Friday July 30, 2004

Go here, think about what your sysadmin has done for you, how far "above and beyond the call of duty" he/she religiously goes, and then start making reservations for lunch on you.

I was reading an article yesterday which refered to SPARC as proprietary. While technically incorrect (it should be "proprietary UltraSPARC"), I got the point. But it did get me thinking about why our industry likes to throw around the word "proprietary", and whether or not it is thrown around evenly. I have always thought it was used in a biased way, biased against Sun Microstems that is. By the way, I don't consider the word proprietary "evil" although I think the industry as a whole does.

So I decided to do some checking on the use of "proprietary" using a very well-known, well-understood statistical analysis tool: Google :) Here are some results:

Chip technology:

• Proprietary SPARC (for those who got it wrong): 284
• Proprietary UltraSPARC (for those who got it right): 64
• Proprietary Itanium: 1
• Proprietary Pentium: 65
• Proprietary Xeon: 20

Office Suite technology:

• Proprietary StarOffice: 89
• Proprietary Microsoft Office: 69

Operating System:

• Proprietary Solaris: 546
• Proprietary Microsoft Windows: 272

What does this little exercise prove? Very little but it sure was an interesting exercise (for example the phrase "x is proprietary. Solaris ..." turns up as a hit). I don't have the cycles to do anything more scientific than the proprietary Google search engine, and I am also not very good at hacking Google. I'll just let you make up your own mind :)