Randomness from days gone by...
I was coming home from work the other day on my motorcycle when I felt a significant THUNK on my chest. I could only hope it was an acorn or rock rather than bird poo.Friday night I had an interesting discussion over whether men or women have better orgasms. Funny enough, all the guys said "women", and the one chick shook her head "no".
I've been getting pretty involved in Earthdawn, a D&D-like fantasy role-playing game. It was originally done by FASA (of Shadowrun and Battletech fame) but was later sold to Living Room games and some other company. It's been good relaxation at the end of the week to go hang out with some college kids and not worry about crap like work.
I was reading an interesting series of blogs linked from Slashdot about the new OpenSolaris initiative and why Sun isn't interested in becoming Linux. I think the blogs speak for themselves, but it makes me itch because I'm in the middle.
I've been working on Solaris since 1996 and Linux since 1997; while I moved over to Linux for many years because of cost and hardware, I wanted to move back to Solaris because I saw it providing better job opportunities in an enterprise size company. I was right. However, my group (in one of almost monthly re-orgs) was joined with another where they were almost exclusively Linux (they had two sparcs to handle a Solaris only tool). Some viewed me, down their noses, as a "Solaris guy" who had some beef against Linux. I didn't, considering I'd been administering it for years, just not in my current job.
I find it extraordinary that many Linux/OSS/FS zealots take potshots at me because I'm primarily a Solaris admin; at other times, I've been labelled a Linux/OSS/FS zealot by others for exposing my opinions. How funny to be yelled at by both sides when one refuses to be an extremist.
So I looked at those blogs this morning and I find myself siding with the Solaris guy; not because I think he is 100% right or because I believe Solaris is 100% "The Answer", but because he accepts that Solaris is better at many things. Linux is better at many things. The Linux kernel developer seemed far less accepting.
Nothing is ever the all powerful Oz.
Solaris and Linux both have their place. The GPL is a wonderful license and I use it often, but I recognize that it has failures, some of which Eric Schrock lists. At some point in the future the GPL may be the yardstick which everything else is measured against, but today it is not. People must recognize this.
posted by Lachlan @ 12:40 PM
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