Solar Power
July 13, 2005 11:55 AM 
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What good is Sun's "World Class Support"?
Sun is
promoting a deal where you pay about $30 per month for three years of "support" and get a "Free" Ultra20 development workstation. The total cost works out to be slightly more than just buying the machine outright, but probably less than more conventional financing. Is there anything wonderful about Sun's support that makes this a great deal?
1. Is Sun's support useful to someone who is a fairly competent developer/manager, but has little experience on the Java platform?
2. Ignoring the support, if I knew I wanted to develop a commercial product on the Java platform, is there any reason to prefer the Sun platform over Apple or generic Linux hardware?
3. If I'm just doing C++ or Perl/PHP/etc. development, is there any reason to prefer the Sun platform?
If you're just writing business apps, in general you code to a certain version number of JVM, for stability reasons, and that opens you up to pretty much any platform you want, these days.
Also, what IDE do you want to run? That might decide your platform for you.
Unless you buy Sun's compilers, you'll be doing C++ development on a Solaris box using GCC, which you can do under OS X or Linux. So there's no advantage really to using Solaris for C++ unless you spend the extra on Sun's tools.
Sun support, at least when I did it, came down to getting system patches ahead of time on an on-call basis, i.e. when an OS incident popped up that would cause kernel panics or service failures. Otherwise, the security patches are free, and the system patches are generally free once they've been tested and rolled out.
posted by Rothko at 12:39 PM on July 13, 2005