Now I do not always quite agree with everything that our ponytailed leader says in public, but in this one Jonathan is, as we Brits say, bang on the money.

Solaris and its nifty new features is not a threat to any of Linux, linux, or GNU/[Ll]inux; it is a competitor to those firms which try to take the Linux platform and use it in “Enterprise” environments, where white-box PCs and DIY support will not really cut any ice.

Before anyone reading this dismisses me as a toadying Sunite who is down on Linux, please consider that I have been running Linux at home since – ooh, 1993 perhaps? Good lord, was it that long?

Looking at [www.linuxjournal.com] seems to imply such.

I started on SLS distributions and forget whether it was a 0.97- or 0.99-series kernel that I first took up to Sun’s then- High Wycombe office to show the SunSoft/InteractiveUnix folk (I was their site admin, and gelled with the IU techies) and boot on one of their EISA Dell 466ME’s – and subsequently got into a flaming argument on an internal maillist about whether this presaged the future and what had Sun better do about it.

Incidentally: Being a cautious sort I subsequently bought a 466ME – having thus tested its ability to run Linux – but tellingly one of my reasons for laying out my own money to buy Linux-able hardware was that an old mate of mine (Alan Cox) seemed to be tight with the Linux in-crowd.

This I considered to be my support safety net. Support is important to cautious people. Verb sap.

So: I’ve been running Linux at home for more than a decade, I still do although I have a lot of Macintosh too, and also I’d like to note that CrackLib has been bundled with every major distribution since RedHat 4.something, so however narrow my focus of interest I am one of probably rather few open-source software authors who happen to work for Sun and who also happen to have an installed userbase measured in millions.

That I’ve not done much programming, nor published much code of late is a matter for an entirely other kind of posting, although that can in part be blamed on my discovery of motorcycles.

So I like Linux. I have gone to bat for Linux. I also believe it’s not necessarily the right solution for every given job.

Anyway… back to my original point.

Jonathan’s right; now I live in hope of a turnabout is fair play article in which he announces the dropping of the X86 designation from the those installations of Solaris which merely happen to run on Intel and Intel-alike architectures, as if the inclusion of same amongst the list of supported Solaris platforms were some manner of afterthought.

After all SPARC hardware is just that: SPARC; further, UltraSPARC is UltraSPARC – but what snappy modern term exists for those chipsets whose instruction sets evolved from the 80386? Three or more chip vendors, many many implementations, nobody seems to want to call anything with an infix “86” anymore, and Solaris-for-PCs would sound daft to my ears.

I’d rather just get rid of the distinction entirely.

There are pros-and-cons to this idea: perhaps confusing customers who (through some incorrect reflex) believe that Solaris equals SPARC and therefore presume that SolarisX86 is some inferior second-tier port; but I would see this as a communications opportunity…