[Ti] Apple's True Market Share!

[Mark C. Langston]

On Thu, Dec 12, 2002 at 11:39:07AM -0600, Loren Schooley wrote:
> 
> Oh, cool, Early Access?
> 
> The Solaris 9 x86 OE Customer Early Access software is:
> 
> *    not suitable for deployment on any production systems
> *    not supported and supplied as-is; please read the license agreement for
> additional restrictions and disclaimers for more information
> *    only available for the x86 platform
> *    is compatible with hardware configurations listed on the Hardware
> Compatibility Page
> 
> Still, seems a bit different than previously released x86. The 8 ISO seemed
> like it was a fully operational system. Was it not?



Sun's development cycle doesn't produce fully-functional OSes from
whole cloth.  It includes a time during which the next OS is released
to beta testers for, well, beta-testing.  This is known by Sun as their
"Early Access" program.

That's not entirely accurate -- there is a private beta period.  Early
Access is closer to a gamma test than beta test.  Still, this is a
normal part of their development cycle.  There will be a final version
of OS 9;  this isn't it.  It does, however, contradict the previous
poster's claim that Sun has given up on x86 development.

-- 
Mark C. Langston                                    Sr. Unix SysAdmin
mark at bitshift.org                                       mark at seti.org
Systems & Network Admin                                SETI Institute
http://bitshift.org                               http://www.seti.org