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I like Linux, the software, just fine.

What I don’t like is listening to all the theological arguments over the GPL. Where I timed out on the issue was when Linus switched the version control system from CVS over to BitKeeper. The crap that the Linux mob gave McVoy was repugnant. So let’s put it this way: Much like some of the BS that comes with using a Mac, it isn’t the OS or hardware that I don’t like. It is the people that it attracts that I cannot tolerate.

From that perspective, I much prefer the BSD licenses. And truth be told, I like the FreeBSD way of dividing up the work and responsibility - it results in more useful work being done.

When I made the remark of supporting 64 CPU’s, I should have made it more clear that was in the context of supporting Oracle, as Solaris has been doing for Oracle. There’s a lot more to running Oracle and a major database than most Linux advocates would like to admit. (there’s a lot more to commercial applications than most of the Free Software mob would like to admit - but theirs is an epistemological aversion to profit, so they’re consistent). The Linux development mob loves to fiddle with stuff in the kernel - and since they’re not being paid, they’re certainly free to spend their time any way they wish.

However, for a large IT environment running a DBMS, there’s plenty more that has to be there than just a slick kernel. The job ain’t done until the data has been put onto disk.

This is why IBM and Fujitsu continue to ship mainframe iron that is still compatible with software written 40 years ago. That’s why a big piece of Sun’s product line is their storage systems.

For Oracle, their main competition in the largest of database deployments is IBM, and at the high end, they’re competing against z/OS and z9 or z10 series mainframe iron with a similar number of CPU’s on a SMP machine, with software that offers more features than Solaris and a TON more features than Linux. Thousands of CPU’s and tons of GFLOPS don’t enter into the situation - scalability and drop-dead reliability with all the features the database uses/needs, from the CPU all the way down to the disk IO, is the issue for them. From that perspective, it is obvious why Oracle bought up Sun. They have to have Solaris, and for the time being, they need Sun’s server hardware. In the future, they could probably find compliant commodity hardware of the capacity they need in some x86 variant, but they’re going to still want many of the features of Solaris, because it is those features that they’ll need to go up against IBM. In the end, their performance will have to scale based on database transaction performance, not floating point benchmarks.

I’ll grant you that Linux works fine for 1024 or 2048 CPU’s in whatever the latest flavor of atrociously unprofitable floating-point crunch box is. Again, my comments were in the context of scalable Oracle performance.