[csw-users] Why support Solaris 8 onwards?

[Ben Taylor]

Donal McMullan wrote:

>I think it was Joel Spolsky who pointed out that code as it gets old,
>doesn't rust. In fact, the longer it runs without incident, the more
>trusted and valued it becomes.
>  
>
And if you've ever been in the situation trying to get support for an 
obsolete OS,
you'll recognize that the first time you have to go through that, you 
wonder why
you didn't upgrade earlier.

>If you want to spend your time replacing battle hardened, proven
>solutions with the shiniest new thing (in other words, fixing things
>that aren't broken) it's probably because you're too young to
>appreciate how precious a commodity time is.
>  
>
That's right, I couldn't possibly understand having worked in the 
financial markets 15 years
ago.  I do recognize, having had the job of coordinating all the open 
bugs with Sun as the
customer, and doing patch management, the hassles involved in getting 
Sun to support
an aging OS and getting problem resolution done.   Due to the large Sun 
presence and
huge support costs paid by this org, several times during my stint, Sun 
had to find
engineers to come out on site and debug the problem because they 
couldn't reproduce
it internally, and the guy who came out was typically the person who 
wrote the driver
or module.

Now, after weeks of limited usability of the systems in question, the 
cost to the financial
org was pretty high because they had stayed on very old HW and an old 
OS.  So I find
your justification just as *charming*.  I never want to be in the 
position of having to
answer why I just cost my organization 50K in lost productivity. 

Ben