill Gunshannon wrote:
> In article <49efc7a4$0$90271$14726298 at news.sunsite.dk>,
> 	Arne Vajhøj <arne at vajhoej.dk> writes:
>> 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.
> 
> I know it was.
> 
>> Solaris and *BSD on x86 is the same hardware. It just lacks software,
>> people and maybe some hype.
> 
> FreeBSD runs on Sparc.  Current version, same as x86.
> Same for NetBSD and OpenBSD.  

But not much reason to chose more expensive hardware.

> So, you have BSD, Linux and Solaris all run on the same hardware.

Solaris runs on x86-64 but it is not (so far - it may change) Solaris's
primary platform.

> All run the same applications.

No. Linux got more apps. Especially more apps than *BSD.

>                                   What is the one diferentiator?

As I said primarily apps and people.

Arne