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Sun Drops Linux Distro

Posted by michael on from the hot-potato dept.

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.

17 of 262 comments (clear)

  1. Further proof by Drunken+Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    This is only further proof that Sun plans on dropping out of the entry level server market and sticking with their old method of selling enterprise level systems with a more robust and proven operating system, Solaris. Too much competition exists on the Linux side of things to make enough money, with Dell, IBM, HP, and others fighting it out.

    Watch for Sun phasing out the blade-style systems next.

    --
    Have you been stalked by Seth today?
    1. Re:Further proof by Amiga+Trombone · · Score: 2, Interesting
      When I was at Sun, this is exactly what I tried to feed back. Who in their right mind would want a non-standard/niche flavour of linux when they can get the real thing from RedHat. Aside from support what value would Sun be offering? The last thing Sun needs is to become another ICL.

      Exactly! I found this comment to be insightful:
      "Enterprises now realize that they are writing to a distribution, not to Linux in general. What works on Red Hat Advanced Server will not work on SuSE Linux," Schwartz said.
      If a company is already running their in house applications on SuSE, Sun has already excluded themselves from the market. Why do they want to re-write their applications to run on Sun's distro? It would be easier, and cheaper, just to buy some more Dells.

      Sun is already late to the table with a Linux solution. They have to provide a reason to switch from a Dell/HP/IBM configuration to Sun. Which means they have to adapt to the customer environment. Trying to force the customer to go through the expense of adapting a non-standard Sun distro is not a good argument to make for displacing their competition.
  2. Reasonable? by YellowElectricRat · · Score: 3, Interesting

    It would be nice if Sun (and IBM et al) started contributing to an OS with real promise, like one of the BSDs. Not that Linux isn't promising, I just think that BSD's long-term future is brighter...

    Imagine if one of the BSD's had Linux's hype behind it, but with *BSD's existing code-review and QA systems - if they could manage the influx of interest, I think we would end up with a much nicer product.

    1. Re:Reasonable? by haggar · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Imagine if one of the BSD's had Linux's hype behind it, but with *BSD's existing code-review and QA systems

      And the BSD documentation! Anyone who used FreeBSD can vouch for the incredible job these guys did in documenting everything clearly and with examples! Sorry but Linux is so much behind in this respect (you wouldn't know it if all you ever used is in fact Linux).

      --
      Sigged!
    2. Re:Reasonable? by walt-sjc · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Yeah, even though the installation process sucks shit, it is documented. Once you get the thing installed, it works pretty well.

    3. Re:Reasonable? by Stephen+VanDahm · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I run FreeBSD and Gentoo Linux, and aside from the fact that FreeBSD is better documented, I haven't noticed that one is really any better than the other. But then again, I don't put much strain on my machines. Why do people think that BSD is technically superior to Linux? I'm not trolling or arguing -- I really want to know what people think....

      Steve

  3. If they're leaving the Linux market by GreyWolf3000 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Why do they want to get their own font handler in xfree86? They have their own commercial implementation for solaris right? They want linux/bsd users to wait for their favorite toolkits to bundle in support of this new standard? I know Sun has interest in GNOME, but still GNOME is based on gtk which is based on pango, and pango+xft+fontconfig does the same thing as their own (not-yet working) design (can't remember the name).

    --
    Slashdot: Where people pretend to be twice as smart as they really are by behaving like children.
    1. Re:If they're leaving the Linux market by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting
      Well, Sun does have its own X server but it's increasingly phasing these things out in favour of open products like XFree86. Sun's eventual goal is to take the Gentoo model: applications downloaded as source code, and then compiled locally, automatically. Indeed, their dropping of RedHat is largely because what they intend to do is make Solaris 10 essentially Gentoo Linux with the SunOS kernel and Sun user space.

      This is why people need to switch over to Gentoo Linux, it's so much easier than RedHat, Debian, and OpenDarwin. By always compiling locally, the apps on your machine are optimized the platform they run on, rather than the lowest common denominator. This helps Sun as very few apps are compiled for Sparc architectures when distributed, so leveraging Gentoo this way will really help them.

      Gentoo is awesome. I recommend you check them out.

    2. Re:If they're leaving the Linux market by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting
      I have to say I agree with this. Sun's commitment to Gentoo as the basis for package management in Solaris 10 is well known; it's been a long time coming, and it certainly explains the massive increase in support for Python (and Jython) they've been making over the last two years. Sun realizes that they MUST use a source based operating system if applications using their hardware are to run as optimally as possible, and hence beat Intel.

      This is the crux of the issue. With Gentoo, applications are compiled optimally for the hardware they'll run on. This means Sun is free is optimize and reoptimize its SPARC architecture as it sees fit to make it as quick as possible without risking the chance that applications compiled for older architectures might slow down. As Sun is directly up against Intel in this regard, this couldn't be more urgent.

      I've been playing with the Solaris 10 Preview now for a few weeks (sorry people, it's a way away from production, it's basically nothing more than Gentoo + Solaris 9 at the moment) and it's gorgeous. I can't wait to see it out there, in use.

  4. what about madhatter by stonebeat.org · · Score: 4, Interesting

    what about the Sun's Linux Desktop "madhatter". what happened to that?

    --


    Consensus is good, but informed dictatorship is better
  5. Never made sense to me. by www!!!1 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    They done wrote their own Unix(tm)! I mean that "GUI" thing they have blows goats but Solaris is pretty good. We still have our cvs repository here running on a 150 mhz (or something) sun box.

  6. Has anyone ever used it? by incom · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Has anyone ever used Sun's distro? What 'was' it like?

    --
    True genius is grasping a situation like a peice of fruit, and peircing it just right so that it drains dry.
  7. Not really...quite the opposite by siskbc · · Score: 3, Interesting
    Too much competition exists on the Linux side of things to make enough money, with Dell, IBM, HP, and others fighting it out.

    See, that's the thing though, they're not,as it states in the beginning of the article...

    "our customers told us they didn't want a standard distribution that had some tweaks, so I decided to fix the problem by simply supporting between two and four standard Linux distributions, though I have not as yet decided which these will be."

    So basically, they're going to stop doing the only thing that IBM wasn't doing: namely, releasing their own distro...such as it was anyway. If anything, this brings them more into competition with IBM. That should be fun for them.

    --

    -Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat

  8. Sun has no Linux direction by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    (Please excuse my AC post.)

    I attended a 2-day NDA meeting with Sun in California some months ago ... several of the "top brass" were there to give us warm fuzzies about Sun's direction. We're a huge Solaris shop, and Sun hosts these meetings with their large clients from time to time. (Scott also shows up at some of them, but not at ours.) I asked about Linux and if they were going to embrace the Linux platform for "edge of network" applications, or for web servers (we have a lot of Linux web servers here.) The next day, they arranged a long meeting with me and their Linux guy.

    The Linux meeting was to tell me about the new Linux offering they were weeks away from announcing. That's the idea they just killed. The idea was that Sun would start out by basing their Linux distro on RedHat, then would immediately fork the distro to create a specific Linux for their "PC blade" hardware platform. Really, they said the goal was to use Linux to push the PC blades. And they thought people would jump on this bandwagon.

    Personally, I thought that a Linux distro that used the Solaris package manager, and had a layout that was close to how Solaris is set up, and was managed the same way you managed a Solaris box, might be a cool thing for shops that ran a lot of Solaris but not a lot of Linux. Your Solaris admins could pick up this new Linux thing in a hurry, since it looked just like their other Solaris boxes. And you could run it very cheaply on the new "blades". But that wasn't where Sun wanted to go, and they said that to me very plainly.

    So what I learned in that long meeting with Sun is that Sun has no plan for Linux. They honestly don't know what to do with it. I'm frankly a little surprised that StarOffice still supports Linux, but I guess since all the SO work is done in Germany by the StarDivision/Sun group, maybe that's why StarOffice still supports Linux.

    On the PC platform, it's amazing that Sun actually recommends WINDOWS rather than a UNIX OS (like Linux.) They've given up on the PC platform - they let Microsoft own the entry-level systems.

    Ah well.

  9. Difficult spot by LittleLebowskiUrbanA · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Apparently Sun has huge cash reserves but they can't seem to make up their minds on what to do about Open Source grabbing a chunk of their pie. The way I could see it they could:
    1. keep on selling high end Unix for the datacenter and pray Windows Server 2003 doesn't make huge inroads and that Linux doesn't catch up too fast.
    2. sell their own Linux distro for use on low end machines to emphasize that Solaris is the best for huge servers.
    3. (my own suggestion) Either release the source code for Solaris or help the Linux kernel developers out w/ Sun's own coders and focus more on selling Linux and Unix services like IBM.
    Before I get flamed for mentioning Windows Server 2003, remember eBay seems to make Windows 2000 work for them. Prbably no the best ROI however. Anyway, Sun's leadership seems confused right now.

    --
    This guy is way out there
  10. No maintenance by fm6 · · Score: 4, Interesting
    Except that they never really had their own distro. Sun Linux was just Red Hat "with a few tweaks". It's the old rebranding game. You buy somebody else's technology and sell it under your own name, on the assumption that your name makes the product more sellable. Small problem: companies like Sun and SGI (which also used to rebrand Red Hat) are known for their hardware, not their software. The brands that have established reputations in the Linux world are the well known distros, not the big iron johnny-come-latelies.

    So people who order Sun (or is it Sun Cobalt?) boxes with Red Hat preinstalled will probably get exactly the same software that the would have had with Sun Linux -- tweaks and all. The only difference will be the brand.

  11. It doesn't mention the good legal reasons... by tlambert · · Score: 2, Interesting

    It doesn't mention the good legal reasons for a software house to *not* have their own Linux distribution, and use a third party distribution instead: patents, and "SCO vs. IBM".

    If you have a copy of Sun Linux 5, hold onto it.

    For all of the Sun patents embodied in the GPL'ed portions of your copy of their distribution, you effectively have a royalty-free license to use those Sun patents, in perpetuity.

    This is, BTW, the reason there is no "IBM Linux".

    Sun was probably also at least a little afraid of the sabre-rattling of SCO vs. IBM; by discontinuing distribution, they move out of the area of having the SCO monkey on their backs.

    -- Terry