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Sun Rethinking Linux Strategy Over SCO Lawsuit
manyoso writes "Sun is waisting no time taking advantage of the SCO lawsuit against IBM. They are making statements trying to play up Solaris as a safe harbor for worried Linux and IBM users. John Loiacono, VP of Sun's operating platforms group, "For people looking at the issues at hand, we are a safe harbor. We have absolute rights to our technology ... We're changing our strategy around Linux (but) we're pausing because we're trying to figure out what the implications of this are going to be". So, this begs the questions... What are the short term implications for the new Linux based desktop we've been hearing about from our fair weather friends? How will the SCO lawsuit affect Sun's long term strategy with Linux and Open Source?"
I always kind of wondered where SCO/Caldera fit in. I wonder if that settlement for OpenDOS was really just a buy-off to make Caldera microsoft's lap dog.
It would seem that SCO's current actions are very much helpful to microsoft in the end.
Just a thought...
SCO will achieve nothing. Actually, this lawsuit will backfire them big time. Sun Micro., which being a little troll here, will come back to Linux once SCO gets its nose bloodied. Speaking of Sun, I don't really see where its heading. I've heard that they'll be introducing blade-based (a la Cisco 6509, but withs server gear not switch gear) chassis soon with a load-balancer and stuff. Will Sun be a next SGI ? Hope not...
Yes this awfully looks like a stab in the back for Linux ! well I guess that's just business !
Hmm, I wonder if anyone here can detect the cycle here:
Sun/SGI/HP/IBM all make big, expensive, customized Un*x-based platforms, that are huge cash-cows for a long time and get people to buy in on the promise of "open standards" while all the while working to "differentiate" their platform enough to keep customers from switching.
Meanwhile, IBM hedged it's bets on a low-end platform cooked up in Boca Raton with a crappy OS and a ridiculous licensing deal with some kid out of Seattle.
Ten years later, the gloss is starting to fade on the Un*x side (mostly due to lack of innovation broughht about by lack of real standards and a serious lack of competition) while the PC side is about to get into the fast track with 32-bit CPUs and a REAL OS co-written by IBM and the slimeballs from upstate Washington.
On the other side of the planet, a smart young CS student is whipping up a bit of the ole black magic, and with a little help from some GNU friends, will soon unleash the original Unix concept back onto the masses (Portability - what portability? This is UNIX my boy!).
Another ten years pass, the PC is ruling the roost once M$ screwed IBM, and the big Un*x guys are all searching high and low for a raison d'etre. The smart ones (read: IBM?!?) figure out that the kid from Finland was really on to something, and they'll never have to pay Redmond a damn cent for it, so they go whole hog. Those that keep fighting, start to die the slow death of ignorant luddites (can you say SGI boys and girls -- I knew you could! Gee, I wonder where 3Dfx and nVidia got all those engineers from!)
Ok, so who's still left out of our wrap up? SCO, who's failed attempt to corner the market on Un*x on Intel (haha, Open Server my A$$!)? Looks like tricky lawyering is truly the last bastion of the dying corporation (right up there with sneaky accounting tricks 101 on the VC Top 10 list).
What about poor Sun, who went from knowing the network was the computer before there even was a network, to being the dot in some dumbass VC plan, to being a wishy-washy half-way cover-our-asses supporter of all thing not-M$. Geez, the enemy of my enemy and all that, but Larry E? Come on guys. And now this? Forget the purple PC, and forget the Slowlaris "better TCO and long term stability" crap and contribute what you have to the one true Open movement - Open Source! IF Sun spent 1/4 of the $$$ they have on FUDding Slowlaris vs. Linux on porting theyr fantastic sh*t to Linux, they could be a real force to be reckoned with (hello IBM? Wannt do the enemry-of-my thing?).
All I know is they all better watch out, because once the Chinese start mass-producing cluster machines made with Godson-2's onto 1U racks running Linux, the game's up for those who would be king!
Just my $0.02...YMMV
-- People who think they know it all, really annoy those of us who do!
Goodbye SCO, I won't miss you...
"To any truly impartial person, it would be obvious that I am right."
Nope, not that good a claim...even SCO's own filing says that there are no specific lines of code copied. It is concepts that are said to have been reused. Wondering about the stupidity of assuming that IBM and Linus et al are unable to make a decent OS is left as an excersise for the reader.
"To any truly impartial person, it would be obvious that I am right."
IANAL, but the reason that organizations use a "clean room" process where one group of engineers extracts specifications from a piece of licensed technology, and a totally different one with no direct exposure the the original IP does the new product is to make sure that nothing "accidentally" infringes on the original license. This is to avoid the possiblity of a lawsuit and to strengthen their case if they are sued. The plantiff still has to prove the specifics of the infringement based on actual code in the infringing product. As pointed out by the Dennis Richie newsgroup posting linked in a comment, the court didn't see much merrit when AT&T sued over BSD. The outcome could be different this time, but that is very unlikely with IBM's legal resources.
Why all of the anti-SUN attitude?
/etc. Probably the only way I could feel good with it on the server was if we developed our own internal-dist. Maybe I'll go back to my old Slackware 1.0. ,a simple intialization procedure, a sane disk layout, and exellent support that doesn't require me to run
Sun has also done quite a bit more than OpenOffice.
Try : NIS,NIS+,RPC,NFS, & Java,just for starters.
I could see it if it were Microsoft, what has MickeySoft ever done for us steal the code and tell everyone it was crap until brought into NT.
As for keeping people on Solaris. I don't think that will be hard. Linux is awesome for the desktop but I won't put it on another server again until the kernel VM is fixed and the directory structure and boot procedure is made somewhat sane. There are too many versions of Linux out there each comes with 5-9 CDs and none of them are laid out on the disk in a nice easy sensible manner. Granted the code is good, the code is there but it is a product obviously developed with little communication between the other developers. A simple example on RedHat 8.0 here I have 627 directories under
Give me a Linux with a mature kernel ( pre-emptive, multi-threaded etc... )
up2date -u on a test box on an almost daily basis before moving it into production. Then SUN/Solaris will need to get worried.
Read the damn articles... Sun isn't stabbing any one in the back.
SUN is free to develop it's Sun Linux without any fear of lawsuits. A Linux like Sun Linux or IBM Linux would make it easier to bring linux into the corporate arena.
The open source community should really embrace Sun more, which is hard based on some of the things they say. But Sun has been working with open standards for a long time. Even it's CPU's are based on open standards.
I'd be more weary of IBM.
If this was the old IBM, I would think that this 'attack' from SCO might actually be orchestrated by IBM. They would fight it for a while, and in the process spread a considerable amount of FUD, then buy SCO -- at which point they would own the corporate Linux market. The old saying was that you never got fired by buying IBM -- if there was a taint on other corporate Linux systems you might push people to buy IBM.
I do think that IBM has changed their spots to a large extent, though, and I'd be surprised if this was the actual strategy.
thad
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
Things just can't get any better for IBM as far as it public images, can it?
With the $1b it spent on Linux a few years ago, it got the view of the great savior of linux and the rebel with a cause.
Now look at this suite and what half the linux community is seeing, its now the great defender and the motherly figure.
Thought it couldnt top itself before. Got to love IBM.
forget it.
Anyhow, paid-up or per-seat I sincerely doubt that even for $82M the license terms would have cleared Sun or HP from the issue of this suit, which is the accusation that AT&T/SCO code is being incorporated into Linux/GPL.
Now I can't see how SCO/Novell/AT&T would have written licensing contracts which permitted disclosure / general release of the code or trade secrets to SUN/HP. Yes, the continuing per-seat nature of IBM's agreement makes it easier for SCO to tactically make a threat to *stop IBM from shipping AIX*.
All of which seems like just so much noise. Solaris has been SystemV based from the git-go is my understanding, tho Sun has been saying for awhile now that it's completely free of any AT&T code. Even moreso HPUX and SGI IRIX began as pure SysV, and I don't think either has made a big effort to do a complete rewrite.
The amusing thing (as I've pointed out in prior comments) is that the source of the AIX *kernel* isn't in the least based on SysV. It's Mach which in turn is derived from BSD. Also nearly all of the AIX system utilities are BSD-flavored by default, ususally with SysV flavors available. AIX has recently adopted SysV-style init (a sad thing) but that's motivated with wanting to be aligned with the way most Linux systems are run.
Furthermore as many commentators have pointed out, AIX is one of the most heavily customized *nixes being sold today. Specifically, the VM design is markedly different, and the hardware interface is virtualized through an OO database.
So for my money SCO has nowhere to hang their (rather nebulous) accusations, and while I'm sure the fud-pushers will be all over this for awhile that kind of tactic usually involves an eventual backlash.
Linux is Linux, if One need clarify their dist: <Dist>/GNU Linux
bsds are of course just BSD
Whatever. Sun is so schizophrenic it's amusing.
"Sell Solaris Computers" "Let's sell Intel computers running Linux." "Wait, uh, let's sell both" "Buy StarOffice" "Open Source StarOffice" "Uhh Whoops. Let's close source StarOffice again" "Whoa! This nanotechnology freaks me out. Maybe we should stop innovating altogether" "Java this. Java that. Java is great!" "Let's sue Microsoft and force them to include the latest Java on their desktop" "Strange, we don't seem to be using Java very often, I wonder if Microsft was on to something" "Whoa. SCO's suing everyone. Maybe we shouldn't be involved in Linux, after all."
Although I don't believe that this will really damage the Linux movement, it certainly warrants each of us, as Linux supporters, carefully analyzing what this is all about, and just what it is we are working for.
I've played around with computers long enough to have been a part of the garage days of the early 80's, where the introduction of the personal computer turned everything everyone thought about computers upside down. The heart of computers before that time, the stuff you would have seen written up in national newspapers and in Wired magazine, as we did ad nauseum during the heady and ridiculous 90's bubble, was room sized mainframes sold at truly absurd prices from IBM. It was universally agreed that only the most wealthy corporations and governments could afford to use computers, and the technology remained safely ensconsed in the top 1%. Then a couple of idiots built one out of wood in their garage. I'll spare the historical details from here becuase the point is that the PC revolution put complex information tools in the hands of everyday people. This is what it took for computers as we know them now to come into being. This turned IBM from a 20's style all encompassing megacorp to an important but surpassed purveyor of technology as they are today. This was a shocking, powerful, important change that we need to keep in mind in todays age of mistaking computer science for what takes place in posh Silicon Valley campuses among people wearing Armani suits. Computers went for nearly 20 years in an environment of very big money with very professional researchers, programmers, and engineers working on them without becoming a revolution. Certainly, almost all of the important technology that makes up computers today, TCP/IP, the GUI, C, etc., were developed in the top 1% environment that I described, but when the day is over and the history is being written, what you know is irrelevant. History is a record of our actions. And history does not care how long the Chinese used magnetic compasses to build according the the laws of feng shui. Compasses began to matter when people starting using them to navigate ships. Similarly, computers started to matter when you and I started using them.
This history continued through the implementation of the Internet among those personal computers, the open source movement, and now through what I believe will be the next step in this new information revolution, which is the development and use of advanced peer to peer networks which will make information sharing completely uncontrollable. None of thse things, especially the last two, were envisioned, pioneered, or wanted by people like Microsoft, IBM, or Sun. I know we see IBM and Sun as friends, but we need to remember that their support of Linux is part of their business plan, and they are doing it because it damages Microsoft and puts them in a position to compete with that company. As this event demonstrates, corporate friends are fair weather friends.
What does all of this mean to us? It means, in short, that we need to remember that the computer revolution is and has always been about US. They are the ones who are marginalized (by history, not by RMS style activism), so it is wrong for us to believe that anything we do depends on their recognition, esteem, or money for it to become important. Furthermore, as this affair demonstrates, we need to be continually suspicious of their involvement, because their goals are not our goals. They will shove Linux into the underground through patent law just as quickly as they will spend money working on big open source projects if they believe it will make them money.
The last renaissance did not require a business plan. There is no need to believe that this one will.
Oh, and support Gnunet and/or Freenet. You may be downloading your ISOs from them before long.
IMO, Sun was just a better marketing company compared to Apollo. They pulled a Microsoft in the UNIX/Workstation market with a mediocre product compared to the competition. Along comes Linux and Sun is having a hard time marketing it's expensive hardware and software against Linux and so it's using it's marketing team to take any pot-shot at Linux. This is all it is and because Sun can't see that it could leverage Linux against Microsoft then see ya Sun. IMHO
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
Once rights are granted under the GPL, they cannot EVER be taken away. Yes, a development group would have "take over" Qt development on an open path. So what?
Can you say "OpenSSH?" Can you say "GnuPG?"
Other companies have tried to make a business by closing what was open, by enslaving what was free. It has not worked. Ever. The free version is the one that has thrived, consistently. In the few cases where a closed version persists, it has moved along just fine with a parallel product.
The single major Qt "application" of consequence in the Linux market is KDE and all of its apps. If TrollTech closed the next version of Qt, KDE would continue with the present version. And, in all likelyhood, will take over development of "FreeQt" or "OpenQt" or whatever. No, they cannot relicense it under the BSD, but why would this be appealing? It would remain under the GPL, where it would continue to be useable by all. There is nothing to fear here. At all.
The patent encumberance issue is a bigger deal.
The paranoid part of me thinks Sun might have put SCO up to this to create FUD and sell some Solaris.
The more realisitic part of me says this is a desparation move by SCO to get someone interested in buying out their IP so they can pay off some investors before dying. This is a bleeding corporate carcass, writhing in its death throes. Nothing more.
I suspect there is no merit to their case (the filing contains no facts), but their hope is to make it easier for IBM to buy them than to fight them.
I know a lot of linux users who have installed Solaris in organizations for one reason: One throat to choke. It is a fundamental part of business, that will never change. RedHat has made great strides in filling this void in the linux marketplace. They do take responsibility for their product, and that allows businesses to consider it viable.
Is having accountability necessary with linux? Yes and no. How many times has it been fixed for no other reason than it was broken? Countless times. If Linus, Alan Cox, Richard Stallman, Bill Gates, Larry Wall, and any other big shots you can name were to die in a firey plane crash on their way to a convention, would M$, Linux, Perl, etc... go on? Of course. There are people in the wings ready to take on the challenges that lie ahead. But tell this to a businessman. M$ is really the only tangible business, therefore it would go on. Everything else would cease to exist, had it even existed to him in the first place.
The world in general is not farmiliar with the concepts that we have started. Many people see our ideas as a technocratic society as 'alien' and 'radical'. How can nobody own linux? That's crazy talk! Are you some kind of pinko commie tree hugging hippie?
There has to be a compromise between our ideals and the sometimes irrational behaviors of the business world. People are willing to buy what we've been giving away, yet they're not willing to accept it as a gift. Until they are, there will be a market for Unices, and people who go through all the trouble of 'selling' linux.
You think that I'm crazy, you should see this guy!
Let me start by saying that I work for Sun but I'm not any sort of spokesperson for the company. I do however have opinions and what follows is my opinion on this post and some of the comments from the /. community.
Sun has a basic business strategy that has worked well for over 20 years:
* give a customer a technology choice that doesn't create a proprietary "lock-in"
* and you'll likely grow as a leader in a standards-based market
* where there is no standard, create one
* and push for it's widescale adoption
Conventional business wisdom has predicted Sun would fail to grow and they have been proven wrong repeatedly w.r.t Sun. Sun typically gets criticised on two fronts:
* Sun can't keep customers without a lock-in
* OR Sun is over-priced vs OS systems
Both arguments put Sun in the middle of two compelling forces. If the market for open systems continues to grow and Sun maintains a strong marketshare then the contradictions apparent are mitigated effectively. Choice and flexibility as features win deals, repeatedly in a large percentage of cases. Sun is just focusing on added value around quality, support and services to maintain a leading position with this approach. For Sun it's always a "call to execute" on the basic strategy because any competitor can adopt the same approach. This is good however because it increases the choices the customer can evaluate and grows the market. Grow the pie and maintain a significant slice... Grow at 20% per year and Wall Street will get it too. We're NOT seeing huge pie growths currently but we have some sins of excess as a market to pay for before we get back to fundamentals on purchasing patterns and excess system inventories being recycled in the market. Those trends seem to have bottomed out. The newer systems offer better value over recycled systems from the Dot Com era. Especially, if support contracts are needed.
This approach has worked with Unix (as Solaris), NFS, X Windows (begrudgingly due to the NeWS system, distrust of Motif, etc) Java, lots of TCP/IP standards (DHCP, SNMP, etc).
Sun's strategy gives customers choice and increases the likelihood that as a market grows Sun will get 15-30% of the product sales based upon that market. It's a solid growth model vs the MS model which leverages customer lock-ins on their technology.
Specifically on Linux... Sun would like to win some percentage of the Linux-based systems sold but that market is driven by price/performance and very tight profit margins. As we've seen a lot of companies have found the competitive pressures of the Linux systems market to make for high volume and limited profits.
Linux OS as a business has also been challenging for Red Hat, SuSe, Mandrake, etc.
Programmer's will tell you that Solaris and Linux present very similar software targets for code. It's close to trivial to move a source object between them... As a result, growth of Corporate Linux use could help Sun sell more Solaris systems where the system requirements exceed those offered by the Linux-based systems (grow the Unix-based market and Sun grows too).
Sun has announced the intention to ship Linux based systems based upon feedback from customers that buy these systems. Those customers want Linux to be stable and supportable. What is the shortest path to Linux stability and supportability given that it's hard to offer Linux software, support and systems that are profitable? I think you just let the "bazaar model" work... Lunix gets enhanced, distributed and tested on new hardware with the Open Source model and the efforts of thousands of engineers and scientists. As Sun learned with the System V situation (when they cut a deal w/ AT&T) you can't control Open Standards and see them prosper. It makes customers nervous and makes ALL your competitors gang together in opposition (see OSF as an example).
So Sun would like to selll something that aligns well with the growth of Linux... systems, software, support services, professional services. Sun is not aggressively fighting Linux adoption but Sun is competiting at various points in an IT architecture with compatible offerings based upon Solaris (SPARC and x86). It would be counter to Sun's Business model to do otherwise because Sun wants a reasonable percentage of the IT budget and to give customers the perception that there's no lock-in stragtegy behind Solaris, Java, SPARC, or key network Standards used (LDAP, Project Liberty, etc).
Expect Sun to keep working with a Linux strategy that offers customers choices and some large percentage of those choices lead to the sale of sun products or services. Otherwise, Sun has truly lost it's vision. There is profit to be made in selling Open Systems and even Microsoft can see the logic of NOT getting blocked by a standards committee.
Users, industries, governments and vendors need to follow the lessons of the Internet to build markets. Widely adopted standards increase the value of networks exponentially to all involved. Linux just needs some aggressive standardization around key areas and it will grow exponentially. Sun is NOT preventing that from happening with some proprietary Linux strategy and we should all approve of that and let the best solutions succeed without leveraging patents of other "barriers to entry".
Just wondering.
Best Buy can have you arrested
If IBM or Sun or someone else who has deep enough pockets would just buy the stock of those SCO cry-babies they could make this problem go away. Who knows, the SCO stock might cost less than legal expense of this worthless lawsuit. Have you read some of the "facts" in SCO suit? The only issue of any legal interest is if they can PROVE that IBM gave away or otherwise re-distributed SCO/UNIX source code or other propriety technologies. SCO makes noise that amounts to "since AIX is an licensed copy of UNIX, then anything IBM calls AIX is automatically the property of SCO". Which is nonsense as all of the IBM value added stuff does not belong to SCO and AIX is IBM's trademark, not SCO's. SCO is on their last legs and is trying to squeeze blood out of any rock it can find. And how about their asertion that their code is so special because it can run on the formerly underpowered Intel x86 chips? I guess they forgot about XENIX and Solaris 86 and QNX etc. I guess they forgot the fact that UNIX has been portable since it was rewritten in 'C' back in the dark ages and ever since the 80386 Intel chips have had what it takes to run a full fledged version of UNIX. With their revisionist view of history, SCO ought to relocate from Utah to one of the few communist countries left.
I'm scared of world leaders who think locally and act globally.
If SCO could mention real, specific pieces of code or techniques that were stolen from their OS (it galls me to call it UNIX) and inserted into the Linux kernel, the kernel maintainers would remove it and humbly apologize. However, I read the entire complaint and did not see one specific allegation of stolen IP. Rather, they argue that Linux is so good that it must be based on their stolen IP.
If the SCO execs were Slashmonkeys, they would claim that Windows 2000 must have stolen pieces of Linux in it because it's so stable. The difference is that the Linux code is out in the open for SCO to inspect; indeed, they were a Linux distributor. They've had every opportunity of finding the specific parts of the Linux kernel that violate their IP, and yet they've failed to do so.
It's as if your neighbor, Bob, brought the police to your place and claimed it was full of his stolen property. When the police ask Bob what things are his, he says, "When sql*kitten first moved in, this place was bare. But now it's all gussied up with furniture, plants and art - he must have stolen it from me!"