Inaccuracy and further comment
Inaccuracy and further comment
Posted Nov 18, 2004 9:13 UTC (Thu) by jhs (guest, #12429)In reply to: Inaccuracy and further comment by paulj
Parent article: Solaris 10
Agreed. This article seemed a little more guided by philosophical or emotional motives than technical motives.
> Sun lacks the momentum that Linux has gained
Sun still has an *enormous* global deployment much larger in scope and importance than Linux deployments. In almost every medium-to-large company in the world, Sun is there, to various degrees. The same cannot yet be said about Linux. Indeed, it is Sun, not Linux, that has the momentum.
The author probably meant that Linux-the-OS has much more potential than Solaris, which is at this point pretty apparent.
Posted Nov 18, 2004 23:14 UTC (Thu)
by edgewood (subscriber, #1123)
[Link] (2 responses)
Linux's installed base is indeed smaller, but it's bigger this year than it was last year, and huge compared to what it was five years ago. That "velocity" can give it the higher momentum, and I think it does.
Posted Nov 19, 2004 19:23 UTC (Fri)
by giraffedata (guest, #1954)
[Link] (1 responses)
I don't see any way to break down OS momentum into analogies of mass and velocity.
But I don't think rate of growth is any part of an OS' momentum. Momentum is the tendency of a moving object to keep moving. An object with great momentum doesn't speed up or get larger. It just doesn't come to rest easily.
I see Solaris as having great momentum. Longtime users give an OS momentum. I can't tell how much momentum Linux has. New users are often easily switched to something else.
Posted Nov 20, 2004 7:23 UTC (Sat)
by hppnq (guest, #14462)
[Link]
In physics, momentum is the product of mass and velocity. So the installed base of Solaris, its "mass", is indeed crucial to the question of whether Solaris has more momentum. But just as crucial is its "velocity". How big is the Solaris installed base compared to last year? Probably about the same size. Compared to five years ago? It might have been bigger then, at the height of the dot.com boom.Inaccuracy and further comment
You seem to be taking rate of growth as velocity. That ruins the analogy, because in physics, velocity isn't the rate at which the mass in increasing.
Momentum
Now, black holes and OSes, there's an analogy. ;-)
Momentum