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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?""
Can someone please explain to me how the purchase price of Solaris is less than that of Linux?
Cost of ownership maybe cheaper, sure. And warranties/support options as well. But what is cheaper up-front than free?
Scott McNealy used to always say gravity was on his side. I used to wonder how he figured that since you had IBM, and all the other big iron makers dropping in from above and back then it was microsoft and intel setting up a rockhard floor for him to be squished on.
Sun is now in quite the pickle. Sparcstations arent a contender for the desktop. Their server sales are being trashed by Linux on Intel, and Linux on mainframe.
Their latest play MadHatter looks nice but so does lindows,suse, and redhat. The latter 3 have one great thing going for them, they are one time licenses not perpetual service contracts like mad hatter.
Its no wonder that they paid SCO a licenses fee and are now dissing Linux. Its also no wonder that Bill Joy left the company.
Ten percent in the first year? What is he kidding? I think reporters should really ask for some sort of substantiation for claims like this. 10 percent would be a seismic shift in the computing industry. This is not a realistic prediction.
eWEEK: So, does the uncertainty around Linux benefit Sun and Solaris?
Schwartz: We have an interesting migration opportunity now because we can go back with Unix that is familiar, we can deliver the Java Enterprise System pricing at $100 per employee, which allows them to run Solaris at infinite scale.
His playbook is obviously to avoid mentioning "linux" and just substitute "Java Desktop System" at every opportunity. He is disguising the fact that they have in fact adopted a third-party linux distribution for desktops. This is the kind of corporate bs that gets slashdotters on Sun's case.
are already financing the anti-Linux, anti-GPL campaign.
If Sun thought that linux is irrelevant on
the server they would have ignored us, and
Schwartz would not arrive to repeat the same
insanities like McBride.
This it is SCO fud again. This time via Sun,
and for the same reasons. The difference is
that SCO knows how their enemies are, Sun does not!
We're speaking of Intel, yes? If we're talking SPARC, I don't know how much Linux factors in. (Of course, if you're buy SPARC, you pretty much have Solaris in the box.)
That said, our organization is giving the Ultra IIIi line a miss. We're going straight from Ultra II to POWER4 in an IBM pseries box. (AIX 5L, though.)
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
Am I misunderstanding something about his math?
expect to take 10 percent of the market in the first year. Ten percent of a $30 billion a year desktop market is huge. So, is it going to be more than 10 percent? I hope so, but in the next year I'd like to get a million users. There's a hundred million computers sold every year, I want to be in front of a million of those and two-million the next year.
How is 1 or 2 million out of 100 million "10 percent of the market?" Anyhow, 1% of the desktop market in one year is an aggressive goal. 10% is ludicrous. Enterprises are not going to switch desktop operating systems that quickly.
Sun is saying that they WON'T indemnify against Linux use on the server. But given that Sun has a valid UNIX licence, and they can distribute as many UNIX kernels as they wish, how could SCO argue that a Linux user who got their kernel from Sun is not a valid licencee? And how would Sun be able to stand up in court and say that they sold Linux to someone without a valid licence, yet they're not responsible?
That is because Sun really doesn't know what it wants to do anymore. Their bread-and-butter has, and will continue to be selling systems: High-end servers complete with Solaris software, and enterprise support for those servers. But the days of high-end servers are coming to a close. Their market share is being taken over by commodity Intel boxes, running Linux and Windows. There will always be a market for high-end servers. You cannot run a stock exchange on Intel Pentiums. But will there be enough of a market to sustain a company like Sun? I do not believe so.
The last hope for Sun is their software business, not Solaris, but Java. But time over time, they have shown they cannot execute on any sort of plan for themselves in this sector. They haven't turned a profit on software in ages, and IBM and BEA make better Java app servers than Sun does.
They remind me very much of Sega. They cannot compete in hardware anymore, at least not to any degree that will support their whole company. The sooner they realize this, and shift their focus into a pure software company the better chances they have of surviving.
Let me get this straight. This guy is saying that Linux has a place on the desktop but not the server? I thought it was supposed to be the opposite. (I know. I know. Linux desktops are tastier than they used to be.)
This guy is seriously reaching. He's also wrong about his customers. At one time, if truly necessary, I would have considered Solaris for high IO applications. Not now. He all but came right out and said that SCO is a business partner. I also would have considered purchasing StarOffice at work. Not now.
Sun you're known by the company you keep. Publically distance yourself from them before you really hurt yourselves.
While there's still quite some way to go, sun has taken a good step in the direction of very creative public relation management.
Really, read the following quote if you don't believe me:
Even though it is killing you in your core market (servers), pretend that this isn't a problem.
Another Slashbot set on autopilot.
Read the latest IDG server reports when it comes to *NIX marketshare and Q2 number of servers sold and get back with me.
Well, I suppose that if there will never be any more security threats then you'll never need an update, but I suspect that most organizations have thrown up their hands and accepted the fact that every so often, you gotta pay the man.
This doesn't change whether it's Linux, Windows, or Solaris - only the METHOD changes and only you can decide whether you can live with the terms.
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
Sun sells to corporations. Sun doesn't really care about someone running solaris or linux on a home pc at this point.
They want a corporate network with thousands of pc's networked off sun "big iron".
To point out something. This month NEC released the first TRUELY "hot swappable" linux server. Its an OLD Quad P3 800mhz for nearly $26,000 that runs a hacked version of linux on a hacked kernel to support the features NEC needed.
On the other hand i can get a Quad CPU Sun V880 with 8 gigs of memory, redundant everything and run solaris 8, solaris 9 and every solaris app off the shelf for about 6 grand more. Were talking a 900 to 1000mhz Ultra Sparc 64bit CPU with 8 megs e-cache vs a pentium 3. With solaris 9 i can swap out CPU boards on a live system, i have all the big apps i need and not locked into a particular vendor. Should i'm locked into SUN, but i'm not locked into only running sun software. If you buy an HA linux solution today you most likely have to work with that vendor to get the software certified.
Do the math. For corporations that NEED mission critical use of UNIX servers, linux is NOT the cheapest solution when you figure in your total costs.
I pay 99.00 for solaris, and thats just the media. i can download the sparc iso's for free, but i like have media locked in cabinets for boot disks if necessary.
In the article Schwartz mentions that he will get Toshiba, Samsung and Sony as customers. Does that mean we may be getting some Sun-based computers from these companies soon?
hey!
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?
:)
106, in theory. Then again you would only have 1 I/O slot.
Sun stated they were no longer going to develop the sparc processors, and in fact were switching over to the AMD opteron (or amd64) line. This was part of an internal emailing they sent to solaris customers.
This actually makes a lot of sense, and saves them bundles of money in the process.
of course, there's the other bit of future history not many people know, Suns lofty plans for solaris10. Solaris10 is supposed to use the Linux kernel completely, just how hypocritical they are about all this is obvious with this press release.
I personally like Sun boxes, with solaris, they really cook, especially the higher end enterprise server boxes, where linux doesn't quite work yet (neither does BSD), Suns future plans via solaris10 is to standardize these 3 different flavors of unix, and to heck with anyone that doesn't like it.
solaris10 was supposed to be a solaris, linux, bsd blend, but use the linux kernel. Maybe this is why they're all over the map with what they're press releases say. I guess only time will tell.
Ummm... his math sucks. One million is 1% of a hundred million, not 10%.
"If English was good enough for Jesus, it's good enough for everyone else."
Our databases are Oracle running on 4-way Sun boxes. But when we add capacity, we will go for SuSE Enterprise Linux running on IBM dual-Opteron boxes (that version of Oracle is still a developer's preview). We use Solaris/x86 for our web and app servers, and it is every bit as reliable as Solaris/Sparc (actually, among enterprise vendors, Sun historically has a reputation for poor quality compared to HP, IBM and DEC). One of our machines we had forgoten about, and had been running for over 600 days before we decommissioned it.
I prefer Solaris/x86 by far to Linux, but Sun shot itself in the foot by signalling its imminent demise (they are working on reversing that, but I doubt they will have much credibility). There is still no version of Oracle 9 for Solaris/x86, they stopped at 8.1.7, which is EOL-ed. Solaris/Sparc is simply too expensive for me to justify for my company, and is not competitive on low-end configurations (4 CPUs or less) with not only with Linux, but even Mac OS X.
Moore's law whittles away at the number of applications that can only be run on large SMP systems, and now that Oracle's reference platform is Linux and no longer Solaris, the Linux version will no longer lag in having the latest patches and fixes. In fact, Oracle's whole "grid" push with Oracle 10g is a transparent nudge towards an architecture with many small Linux servers rather than a single SMP system.
I for one don't believe all applications can be parallelized so easily, and there will still be a need for large SMP systems, but that will become a niche and the interesting thing is Oracle is putting its marketing muscle behind an architecture that is antithetical to all the big iron manfacturers (Sun, IBM, HP).
Anybody who uses an E15K to host web servers or application servers "because it's more scalable" rather than a farm of cheap uniprocessors with load balancers is wasting their company's money and deserves to be fired in my book. Only databases justify heavy iron.
Sun says 128 CPUs in their PDF document "Datasheet: the Solaris 9 operating system".
You can read about 2.4 and 2.6 SMP scalability here Though Linux can run on 64-way, it is currently best on 8-way or less, with 16 and 32-way improvements still in the works
Both FreeBSD and Linux started SMP with very coarse mutex methods because it's very HARD to write that stuff. They will get better over time. In Linux, IBM is helping to tune and improve that stuff (and SCO hates it and wants to claim it)
Sun's traditional market is in high-end servers in both business, government and R&D shops. They have lost a lot of those customers to Lintel servers.
Rather than waste their time trying to push Java on the desktop, what they should try to do is leverage their excellent support and service infrastructure to specialize in openMosix cluster and thin client technology.
I know they are trying to push some sort of Sun thin client architecture, but people are not interested in massively expensive Sun proprietary hardware. OpenMosix clusters may be exactly what it takes to bring Sun back online. Because of support, security and power consumption issues, thin client is really coming back with a vengence.
But people do not want slow Java-based thin client architectures. If they really wanted to kick butt they would make their own gigabit fiber or fiberchannel backplane and then have Sun branded cluster modules that plug in or they could work standalone. Something about the size of the old Sun IPC.
And if they were really smart they would partner with SGI or something to crank out an elegant 2D/3D thin Station. Something that talks both X and Citrix and Tarantella. They could get SGI to bring back the awesome 1600sw display (albeit with a DVI interface) and market it as the ultimate thin client solution (maybe even with local processing power).
For some reason I don't think its going to happen. Maybe now that Bill Joy has exited stage right he could play the innovator and show Sun the error of their ways.
Sun & Schwartz - playing the role of the Emperor, egotistical and proud. (He was intially scheduled to play nilatS, Stalin in reverse, because Sun seemed allied with the forces of freedom in the beginning but now is working with Hitler. Besides, Stalin was never considered part of the Axis Powers.) Believing the Sun rises and sets on him and his empire, he makes alliances with Mussolini and knows full well that sooner or later he'll have to deal with Hitler. Like Hitler, he believes that "There can be only one."
MS & Gates - playing Hitler and out to own the entire world, including those territories of Mussolini and the Emporer, no matter what laws are broken or who gets burned. His Panzer Cash units, having done their work in America, are burning trails of greed and deception throughout Europe, Asia and Down Under, but legions of resistance fighters around the world, under the symbol of the Penquin, are beginning to reverse the fortunes his Panzers have brought him. Will he be able to subvert all governments and politicians, using his DMCA and Patent Rockets, into making freedom illegal? His intial success with the DOJ, snatching Victory out of the Jaws of Defeat, seem to indicate so, but losses in China and some cities around the world indicate another outcome.
Will Hitler succeed in emerging as the Lone World Dictator, errecting Iron Curtains around the Internet and PC hardware, with all access points guarded by DRM chips?
It's a true Cliff-Hanger! Only time will tell.
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
Perhaps you are referring to the security Sun provides by taking weeks to release patches to Solaris? For example the recent sendmail and ssh exploits? I would expect better support from an "enterprise" class company. Don't even get me started about the sorry state of their Cobalt support since they took over the little blue boxes. Don't get me wrong, Solaris on Sun hardware is more stable but the free BSD/Linuxs on cheap Intel hardware are not far behind. The 10% of people that need Solaris/Sun is shrinking fast and Sun should be very worried about that. Every single company I have done work for has is in the process of migrating their Solaris platforms towards Linux for cost reasons. This includes several companies serving enterprise needs such as medical records/credit agencies/etc.
You pay for that on Solaris so you should expect to pay on Intel+Linux too (albeit less).
Let's see:
>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)
PolyServe Matrix Server does consistent device mapping in SAN situations.
> Reliable open source volume manager that is rock solid
Well, rock solid for free - your company paid for Veritas on Solaris,why do you expect equal quality for free?
> distributed lock management
Again, Verita$ vs. Linux... PolyServe Matrix Server + Linux does it and it's much cheaper than Veritas on Sun platform.
> size of single swap partition limited to 2GB
Well use commercial software to get around it.
I don't understand why are you complaing about this - it's not a freaking vi editor; we're talking about mission critical features - I would prefer to use commercial software for things you mention even if GPL alternatives were available.
Even with GPL apps one should at least buy 24x7 support for things like these.
> high performance filesystem that is also solid.
PolyServe File System (psfs) is rock 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.
Were it so easy, there'd be one yesterday.
I noticed many enterprise users are really cheap bastards - they keep using UNIX even when they're getting ripped off but they complain about any commercial software on Linux. Phew!
Rock
There are really only two approaches:
1. Ignore.
2. Embrace.
And of course the SCO option (insanity).
On the Ignore side: MS, Sun.
On the Embrace side: IBM, Apple.
Guess which companies will still be around in 5 years' time?
Ceci n'est pas une signature
Some proprietary products require a certain size of swap as a certified configuration
yup, Linux has an LVM, but I've had it puke on me before in test lab; we'd have never used it in production. I know LInux will soon have all the data center features I listed plus more. Two more years, I think.
The swap limit is with 2.4 kernel on Intel 32 bit processors [it's hard-coded in memory/paging ]. Other architectures might go higher - if you are on 32 bit intel with 2.4 kernel I think you might not really have what the outputs to free indicate