Sun stares down Red Hat with Solaris 10
Found on The Register on Sunday, 14 November 2004
That appears to be the flag Sun Microsystems will be waving today as it officially unveils Solaris 10 (even though the OS won't actually ship until January). Sun is eliminating the fee customers have paid in the past to run Solaris x86 on Intel or AMD servers in a bid to make its software model more like that of Red Hat. In so doing, the Unix server maker hopes to regain ground lost as customers flocked to Linux boxes in the post-bubble era.
Sun manages to garner a lot of attention for new versions of Solaris and is hoping that some of those folks that went with Linux will be tempted to give Solaris another try. This mid-tier pricing model gives Intel and AMD server customers a chance to test Solaris for free.
I think I'll give Solaris a try. Being around for so long, it surely can be considered stable and reliable. I don't know if I'd switch from Linux to Solaris, since this would depend a lot from the required 3rd party software.