[OpenIndiana-discuss] [developer] review 2837 - remove print/lp* from gate and use CUPS from userland

[Jim Klimov]

A couple of observations follow...

2012-06-07 11:42, Garrett D'Amore wrote:
> I don't care either way about the "bullet point value" of those items
> unless someone else cares enough to contribute actual resources to the
> project. As far as I know, there is no commercial interest in either of
> these (sort of like SPARC, actually), except that some commercial
> companies want to be able to use illumos as a free alternative to other
> expensive commercial offerings. In theory having such consumers may
> bring mindshare and intangible value, but if it takes a lot of extra
> work on our part, then I want more than just intangibles. A bullet point
> on a power point slide that has nothing to do with actual purchasing
> decisions is totally and utterly meaningless to me.

I know that some time has passed and we all know more than we did
before (i.e. about the need for commercial interest to do some
harder tasks, such as, perhaps, is the SPARC support, and setting
realistic reachable priorities); still, it is interesting how the
points of view evolve :)

----

http://blog.davekoelmeyer.co.nz/2011/06/17/illumos-panel-discussion-some-highlights/

“Solaris 11 is mutating into what some people would call the bootloader 
for the Oracle database. Oracle’s priorities are clearly way different 
from what Sun’s were…I would not be entirely unsurprised if it turns 
that out you can’t actually license Solaris 11 separately…I would be 
actually very surprised if there’s ever a Solaris 12.” – Garrett D’Amore


“There’s a huge installed base of Sun hardware out there in datacenters 
around the world, billions of dollars worth of equipment, and Oracle has 
basically given it the finger.” – Garrett D’Amore

“Oracle has removed sun4u from Solaris 11. So there is no sun4u support 
in Solaris 11, which means that there is this huge amount of hardware, 
this installed base (anything earlier than a year or two ago) that can’t 
run, will not run Solaris 11 at all. And that’s a huge Illumos 
opportunity.” – Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal

---

2012-05-27 4:15, Alasdair Lumsden wrote:
 > I'm sorry to have to tell you this, but SVR4 and SPARC are both dead.
It's as simple as that. Get over it and stop bothering the rest of us.
 > The only SPARC boxes you can buy on eBay are relics, and I'd wager
my Samsung Galaxy S2 phone with it's dual core 1GHz ARM chip can 
outperform all of them.

Does the tab have LOM or RSC installed? ;)

 > Power is now incredibly expensive, and the economics of running old 
equipment make no sense what so ever. If you buy an old SPARC box on 
ebay for $500, it's going to cost you more than that per year to run it.
 > So at this point, as far as I'm concerned the people who want SPARC 
are hobbyists interested in running old equipment, much like how I like 
to get out my Commodore 64 and BBC Micro, or they're lunatics with no 
grip on reality.

Some countries generate the power, and it costs less there.
So, at least, keeping the existing old boxes running for years
may be not a big problem, especially in the non-commercial sector
which gets such things for granted (edu, gov). Some boxes are
pushed off the first-class countries or corporations into
third-class ones for free (as economical help and to sign off
some taxes). Our uni got a Sun E10K that way recently, and they
still think what to do with 108(? IIRC) 300MHz CPUs in a box -
perhaps they'll make a clustering/HPC lab for students...

And, as other experts presented above, around the globe there
are many already-deployed such boxes, which are engineered
well and might run like forever ;)

But, true, the lack of enthusiasm and help (and money) from
these boxes owners may be a showstopper, indeed.

//Jim