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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?""
'We believe you should buy our product instead'
This is news?
Banaaaana!
sun is getting killed by lintel. what else they gonna say. of course, it makes him look desperate and stupid.
My problem? I was perfectly gruntled, until some numbnuts came by and dissed me.
What a foolish statement. It's as if people were to start really wanting Pepsis so bad that Coke had to start selling them. Then Coke goes and says "We'll sell you Pepsi cause you want it and we love taking your money, but Coke is a better cola" This is also assuming Pepsi came out with a way to make the cola at home for free and let you alter the formula, then sell it as your own cola.
Once again they show their true colors. They see linux as something stupid that the people want but they know better. They are out of their league. They keep harping on IBM not indemnifying their customers from the SCO debacle. Why should IBM a primarily hardware & services company indemnify their customers for using Linux? They don't do it with MS, they don't do it with zOS, AIX, or OS/400.
MS got sued and LOST with the plugin thing, hell MS got sent up in front of the justice department. Should a hardware vendor such as IBM or Dell have to protect their customers from that? No, they don't.
Sun is the dinosaur in this market. They make second rate hardware that is over priced and underperformed. Why else would they never want to run a TPC benchmark and keep ballyhooing 'real world' tests when they come in and try to convince you to buy their hardware? They stopped making benchmarks the day they stopped winning them and got behind. Ultrasparc 4 was to save the world yet we still haven't seen it. Now little Intel machines that cost less than the yearly maintenance of the 'inexpensive' Sun boxes can run circles around them on Linux.
As a rock-in-roll Physicist once said, No matter where you go, there you are.
I think Sun is making a major mistake by not distancing themselves as much as possible from SCO. They're now drinking the SCO Kool-aid (see the "indemnification" comments), and generally taking advantage of the situation. Perhaps it looks good from where they're sitting, but I think it will backfire. Ignoring Linux, while not wise, is understandable. Repeating SCO's FUD, and possibly funding them, is a Very Bad Thing.
Litigious bastards
He's talking about a total package.
"...dramatically less expensive in purchase price. How much is the nearest competitor's cheapest enterprise offering? And it doesn't come with a portal server, application server, Web server messaging, calendaring, clustering, high availability services and directory services provisioning. Give me a break."
Of course he is probably discounting open source versions of all of those things. But if he does that, what is he going to say about Sun's database strategy? I can only assume that all of these things run (by default) on an open source database because I don't think that Sun has the right to re-license Oracle at $100.00/head. Any real enterprise is going to want to run these things on a commercial database which makes it hard for Sun to compete with Oracle's application suite.
Possibly he was speaking of Suns niche market which caters to organizations that still need a big iron machine to do their work for them (or at least they think they do). This is where Sun shines. In regards to his statement about Linux not belonging on the server, well what do you expect him to say? Sun sells competing software for a server os. Just because they sell a desktop version of Linux doesnt mean they are going to throw away and disregard their crown jewel for it
I have licenses to all those issues that SCO is suing IBM for. If I didn't have them, I certainly wouldn't indemnify them.
So do I buddy. It's right here.
microsoftword.mp3 - it doesn't care that they're not words...
They make second rate hardware that is over priced and underperformed
Anyone that has used Sun hardware would not say this. Tell us about your experience with Sun.
Why else would they never want to run a TPC benchmark and keep ballyhooing 'real world' tests when they come in and try to convince you to buy their hardware.
Because even the other vendors and TPC themselves admit it's outdated. Do you make your server purchasing decisions based on a single benchmark?
Ultrasparc 4 was to save the world yet we still haven't seen it.
Because it's not supposed to be released until 2004.
But the dirty secret at Sun is that Linux IS as good as Solaris today, if not better. Take one small area: software installation and patching. Linux distributions are lightyears ahead of Sun's Solaris in this area. To patch a Solaris box you have to either get a whole recommended patch cluster or select individual patches that apply to your system and hope the ones you need aren't limited to only people with Sun support contracts. To patch the average Linux box you just run apt-get upgrade or use the Red Hat Network interface or even MandrakeUpdate, etc. It's dead simple to keep a Linux box patched.
Doesn't this all seem far too familiar to a lot of you out there? Here we see another veteran UNIX company that has fallen on hard times, pretending to embrace Linux but speaking out of both sides of their mouth. Right now Sun is getting press through their Linux efforts, which they desperately need. At the same time, it's clear they don't really like Linux, and would rather not be promoting it. Linux beat them, and now they are begrudgingly pushing it, a little. If their financial situation gets dire, Linux will be the first enemy they'll look to even the score with. After all, it's all our fault what happened to them.
How does a billion dollar company keep makign thse big goofs..
First implying that they will indemify a cusotmer against frivouls lawsuits on copyright infringment..remeber users are never sued in a copyright matter becasue there is no legal basis to do so..
Two, saying linxu on servers is a non issue when in fact Unix software OS dying such as Solaris is a reality..take a look at Sun's last quarter statement on rpofit and loss to see why..
Don't Tread on OpenSource
I really wish Sun would stop going on about indemnity. Scwartz says:
We will also indemnify you for Solaris, and if IBM says you don't need it, then why do they have so many lawyers suing people over patent and copy violations.
But he must know that users do not need indemnifying against such violations.
Then:
If you use Linux on the server, even if we sold the distribution to you, you are on your own.
He continues on and on about it. Sun are obsessed with this at the moment because they think they can worry PHBs. However the danger for them is that people purchasing Linux servers (an increasing market) will avoid Sun because they are really only interested in selling Solaris.
- Brian.
Schwartz has just given the game away. Sun is the fortune 500 company that bought the token Linux usage license off SCO. I'm pretty sure SCO and/or Sun denied it at the time, but we know how trustworthy they are now.
Er, ok. I would have thought the fact they're responsible for a sizable chunk of open source would prove the opposite. But, obviously, "Loving Linux" is the real test of whether you're against open source or not. I assume you'd go into meltdown if they said they hate Linux, think it's the worst operating system ever written, and BTW, they think FreeBSD is cool.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
He's including a full suite of server software: database, SMB fileservers, calendaring, messaging, etc.
He forgets that Sun's calendar system is iplanet based, one of the less manageable webservers on the planet, you can't patch the source code to it, it's not well documented, and their SMB and messaging systems suffer from the same proprietary cores and lack of cross-compatibility.
Hell, the NIS service that Sun *invented* is implemented *far* more securely, flexibly, and with better documentation and configuration tools on a standard RedHat Linux box.
Sun's core OS has bitten the big one ever since the Solaris release, where they tried to integrate the AT&T SysV approach and standards. Guess what? They had to spend the last 7 years or so, after the AT&T purchase fell through, writing back *in* the BSD functionality. And they *still* use a native compiler that is fast on Sun's, but is non-ANSI compliant, can't deal with cross-platform compatible code, and has different flaws with slightly different versions of the compiler. And they still use "compress" instead of "gzip", and the "here, leave the leading / on" versions of tar, their nroff has bitten hard for years, and all of those tools benefit from being replaced with the FSF versions used by Linux OS's. And have you ever tried to *use* pkginfo to manage packages? I'd rather have root canal without even a drink than deal with that piece of useless !@#$
My own take on this as a customer is that I DON'T want my service provider to provide me with indemnification. I've a brain and that's how I run my company. No, indemnification from my services provider isn't what I want. What I want is for them to sue any company that threatens me with unfounded claims.
Fortunately, IBM is doing just that. We will do business with IBM. HP isn't.
Sun is being so hypocritical.
Why does Sun's license agreement explicitly state that Sun can not be held liable for loses caused by Sun software?
It sounds like Sun doesn't have faith in their own product line. Should I use Sun products for mission-critical applications? Well, I know that Sun won't stand behind me if I do!
I've seen Sun's play real world against Linux.
Linux is cheap, robust, powerful.
But when your talking about mission critical, high performance, no-limit systems... your talking about solaris.
Solaris on one of Sun's boxes is really something. Combined with Netscape Enterprise, and Tomcat.. they are robust. These things really can take a ton of traffic, and not sweat it.
Not to mention their stability, and security.
For 90% of websites out there... Linux is the better alternative. They don't need the performance, power, stability of Solaris on Sun hardware. Will 5 minutes of downtime on Flashyourrack.com really kill you? Of course not.
But when it's a mission critical website, that needs to run... it's Solaris.
Solaris on Sun hardware hurts the wallet, but it's powerful. They can really take a beating and continue on.
yeah, I guess some people want to conviently forget about OpenOffice when it comes time to bash Sun. Not to mention the contributions to Gnome.
What is Linux as of today (2.4.x kernel, 2.6 isn't ready yet!) missing for higher end servers?
So, I have to ask, because I don't really know.
What's the most number of CPUs that you can run in one box under Solaris? Some question for Linux. Can someone answer that for me?
One of the things that bugged me about Linux when I was paying closer attention to the kernel was that Linus seemed to be completely against finely-grained semaphores in the kernel and basically opted for huge chunks semaphored code instead. In order to be able to take advantage of a high number of CPUs in a system, the Linux kernel is going to have to go to that route, or you'll end up with a lot of CPUs spinning cycles while they wait for other CPUs to finish up whatever they're doing. (That's assuming of course that Linux allows multiple processes in kernel context at the same time, vs. the traditional Unix model).
Unless Linux can solve this sort of problem, Solaris will have an advantage because they can throw more hardware into one box, and have the kernel take advantage of it.
This is very bad PR. Anytime a senior exec starts negatively dissing successful competing products it becomes painfully obvious that the company is hurting. The saddest thing of all is that Sun's hardware is of very good quality and if they made the strategic decision to support Linux on their servers they could have provided good competition to IBM. As it is they will continue to lose customers as more and more companies switch to Linux, which isn't very well supported on Sun hardware. What Sun hasn't noticed is that almost no one is really worried about SCO anymore.
Let's face it: The reason Windows is even in the Server market is because of the long standing availability of Windows on the desktop.
For many years, Windows is what most people have used on the desktop. Young programmers have it at home, and start tinkering around, developing for the platform that's sitting in front of them. Naturally, when you need an application on a server, you go with the platform that you're used to.
This is where Linux will pull ahead of the likes of Sun. A lot of the new young developers are using Linux. It's highly available and free for download and modification, with no strings attached. You have access to a large variety of development tools. You get the chance to work on development teams, to make a difference in the community. You build your skill-set on this very attractive development platform that is Linux.
So when the time comes for these new developers to help decide what platform to use in their companies, what will it be? Linux.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
From the article:
The only operating systems that have credibility on Intel are
Microsoft Windows, Solaris and Linux. Which one of them does IBM
do? They don't own their own operating system that runs on the
volume platform. So they will continue supporting other people's
platforms. So will HP. While they have done a superb job of telling
the world that Linux is the future, but sadly it may be true for
them because they don't own an OS
It's sad that the former great Unix hardware companies (Sun, SGI,
Next, Apollo) had to live through times where their product was
commodotized to a point where they either had to compete with as a
softare company or die. SGI and NeXT didn't make it, and sun is now
having to sell their soul to make it as a software company.
I think IBM (and to a lesser extent, HP) see the big picture here -
the commoditization of software and re-emergence of premium hardware.
And if you think about it, isn't that how it should be? You can't
develop hardware in your basement, and if you could, you certainly
couldn't afford to mass produce it. It's a good thing: great
hardware running great open source software.
P.S. I'm astonished to see the number of Sun apologists on Slashdot.
They are on a slippery slope right now, the way they are conducting
themselves. I think Bill Joy saw it and got the hell out. I can sympathize - my first Unix experience was on a Sun, but I'm not about to let nostalgia rule over common sense.
I'm an adamant SunBoy.. the room i'm sitting in right now is painted the color of a Sun box. I love Sparc and Solaris; I'm not stupid though. Solaris is a great industrial strength OS for heavy transactions and the like but Linux is simply the best tool for smaller jobs right now. IE: I would not run Solaris on my desktop, it's simply pointless, too expensive and not as open to debugging as Linux is. The majority of companies out there don't need high transactional items or they don't need to be constantly processing large dumps of data per minute or whatever. They simply want to host a website, or file server, etc etc. This is where the money is at, the bigger companies want flexibility which is what IBM is providing.. and Sun is doing nothing but making stupid comments like these left and right. Even if SCO were right Sun, what exactly does this do for your business?! You aren't offering a product strong enough in any category except high end right now and the middleware/small end stuff is being done alot better by IBM and Dell.
It's getting to the point where I'm looking to paint this room a different color, simply because of embarassment.
Stop making stupid comments, assess the market situation you're in currently and become flexible. I think it was a horoscope which told me to be flexible and to bend with the wind; otherwise I'd only have the option of snapping. The part that hurts the most is that Sun could really be raking up dough in this market especially with people who know Sun is the only company to do business with when it comes to support.
In other words, WTF are you doing Sun? Are you going totally isolate yourselves now? Another part of the problem is the attitude over at Sun.. We know Solaris is better in certain situations.. The old saying sometimes best in market is not best to market holds truth here.
Do something and do something now otherwise I have to paint this room Blue. Probably a light bluish fusia of some sort.. Or maybe ocean blue.. Nevertheless, it'll be blue.
They should emphasis with the Hardware.
Sun is all about hardware actually. Ranting about Linux this way is silly and unprofessional.
Solaris may rock on Sun hardware and may be more consitent than Linux. But the case is that in a market that is - believe it or not - dominated by an OS called Windows it's pointless to haggle over details.
It's x86 that sucks and if Sun would manage to get Sparc architecture more widely used, accepeted and payable they'd actually stand a chance. Sparc is to x86 what Linux is to Dos5/Win3.1. Honestly, think about *anything* that *really* is a pain on PC Linux and you'll find it to be an x86 problem.
The way Sun plays now, it's going more and more comoditiy hardware as usuall. We'll 'compensate' for Linux' 'unreliability' by clustering with boxen off the shelf of Wallmart and loadbalancing with software that you can get for free of the 'net in 5 minutes flat. And AMD and Intel will just keep churning the Ghz crank - and even make good money while doing so too.
And in the end we're gonna all rember those times when there once was an architecture that you could hotswap CPUs with but had a management so full of it they died even before all the rest.
It's a shame, 'cause I really would like to give Sparc a try one time. And believe me, if it's mainly Gnome/Solaris/JBoss or KDE/Linux/Zope or any other way - I really don't give a damn, as long as it is 'nix and I can get the stuff I use compiled. Coming to think of it, Sun actually could open source Solaris... But I guess the moon will crash into the pacific before that happens.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
This thread is actually from yesterday, and my ;). Basically that Sun's execs may be clueless, however they are contributing to FOSS despite their perhaps dubious intentions, and in the end, their contributions are making the world a better place for FOSS.
highly unmodded comments about it still apply
"If the issue is a non-issue, why don't they indemnify their customers?"
Backwards. If the issue is a non-issue, why would IBM indemnify their customers? It's like asking IBM to indemnify a customer against tripping and falling because they fail to tie their shoe. It has nothing to do with IBM or the software/services the customer is being sold, so why would IBM indemnify their customers against it? IBM is not an insurance company.
It's all just FUD by Sun, but it always amazes me how these guys around the industry can spew this nonsense that's not only wrong, but completely irrelevant and, well, nonsensical. There's just no logic behind it at all; you look at it and go "huh?" Really makes you wonder what it takes to succeed in business. Seems to be more luck than anything; it's obviously not brains. And luck only lasts so long.
Sun is scared of the Linux progress on as well the server as the desktop systems.
.. you guessed right Linux.
.. you guessed it Linux.
.. if we want to keep them .. YES.
Where I work we are looking into using Linux on the Desktops with vmware installed to run different OS:es. Windows and Linux mostly. This is to Lower costs.
The users running Unix cad-stations are also looking into replacing HP-UX/Solaris and AIX with
On the servers were looking into replacing our database machines that runs on AIX/Solaris and HP-UX with
Now, why? Because it is a customer demand/wish. I work with outsourcing and the customers are getting more and more cost-aware. What are they doing to lower the cost? They look at alternatives for example Linux. They ask us if we can set this up, what should we answer? Well
I really HAD another userid
"They make second rate hardware that is over priced and underperformed
Anyone that has used Sun hardware would not say this. Tell us about your experience with Sun."
I use Sun hardware, and I agree. It's overpriced and it's slow. We paid something like $10K for a single processor box a year ago, that doesn't have the performance of an AMD or Intel high end desktop solution. We're switching to Linux on AMD boxes as soon as our cad tools have linux support, which is very soon.
It's only a matter of time -- and not a very long time at all -- until free open source solutions will replace or strongly compete with proprietary solutions in all but the most peculiar of applications, and even there they had best worry.
Does Sun really believe that they can, in so far as they may now, maintain any technical superiority at all? They can not, not with big money funding the development and deployment of free open source solutions.
In a few short years, either Sun will change its tune, or Sun will join SCO in the gutter.
.sig Realistic fines for copyright in
The real question for you Sun apologists is this: What has Sun contributed to Linux?
Thats a tough question. Most of Sun's contributions to the open source community aren't necessarily linux specific, like Xemacs, Open Office, Internationalization code for X11, work on gnome, etc. But I do have a Linux specific contribution for you which was developed on Sun's nickel, the NFS version 4 implementation, which is now in the 2.5 kernel. Does that count?
You seem to be spreading quite a bit of FUD yourself. Lets ask a few clarifiying quetions.
You speak of "indemnification FUD." What do you mean? Nobody besides Sun who is selling Linux will offer any indemnification at all. Why doesn't that bother you? Why does it bother you that Sun is indemnifying people that use their Linux desktop solution? Indemnification is potentially a serious problem for Linux. So really, you are spreading FUD about the only vendor of a desktop Linux solution that offers their clients indemnification.
You say that they are "helping to fund SCO's ongoing legal assault." Sun licensed drivers from SCO to try and make Solaris X86 a better product. Are you saying that they can't do that? How far does your zone of exclusion run? Is it OK to buy from anyone who does business of any kind with SCO, or is that all "helping to fund SCO?" Or is this more anti-Sun FUD from you?
Sun is a Linux vendor, and the only Linux hardware vendor trying to make a serious run at establishing a corporate Linux desktop. If you were really a Linux advocate you should be praising them, but instead it's FUD, FUD, FUD of the anti-Sun variety.
I think that at this point your views are clear: Nothing that Sun does short of dropping Solaris and replacing it will Linux will satisfy you.
Your views are quite narrow.
Cheers.
This is an Ugly day for SUN. A sad day. Enjoy your ride on the FUD train because it will not last.
No one is going move from one closed, proprietary solution to another one. So if this is your strategy to get some MS customers, you are fried.
You have/had an opportunity to be part of something great. This is your response? Bad leadership kills companies quickly. You are barely holding your own because you still choose to follow the old proprietary model for UNIX failures. Why? Scared?
The world came together to build a free unix clone because it didnt trust either MS or the proprietary unix vendors. And having tasted freedom, it will never allow one company to dictate terms to them again.
You have embarrassed your company and its stock-holders. I only hope you find your way before your company folds.
You cannot compete with your attitude. You dont support as many devices, software platforms, or computer platforms as either Windows or Linux or Mac.
Come with us if you want to live.
First, stop drinking IBM's kool-aid. Are your memories that short? IBM was a corporate monster before you had Microsoft to complain about. Forget their friendly facade at present, they're not your friend, even though it may seem so. Like Sun, they do some good things for the community, but I wouldn't say it's been nearly to the extent that Sun has. Stop and think about it. Sun in part, or in whole, gave the world OpenOffice, XML, Java, massive contributions to GNOME, and a vigorous voice against hijacking/breaking open standards as Microsoft was oft to do. Sun's never been cheap, but they've been the friendliest UNIX vendor out there, and fighting the good fight. So they've fallen off the horse competitively. So what if they're endorsing Solaris over Linux -- it only makes sense. They do have a better product for the kinds of tasks that business environments require. If you don't think so, you have to stop smoking crack. You can brag about your webpage which runs on RedHat and hosts your blog, but Solaris is inherently predictable and trustable in critical situations. That costs money, but less money than it takes when shit goes wrong. If you run Linux, you have to test everything like mad -- because of the nature of open-source and the way things change and break. With Sun's stuff, they do a massive amount of regression testing. Much of the testing burden you'd have to do yourself is gone. Before you think you know so much, examine the realities of business and what Sun has done for everybody, and the industry as a whole. Everyone conveniently forgets all of this in the midst of their Sun-bashing.
They make second rate hardware that is over priced and underperformed
Anyone that has used Sun hardware would not say this. Tell us about your experience with Sun.
I must respectfully disagree.
For uniprocessor boxes, the price/performance of a Sparc is not competitive at all.
There was a time, when the Alpha was slowly rotting, that Sparcs were heavily used in the physics community. But Lately, I see more people buying new Apples than Sparcs. (PS: I don't see very many Apples used for work (I see plenty for desktops though))
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