[geeks] Article: Sun's not so cheap trick doesn't work

[Jonathan C. Patschke]

On Fri, 10 Oct 2008, Joshua Boyd wrote:

> I'd recommend Ubuntu or Solaris before RHEL.

I generally like recommending things to my customers that I can say with a
straight face.  "I recommend we consolidate all our future IS
infrastructure on the *twitch* Ubuntu platform, specifically the *snicker*
Hoary Hedgehog release, or, if we're feeling really ambitious, we could go
for *chuckle* Intrepid Ibex".

The curse of open source is that it seems impossible to be both a free
software hacker and be competent at naming anything.  The FOSS community
is full of garbage names like "GlassFish", "RenderBitch", "Spidermonkey",
"SquirrelFish", and "Anjunta".  I don't care if the word "ubuntu" is
"too beautiful" to translate into English; you can't say it without
sounding like like Mushmouth.

RHEL 5 is bloated crap, but its crappiness is well-documented and
well-understood; ISVs also like to support it.  I'd recommend Solaris or
FreeBSD before any Linux, though.  FreeBSD is an excellent high-
performance OS if you don't need much in the way of commercial
software support, and Solaris is a close second if you do.

It's too bad that Sun gave up on making money with Solaris right about the
time that it turned into something worth running.  People used to pay
through the nose for the privilege of running the absolute garbage that
was Solaris 2.4, but 8 and later were effectively free.  Sun could price
it for commercial use at $150/system and probably make back a decent
amount of the cash they're bleeding.

-- 
Jonathan Patschke | "There is more to life than increasing its speed."
Elgin, TX         |                                   --Mahatma Gandhi
USA               |