Linux is a reinvented wheel, and not always a very good one either. I do not think people understand portability very well beyond `will it run on RedHat AND SUSE?', which is quite a narrow perspective. POSIX is about portability, and I notice Linux programmers like to claim it an awful lot as a 'checkbox' item on freshmeat.net, but most of the time, that checkbox is the extent of the portability.
When I write something on Solaris, I can much more easily write it to be portable, and chances are it will build or run ok on other commercial grade Unixes, and that is my primary concern. Because if it's portable now, it will also age well, and be usable for far, far longer than something that requires yet-another-version of glibc or something similar. Most of my associates, wether they use Linux only, or use it and other Unix flavors, have complained to me about a problem known as `dependency hell' where conflicting and multiple versions of supporting libraries and applications are needed to build or run an application. It's quite awful, and not much fun to deal with either, but it is not something I have to deal with under Solaris and other Unixes as much by far, because they are standards based, and standards compliant. Linux also suffers from programmers bringing their politics into the mix in a bad way too. The Linux crypto framework is a great example of this, stupid anti-patent protests & sheer lazyness pretty much killed that project off, and Linux is poorer for it. I do not need or want that type of thing in my operating system, and that is but one bad example of the phenomenon. I have ported a large number of programs that were written to run under Linux that claim portability, but in truth they are not very portable at all, and have required serious recoding to build and run. While I would love to have some more advanced tools than LINCAT to use on Solaris, what I do not want is to see Solaris start falling into some of the slop traps that Linux suffers from. I am fine with people making their own Linux-like OpenSolaris distros, but please do not expect me to run them. I prefer reliability and stability over the twitchy barely thought out trend of the moment that Linux often suffers from. -G This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
