I feel fifteen years younger. Last week, I got swept away in the sweet, sweet BSD Unix that is the Darwin 8.x core of Apple's Mac OS X Tiger. Today, I'm delightedly up to my chin in Open Solaris, the official drop of the "express" cut of Solaris 10 for Sparc and x86.
Do Darwin 8 and Open Solaris really matter? Hell, yes. More than you can imagine. If you just like a good fight, the battle lines are drawn: Sun and AMD on one front, Apple and Intel on another. I don't see them battling Windows. They're aiming at each other, and at Linux. Sun and Apple are challenging the presumption that Linux will grab all the rack space lost to the declining sales of low to midrange Unix systems.
It's bath night for my son, and bubbles (and most other things) always take precedence over blogging for me. I'll take this up in my next column. But be assured: This has been a momentous couple of weeks where the future of computing is concerned. Hail the return of real Unix to the x86.
A quick side note: During the conference call announcing the 6/14 launch of Open Solaris, Sun officials were asked to predict what kinds of solutions customers might develop using Open Solaris. The consensus was that "the number of new distributions will be our metric for success." Just before that company line was delivered, a lone Sun voice said that hey, we're hoping that the community will port Solaris to PowerPC for us.
I love this freakin' job.
--------Posted by Tom Yager on June 14, 2005 06:28 PM
