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

Further proof

[Drunken Coward]

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.

Re:Further proof

[elmegil]

Your post is only further proof that you don't know jack about Sun. If we were doing well sticking to the old method, we never would have travelled down this road in the first place.

It is my impression, though I am not speaking as a Sun PR/Marketing person or in any other official capacity, that we had pushback from customers on selling a "non-standard" linux, and so we have changed our direction only slightly, from "modified RedHat" to whatever distro or distros we end up pulling off the shelf without making modifications.

Re:Further proof

[joe_bruin]

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.

Red Hat a bigger player than Sun?

[tindur]

Is Red Hat now considered a bigger player than Sun?

Those Sun guys.

[termos]

First this and now this! When will they ever stop?

If they're leaving the Linux market

[GreyWolf3000]

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).

Re:If they're leaving the Linux market

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

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.

Why did they bother

[Tsugumi]

I just don't know why Sun had a Linux distro in he first place. What value did they think they were adding? How could it contribute to their server sales? From the beginning, this stunk of some suit saying "we're getting creamed by Linux on commodity hardware - we should be doing Linux!"

I know for a fact that businesses told Sun they could not envisage using their offerings - it just didn't get you anything you couldn't get elsewhere better and cheaper...

Translation:

[ajuda]

A company decided to stop offering for free software that competes with one of its most expensive products. Nothing to see here. Move along.

Well yeah...

[Bob Abooey]

This makes perfect sense for them. They're still going to support "between two and four standard Linux distributions", they just don't have to spend the money to maintain their own version.

They are planning on making money on support so this really doesn't change things much in the big picture.

what about madhatter

[stonebeat.org]

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

Has anyone ever used it?

[incom]

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

What are sun's plans ?

[Billly Gates]

They seem to have a multipersonality disorder. First they claim solarisx86 is the answer, then they come out with AMD powered blades and claim solarisx86 is dead and cancels it, then they bundle sun linux for their amd blades, then they decide to resurect solarisx86 after all the vendors left and use it in conjection with linux, now they are deciding to cancel linux again?, or maybe do an all linux with redhat.

Redhat has stated publically they do not like Sun marketing Solarisx86 and they consider it a competitor. My guess is redhat is willing to do a port if Sun cancels solarisx86 and eventually moved to redhat linux for their sparc machines.

Why can't sun just keep a direction or any direction for that matter? It makes them look bad not to mention if I was an IT manager I would feel real uncomfortable purchasing a sun solution. How do I know what I pick today will be supported by sun tommorow?

Since they are outsourcing all their programmers for minimal wage in India, perhaps the marketing and sales team should be outsourced as well. There expensive American counterparts are not real effective.

This isn't that big

[LowneWulf]

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?

They are, they're not..

[EvilStein]

Geez.. Sun changes its mind more often than my last 3 girlfriends combined. WTF??

last time I heard a good long thunk...

[deft]

I left me zipper undone.

Sun has no Linux direction

[Anonymous Coward]

(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.

Time & Money

[_Sprocket_]

There are a couple of interesting points raised by this article.

The first issue is time. It takes time to put out a custom distribution and/or packages. Unless one is adding an appropriate amount of added value, the effort is questionable. A while back, I was on an internal security team for a major corporation. We had a security software product that we had licensed with access to its source code. We did not review this code, but we did compile it ourselves for a couple of platforms and create official corporate packages for internal use. It then became apparent that the default binary packages direct from the vendor were created using the same options. Without regular code review - what justified the additional time and effort? There was no acceptable answer - we began deploying vendor binary packages.

It makes sense for Sun to drop the customized distribution approach. After all, are they really bringing anything new to the environment that's not already being covered by existing Linux vendors? Working with those vendors to ensure that your product will work with theirs seems to be a much more sensible, and lest time-costly, approach. Especially when vendors like Red Hat are pushing towards Enterprise solutions.

Which leads in to the next point. From the article:

There is little doubt that the notion of "Linux and free have gone away. Red Hat's pricing model now makes that clear," [Jonathan Schwartz, Sun's executive vice president of software] said.

Money. The price of Linux is an interesting point. The no-cost aspects of a Linux distribution is nothing to toss aside too lightly. A lack of licensing fees and tracking headaches makes building a development box based on Linux that much easier. Price is very important to small and mid-sized businesses.

But even though licensing fees have come under increased scrutiny by corporate interests who wish to limit their spending in the current economy, its a relatively minor point. These environments are more than capable of handling licensing fees (although license tracking is still an issue). So in this regard, free in the sense of no-cost has never been an issue.

It might be worth noting that even with Red Hat's Advanced Server offering is still about service. Most of what makes up this new product is still available for free in source code form. One could compile one's own binaries and build one's own Advanced Server-like environment. Buying a license from Red Hat gets you access to their binaries - it is essentially buying a service. Which is a real time-saver whether you're in charge of a corporate IT infrastructure or need a friendly platform to help sell hardware.

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.

No maintenance

[fm6]

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.

Re:Reasonable?

[haggar]

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).

Re:Hardware support on non-redhat systems?

[Jahf]

That's never been the case, even with Cobalt appliances. The Cobalt appliances had -no- hardware support beyond their warranty. If you modified the software, you didn't void the hardware warranty, only your free software support. If you modified the hardware (beyond adding supported PCI cards), then you did void your hardware warranty (they are "appliances" after all, not meant for general purpose modification).

It was unfortunate that we didn't offer hardware service contracts, but for the low-cost appliances it (especially for a start-up company) it was not feasible. The cost of the hardware contracts would have been prohibitive to the customer (more than the cost of the box itself) -or- would have been a loss for us (the manufacturer). We looked at many was of providing this but it just never worked out. Even once we were a part of Sun, Sun came to the same determination. You would be surprised how expensive it is to stock a worldwide hardware service organization, even with commodity components and even when you already have an organization for your high-end systems.

As for the x86 general purpose stuff, yes, we provide separate hardware and software support contracts in addition to the base hardware warranty. If you want to run Debian on an LX50 and still have a Sun hardware service contract, no problem and you don't pay for software service that you don't run.

(For those intimately familiar with Sun's service levels, note that the LX50 doesn't offer Sun's high-end "Metals" programs (Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum). Future products may, but to get "Metals" you have to be running both Sun hardware AND software. However, if you're happy with "Hardware Only" and/or "Software Only" support, you can mix and match as you please.)