[OpenIndiana-discuss] Oracle Solaris on x86 going to be killed?

[Richard L. Hamilton]

On Jan 7, 2012, at 4:42 AM, Andrew McRae wrote:

> If you read the whole statement, and its context, rather than just pulling out a few words like this, then it's clear that what he means is "if SPARC was cancelled, then Oracle would not control the CPU that their OS (Solaris) runs on, and that would be bad for Solaris". He's not suggesting that anything is going to be killed -- quite the opposite.

That cuts both ways: having one's own CPU _and_ having the OS run on something else are insurance either way, whether one's own CPU line loses competitiveness, or whether the objectives of some other CPU maker (Intel/AMD) become less compatible with the objectives of producing one's own OS.

With both, and source-level compatibility under Solaris between x86 and SPARC (too bad IBM gobbled up that product that let SPARC binaries transparently run on x86, and then let it die), customers should have a level of confidence in the future of the platform greater than they'd have with either alone.