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?"

Comments

It's about time...

[Anonymous Coward]

...that Sun capitalized on their immunity from whatever craziness that SCO comes up with next -- no matter what, Linux from Sun is free and clear from litigation.

Re:It's about time...

[melete]

no matter what, Linux from Sun is free and clear from litigation.

Not neccesarily. In the unlikely event that SCO were to win their case, Sun would be distributing any tainted parts of Linux without a valid license from the original copyright holder of the tainted code. For SCO to win, the GPL has to be invalidated, at least in a limited sense, which will leave everyone, including SCO and Sun, scrambling for legal cover.

Re:It's about time...

[Curtman]

"no matter what, Linux from Sun is free and clear from litigation"

Thats fine as long as they are fee and clear to distribute it under the GPL, you and I are free and clear by proxy.

Re:It's about time...

[vsprintf]

Not neccesarily. In the unlikely event that SCO were to win their case, Sun would be distributing any tainted parts of Linux without a valid license from the original copyright holder of the tainted code.

How so? Sun has been in bed with SCO for months. They paid some portion of many millions of dollars for the right to the Unix code. To me it looks like Sun is playing both ends of the game, and in the middle is Solaris. I certainly wouldn't construe this as a friendly move -- just another move for Sun.

Re:It's about time...

[Marc2k]

Mmm....That's the point. A large part of SCO's case is that they claim that code put into any official, registered branch of UNIX (a'la AIX) is their intellectual property in accordance with the UNIX licensing terms. By paying the royalties to SCO now, Sun will be indemnified of all discrepencies (on SCO's part), in the event that the AIX code is, in fact, determined to be owned by SCO through that indirect and shady means.

What I think is interesting is whether or not Sun can and/or will go after SCO to recoup losses for royalty payments that SCO never actualy owned, after this case is settled (provided SCO loses, that is).

it never too late

[McAddress]

to go to linux. however, sun is making a big mistake. if they are not marketing solaris, they are losing their main product. why would you use a sun chip if you can get a 4 chip 64-bit x86 system running at speeds greater than 3.0 ghz? for much less. if linux takes off, it will not only destroy microsoft, but there will also be some friendly fire deaths involved as well.

Re:it never too late

[BFKrew]

I think the Sun vs Linux case is one in which the costs of going from Solaris to Linux in terms of hardware and training isn't that. Certainly I can see why spending a few thousand less by going for Linux over Sun.

However, as for Linux "destroying" Microsoft, the case isn't as clear as you simplistically state. There is a far greater difference between a Red Hat/SuSE and 2000 server than Solaris.

Re:it never too late

[Anonymous Coward]

They market linux on their low-end machines, not on their high end machines (yes a 4 chip machine is low end in these waters). Their market is different than the one you're talking about.

Sun already lost the low-end market. They're trying to buffer their high end market by saying "we too can interact with that other OS, no need to change your high-end just to get linux compatibility"

Re:it never too late

[epiphani]

There will always be a market for Sun boxes - of all the higher-end server machines that have been out there, sun has outlived most. They're now the defacto non-intel platform in the server arena. From my experience, sun hardware is the first platform out there that you'll run into if you cut out apple and i386 hardware.

Plus, Sun is much more than just a hardware/OS company. They're diversifying - thats good. They probably see the threat that linux/open source represents to their sun/solaris product lines, and are moving to embrace it, so they can have a peice of the linux pie when it starts eating into their solaris cashflow.

Re:it never too late

[Curtman]

I think that with GNU/Linux being so portable, there is a chance we might be able to do away with manufacturers locking us in to an architecture. I for one would like to see hardware compete based on cost/efficiency, rather than the manufacturers operating system. It forces Sun to be more competitive if they are going to remain a hardware vendor, and the death of Solaris might free up a lot of resources that could be in hardware R&D. Having Linux as a supported platform also provides us the ability to do real world benchmark results. A comparison of the same code running on different hardware should be more useful than having numbers to compare from Windows vs Solaris vs Mac OS vs Linux vs BSD would anyhow. As long as we don't limit their ability to change the hardware without breaking compatibility we probably don't need Solaris around anyhow.

Re:it never too late

[Kenja]

Your right, why run on a platform that scales to 128+ CPUs with 16megs of cache per CPU when you can run on a consumer platform that cant scale higher then 4 CPUs and has poor IO?

Have you ever realy used Sparc systems? The things are tanks, no matter what sort of work load I throw at them they just don't stop. On a single task a PC will be faster, however under heavy load the PC just falls apart.

Re:it never too late

[1lus10n]

HP-UX is nowhere near as good or refined, or well known as solaris.

and Itanium proc's suck, they aren't even as good as alpha proc's, let alone the newer ultrasparc's. take a look at real world benchmarks for that type of equipment, like database benchmarks. Sun/Solaris OWN high end benchmarks, and still constitute the majority of the enterprize field.

and i wont get into the enterprise level of support that Sun offers, it beats everyone else hands down.

And you know how linux is making leaps and bounds ? take a look at some of the more recent code that has been put into the kernel, and in userland. Sun is a major contributor.

Re:it never too late

[__past__]

And you know how linux is making leaps and bounds ? take a look at some of the more recent code that has been put into the kernel, and in userland. Sun is a major contributor.

Not only the Linux kernel. Sun is who came up with NFS and PAM, they are major contributors in the Gnome project, they open-sourced Star/OpenOffice, they are an important part of the DocBook community, they invented the Morphic GUI now used in Squeak for the Self language, employ several hacker legends like Richard Gabriel, Guy Steele or Bill Joy (well, if you want to call that employment) etc, etc.

I mean, this is slashdot. We should not forget that, all objective topics aside, Sun is just one heck of a cool company! If only they would get rid of that annoying Scott McNealy...

Re:it never too late

[anthonyrcalgary]

They've got a few hundred Ultra 5's at uni. I don't know how old they are. 8 years? Something like that. They never quit. 8 months of the year they're in near constant use by idiots, and I've only seen a handful need attention in my time there. When they were built you couldn't get x86 hardware that solid. Now you can, but you won't be saving a lot of money, and the x86 systems don't scale nearly as well.

The problem is that Sparc/Solaris is overkill for commodity tasks such as basic web servers. There's no reason to spend the extra money. In other areas, Solaris/Sparc or AIX/POWER really are needed to provide the reliability that the customers need.

Linux gets better every day, but it's stupid to assume it can do everything just as well as the big iron, especially when it's often paired with inferior hardware.

nah

[thesadjester]

It's never too late really when you dominate the high end unix market (with IBM). But really, when it comes to running large oracle databases that are mission critical, sun shines, and that is where their market is. They just want to expand more and keep some of the smaller market to help supplement their main focus. You may argue that the high end server market isn't their focus, but that is the area that they differ from all the other providers, which is an important thing.

cheap?

[broeman]

smells like a cheap-scate version of their original plans, but then again it could let them to be more familiar with Linux and thereby be prepared to create their own distribution later on (and discard their own *nixes).

will Sun buy SuSE?

[wfmcwalter]

It's pretty common to enter into some kind of partnership between two companies as a prelude to a merger or buyout. Sun knows it's behind the times in the Linux front, and building that compitency up by itself is a daunting task. Buying SuSE would radically redress the balance for Sun.

Perhaps the question should be - is there any reason Sun _shouldn't_ buy SusE?

Re:will Sun buy SuSE?

[ElGuapoGolf]

If anyone will buy SuSE, it'll be IBM. They're already giving SuSE Advanced Server away with some of their pSeries line of servers, and they push people to use SuSE over redhat. When you throw in that Munich deal, where SuSE and IBM worked together, you seem to have a very cozy relationshipo between IBM and SuSE.

Too late for Sun?

[antarctican]

No, I don't think so. They've been fantastic in the setup of the cluster we bought from them, full of these new Sun V60x machines. They even threw in 13 extra nodes at no extra cost for a total of 43 nodes.

What will kill them is their supply chain however. We've been waiting a few weeks for mounting rails for the V60x machines.... however this isn't Sun's fault, they aparently OEM these machines straight from Intel. It's Intel who is now able to supply the part, it's actually effected another server we bought straight from Intel. It seems with their linux initiative they're simply relying on the services of others.... Intel for the x86 machines, RH and SuSe for the linux support. They're becoming a reseller when it comes to linux rather then a producer/supplier.

Then there's the NAS system which has been held up in QA for the past 3 months.

They have some great products coming out and good linux knowledge and service, however until they streamline their supply chain they might be in trouble. The rep told me they're putting quality as the top priority, however it seems to have created more problems then good. This new 3310 NAS system was suppose to begin shipping in May.... it's now August....

That will be there downfall, not meeting ship dates. They have the knowledge and inovation to survive, they just need to ride their hardware guys' asses a little harder.

Re:Too late for Sun?

[Biolo]

I really wish I could say more about this, but contracts kind of restrict me. What I can say is that Sun really are putting their money where their mouth is when they say quality is their number one priority. You saw it with the Broadcom chip incident, where they did the right thing and stopped shipments, even though it hurt the bottom line. That is just one incident that got widespread attention. Right now, more so than ever before, they are taking no risks that a customer will get a product that doesn't work just right when it gets installed in their server room. You've got to admire that sort of attitude, especially in this financial climate.

Bombproof computing, they are really making it their goal -although having just come back from watching Terminator 3 I'm no longer sure thats a good thing! :-) . You have to wonder how many other vendors, when faced with something like the Broadcom thing, either 1) don't notice it, 2) notice it but pretended they didn't, or 3) did the right thing even though it hurt them.

As for the holding onto Solaris thing, you can understand that. Solaris is and was a really great product. Having used AIX in a production environment I can understand why IBM aren't so bothered about loosing it to Linux. Given a choice I'd certainly pick Linux. When it comes to Solaris though, it's still not so clear cut, I'd go for Linux on the desktop because that's what everyone is targetting, but I would be sorely tempted for Solaris on the server, and it's a shoe in on the SPARC platform. If you truly believe in your product, like Sun does, it's much more difficult to accept that there may be a real alternative. Part of the problem is that Linux isn't (yet) a real alternative across Suns product range. SGI's Altix scales Linux to 64 processors, but that's the high end limit for now, until Linux gets to being capable of running on the top of the line Sun kit they can't fully commit to it, and by this I mean 128 CPU's, and be capable of handling 256 cores (coming soon(tm)). You've got to look at Suns selling point ever since it was started, Solaris from the lowliest workstation to the highest end servers. Your developers build and compile and test on the low end and deploy straight onto the highest end. Binary compatibility, surprisingly compelling, and Solaris still does this better than Linux, especially across OS/kernel versions.

That said if it was me who made those decisions I'd be sponsoring a major push to get Linux running on the SPARC platform, after all Solaris doesn't really make much money for Sun by itself but its SPARC hardware certainly does, and who cares if the customer runs Linux on Sparc or Solaris on Sparc, as long as they chose Sparc.

Disclaimer: I work for Sun, so obviously I'm biased, and none of the above statements are sanctioned by Sun in any way.

It is too late for Sun.

[reporter]

The revenue of Sun Microsystems in the quarter ended June 2003 fell sharply from the revenue in the same quarter of 2002. Please read "Sun Earnings Trail Expectations". The revenue fell far short of Wall Street expectations, and the stock promptly crashed.

Linux brings no value to Sun and actually destroys Sun's profits. Why? For years, Sun has hidden its performance-poor servers behind its Solaris operating system. Sun focused its marketing message on "the whole system" and said that performance is only one part of the system value. Most of that system value outside of simple performance came from Solaris.

Now, with Linux, the Sun salesperson can no longer argue that the operating system has some intrinsic value over the operation system of, say, an IBM machine. The IBM machine and the Sun machine are running the same operating system, Linux. Then, the comparison of the two machines comes down to performance. In other words, the customers will be forced to look at the quality of the basic hardware. In this area, Sun falls woefully short. Look at the results for the ""SPEC benchmark" or the "TPC-C benchmark".

Re:It is too late for Sun.

[n3rd]

The revenue of Sun Microsystems in the quarter ended June 2003 fell sharply from the revenue in the same quarter of 2002

There is no mention of this in the article you posted.

The revenue fell far short of Wall Street expectations, and the stock promptly crashed.

"Crashed"? Come on, quit with the exaggerations. Look at this graph. Thus far they have sunk $1 per share or ~20%. When your stock value is that low it's easy to lose a large percentage over a small amount.

I find it strange that Red Hat's stock is higher than Sun's and yet Sun brings in billions every quarter and has 6.6 billion in the bank. I think it says a lot about the relavance of using stock prices as a note for discussion.

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?

They have one of the most stable OSes out there, superb hardware and some of the best support which I'm sure amounts to nothing.

The IBM machine and the Sun machine are running the same operating system, Linux. Then, the comparison of the two machines comes down to performance

Once again, you seem ill informed. The Linux offerings are on x86 servers, not SPARCs. With x86 hardware there aren't many ways to differentiate one box from another at a hardware level.

In other words, the customers will be forced to look at the quality of the basic hardware.

You forgot cost and what's most important to companies, support.

or the "TPC-C benchmark"

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.

Before you keep bashing Sun I would seriously consider doing two things: Getting out into the real world to see how many people trust and use Sun/Solaris and do some research.

Until Sun is unseated as #1 in the UNIX server market (as reported by Gartner) and has less than it's 6.6 billion in the bank along with 13 billion in total assets I don't think Sun is too concerned.

Your post is nothing more than the often repeated "Sun is dying" chant that is not backed up by any relavant facts.

Re:It is too late for Sun.

[cartman]

I find it strange that Red Hat's stock is higher than Sun's and yet Sun brings in billions every quarter and has 6.6 billion in the bank. I think it says a lot about the relavance of using stock prices as a note for discussion.

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.

Re:Let the Sun Bashing commence

[BFKrew]

My guess is that it's Java...

Safe move

[MC68040]

This was most likely the safest move for SUN's linux solution and idea, if they team up with someone else they more or less just sell an already existing product with modifications, thus legal responsibilities change and they got more behind their back with a old and stable Linux distribution.

And SuSE is most likely 'closed' enough already for SUN to consider it as a safe solution compared to the dangerous ;) open source world. (Pointer: you have to pay for suse).

Nice article but its missing alot

[Crashmarik]

The reuter story highlights the difference between information and knowledge.

The reporter completely misssed pricing issues, platforms that sun would be selling it for, the support that would be entailed with the license, ETC.

What is truly missing is there is no comment on the SUN-REDHAT, SUN-SUSE licensing vis a vis the SCO suit and licensing. We know, to the extent that SCO's statements may be believed that sun pretty much has a license to do whatever they want with unix. The question is if they sell/distribute a linux under the GPL does that spill over ? Is it protected ? If I buy redhat from sun is it covered by SUNS rights, if it is how does that affect the GPL that comes with the distribution ?

IT would have been wonderfull if the article instead of just being a parrot had of addressed the questions.

What's the point?

[Trurl's Machine]

OK guys - I know that questions like this most often are modded down as "flamebait" or "troll", but I HONESTLY want to know, what is the point now of buying a non-x86 and non-PowerPC workstation. Mod me down if you please, but also mod up an answer that would provide an insightful, informative and interesting explanation. I mean, I understand it for the early 1990's. When "Jurassic Park" was a big hit at the movies, the sitiuation was pretty obvious - you had these single-user, single-tasking OS'es like Windows 3.11 or MacOS 7 on one hand, and those powerful Unix boxen on the other hand. It was obvious, that you need a special dedicated machine to run high-end graphics tasks and another machine just to read the MS Office documents or play Doom. But now - what is the freakin' point, if you can run MS Office and all the latest games on a high-end personal computer (be it the PowerMac G5 or some x86 machine) and ALSO have your favorite Unix flavor running on it like charm? Where is the market niche for a workstation incompatible with the majority of commercial software?

Re:What's the point?

[bobintetley]

One word: Quality Would you trust your mission critical application to some cheap Intel chip with bog standard non-parity DDRAM and low quality components? Alright, you can swap it out for another if it fails, but how much time will that take and to business, time is money. x86 might be cheap, but if you want hardware you can really rely on that's going to operate without problems for years, you buy a Sun box.

Re:What's the point?

[niko9]

I honestly don't understand your reply. I'm not trolling but you said "cheap Intel chip"

Is that how Intel's CPU's are thought of in the computing indusrty?

I just purchased an Intel Pentium 4 3.0Ghz and specifically chose an Intel 875PBZ board for it's stability and reliabilty. With The P4's heat spreader and inergrated heat protection, I consider it a high quality product.

After nearly 3 years of worry free opertaion with a dual Pentium box running almost 24 hours a day without so much as a hiccup on Debian Linux, I thought I made a wise choise with buying Intel.

Can anybody shed some light?

Re:What's the point?

[I_am_the_man]

...running almost 24 hours a day...

You proved his point right there. *Almost* is something that someone buying Sun does not want to consider. Almost is not good enough.

Re:What's the point?

[cartman]

One word: Quality Would you trust your mission critical application to some cheap Intel chip with bog standard non-parity DDRAM and low quality components?.. x86 might be cheap, but if you want hardware you can really rely on that's going to operate without problems for years, you buy a Sun box.

I've had sun boxes on my desk for years, and from what I've seen, this hasn't been true for quite some time. If you opened up a Sun Ultra5 you'd find that it was made almost entirely out of low-end commodity components. The drive was a Seagate IDE drive, the power supply was relatively cheap, the graphics chipset was ATI/rage, and although the RAM was nonstandard it wasn't ECC and it wasn't superior in quality. For a comparable price you could get an x86 box with far more reliable SCSI drives, and with redundant high-quality power supplies, and with ECC RAM. Such a box would be far more reliable (and far faster, incidentally) than the comparably priced Sun workstation.

Of course it's a different issue entirely when you enter the arena of servers, where Sun still has many reliability features not found on any x86 boxes. But in the server arena, Sun is competing against HP and IBM, both of which make sturdier equipment than Sun. Although all 3 unix makers offer vastly superior equipment to what you'd get from, say, Dell.

Re:What's the point?

[xlark]

There are quite a few niches in which any x86 or Mac machine wouldn't be enough.

Very, Very Big CAD projects need a 64-Bit processor and the extra address space that comes with them. The G5 (or 970) is 64-Bit, but OS X isn't yet 32-bit clean. x86 is out of the question.

A lot of specific applications are also better run on Workstations. I've been told that Molecular Analysis simulations are faster on a MIPS R1k/195 than on a 2 GHz Intel.

Thanks to a lot of open source stuff, lots of applications are availible for these other platforms. Abiword, Mozilla, and others can all be made to work on pretty much all of the Six Big Unicies. Just look at SGI's Freeware collection.

You can even play Doom on most of these machines. ;)

Re:What's the point?

[mihalis]

This is ridiculous. Parity is cheap now, any decent PC vendor can sell you a machine using ECC SDRAM.

Meanwhile, of the three Sun machines I've had from new at work in my current job, the Ultra 10 blew a disk, the Blade 1000 had a fp bug (US-III 750Mhz) and blew a disk, and my v240 has both an ethernet bug in all four NICs, and had to have the power supply replaced before it would boot for the first time as a brand new machine.

I don't buy the hardware quality theory for Sun any more. Sure, the metalwork on my Blade 1000 is very nice, but then VAXes were built like tanks too.

Bright sun

[G3ckoG33k]

"I wonder if this is too late for Sun"

Waddya mean?

* They have StarOffice, based on the GPL'd OpenOffice; they have a great future.
*Java (that pesky little language) was doomed too but still hangs around, much like Basic, Pascal and Visual Basic
*Solaris still has an unbeaten reputation for carrier grade quality in telecom compared to Linux, yet...
*They have their own hardware too, even if Opterons...

SUN is better than its reputation here, I believe.

Why hit Sun?

[junkgoof]

Sun does some great stuff, and they have great support, but they can't decided what to do in terms of business. x86, linux, CDE, solaris, SCO-meddling, java...
Sun tries so hard to damage M$ that they hurt themselves, their friends, and their clients.
That said I'm a Solaris admin, and I like Sun hardware and software in spite of the Applesque pricing (yes that HD is $400, yes it is physically identical to the $80 PC drive, no you can't get the mounting bracket separately).

Re:Sun tax?

[nemaispuke]

I don't know where you get your information on Solaris, but the downloaded version of Solaris 9 4/03 runs quite well on my dual processor Ultra 2! And mpstat shows 2 CPU's! To be "legal" with Sun you need to purchase a license based on the function of the machine you intend to run Solaris on (either Intel or Sparc). Prior to Solaris 9, Solaris 8 Intel could handle up to 8 CPU's out of the box. I am sure that is probably still the case, you just have to pay for the licenses if you use Solaris Volume Manager, multiple processors, etc.

Re:Um No

[Znork]

If they have any separate licensing necessary for Linux then they may not distribute Linux. The GPL prevents distributing GPL code together with code that is licensed under terms not compatible with the GPL.

SCO can try to license their alleged 80 lines in whatever way they want. The problem is you just are not allowed to distribute the other millions of lines together with those 80 lines in any case. Which means any license to do so is worthless.

Great! That means they'll...

[Santabutthead]

..be giving legal guarantees because I'm sure they wouldn't want to go against the CEO's words.

Nice Microsoft advertisement

[FatAssBastard]

...right below the article for Linux being sold by Sun. "Microsoft Windows 2003 Server: Do more with less". That's rich (is it ironic? I can never tell...)

I think Sun is just hedging their bets here. Plus, they can offer 'immunity' since they have the license from SCO. I know, I know, it's all crap (the SCO issue), but they can trumpet the fact that they have a proper license to all the code no matter what. None of us gives a shiat, but some PHB's might find it puts them at ease.

Re:Nice Microsoft advertisement

[spitzak]

No, unfortunatly any such "license" immediatly makes it illegal to sell (or give away) a copy of Linux containing the code covered by the license. This is because it violates the GPL that covers the rest of Linux.

The only way for this license to have some value is for SCO to identify what part of Linux it covers, and for that part to be a module or a user-level program or library (such licensed properties are allowed to be added to a Linux distributionj). SCO is definately claiming the exact opposite.

Sun should give up on sparc

[Billly Gates]

First off the versions of Linux provided are for some amd blade servers. Sun is experimenting at this stage to see where the market is.

The sparcIII was years late and already obsolete when it hit the market. SparcIV has been delayed which also gets in the way of the upcomming sparcV which supposed to come out late next year.

The sparcIV supposed to be just as fast as a pIV and a sparcV is going to be even faster. However by the time the sparcIV comes next year it will already be obsolete as well.

Also sparcs are expensive.

My solution would be to switch to AMD64. They are cheap, really fast, and Solaris has already been ported. They can keep their expensive bus technology and only use the cpu's in exchange from sparc's. Or even better just use hypertransport and reduce the costs.

They should also look at the powerpc970 and 980'd. Unfortunately no version of solaris exist for those platforms. AMD64 would probably be a better bet.

Sun's are expensive and underpowered. Commidity hardware makes sense.

Sun

[rihock]

To be honest, I think partnering with SuSe and RH is a good thing. The Sun version of Linux never really took off, so why not partner? Sun makes great hardware, and they are now making great software as well (email, directory, calendar, identity, portal, app server) that run great. I don't think the press gives them enough credit for the effort.

2 flavors of Linux on Sun X-86 Servers.

[revans]

Who says the ENTIRE company is based on ONLY selling big-iron? Just like IBM, Sun sells big-iron, and smaller-iron, and software. Sun also sells this stuff through partners.

So now Sun re-sells two flavors of Linux for its X-86 servers: RedHat and, now, Suse.
Sun is simply giving their customers a new choice.

Running an increasing number of small Intel boxen requires increasing support costs. As needs increase, switching to fewer more powerful big-iron boxen can help to flatten support costs. Seems like Sun is positioning itself to take advantage of that trend.

Given that Java still seems to be growing, so much so, that the IBM folks seem to be obsessed with controlling the standard, I don't see how Sun cannot succeed.

You people have really missed the point.

[EoRaptor]

1. Sun offers 'big name' support contract for Linux.

2. Fortune 1000 companies require this type of backing on any new 'deployment'.

3. Sun now has an 'in' for their sales and support team.

4. Eventually, the solution to further growth will be something linux is 'unable' to do.

5. Experience with Sun, means Solaris is a natural upgrade choice.

6. Profit!

Sun doesn't care at all, they'd support windows if they could figure out some way to convince people that Solaris was the natural upgrade path from that. Linux will always have the 'hobby' stigma attached (mainly becuase Sun will always be whispering in the right ears. After all, they have access.) and thus Solaris is an easy sell, along with the dedicated, lock in hardware for it. Sun can't lose, even if they cna't upsell the client, they have still made a truckload of money on the support contract.

Grow up everyone, Sun isn't run by technologists, and doesn't give alick about Linux (or Solaris for that matter). What they want is money, and this is a means to that end. It may align with some peoples goals to promote Linux, but don't get confused about what Sun is really doing.

Re:Astonishing

[Decaff]

"Given the way Java is going nowadays"...
Java is the most widely used programming language and is still growing at an amazing rate. Sun sell licences for enterprise java and make a lot of money doing it.

Sun have always used an interesting strategy to open up markets for their products and services. They promote open standards, and even donate technologies to the IT community (such as NFS). Sun virtually invented the idea of the desktop Workstation. The idea being that the bigger the market for open standards, Unix, Java whatever, the bigger portion Sun can take. The more people use Linux, the bigger the Unix-ish market is a whole, and that benefits sun. There will be more users who could want to migrate to a more enterprise-level Unix version.

Yay!

[stevey]

I'm glad of this - I run several Oracle installations on Solaris and a couple of small ones on SuSE.

SuSE and Redhat are the two platforms that are certified by Sun, and I had been worried that they'd drop the SuSE support when they got into bed with RedHat more.

Happily it looks like that's not going to happen which is good for me.

(Now if we could only get somebody to pay for Sun to certify Debian ;)

Solaris 10

[dodell]

Well, I've got Solaris 10 alpha test CDs. Solaris 10 is coming out and has some killer features. I don't think this is an "If you can't beat 'em, join 'em" situation at all. Sun has spent years developing and marketing Solaris/SunOS, and I don't think they'll stop here. It's very profitable for them to sell a true UNIX OS.

I imagine it's also just as profitable for them to do support/development for Linux. And I think that they're expanding, not downsizing or rethinking an entire business model.

Re:Why not DEBIAN??

[brsmith4]

Because, the only way to get any relatively new packages or software for debian is to go with their distro that is dubbed "unstable". Who the hell in their right mind would do that? Plus, does the Debian group offer support for their product in the corporate sense of the word? I don't think so. Your average CIO/CEO etc. is not going to be happy knowing that any problems with their IT infrastructure will be handled by some guy on a mailing list from some other country. This scenario is not at all attractive to the corporate big-wigs that run companies.

They're not so pro linux

[tvm662]

Sun boss, Scott McNealy has been hitting the new quite a bit lately. Sun might have struck a deal with SuSE, but Scott has recently warned companies "Don't touch linux without legal guarantees" He's had lot more things to say including calling Gates and Ballmer dropouts,

Missing the point about SuSE

[panurge]

The garbled Reuters (close company) I think is trying to say that SuSE is not public. It's an AG. It's German. It doesn't have to be bought by anyone. It may well be a sales benefit in the German speaking world for a US company to have a local business partner. Patriotism is not limited to Americans, you know.

Sun has also always had a strong Indian connection and it is unsurprising that it should leverage that.

The "Sun is doomed" crowd closely resemble the "Apple is doomed" crowd. They seem to think being a mere $12G player in a huge industry is somehow a guarantee of failure. Depends. Spreading your alliances, being perceived as more rest-of-world friendly than Microsoft, being good at big tin that has to run with low outage, these could be good strategic positioning.

And the short-term opinion of the NYSE on this counts for precisely zilch. (as does the instant opinion of the typical /. reader, me included.) Stock exchanges are not able to make rapid long term evaluation of strategic decisions by enterprises. If they were, they would be economic analysts, not traders.

Re:Um No

[ickoonite]

This is a bit OT, and I'm sure it's been said before, but do the 80 lines matter? That SCO distributed and continues to distribue Linux from its FTP servers under the GPL licence means that its threats are at the very least a waste of court time.

iqu

Throughput Computing

[thanasakis]

Have a look at that (3rd time I post this link in /.)

Sorry guys, but Sun is a great company. They have supported open standards before anyone had a clue about it and they have already given a lot to the community. Java gains groud where microsoft still tries to enter the market (mobile phones etc), solaris is a mature product (solaris 10 is being used/tested inside sun for almost a year) and their hardware may soon fill the performance gap.
I do not see why it may be too late for them.

Re:Throughput Computing

[mihalis]

heir hardware may soon fill the performance gap

Perhaps the throughput computing stuff will be great, but until then, Sun has a bit of a problem in their traditional markets, because their cpus don't deliver competitive bang for the buck in the workstation and small server markets any more. This is where they grew all the mindshare which got them a lot of success. Since they announced US-IIIi at 1GHz, Apple/IBM came back with 2GHz G5. I am fairly confident a dual 2GHZ G5 Powermac is a better unix workstation for many uses, especially for the money. Sun does not ship AGP graphics cards, and hence is cut off from the majority of high-end graphics solutions. My job involves a product which uses fast 2d graphics on both Windows and Solaris, and it's just a dismal comparison between any Sun desktop product and the competition. Even their "high-end" workstation is very disappointing (fiber channel disks are a waste in a desktop, firewire support virtually absent, poor 2d graphics performance, hell, mediocre outright cpu performance).

Re:Throughput Computing

[n3rd]

Hyperthreading uses unused parts of the processor to act as a second CPU is how it was explained to me by a friend who works at Intel. So if X is waiting on Y then X can be used for another task while it waits for Y.

What Sun is doing is putting multiple fully functional CPUs on a single die. Think of it as a single Pentium 3 Slot A cartridge that contains 10 Pentium 2 CPUs.

Re:Is this new?

[Biolo]

Exactly, and of course there is their membership and adoption of Gnome, involvement with Apache, etc. Not to mention that they were the most open of the Unix companies, they effectively open sourced SPARC right at the beginning. Fujitsu make and sell their own line of SPARC chips and servers, because of this, and www.sparc.org is still a real entity because Sun continues to support it. NFS, NIS, Java, and a whole host of core unix things we take for granted today all came about because Sun invented them and open sourced the specifications if not the code. Sun goes on about Open Systems, and are one of the few that really mean it, even if they don't go as far as a lot of people, including some insiders, would like.

Re:Why not DEBIAN??

[brsmith4]

To moderators:

The parent is not flamebait material. Just because you use debian or love debian does not mean you have to mod a post flamebait. This is the absolute truth. I did not say that debian suxors or some bullshit like that, I stated that debian is NOT very attractive in the corporate sense due to support and what some would call bad "marketing".

That said, debian is a solid distro and has contributed great things to the open source world. I have no ill will toward the debian project.

Perhaps restating this line

Because, the only way to get any relatively new packages or software for debian is to go with their distro that is dubbed "unstable". Who the hell in their right mind would do that?

As:

Because, the only way to get any relatively new packages or software for debian is to go with their distro that is dubbed "unstable". What unknowing corporate executive, in their right mind, would take that chance?

would clear up any confusion.

aka if you can't beat 'em, join 'em strategy??

[antis0c]

What?? I don't know what corner of the world you live in but Sun Microsystems software is in use quite a lot still, and still beats Linux when it comes to server market share.

I work for a large data hosting company which shall remain unnamed so I don't get a memo with a copy of the NDA and privacy policies I signed, that has somewhere around 15,000 - 20,000 servers. We primarily offer 3 basic managed systems. Windows 2000, Sun Solaris, and RedHat Linux.

Of the servers about 55% of them are Compaq servers running Windows 2000, 40% of them are Sun Solaris servers, and a whopping 5% of them Compaq servers running RedHat Linux.

Who's beatin' who huh?

* Of course I believe Linux will eventually surpass just about anything, that or a fork of Linux or another open source project. But as it stands now, Sun Solaris is still one of the major UNIX operating systems in the market, and will remain so for years to come.

Re:I call bullshit

[maitas]

Well... actually the Software department has their biggest R+D headcount (even more than Solaris and SPARC conbined), something like 5000 souls...