Sun, Red Hat gird for traditional OS battle

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Binary incompatibility?

/What/ binary incompatibility? I've got the same binaries running on RHEL 3.0, RH7.2, RH7.3, Mandrake 9.0, SuSE 9.0, and unnumbered Gentoo flavors. They all work fine.

The only "binary incompatibility" we've seen so far is between Red Hat versions, where some vendor actually writes tests for Red Hat versioning into wrapper scripts. Since the wrapper scripts are plain ASCII, we just either:
a) Edit them out, or
b) set the environment variables that "fake them out" to let the tool run -- which it then does without complaint.

The net conclusion is that any incompatibility is deliberately introduced, not by Red Hat, but by the third-party vendors.

If Sun thinks that those third-party vendors will start writing to lock out Red Hat instead of Sun, I want some of what Schwartz is smoking. The vendors I know (electronic-design automation) have been developing on Linux for years and then porting to Sun -- this, even when Sun was the dominant customer platform.

The noise about vendor incompatibility is the same as we saw back in the early 80s over "true IBM PCs" -- people got over it once they figured out that the platform was a commodity. There's no more magic to running on Red Hat (vs. SuSE) than there is to running on a Dell (vs. HP).

Customers may not need access to source code (althouth it certainly helps at three in the morning) but third-party developers certainly do. That's why Linux replaced Sun as the preferred development platform. At this point, the best Sun can hope for is to be included along with RHEL, since the binaries should work equally with both.

Posted by: Yagotta B. Kidding   Posted on: 06/10/04 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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