I don't think that will work.
It would work if Solaris was something people really desired. Right now, it's not. People are very happy with Linux and need some incentive to move to Solaris. Paying more is not a good one.
The IBM AS400 isn't something that people really desire, but there are a lot of businesses that rely on it and IBM still gets paid to support mainframes.
[1] http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc/2004/08/28/the-economics-of-soft...
I liked OS/400, you insensitive clod. If I come across a 5250, I'll buy it immediately.
Not sure what I'll connect it to.
But, going back to Solaris and OpenSolaris, it's easy to switch a deployment to "legacy mode". Unix machines are Unix machines and it's not nearly as difficult to move from AIX/HP-UX/Solaris/IRIX to Linux as it would be to move from MVS, unless your binaries insist on running only under Solaris. Legacy mode means no new deployments and no expansion unless justified. It's slow death.
True, in the case of very proprietary platforms (like z and iSeries boxes) it takes very long, but it's death nevertheless.
In order to be kept alive, the Solaris boxes have to be able to perform tricks Linux boxes can't and, to a large extent, this is not the case.
But I'm not saying that Solaris is going to live. Just that, as someone who uses Solaris 10, Oracle seems to be tightening up. I think that they don't really care that much about Solaris and are just going to squeeze it dry. I'm far more worried what they're going to do with Java.
> In order to be kept alive, the Solaris boxes have to be able to perform tricks Linux boxes can't and, to a large extent, this is not the case.
True, but keep in mind that their competitors are often limited to "enterprise" distributions like RHEL and Ubuntu Server.
I for one am not happy with Linux and would love to run Open/whateverSolaris ... if it has serious driver support. That's been the Achilles heal of x86 Solaris for more than a decade (e.g. something I directly experienced in 1999) and fixing that will likely be a determining factor in its future success.
Unfortunately that's very painful hard work and lots of it, I wouldn't predict success on general principles. But one can hope.
