Sun Microsystems Inc.'s announcement this week that it plans to make Solaris an "open-source" operating system was met with mixed reactions from users and skepticism from open-source advocates. . . .
Sun Microsystems Inc.'s announcement this week that it plans to make Solaris an "open-source" operating system was met with mixed reactions from users and skepticism from open-source advocates.

"I'm totally nonplussed by the announcement," said Dale Pickford, chief infrastructure officer at Ocwen Technology Xchange Inc., the technology subsidiary of financial services company Ocwen Financial Corp. in West Palm Beach, Fla.

Ocwen last year consolidated around 140 servers into several high-end Sun servers running Solaris -- one with more than 100 processors. For smaller servers with four or fewer CPUs, Linux on Intel is suitable, Pickford said. But for systems larger than that, "the Sparc [processor] and Solaris environment really comes into its own," he said. "And once you start playing at that level anyway, you don't want to be messing with the OS."

Terry Verity, CIO at Seneca College in Toronto, runs 66 Sun servers, including one with an Oracle Corp. database containing 50 million records. Verity said he opted for Solaris over Linux because it's strongly supported, secure and well maintained. Although Verity said using Linux is becoming less of a security concern, he plans to stick with Solaris.

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