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Sun's Schwartz Speaks Out on Linux, SCO

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the alas-poor-yorick dept.

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?""

3 of 448 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Purchase price.... by smallpaul · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  2. How To Deal With Linux by harlows_monkeys · · Score: 5, Insightful
    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.
  3. Re:from someone with actual experience... by iggymanz · · Score: 5, Insightful
    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!