On Sunday 20 January 2002 19.10, Steven T. Hatton wrote:
I would truly hate to think Sun were shooting themselves in the foot by giving away so much of their intellectual property at the expense of their own hardware products.
Sun makes most of their money from hardware sales. Their chief (nowadays perhaps only) competitor in the upper range server market is IBM. Benchmarks between the two are roughly equal. Sometimes IBM comes out ahead, sometimes Sun does. I think it depends on who does the benchmarking, and who pays for it (hey, you didn't think M$ invented that, did you :). As far as supporting Linux and giving away Solaris x86 and stuff for linux goes, I think Sun knows exactly what they're doing. Someone who's used windows on Intel is far less knowledgeable about unix and far less likely to go with Solaris on the server. If linux/unix is used on the desktop, people will be more than halfway towards going un*x all the way. Call it a loss leader. And I don't think Sun would cry too much about Linux on the Sparc. I could be wrong, but I think their profit margins are so directed towards the hardware side that I really don't think they'd care. They may even save a few $$$ in reduced support calls, since they don't support linux themselves. //Anders