Slashdot Mirror
Sun To Sell Linux PCs
Rubbersoul writes "Reuters.com is reporting that in "a bid to undermine arch-rival Microsoft Corp" Sun is going to jump into selling low cost Linux PCs. The article is a bit low on technical details, but is interesting none the less. Also if you take this new news with a story from yesterday about Sun pushing StarOffice for schools around the world, you really start to get an idea that sun wants to beat MS like a red headed step child ..." An editorial in the WorldTechTribute argues that Sun's education-market giveaway is exactly the sort of behavior that Microsoft has been attacked for in the past.
What compelling reason is there to buy a Sun box over a the umpteen beige box vendors, IBM, Compaq, Dell, etc? Linux is only part of a low-priced solution. Does Sun think they can make a box cheaper than Dell?
Moreover, what is Sun talking about giving away here? Linux machines? Java tools? StarOffice? Sun isn't exactly the only provider of such technology, so even if the giveaways propel adoption of these technologies, their open nature means that this won't necessarily translate back to their bottom line. On the other hand, for every PC Microsoft gives away it'll be running Windows [money back to themselves], it'll probably be running Office [money back to themselves], and maybe it'll have Visual Studio [money back to themselves]. None of these are open, none of these have significant competition. If they get people using such technology, there's only one vendor supplying it.
Please compare Apples to Apples or, in this case, Suns to Suns.
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
And when Sun has their Office Suite monopoly, they'll use their propriety (fully documented) xml file format to force people to use either Windows, Linux, or Solaris forever. HAHAHAHAHA!!!! It's just too dastardly!
New Linux virus creates peer-to-peer terror network
HP finally fires their anti-business business strategist for Linux
Disbanding the RIAA will turn the music scene into 17th Century Europe
The GPL, open source freedoms and the Cold War
This last article has this classic quote:
The small minority of geeks who adhere to the cultish mindset of the GPL and Linux will definitely take offense to this, but there is no reasoning with someone who blindly follows the precepts of open source and the GPL ...those people will never understand why the NSA would reject the GPL. For rational people, I can sum up exactly why the GPL is not and in its current form will never be useful for the NSA or any similar enterprise: "Open" is the exact opposite of "secure."
You are no doubt quite capable of buying the parts for, and assembling, a custom PC. You can install and maintain a linux distribution.
The people who should buy from Sun are (and i quote) markets such as corporate call centers, government and schools. These are the sort of folks who don't have a clue how to run their PC's. More importantly, they don't want to have a clue how to run them either. They expect their computers to Just Work, and for someone to come fix it damn quick if it breaks.
This is exactly the sort of thing Sun excels at.
Best of luck to them.
Let's all move Scott McCollum into our collective killfiles and move on, shall we? Furthermore, the key difference between Sun's donation and Microsoft's, besides the fact that Sun is not a monopoly, is that Sun has open sourced Star Office. To gloss over this little fact is typical for a professional troll like McCollum. While Star Office itself is not open, it's an open platform, and the differences between SO and OO are minor. So even if SO/OO were to become the standard, it would always be easy to move somewhere else if necessary (and you can bet someone will fork OO if Sun does something fishy).
Scott had the opportunity to make nice a few years back like Steve Jobs, and just accept the inevitable - Bill controls a huge swath of the computing market. Admitting such helped keep Apple in the game, and it got some good MS software on OSX quickly.
I'm not saying that MS and Sun would exactly be in bed today had Scott made nice, but certainly a less adversarial approach could have kept Sun out of the crosshairs.
Well, maybe not quite that bad, but close. Here are some samples from their articles:
"What makes open source the secure, stable and elegant software panacea open source cultists claim it is? ... say you are the IT director at a bank and you buy into the Linux is stable, secure and bulletproof hype. ... Welcome to the lazy, cut-and-paste world of open source 'innovation' where people who should be smart enough to know better still think you can get something for nothing. It would be humorous if it wasn't so pathetic..." ("Thanks to open source methods, only 2 out of 500 job-hunting programmers pass skills test")
"The outcry against Palladium doesn't really stem from a concern about your privacy, but more from a vocal minority who wish to impose their anarchistic schemes onto us under the guise of 'freedom' and 'liberty.'" ("Microsoft's Palladium transforms Internet from Wild West to suburban neighborhood")
"many customers who purchased those inherently more stable, secure and virus-proof Linux servers are probably wishing there was a multi-million dollar virus protection industry to help them out." ("New Linux virus creates peer-to-peer terror network")
"The SE Linux project was developed during the Clinton administration ... NSA officials say their cyber security enhancements made for SE Linux have not only benefited the NSA, but because of the terms of the GPL have also strengthened the security architecture of computers used by malicious cyber terrorists around the world."
("NSA deputy director says 'never again' to Open Source")
That last article is just hysterical. The NSA administrators, under pressure from Microsoft, stopped development on SELinux -- because Microsoft didn't like the fact that government-developed code was released freely under the GPL. Microsoft objected to the competition. WorldTechTribune is using all its quotes out of context, and pretending that the objection was concerning national security and terrorism. Amazing.
The editorial mentioned at the end of the slashdot article is painfully bad. The person writing it obviously has very little idea what he is writing about.. Let me give some examples..
First, Sun will forego the PC OEM deals for StarOffice 6 because Sun Microsystems' main revenue stream comes from their own PC sales.
This is in reference to SUN not getting together with companies like Dell and Gateway to put StarOffice on their machines. The first thing that got me, though, was that it says that SUN's main income is from their PC sales. Last time I checked, SUN doesn't make PCs. And, while they may start in the near future, they certainly don't have any revenue from it now.
After years of protestation and lawsuits against Microsoft giving away IE for free, is Sun hypocritically hoping to create an illegal monopoly of their own by giving StarOffice 6 to students for free?
Again, just because you do something that mirrors what Microsoft does, does not make you Microsoft. Giving away software does not make you a monopoly. Immoral business practices do. Besides, as the author tries to mention, SUN makes its money on hardware (not PC sales), similar to Apple. All they're trying to do is show people there's an alternative to the Wintel platform. They're trying to show people that you don't have to have a box running windows to be productive. That you can have a Linux box (that they'd love to sell you in a few quarters) and run StarOffice on it and be doing just fine. As far as I can tell, there's nothing wrong with that. Another thing people need to remember is that there's a big difference between a non-monopoly business practices. If a non-monopoly says "If you don't put our software on all your machines, you can't put it on any, it doesn't matter, because the OEM has choices. When a monopoly does it, it is illegal, because the OEM has no real choice (go out of business?).
If the schools had actually purchased the software rather than acquired it for free, the deal adds up to a $5.7 billion (yes, billion with a "b") missed opportunity. That's $5.7 billion USD in sales that Sun will never see because they gave it away at a time when they don't need to be giving away $5.7 billion.
Oh come on, buddy. This is complete nonsense. While the numbers work out, it's meaningless. Software doesn't have intrinsic value. That's not like saying "I'm going to give away 100 cars." It's the same thing about trying to figure out the value of "pirated" software. You can't say you lost 40 millions dollars, because one million people "pirated" your $40 software. It just doesn't work like that. These schools wouldn't have paid $5.7 billion for this software, so SUN didn't give away $5.7 billion.
Anyways, the editorial just goes on and on like this.. it's truly painful to read.
Perhaps the difference, however, is that Microsoft is a judicially declared Monopoly, whereas Sun is not. So, the anti-competitive..nay...competitive behaviour of Sun is NOT on par with the same behaviour of Microsoft. This fact is one of the big reasons Microsoft fought such a declaration so hard--they kept saying, to the effect, "we're just competing in the marketplace."
From a certain perspective this actually may seem unfair to Microsoft, but remember that the determination that MS was a monopoly was based, in no small part, due to the illegal activities that they were engaged in to obtain/maintain an unfair market advantave. So, punitive actions are certainly justified to try to bring it back into line and even the competitive landscape--to give other companies such as Sun the opportunity to succeed that they were previously denied by Microsoft's behaviour.
Just my $0.02.