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?""

Comments

Duh

[Exiler]

'We believe you should buy our product instead'

This is news?

what do you expect

[b17bmbr]

sun is getting killed by lintel. what else they gonna say. of course, it makes him look desperate and stupid.

Re:what do you expect

[Wavicle]

Solaris on Intel is, for all intents FREE

How do you figure? Is $20 free? Is $95 free? Having paid $20, which is strictly the cost of the media (huh? downloading software is cost of media what??) can I give my copy of Solaris to a friend?

My last version of RedHat cost me $0.12 in media thanks to a 200 pack of CD-Rs I got with a fat mail-in rebate came out to 4 cents a piece (I'm willing to pay 4 cents a CD to get copies of Knoppix into the hands of windows users). Oh, 12 cents plus whatever the electricity cost was (probably another 12 cents).

From where I sit, a "free" version of Solaris is two orders of magnitude more expensive than the "free" versions of RedHat, Mandrake, Debian, Gentoo or several others I'm sure I could find.

Proves my point. Sun is against OSS

[OS24Ever]

When Sun released Mad Hatter and I posted this comment regarding why we as an open source community would support this I got lots of interesting responses about how 'they're not all that against' linux.

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.

Bad PR

[Nucleon500]

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.

Re:Purchase price....

[smallpaul]

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.

Suns Niche Market

[kevin_conaway]

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

How To Deal With Linux

[harlows_monkeys]

There seem to be five approaches by major (or wannabe major) companies to dealing with Linux:

1. The Microsoft Approach. Treat it as any other competitor.

2. The Apple Approach. Cooperate with it somewhat. Use it when you can (e.g., the html handling in Safari), make it easy for people to port Linux stuff to OS X. Specialize in those areas where it is harder for Linux to do well (e.g., user interface). Someday, Linux will be trouble for Apple, perhaps, but for now, they are in separate enough markets that it is not a problem.

3. The IBM Approach. Embrace it. Become a Linux company. Figure out where the money is to be made in Open Source, and go there, rather than struggling to make Open Source fit in with previous ways to make money.

4. The SCO Approach. Claim you own it.

5. The Sun Approach. Even though it is killing you in your core market (servers), pretend that this isn't a problem. Instead, concentrate on the desktop, so you can, if you get very lucky, pick up the crumbs that fall from Apple while they eat Microsoft's table scraps. Meanwhile, continue to try to commoditize hardware by pushing Java, even though you are a hardware company and that's the last thing in the world you should want.

Re:from someone with actual experience...

[iggymanz]

I too have spent over 10+ years administering SunOS/Solaris and 5 years with RedHat's distribution of GNU/Linux. I would just add for rock solid stability on the *low* end approaching that of Solaris one should probably use FreeBSD or OpenBSD, not Linux.

What is Linux as of today (2.4.x kernel, 2.6 isn't ready yet!) missing for higher end servers?

• Hot plugging for SCSI devices that is reliable (adding and removing can be a mixed bag, it does't always work for all types of devices, especially in SAN situation)
• Reliable open source volume manager that is rock solid
• distributed lock management
• size of single swap partition limited to 2GB
• high performance filesystem that is also solid. All the journalled filesystems available on Linux can have inconsistency after crash at just the wrong time; also, too many journalling threads can bring system to its knees as during Oracle load. Let's just get a good FFS for Linux already!