> and the world's server's might be running on SPARC chips that are immune to these issues.

Given enough time, SPARC chips would also become vulnerable to these issues. See what happened to ARM: their later (higher performance) designs are more vulnerable than their older designs.

>Ironically, Sun might have not had to sell themselves to Oracle, and the world's server's might be running on SPARC chips that are immune to these issues.

Solaris, with the exceptions of a few bright stars like DTrace and ZFS, always seemed like a POS to me, compared to linux. Especially as a work-station. Sun went full retard with Java everywhere right before they went under and I have a feeling the Solaris Desktop experience, and by extension the UNIX desktop experience, would be something from my worst nightmares, something to make wish for Windows Vista.

This is true, but if there hadn't been Linux there would have been something else to fill this niche (runs on commodity PC hardware, zero license cost). Sparc/Solaris wouldn't have continued to rule. Intel would have found some other workable solution.

True. And we'd have the same issues with this processor family now...

Don't get me wrong, I love Linux and loved FreeBSD back when it was more easy to choose... But I do think the 'free UNIX' movement has had unintended consequences like the demise of Sun, and perhaps now also this exposing of a failure in what was a desktop class chip architecture that was elevated to server usage.

Everything has a cost is all I'm saying.

Indeed. For one there was the 386BSD lawsuit, for another there was HURD. Torvalds himself has stated that if HURD had been usable at the time, he would not have bothered working on Linux.

Honestly, back when Linux started getting momentum, RMS' GNU/Linux argument had merit. Most of the stuff people where running on top of Linux, never mind using to develop Linux, came from the GNU project.