Solaris / OpenSolarisThis forum is for the discussion of Solaris, OpenSolaris, OpenIndiana, and illumos.
General Sun, SunOS and Sparc related questions also go here. Any Solaris fork or distribution is welcome.
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There's something I still don't get here - this smells of indirection. If you're going to charge $20, then why charge at all - why not open it up and put it on FTP? There's something not right here.
What does Sun want with releasing it on x86 - there's still issues with driver support etc, isn't there? Don't get me wrong, I'm all for choice and I understand that the people using Solaris swear by it - I'm not saying Solaris isn't a great OS!! But you're buying the service as much as the OS. With x86 binaries you get none of that.
And Linux frankly does it better on x86. Is this making Sun any money? They need it too ...
8 days after they released the "early access" (codeword for beta) version, they had something like 1.4 million downloads. at $20 a pop, I would say they are making money!
Yep. That's fair enough. That's a source of quick revenue. I'll bet the curve fell away quickly though - those people wanted to work with it because they use it at work perhaps.
But if they handed it out free, they could makes $30 each service pack for driver, system and firmware updates ... new window manager functionality, ported apps ... etc.
Think about the cost of porting the system over to x86. I doubt they really made much money from this.
Like I say, I'm not flaming for the sake of it, and I understand that Solaris is a great OS. So was OS/2. Linux is killing off Solaris like Windows killed OS/2.
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