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.

Comments

Just to be clear

[Jahf]

I work for one of the groups specifically involved in this ...

To be clear, since the title of the original article and this /. article are a bit misleading (IMO):

Sun will:

* Continue to offer Linux as an offering on x86-based servers. These offerings will come in the form of standard distributions that everyone today knows and loves.

* Continue to develop x86 Linux hardware offerings. Currently stocked by the LX50 (released last year) and the Cobalt appliances (where I originally came from). Coming up there are a number of things due out by the end of the year. I'm not going to cover them now so that I can keep my job :)

* Continue to add software value on top of the Linux distribution by making various Sun softwares (like Star Office, Sun ONE, Java, etc) run ever better on the Linux platforms. ...

The only thing that Sun is not continuing is the customized Sun Linux 5.0 line. Anyone who took a close look at SL5 knows that it is virtually identical to Red Hat Linux 7.2 (in fact, you can even use Red Hat Network or Ximian Red Carpet to update with RH72 patches, though at that point it's not considered SL5 by Sun).

The only differences from RH72 were a modified installer (and some might say broken, since it had problems with Kickstarting), some custom Sun labelling, and value-added software (like the Sun Streaming server).

What is being "killed" is the modification of the base distribution ... in other words, the installer whatever distributions Sun chooses to ship will be the same installer that you get when downloading that distro from it's main website, and the graphics you see during install, etc will be the same as well. We are continuing to layer above and beyond that with things like Sun ONE, etc. ...

In other words, not much has changed except now Sun does not have to go and recertify drivers (that already worked perfectly well) or try to explain why Sun Linux is NOT a proprietary closed Linux (which many people seemed to think even though it was not so). Now we can concentrate on providing software value add above the base distros, which are already maturing quite well on their own. ...

This doesn't mean Sun has abandoned Linux or Open Source. The worst it means is that when a Sun engineer creates a patch (for example, on the kernel) that it has to be submitted either to the distro parent and/or the maintainer of that software before it will make it into the core of a Sun Linux product offering. That should be considered a good thing by most people in the community, as it further confirms that Sun is contributing and not closing off any open code.

Re:If they're leaving the Linux market

[Jahf]

Sun's not dropping Red Hat. We're dropping the modification and rebranding of Red Hat. The article, if you read it, states that the hope is to ship -actual- Red Hat (and other distros) products on Sun x86 hardware (rather than rebranding it Sun Linux and dealing with all the hassles that takes).

And, being a Gentoo user myself as well as a Sun employee, I can say I've heard almost nothing about Gentoo internally with regards to Solaris -or- Linux. Not to say there might not be a group I don't work with that has learned to love the Gentoo like I do, but in every case that I've talked to someone about it, I had to explain what it was.

Sun -is- focusing on LSB compliance, both for Linux (which can be accomplished by using LSB compliant distributions) and for future parts of Solaris.

But as far as the idea of compiling packages from source like with Gentoo, when it comes to Solaris on SPARC, there is almost no reason to do this. One of the beauties of the SPARC platform is the backwards compatibility. If you have that compatibility, and you have known quantities for system configuration, you don't need to compile from source, it just steals cycles from your customers.