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- Newsgroups: comp.sys.sun.admin
- Path: sparky!uunet!nih-csl.dcrt.nih.gov!yog-sothoth.dcrt.nih.gov!jwa
- From: jwa@yog-sothoth.dcrt.nih.gov (James W. Adams)
- Subject: Re: avoiding Solaris
- Message-ID: <1992Nov18.161533.20891@alw.nih.gov>
- Sender: postman@alw.nih.gov (AMDS Postmaster)
- Organization: National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD
- References: <morgaine.721992103@siap.sublink.org> <15540@auspex-gw.auspex.com> <BxwsK4.6Ko@VOA.GOV>
- Date: Wed, 18 Nov 1992 16:15:33 GMT
- Lines: 35
-
- In article <BxwsK4.6Ko@VOA.GOV> ck@VOA.GOV (Chris Kern) writes:
- >In article <15540@auspex-gw.auspex.com> guy@Auspex.COM (Guy Harris) writes:
- >>
- >>Unfortunately, all too many people are going for general philosophical
- >>whines about BSD vs. SV, rather than for specific complaints about the
- >>fact that the OS is changing at all.
- >
- >Which is surprising to me *especially* when it comes from techies.
- >I understand why, say, a casual MS-DOS user would be anxious about and
- >disoriented by even a superficial change in the computing environment
- >he is accustomed to. I would have assumed, at least before seeing the
- >high hysteria in this thread, that most techies would take such a
- >change in stride.
- >[...]
-
- I think the key to this issue is that UNIX is more than an "operating
- system." It is really a "computing environment." Most people I know
- with concerns about the SunOS 4 -> SunOS 5 switch are not concerned with
- niggling details of the kernel implementation (as others have pointed
- out, SunOS 4 was a major contributor to SVR4 and is already a major
- departure from 4.3BSD).
-
- People like the present environment and don't want to change. Worse,
- many regard this as the start of a trend leading to loss of much of the
- useful UNIX applications environment. OS/2 comes with little in the way
- of the applications environment of SunOS 4.1.x or 4.xBSD. There is no
- reason to believe that NT will be any different. Business users don't
- care so much about this because they primarily want to run shrink-wrap
- apps. The people who are upset are the ones who want to develop,
- customize or at least extend the functionality of applications they use.
- --
- James W. Adams -- NIH Scientific Computing Resource Center
- Building 12A, Room 1050 phone: (301) 402-3488
- National Institutes of Health uucp: uunet!nih-csl!jwa
- Bethesda, MD 20892 Internet: jwa@alw.nih.gov
-