>>Come on!  Everyone knows that the only reason Sun went SysV is because
>>they slept with AT&T.  If that had not happened, since Sun was the leader
>>in the field at the time, SVR4 would not be NEARLY as prevalent.  A lot
>>of businesses invested much of their capital budget in Sun systems.  They
>>are using Solaris now because they don't really have a choice.
>
>Eh?  We use sparcs almost exclusively where I work, and there's not a
>single Solaris box in the building.  I'd say we definitely have a
>choice.

Depends on how you look at it.

Sun is barely supporting SunOS 4 ... nearly everything added since 4.1.1 has
just been bug fixes.  Meanwhile, most of Sun's energy is being poured into
Solaris-only products, like HotJava (I know HotJava is supposed to be portable,
but I've heard a lot of talk that it isn't).  Solaris has all the newer
technology in it, like multicast, a non-ancient sendmail, support for some
TCP options, etc etc.  And you're forced to run Solaris on some of their
machines like the Sparc 1000.

I see more and more Solaris-only products all the time; admittedly, the list
isn't that big now, but look again next year.

I used to work for a company that developed speech tools for Unix
workstations.  When conversing with Sun engineers about deficiencies with
the Sun audio drivers, we were told they were fixed in Solaris and a
special one-time-only, do-not-distribute patch was generated for us that
allowed us to workaround the problem.  We were also told that this problem
would never get fixed in SunOS 4.

Don't get me wrong; I'm no fan of Solaris.  But I'm willing to bet that
Sun will announce that they are dropping support for SunOS 4 in a couple
of years.  While I would choose SunOS over Solaris, I can understand
why more and more people are moving over.

I guess our only hope for the future is NetBSD/sparc :-)

--Ken