If you want to attract hackers to write software that will sell your hardware, you have to make it something that they themselves use. It’s not enough to make it “open.” It has to be open and good.
And open and good is what Macs are again, finally. The intervening years have created a situation that is, as far as I know, without precedent: Apple is popular at the low end and the high end, but not in the middle. My seventy year old mother has a Mac laptop. My friends with PhDs in computer science have Mac laptops. And yet Apple’s overall market share is still small.
Paul Graham sees Apple differently than Tim does (
20). Granted, Solaris never enters the picture (though curiously, x86 hardware and the OSes that drive it’s sales are mentioned).
It looks to me like leaving OS X for Solaris — as a desktop/laptop OS — is abandoning a boutique product, as people describe Apple, for an even more esoteric one. If I am going to run UNIX on fast commodity hardware, it will be with Linux or one of the BSDs for driver support, etc. If I am going to have shop around to find hardware that will run some esoteric OS, I’m not really able to leverage the competitive nature of the commodity market and I’m getting closer to where I just was: I’m buying specialized equipment again.
Me, personally, I’m not sure that I would switch from OS X to Solaris. My issue w/ Solaris is it just seems to run slow. I have a few sun boxes at my house, one running solaris and the others running NetBSD. The NetBSD, to me, seems to run quite a bit faster. Could it be that I’m installing to much w/ Solaris (due to my lack of knowledge of that product)? Maybe. I lean towards the BSD’s more than I do linux, no idea why. Maybe it is because I view the BSD’s as more of a challenge (less support user support etc).
I just got a Mac, mainly because it’s running a unix. I have been pleased w/ the Mac that I have, but it too seems to run a little slower that what I would expect it to.
Pretty sure that my post is off topic, but whatever :). Nice site re-design.
Mark J. Graham
I haven’t run Solaris in ages, so I can’t say if it’s fast or slow. The issue in the places where I have used is the speed of the hardware, since Solaris on anything but SPARC was a non-starter. It seems things have improved there . . . .
Seriously, the simple webserver or app server isn’t going to leverage the SPARC: you can do fine with cheap, fast x86 hardware running a variety of equally fast and even cheaper OSes.
I think a key win for Solaris was always networking and their TCP stack as well as their tunability: tons of variables to tweak and datapoints to monitor (Adrian Cockcroft’s SE tools were amazing to work with).
But worth the differential, especially given the maturity of net-snmp? It’s not an easy call.