Hi,
dev wrote:
It would be a waste of effort to look at anything previous to a
Sun Fire V890 or any UltraSPARC IV based server. There are very
few out there running Solaris any more and only hobby types have
SPARC anywhere else.
The first thing you forget is the fun factor. People devote time in
open-source also because of fun and other "profit" from it. If
everything was for profit, a lot wouldn't exist.
Otherwise just use Windows or RedHat on intel... and suffer with their bugs!
You might find fun in driving your 1976 car and even learn how to steer,
how to drive without traction control. Perhaps you won't use it for
daily commuting, but to go to the lake in the weekends?
Also, we are not speaking here of Solaris, but on OpenBSD. It can run on
slower stuff even.
Last point, I develop (= code) open source software since many years.
Not only I take pride that it runs on lesser known architectures and
operating systems, but doing so helped me find so many bugs that make my
software more robust and reliable than the average program coded for
"Linux and x86".
Buffer overflows, uninitialized variables.. especially structure members
are very sensitive on SPARC.
My stuff is more desktop oriented, so perhaps of less use for some
people here, but still !
Right below my SS20 there is a Fire, so don't worry, I'm working to get
my stuff working on Solaris and UltraSPARC too. If it runs on both, it
is a gain for the free software world.
Riccardo
