So I got the quote for my Ultra 40 that I’m going to be using for participating in Sun’s try before you buy program. Hopefully they’ll soon be shipping me a $5,000 system for testing Ruby on Rails.

One thing that I did notice, thanks to a comment on Jonathan’s blog entry about the promo, is that Sun explicitly forbids benchmarking in their Solaris Software License Agreement. To wit, in part 5(f):

You may not publish or provide the results of any benchmark or comparison tests run on Software to any third party without the prior written consent of Sun.

So, to that end I’m going to not post any hard numbers for benchmarks in Solaris. Instead, I’ll be commenting on how performance feels in relation to Linux — basically whether or not I think it would be a contender in an environment where performance was very important. Then again, it does say “third party.” If I’m publishing them myself, would that not be publishing to a third party? I might take that up with Sun’s legal department, just to be certain.