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It's all context specific. When you say "people don't care", I think you have a specific, but not explicitly defined, set of "people" and "organizations" you a

It's all context specific. When you say "people don't care", I think you have a specific, but not explicitly defined, set of "people" and "organizations" you are presuming. Proprietary Unixes are still common enough in large traditional organizations to stay profitable and developed. They get purchased or bundled by non-hands-on people likely using different criteria than average hacker news hacker might consider. (Source or disclaimer - probably half the projects I've been on in ERP space are on proprietary Unix. My problems are very different [not implying better or worse] than those typically discussed here)

syshum 5y ago
While that is true. It is also true that many many companies are moving their ERP systems off unix
- NikolaNovak 5y ago
  For sure. Not as many as I would've thought though. A perspective in large number of orgs I've seen (not claiming right or wrong) is that Linux is better at horizontal scaling while Unix is better at vertical scaling. Vertical scaling is out of fashion but still powerful for many scenarios. So I've been in many rooms where prevalent thought is "Linux is great we love Linux we want more Linux, but we want this database to run on 128 cores and we don't feel Linux is the right choice". So I've seen clean slate ERP implementations on Unix, not just legacy upgrades. And I mean, what some of these things do in firmware is impressive. They do on firmware and hardware level what we're these days doing in software and software defined whatever. Different worlds though :-)
znpy 5y ago
that doesn't really make sense. organizations with enough cash to use solaris for production environment probably have enough cash to pay for licenses for dev/staging environments too. this move is likely a (desperate?) try to keep solaris relevant among open source developers. tbh, if I were developing something and somebody asked me to support a proprietary operating system I can't run in a VM... the least I'd ask for is for them to provide me a licensed environment (like at least a virtual machine or something, with the license paid by the requestor) for me to run tests and stuff.

syshum 5y ago

While that is true. It is also true that many many companies are moving their ERP systems off unix

NikolaNovak 5y ago
For sure. Not as many as I would've thought though. A perspective in large number of orgs I've seen (not claiming right or wrong) is that Linux is better at horizontal scaling while Unix is better at vertical scaling. Vertical scaling is out of fashion but still powerful for many scenarios. So I've been in many rooms where prevalent thought is "Linux is great we love Linux we want more Linux, but we want this database to run on 128 cores and we don't feel Linux is the right choice". So I've seen clean slate ERP implementations on Unix, not just legacy upgrades. And I mean, what some of these things do in firmware is impressive. They do on firmware and hardware level what we're these days doing in software and software defined whatever. Different worlds though :-)

znpy 5y ago

that doesn't really make sense. organizations with enough cash to use solaris for production environment probably have enough cash to pay for licenses for dev/staging environments too. this move is likely a (desperate?) try to keep solaris relevant among open source developers. tbh, if I were developing something and somebody asked me to support a proprietary operating system I can't run in a VM... the least I'd ask for is for them to provide me a licensed environment (like at least a virtual machine or something, with the license paid by the requestor) for me to run tests and stuff.