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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.
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
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.
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 !@#$
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.
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.
"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