[OpenIndiana-discuss] Update info?

[Blake]

I certainly understand your point of view, Richard.  Unfortunately, fewer
developers nowadays understand systems, and that's not likely to improve.

My point is more that tool choice in business is driven by opportunity cost
and the bottom line.  If I have to spend an extra two weeks training devs to
use a Solaris platform, management will often prefer to use the faster,
albeit sloppier, Linux platform instead.  Hence the meteoric rise of Ubuntu,
Ruby, RVM and other easy-but-not-that-stable tools.  Stability ends up
getting handled with horizontal scale across many systems, rather than
making a smaller set of monolithic systems highly reliable.

I predict that if we as a Solaris community don't adapt to this changing
corporate landscape we will be relegated to a corner along with AIX and
HP-UX.  In *every* development environment I've worked in, developer
response to my suggestion to try Solaris has always started with "why?  it's
too hard to use/compile on/install".  I've been able to change these
opinions in some cases, but it's a hellish uphill battle when the Solaris
community has refused (until fairly recently), to compromise in the
userspace.

All I want is to get as many people as possible using and contributing to
this project :)


Blake

On Tue, May 24, 2011 at 2:12 PM, Richard L. Hamilton <rlhamil at smart.net>wrote:

>
> On May 24, 2011, at 12:13 PM, Blake Irvin wrote:
>
> > As a longtime Solaris user I don't have to be convinced that it's better
> in many ways than Linux.  But there is a reality that I've been forced to
> embrace - developers don't care.
> >
> > I'm in the process right now of helping a large development team make the
> transition to a Solaris hosting solution.  I've spent hundreds of hours with
> my operations team customizing our environments so that they 'look and feel'
> like Ubuntu.
> >
> > Why?  Because that's what the current crop of developers know, and it's
> too expensive to train them otherwise.
>
> Being both a programmer and a sysadmin, I wonder how good a developer is
> that needs to be trained to learn something new.  There's got to be a
> "Solaris for Linux users" doc around somewhere.  If someone can write code,
> they _should_ be able to read English, too.
>
> If they're too stumped to _use_ more than one environment, they're
> certainly not going to be the brightest about writing portable code.
>
> People who have trouble learning something new are just dead men walking.
>  Flip the switch, enjoy the crackly sound, and get new ones.
>
>
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