Chaos Program

I usually stay away from the popular news of the day but this one was so funny I had to say something about it: IBM in Talks to Buy Sun in Bid to Add to Web Heft (Note: This link keeps coming up with an excerpt and a “subscribe” link, but when I opened it from Google search results it gave me the whole article. Interesting, huh?). The short version of this is that the two companies are in talks and there’s a possible price tag of $6.5 billion.  As of this writing, no actual deal has been announced. They’re just talking. Interestingly, according to the WSJ article, Sun has been looking for a buyer for some months. This makes sense to me since I’ve considered Sun to be doomed for several years.

I’ve worked with Sun’s Solaris operating system quite a bit. I like it. It’s terrifically stable. In fact, the times when it seemed to fail there was always an underlying hardware problem. Sun hardware is pretty good, too. Some of their Sparc stations run practically forever. That said, I don’t see Solaris to be all that much better than Linux and it costs MUCH more (On any hardware. Linux has been ported to everything except my mailbox but it’s not much of a mailbox). The extra cost for Sun just isn’t worth it.

When I worked at the newspaper the editorial software we put in during my first year ran on Solaris 8 on a pair of V880s the size of one of those mini office refrigerators. At the time, that editorial system depended on Oracle for the db and was not available on Linux. It was a powerful, very stable and fabulously expensive system. That editorial software is now available on Linux. It’s still fabulously expensive but the cost of the hardware and the operating system are a fraction of what they used to be.
read more »