Re:Sorry, but Linux *IS* inferior... (Score 1)

I think I understand (and agree) with the thrust of this post, but I think that it's important to qualify your statement. Inferiority is extremely subjective. Linux is inferior in terms of scalability, stability, and such, on high end hardware. As much as I wish it weren't so, that's just how it is.

However, Linux is not inferior in some other respects -- Linux is a pleasure to work with (especially Debian) and Solaris is not. Solaris is a major, major pain in the ass.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, as some famous guy once said. Anyone that has ever extensively administered both OS understands that there are places Solaris excels and others where Linux excels. Saying one is inferior without qualifying your statement is silly.

So now the question is why? I have a thought on this. Linux is, by in large, a free (non-funded) development effort. This is one of the things that makes it scream on older hardware and futz up on the bleeding edge stuff -- you need time for free software developers to get the new stuff working because most companies don't support Linux.

Sun big-iron servers and their ilk cost a lot of money. Much more than the average Free Software developer could possibly afford. As a result, Linux is not (and cannot easily be) tuned for these systems. Is it any wonder that it doesn't run well on them?

Solaris is designed to be the sort of OS that runs these servers -- it's not meant to have nice, user friendly tools, and increasingly Sun is coming to terms with the fact that people prefer Linux's interface to Solaris'. But Solaris will probably always be ahead of Linux in the server market, because Sun has a lot of these servers to dev Solaris on (they make them, after all) and the Free Software Linux core will never be able to afford these machines -- and since most people don't run them it's arguably a waste of effort. And unless you're a real Free as in Freedom advocate, there's no reason not to run Solaris on these machines. It's free as in beer anyway and you know it's going to work on your 64 way Sun server.

For really expensive hardware, it's just not workable to have good Free Software. No one is making FreeMVS, for example. Where would you test it? No one has a 2 million dollar IBM mainframe just sitting at home for development.

See what I mean?