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Sun Closes Solaris Source Sales June 30
Vardamir writes: "
It appears that Sun is no longer interested
in distributing the source code to their Solaris Operating System, even for
a charge of $75.00. 'Thanks for your interest and welcome to the
Solaris[tm] 8 Foundation Source Program. Please note that the Solaris
8 Foundation Source Program will be canceled effective June 30, 2001. In
addition, both the secure chat and code-exchange sites will also be terminated
on this date.' Get it while you still can, bzip it, and upload to a gnutella
server!" Hasn't exactly been that long a ride since this idea was first floated, but it never seemed to be the roaring success that Sun perhaps thought it would.
It's not slashdot's opinion, it's the submitter's.
Szo
Red Leader Standing By!
... to encourage people to get the source and put it Gnutella ?
C'mon people, this is not open source, they were selling the source and are now cancelling the effort (who knows why). But by making little comments like that, you're making us look like a community of software pirates not open source advocates !
- sigs are for wimps.
Rather than deal with continued maintenance of products that have new versions out, Sun tends to ask its users to upgrade to the newest version, and enforce this by killing off access to the older versions. Personally, I see nothing wrong with this (though having an archive available is always nice). Who wants a tech support call for a modified version of an outdated product? Especially if the problem is one that is fixed in a later version.
DISCLAIMER : I work for Sun, so am biased, but the below comments are in no way endorsed by Sun or necessarily reflect any of Sun's official positions.
I suppose the same applies to TCL? I believe one of the lead developers of TCL/Expect is in the full-time employ of Sun and has been for some time. Besides, GNOME spent a lot of time shouting at KDE for their proprietary library, so there is no way they will let anything proprietary into the GNOME source. So exactly HOW will Sun kill GNOME? If people don't like something Sun gets into GNOME, someone will put in a way to disable it, or more likely it won't get into the official version.
I see all sorts of negative comments against Sun, yet no-one seems to have any real facts. Yes, Sun still has proprietary code, these things take time to change (has IBM open-sourced AIX? HP HP-UX? Oracle? ). Yes, they still don't really support Linux, but the Cobalt range still runs it, and Sun owns them, again, it will take time to change. I think they'll get there, probably only on the low-end high-volume stuff for quite some time, but they'll get there when the really mission-critical (which is mostly where they sell) guys start to demand it. Don't forget in Sun's marketplace it's maximum uptime and speed that counts, not a pretty desktop. That and CONFIDENCE, try selling a Linux solution for a banks core systems.. won't work (yet).. but Solaris is a serious contender.
So, where does that leave us? Sun doesn't fit with "pure RMS tenants", well ok, show me an old-style computer firm that does! Those companies started with a pure open-source philosophy have a much easier time maintaining that philisophy than firms that grew up with the "what's mine is mine, what's yours is mine" marketplace that M$ et al forged. Sun has open-sourced a lot of its stuff, StarOffice, lest you forget, Java, etc. StarOffice alone may do more good for Linux's success than anything else, and don't forget Sun actually laid out hard cash to buy that just to give away, who else can claim that? Personally I think Sun is helping Linux incredibly, and whilst it may not be pushing it or supporting it on its own hardware, yet, Linux is certainly not being hurt by Sun's contributions. Can you say the same about Microsoft, to which you compared them?
Just my two pence.
Stealing a rhinoceros should not be attempted lightly.
The most appropriate comparison to Sun is DEC. DEC had extremely strong software (VMS), and weak hardware (VAX), and very expensive machines. They were killed mostly because Sun put systems which were much cheaper and much faster (although of dubious quality, which has improved somewhat in the past 10 years). Sun now has reasonably strong software (Solaris), quite weak hardware (Sparc, although it is quite strong as far as scalability goes). I think Sun has quite a good chance to lose significant ground to Intel based systems with Linux or Windows, sold by Dell and Compaq. Intel is now competitive with Sparc (always has been at the low end, and just recently with Itanium at the high end). With Compaq's recent transformation, clearly they are trying to turn into a service company, and shed as much hardware design/manufacturing as possible. With this strategy they really have an excellent chance to reduce their costs and really beat Sun. You can bet Dell will continue to chip away at the low end markets also.
In pure CPU performance, a 1.7 GHz P4 absolutely slaughters any Sparc. Please note the comparing kernel compiles is entirely meaningless because you are targeting two different architectures; i.e. the compiler is doing completely different work in each case.
Here's the respectve SPECint numbers (of which, GCC is a component):
P4 1.7 GHz - 573
UltraSparc II 450 MMhz - 225
UltraSparc III 750 MHz - 370
UltraSparc III 900 MHz - 438
And floating point:
P4 1.7 GHz - 598
UltraSparc II 450 MHz - 274
UltraSparc III 750 MHz - 373
UltraSparc III 900 MHz - 427
As you can see, Sun products are quite sluggish in comparison to commodity Intel products.
I was watching the JavaOne keynote's last week and something struck me as interesting. While JavaOne is a conference sponsered by Sun, the majority of the products that had on-stage demos were running under the Linux OS. Not all of them, but a lot of them were.
I thought it was interesting how people kept coming up on stage and telling the Sun reps that this that or the other thing ran with a Linux backend. Once or twice they had the comment "oh....it runs on Linux?"
If I worked for Sun, I would have taken that as a wakeup call. Currently Sun is one of the companies that doesn't know quite what to make of little free OS we know and love.
I personally never thought it really made sense to release the Solaris code. Maybe they are starting to come up with a real open source strategy...at least we can hope.
-Pete
Soccer Goal Plans
...it's because they finally figured out the "Network is NOT the computer".
Perhaps the often prohibitive cost of most sun hardware is that which contributes most to the failure of this effort. Had an effort been made to make the hardware as accessible as the software maybe things would be different.
Is this yet another sign that Sun is weakening?
Since the beginning of time, man has yearned to destroy the Sun. I will do the next best thing -- read their source code!
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
First, there are still many boatloads of legacy Sun equipment out there with proprietary drivers for hardware that's poorly documented, if at all. Access to Sun's source is a leg-up for anyone who wants to understand how such hardware works.
Solaris still has the most scalable SMP tech. There's a lot to be learned by groveling through that code.
Now think about people who have to support large Solaris networks - bugs and all. When you run up against a problem and can't get Sun to admit that it is a problem, your only recourse is to fix it yourself. Try that without source.