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Sun Microsystems, SuSE Link Up To Sell Linux
ChilyWily writes "Reuters is reporting that Sun Microsystems Inc. has agreed to resell and support closely held German software firm SuSE's version of the Linux operating system, the leading variant in Europe, the companies said on Friday.
This agreement follows a similar one in May between Sun and Red Hat Inc. While I'm happy to see Sun's finally beginning to warm up to Linux (aka if you can't beat 'em, join 'em strategy) I wonder if this is too late for Sun?"
Their strategy? Pick a popular flavor of Linux to sell with their hardware. Hook them on the H/W, then upsell the "more powerful" Solaris.
They're just using Linux as the free enterprise OS drug to get potential customers hooked, then sell them the expensive stuff and keep 'em locked.
The kernel was described by the developer of same as "ancient", however the software update mechanism in SuSE didn't offer anything newer. As a matter of fact, for the 6 weeks I allowed SuSE to live on the machine, the software update program didn't offer to update anything, despite a number of security updates available from upstream developers. To a user or administrator spoiled by Debian and apt-get this updater was totally unacceptable.
Anyway, I just don't understand why everyone is rushing to ship SuSE. It's the second-worst Linux I've used (ahead of Red Hat).
No offense, but from this I'd assume that you're not an expert at the Stock Market. Stock price is not comparable between companies unless both companies have the same number of outstanding shares. A theoretical company worth only $1 million would have a stock price of $333,333 if it had issued only 3 shares (of course this doesn't happen, it's an illustration).
"For years, Sun has hidden its performance-poor servers behind its Solaris operating system."
Please, tell us about your experience with Sun. Have you administered it and if so for how long? Are you a user and if so for how long?
I've been using Sun boxes for 7+ years. Their performance used to be slightly inferior but comparable. Now their performance is significantly worse. The UltraSparc III was a substantial design failure, with a 14-stage 4-issue IN-ORDER design at 1GHz, compared to competitors that have shorter pipelines, far higher clock frequencies, more units, more parallelism, and OUT-OF-ORDER designs. Sun's CPU is the last RISC CPU that's still an in-order design, something which by itself can affect commercial performance by more than 40%. Now, Sun's boxes are inferior in performance by a substantial margin.
Sun hasn't submitted a TPC-C benchmark since late 2001, and it was on old hardware. This may or may not be a good thing, but you cannot tell.
Sun withdrew from the TPC-C benchmark because they were trailing their competitors by a widening margin. They publically admitted as much.
Your post is nothing more than the often repeated "Sun is dying" chant that is not backed up by any relavant facts.
Sun is obviously not facing any kind of short-term crisis. But there's a growing consensus that Sun is becoming increasingly incapable of designing and manufacturing competitive high-end Sparc CPUs to power their servers. Intel and IBM are producing much better designs and have access to far better process technology, and there's the perception that this gap is likely to widen over time. Given this situation, Sun will gradually fade into oblivion, or at least that's what some people are assuming. Of course, Sun might pull a "rabbit out of the hat" with this throughput computing thing; we'll have to see.