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Sun Opens First Linux Competency Center
McGarnacle writes "Looks like our friends at Sun have opened the first Linux training centers at the headquarters of a Belleville, Ontario firm: beONix Technology. Now there's a worthwhile summer activity for the kids :)"
I realize that they do make use of linux, but haven't they got their own OS?
I could think of many more companies that have a more vested interest in seeing linux succeed.
He tried to kill me with a forklift!
I was chatting to a Sun employee the other day. He was telling me that a lot of developers at Sun are unhappy with the proliferation of Linux through their organisation.
The way I understand it, they aren't happy with the level of maturity in the Linux kernel *compared with the Solaris kernel*. He seemed to imply that the scalability in Linux wasn't as good, and felt Sun should be pushing Solaris more than Linux.
Don't take this as Linux bashing - I use it a lot at home and work, I just wondered if other developers felt similarly.
This move by Sun means that one of the largest HW vendors is looking at Linux as an OS.
Linux as the OS, Java as the environment, J2EE as the application platform.
IBM have gone this way, now Sun, HP already have too..... interesting times ahead.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
I think Sun is starting to realize that Solaris is a dead end market share wise. This is no reflection on the quality of Solaris, just that the only major OS's to experience growth are Windows and Linux (and maybe OSX to a very small degree). Besides, companies like the idea of standardizing on a platform. For many that choice is Microsoft. If they don't like Micro$oft, then maybe they'll go with something else. But they probably wont go with three different things... for example Linux, Solaris, and AIX. So a smart company will give the customer what it wants- the ability to use standardize on a platform of choice.
Blender And Linux Fan
I educate people in Linux and open source for free. I also perform the task for a fee on occasion, but mostly for free. This is because I'm not a lazy ass like you, and choose give back to the community that gives me a free operating system with a slew of applications and tools. Suzy.
Bottom line is that they practically invented the idea of "Open Systems", and were a pioneer with the SunOSs (essentially a BSD fork). In the late 80s, I was working at AT&Ts Summit, NJ facility (later to be spun off and sold as USO, Unix Software Operation). Bill Joy came to speak at a nearby AT&T location, and I heard him give his rant on "the vendor motel" (you know, you check in, but you don't check out). At that time, this was more directed at IBM, DEC, HP, and anyone who was still maintaining their own non-Unix OS. MicroSoft wasn't even on anyone's radar screen then, but then, you can't blame them, Windows 3.0 hadn't come out yet, so it was hard to consider it more than a toy.
In the end, Sun continues to deliver a lot of value to their customers. It's going to cost a bit more than buying commodity PC hardware and using Linux, but in my experience it is a lot more foolproof. You can probably get most of this with the best PC vendors, and Linux, but the service and support will be better from Sun. You have the commitment of a single vendor to deliver a complete hardware/software system. All of the Linux distribution houses are in the mode of packaging what they get from the community, not putting together a complete system (well, that's my impression anyway, it would be nice to see a vendor prove me wrong).
It is fair to say Sun has been reluctant to fully support Linux on their hardware, but I see that position as well justified. Until recently, Solaris was significantly more stable than Linux, so not many customers wanted it. Now, with so many huge server farms with many x86 boxes running Linux, and say a few larger Suns running databases and such, I can see wanting to run Linux on the Sun servers too. Your going to have less support cost for an all Linux environment than a Sun/Linux environment. For Sun, it doesn't matter if you run the box on Solaris or Linux, they aren't making much money on the software anyway. In fact, it probably costs less to support the user on Linux, so it is conceivable that they eventually drop Solaris altogether.
It's really the same dynamic is IBM has with AIX and Linux. As long as there is a strong demand from the customer base for Solaris, or AIX, they will keep them going. At some point, it will be attractive to port a couple of distictive tools to Linux and be done with it. These tools would be the ones that keep the holdouts for AIX/Solaris hanging around. It also means that Linux is just at stable as AIX/Solaris (I would say it is pulling close or even by now, but this is a difficult thing to measure).