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Sun's Schwartz Speaks Out on Linux, SCO
An anonymous reader writes "In an interview with eWeek Jonathan Schwartz, Sun's executive vice president for software, states: "We do not believe that Linux plays a role on the server. Period. If you want to buy it, we will sell it to you, but we believe that Solaris is a better alternative, that is safer, more robust, higher quality and dramatically less expensive in purchase price.". Also: "IBM is being so hypocritical. If the issue is a non-issue, why don't they indemnify their customers?""
IMHO, Solaris is a great product, Solaris on Intel
is, for all intents FREE, but it does NOT compete with Linux, it requires much more effort to set up correctly, has far fewer applications available and because it is the domain of a single monolithic corporation it does not have the rapid pace of development of either Linux or the BSD's.
Personally I use Solaris, I also use Linux and FreeBSD, God help me I even use Wingoze, let's not speak ill of any *nix no matter how ridiculous the statements their corporate brass might issue.
I killed da wabbit -Elmer Fudd
And when it comes to the high-end, corporate market, it's a pretty valid comparison.
If you went into a VP's office with CD-Rs of Slackware (or your favorite distro) and tried to sell those as being better than Solaris, you probably wouldn't get very far based upon name recognition and perception of stability.
However, if you went in there and compared Solaris against Red Hat Enterprise, you'd have a better shot at selling the Linux angle, because Red Hat has taken the Enterprise line and given it the perception of being superior to 'normal' Linux and packaged it with all the support.
Perception is reality with management, so in most corporate environments, smaller Linux distros won't even enter the equation. Though I disagree somewhat with Schwartz's comments, I can't say I fault his logic or his analogy.
I know why he says that Solaris is dramatically less expensive than Linux. It's because he works for Sun and therefore doesn't pay Sun's massive rates for service contracts. :-)
Seriously, Sun's post-sales services are pretty good, but nobody ever said they were cheap. Or not too expensive. Or not even just very expensive. The only word that comes to mind for decent cover is exhorbitant.
A top-end Sun service contract costs many many times the total cost of a Linux server system, including all its hardware, software, and permanent supply of Jolt cola, so clearly the man is engaged in baseless PR.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
Yeah, but at least it comes with a C compiler so when I download that stuff I can actually build it...
hi
Solaris for Intel isn't really free. First, you'll have to pay to download it. Second, the "free" version has restrictions, as it is restricted to uniprocessor machines and you can't use it for commerical purposes.
1f u c4n r34d th1s u r34lly n33d t0 g37 l41d
obviously you've either never installed solaris, or you are just a troll.
Beyond other compilers available post-initial-build, there is a CD that comes with the system called the "solaris software companion." On it is the gnu c compiler suites versions 2.95 and 3.2. Since you don't have any solaris administration experience obviously, I'll throw out a web site that anyone who has done a week of solaris administration would know. Then a few years from now, you'll know it when you need it.
the main solaris freeware site
Oh, I could toss out a few others, but really - that software companion CD comes with the solaris OS set anyway.
A little pkgadd, and bam - you're there. No worries - you can gui the install too.
I would even take your comment a bit further. I am a user of both Solaris and Linux. I feel that linux is a far superior platform for a workstation. Hardware support is much more diversified, XFree86 has all of the features users want that the Sun X Server lacks, desktop performance is better, etc. Where Linux loses out is when you get 4 or more processors in a system. It just dose not scale well. It runs great on 1 and 2 cpu(x86, not sure about ppc, sparc, etc) systems and can outperform Solaris. But once you get into 4 way, it starts to get unstable and the performance gains are not nearly as great as they are with Solaris.
I think that Linux can and will excell in those areas eventually, perhaps even with the 2.6 series kernel. I have not yet tested with 2.6.
Of course these incoherent thoughts are just my opinion based off my informal testing.
You are being so naive.
Try to find a software supplier who will accept liability for losses caused by the use of their systems.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
I have spent several years administrating both linux and solaris (as to be distinguished from the various rantings I've already seen on this thread from people who obviously have not). Now to some extent I disagree with him very much - linux does have a place on servers. Its a matter of which ones though, really. :P
In my experience, if you have something that needs to be bulletproof - if you have something that, on the ultra-rare occassion there is a major problem that is beyond an admin's scope to fix, you can toss cores to a group and demand a quick response (if something dies with a linux box, there's really no one you can get lvl3+ support from) - then you put it on a solaris box. Solaris has a wide range of very useful functions and features that have yet to be mimiced in linux yet. It also has FAR better stability.
On the other hand...if you want to be able to run obscure things, if you want a very versatile and powerful development platform, if you want a cheap but powerful system to do something an enterprise sun box doesn't make sense for, then linux is definately your way to go. If you want to do computational clustering, still linux (though sun's grid engine can still be used, if you want...).
I've been a linux nut since 95. I have loved seeing it go from a hobby OS to something serious. Score a huge one for the underdog! On a high-end server though, it still has a long way to go to compare to solaris. For an easy dividing-line, I find anything from Sun that isn't a v880 or better to be pointless. Solaris for x86 sucks terribly, and once you're below the v880 line you should just be using an intel or amd (depending, again, on function) system, and running linux as its OS.
At least, that's my opinion...as someone with actual experiencerunning both.
No, not really. I downloaded them at my work (we are starting to use Linux servers) and didn't really have to even pay for the CD-Rs! I guess my friend's did have to invest less than $1 worth in CD-Rs when I let them copy. Besides, even if I downled the images from home, ISP expenses are fixed cost, so I pay the same amount no matter what. And I didn't get the home connection to download Linux ISO images.
One more thing to add, you can use the downloaded versions of Linux distros for commerical purposes but you can't with the cheap download version of Sol. for Intel.
1f u c4n r34d th1s u r34lly n33d t0 g37 l41d
And they *still* use a native compiler that is fast on Sun's, but is non-ANSI compliant,
Just like gcc.
can't deal with cross-platform compatible code,
Meaning it can't deal with GCC-isms that no other compiler supports, including older versions of gcc.
And they still use "compress" instead of "gzip",
No, they use gzip now, and have been doing so for over four years. Guess that shows how little you've been paying attention to Solaris.
And have you ever tried to *use* pkginfo to manage packages?
Yep. And RPM. They both suck, but they both work well enough if you understand them.
Edith Keeler Must Die
With a linux distro anyone can download and burn it for you, either as a friend or for a small fee.
The import part was the second paragraph which you ignored, however.
And what he did not say, you can't modify it.
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
SGI sells a 64p system running a version of Linux.
Yes, Microsoft gives away their compiler. You can download the .NET SDK, including all compilers for free.
You pay because VIsual Studio offers sginficiant value to the developer.
According to "IBM steals server sales from Sun", IBM has been handily defeating Sun in its bread-and-butter market. As Sun's share of the UNIX server market shrinks, Sun itself shrinks. The worst is yet to come.
That's totally out of touch with what the analysts are saying. Here is one of many examples:
"The [Forrester] report says that three powerful forces will cause Linux to tip in 2003 and sweep new Unix installs out of the datacenter on all but the data tier by 2007. These forces are Unix reliability at Intel prices, falling technology barriers, and commercial support from high-tech giants. "Proprietary Unix on RISC will all but disappear by 2007," the report predicts."
Source
I just completed a stint at a large western telecommunications company that was a Solaris/Oracle shop. With Oracle's new commitment to Linux, they are now re-evaluating their need for expensive Sun boxen. If this account goes the way many of my other accounts have gone, Sun is looking at losing yet another large customer.
I'm not sure what definition of "truely hot-swappable" you're using. But from either HP or IBM you can get fully-supported Itanium2 and Power4 machines respectively that run Linux and allow you to hot-swap PCI cards, disks, fans, power supplies, and IIRC even CPUs and memory. I don't know if they'll be any cheaper than Sun, but you're incorrect in saying you can't buy them.
There have also been custom very-high-availability redundant i386 Linux boxes for a few years now.
Hot-swap support went into the stock kernel in 2.5.
But this is a bit of a furphy anyhow. For most Linux applications, clusters are a better choice than a single enormous system, and they're cheaper anyhow. Google and Amazon have hot-swap at the box level, and for 1/10th the price of Sun gear.
Even Oracle, traditionally the big reason to buy pricey monolithic Unix machines, now runs well on Linux clusters and that's only going to get better.
At a constant $/tmpC, one IBM p690 is worth an order of magnitude more than one Sun E15K. So, IBM reaps the profits.
Sun has a serious problem in the shockingly poor performance of its UltraSPARC III.