Screaming Penguin - Source Does Matter

Solaris x86 to be available on IBM Opteron and Xeon based servers. The Register has more details.

My high level non factual 5 second dismissive take on this: Solaris is good and people still like it, for now. Sun hardware is fantastic, but way too damn expensive. IBM can sell crap to anyone, and is still somehow respected in the "Enterprise." The marriage makes sense, IBM backing an OS that some people want (and still offering other OSes like SuSE Linux too).

And now for some ranting:

In the long term, Solaris x86 is just a stop gap. Linux will "win" despite efforts to beat it. Linux is entrenched *because* it was the first major OS (along with OpenBSD and a few others) to recognize the power of open source. The GPL and Linux are pretty much unstoppable, despite years of people whining about the "cancer" and simultaneously claiming it will never amount to anything.

OS server software will be Linux on x86, lots of boxes, cheap clusters, a commodity. Enterprise shops will still want to buy support, and tested distros, etc, but those are available already from Red Hat, Novell, and so on. We are in the "last throes" of the non Linux data center, really.

Solaris may be better than Linux in many ways, better threading, better memory management, better desktop, better whatever, and none of that matters. I don't need the best, I need the most readily available and adaptable open solution that I can cluster to scale (and Linux is no slouch in any of those areas for the record, the point is that stuff is not the most important factor).

Solaris "x86" itself is an admission of the shifting paradigm. 10 years ago, when many people were already using Linux (myself included), Sun scoffed at x86 altogether - much less open source. And when you install Solaris, even if on Sun hardware, what do you have to do to actually make it useful? Install Sendmail, BIND, Apache httpd, the GNU Freeware tools, and so on.

As more and more people realize that is just silly, and use Linux to begin with, Solaris x86 will be even more marginalized. IBM will sell some in the meantime, but in the long run Solaris can't "beat" Linux.

And don't get me started on other "server" alternative OSes such as Windows DataCenter. That just won't scale economically, support wise, security wise, nothing. I know many people use it now, and it is a capable product, but it is not going to have any affect at smart companies that recognize the need to commoditize and scale (and throw virtualization into that mix too). And, in the long run the list of organizations coming to that realization will only increase, because it is truth, not because of any advertising or marketing or anything else. You can't fight the power, simple, whether or not you are "better."