Ubuntu to cease Sparc port?
I don't know what to think about this mail sent out on Ubuntu development list. I have been living in Sparc-land for well over 10 years, mainly running SunOS on servers, hundreds of them. Whatever I think of the development in days gone by I have grown attached to them, kind of a love-hate-affair we have. I run Ubuntu on several PC's on Intel platforms, both stationary and laptops, and I am fairly happy about them. I don't do heavy development anymore so performance is not the main issue, functionality is. All in all I'm pleased with the environment when it's tweaked to please my eye and behavior.
What worries me more than anything else is that this might be one outcome of the Oracle acquisition of Sun Microsystems. That Larry Ellison decides he wants to keep things close to him and change the fairly open atmosphere Sun started to market in the latter days. Not only Ubuntu will suffer from this, more importantly OpenSolaris will. If OpenSolaris dies Solaris will probably see a future very much like that of Oracle databases, with patches coming out maybe five years after security issues has been discovered. If Oracle says it is not an issue, then no patches will appear. Period. What's next, MySQL going the same way? That would be a more understandable reasoning since MySQL is a competitor to Oracle in-house, even though no-one at Oracle ever would admit that.
It just worries me a bit...
What worries me more than anything else is that this might be one outcome of the Oracle acquisition of Sun Microsystems. That Larry Ellison decides he wants to keep things close to him and change the fairly open atmosphere Sun started to market in the latter days. Not only Ubuntu will suffer from this, more importantly OpenSolaris will. If OpenSolaris dies Solaris will probably see a future very much like that of Oracle databases, with patches coming out maybe five years after security issues has been discovered. If Oracle says it is not an issue, then no patches will appear. Period. What's next, MySQL going the same way? That would be a more understandable reasoning since MySQL is a competitor to Oracle in-house, even though no-one at Oracle ever would admit that.
It just worries me a bit...
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