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Sun Drops Linux Distro
The Wireless Guy writes "eWeek is reporting that Sun has decided to stop offering a Linux distribution. From the story: "Yes, this is a change in strategy. Our Sun Linux distribution is essentially Red Hat Linux with a few minor tweaks," John Loiacono, vice president of Sun's operating platforms group"... so, is this good news for Red Hat?" They were rethinking it, and I guess they've had a good long thunk.
I didn't even know!
Is Red Hat now considered a bigger player than Sun?
First this and now this! When will they ever stop?
Note to self: get smarter troll to guard door.
With a growth-rate like this there'll be four distros per human being in 25 years. (roughly 24'000'000'000)
GAAH! MY PRINTER IS ON FIRE!!! PUT IT OUT! PUT IT OUT!
A company decided to stop offering for free software that competes with one of its most expensive products. Nothing to see here. Move along.
Basically this is the scenario they must have tired of:
Employee: Yay! We've got our low-end-Sun-box-with-Sun-Linux! Time to put it to use!
Manager: But all our software was for Red Hat!!! What good is that...
Employee: *calls Sun* We need Red Hat Linux supported on our box so we can run our software.
Sun: We only support Sun Linux.
Employee: But we don't have any good apps for Sun Linux!
Sun: Well... just run your Red Hat apps on Sun Linux. It'll work.
Employee: That's can't possibly work! Our software says "Operates with Red Hat Linux" on the box!
Sun: Trust me, it'll work....
Employee: You're insane! My MSCE certificate taught me one thing (and only one thing), and that's every minor revision of every OS is inherently incompatible! I'm buying Dell...
So instead of confusing people needlessly, they just give people Red Hat. People know what Red Hat is. Who the hell ever heard of Sun Linux?
It was very much like RedHat :-)
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
Geez.. Sun changes its mind more often than my last 3 girlfriends combined. WTF??
I left me zipper undone.
There's nothing Intelligent about Intelligent Design.
Way to promote the value.
see, what you fail to understand here is that sun is not really a "company" in the traditional sense of the word. sun is much more like a bunch of warring enclaves. the interesting thing is that they have no real concept of the real world outside of them, and certainly no central management.
the sparc division has reached their goal in life, 64 bits. 64bits means "the best chip ever", and they can now retire because the competition will never be able to improve on their miracle cpu. it was true 8 years ago (actually, it wasn't), why shouldn't it be true today? sure, they may like to tinker around with their chips, mostly as a hobby, but it's not like anyone is going to give them the budget to do anything with them anyway.
the solaris division made a kickass os. performance rocks, stability rocks, security... well, two out of three ain't bad. sure, it ain't pretty or useable, but remember, sun delivered us from the mainframe os's, which were at least twice as ugly. their only problem is that people keep bugging them about making an x86 version. why, for god's sake, would anyone want to run solaris on x86? i mean, seriously. they're not happy about it and trying to get the project canned, so they can get back to tuning performance.
the java group are the young guys in sun. this once-beloved buzzword generating group has proved to be quite a money pit for sun. now that even marketing doesn't love them, they've fallen into a routine. every tuesday, they run their auto-deprecating program, that goes through the api renaming functions and changing parameters. then they bump up the version number and release an entirely new version of the "write once, run anywhere (slowly)" environment that breaks every application out there. the people that are responsible for keeping the enterprise servers running right are not amused by this. of course, the best version of the java environment is the win32 version (does anyone know why? it's not like java is useful for desktop applications), with the solaris version running second (including a painful install and configuration procedure). solaris does not ship with java, since it is unreliable.
the hardware group used to make the coolest purple boxes ever. now they make pizza box (no, smaller, blade) commodity servers at overpriced rates. don't get me wrong, the e10000's are still awesome, but the only work to be done there is for someone to dustoff the inventory before a customer comes in. the customers who got stuck buying blades due to the fact that their organization has some agreement with a sun reseller sure as hell don't want their webservers running solaris. they're bugging sun to run linux on there. of course, os's are not the hardware group's thing, so they have to prod the solaris people to try their hand at linux (a competitor to solaris). the solaris people are not ecstatic about this.
sun linux gets cancelled today, new java tomorrow, new x86 based blades the next (getting ultrasparc3 docs to the openbsd group? never gonna happen), it's all par for the course at sun.
Sun has revealed the latest weapon in their fight for market share.
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
Red Hat, Sun, Debian, Mandrake...who the fuck cares?
If you want a stable Linux distribution, go to www.linuxiso.org and download yourself a set of Ninnle Linux CD images.
Can't go wrong with Ninnle!
What's even more interesting is that the next version of Solaris - Solaris 11 or 'Dingo' as it is codenamed - will be based on FreeDOS. Sun realizes that very often DOS based applications can get good performance, since they can run much closer to the hardware and make their own decisions about scheduling and the like (there is no preemption of processes in classic DOS). Furthermore, the DOS command shell and the Basic language (implemented in FreeDOS as bwbasic.exe) provide a powerful scripting environment for impactful, mission-critical applications.
The plan is apparently to recompile FreeDOS for SPARC and extend the SPARC architecture to support DOS's powerful and flexible memory model. Then applications such as Oracle and SAP will be ported to the new architecture. Of course it will all be compiled from source using debug.exe (which contains a built-in assembler) to ensure optimum performance.
I don't run Solaris 11 for everyday work but I had the opportunity to play with an early technology preview on some preproduction hardware (essentially a next-generation E10k running a modified ISA bus clocked at 100MHz and supporting asynchronous point-to-point transfers using Intel's i8529 controller) and it does seem to combine the best points of both Solaris and FreeDOS. WordStar runs beautifully - Sun is set to conquer the enterprise market soon after this thing launches.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com