http://www.adgerlinux.com

http://www.badgerlinux.net

Chris: i agree, conversion will be important. it’ll be critical for Solaris – just as it is for MySQL and others – to use financial conversion as a means for demonstrating traction to ISVs.

great point on binary compatability.

Jonathan: i’ll be speaking on just that subject at OSCON; stay tuned. but i’m becoming more convinced every day that the original assertion is accurate.

Bryan: well…economically unsustainable? i don’t know. the jump to 2.4 to 2.6, for example, was far from seamless and quite painful for some ISVs, but given a sizable enough volume it’s justifiable – much like it is in the Windows world. but point taken on binary compatability; it’ll be interesting to see how seriously this is taken from Linux in future, and further how that impacts development speed.

Mike: good points all around, and i can absolutely confirm that the world is watching. no huge commitments, but there’s a definite feeling that Debian is a community worth working with.

on your last point, true. but the reverse is also true, n’est-ce pas?

What Mark has going after with Canonical is different and innovative in approach – it will be interesting to see where this goes especially with Dapper Drake and full support. I think it’s too early to speculate if ISVs and enterprises will pick it up to the point of IBM, Intel, AMD, HP, Oracle, Fujitsu, and Dell supporting it, but you can bet the world is watching.

I’m more interested in the millions of high school and undergrad students who are learning operating systems, development, and administration on Ubuntu/Debian… interesting things can be driven by the skill base.

I also applaud what Mark has done for making a social impact with Ubuntu. It’s that type of impact that drives a dedicated community.

But you know what… all those Ubuntu skills are very easily portable to RHEL and SLES… commercial adoption is not an easy task.

Finally, on the Nvidia/DTrace rumor: to the best of my knowledge, Nvidia hasn’t added any DTrace probes, but with the FBT provider they also don’t need to — DTrace can be used today to observe the inner-workings of the driver. (Indeed, I’ve done just that in several public demonstrations — and that may be the source of the rumor.) If Nvidia is adding stable DTrace probes to their driver, that’s obviously great — but given that they take the time to obfuscate their symbol names, it seems unlikely that they would invest in technology that allows their customers to better understand their driver…

Very thoughtful piece. I’m seeing more evidence by the day that the world I (and others) described even a year or two ago, is changing (and that perhaps some of our assumptions were wrong). I would add that the Eclipse/NetBeans world is interesting again, as well… like I said, don’t bet against community.

Choice and competition are good things – far more valuable than hype cycles.

If such a thing did happen, suddenly the market perception around Red Hat (and Solaris) would change dramatically, giving Sun a lot of positive press coverage and Red Hat a lot of negative coverage – which would just accelerate the changing market. Sun make most of their money on hardware, so could also afford a price war pretty easily.

However, such a thing wouldn’t necessarily hurt Debian. In fact, if the Linux market stops concentrating on Linux = Red Hat, then Debian would likely benefit.

PS As a side-note, not only is it easier for ISVs to support Solaris than multiple Linux distributions, I’m pretty sure it’s also easier for them to support multiple versions of Solaris (eg support Solaris 8, 9 + 10 with one package). This should help ISV support for Solaris in the longer term.

Basically, the Solaris engineers are really careful about backwards compatability. Of course, ISVs would need to do extra work to make use of new features in new versions of Solaris, but even then, Sun engineers seem to bend over backwards making ISVs life simpler – eg with the new network driver framework (GLDv3 aka Project Nemo), there’s been a number of posts on blogs.sun.com about it specifically mentioning making it easier for ISVs to use the new framework. Of course, I have no idea how ISVs view things…

PPS Nvidia’s drivers for Solaris have specific DTrace support (stable providers or something). I first heard about this late last year but I dunno if they’re still doing this or have decided to mention it officially yet.