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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.
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?
"we believe that Solaris is a better alternative, that is safer, more robust, higher quality and dramatically less expensive in purchase price."
In other news, Ford recommends Ford cars, Dell have a high cosideration of Dell products and McD suggests we all eat a hamburger.
What's wrong with people today?
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
I know why he says that Solaris is dramatically less expensive than Linux. It's because he works for Sun and therefore doesn't pay Sun's massive rates for service contracts. :-)
Seriously, Sun's post-sales services are pretty good, but nobody ever said they were cheap. Or not too expensive. Or not even just very expensive. The only word that comes to mind for decent cover is exhorbitant.
A top-end Sun service contract costs many many times the total cost of a Linux server system, including all its hardware, software, and permanent supply of Jolt cola, so clearly the man is engaged in baseless PR.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
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.
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!
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.
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.
I have spent several years administrating both linux and solaris (as to be distinguished from the various rantings I've already seen on this thread from people who obviously have not). Now to some extent I disagree with him very much - linux does have a place on servers. Its a matter of which ones though, really. :P
In my experience, if you have something that needs to be bulletproof - if you have something that, on the ultra-rare occassion there is a major problem that is beyond an admin's scope to fix, you can toss cores to a group and demand a quick response (if something dies with a linux box, there's really no one you can get lvl3+ support from) - then you put it on a solaris box. Solaris has a wide range of very useful functions and features that have yet to be mimiced in linux yet. It also has FAR better stability.
On the other hand...if you want to be able to run obscure things, if you want a very versatile and powerful development platform, if you want a cheap but powerful system to do something an enterprise sun box doesn't make sense for, then linux is definately your way to go. If you want to do computational clustering, still linux (though sun's grid engine can still be used, if you want...).
I've been a linux nut since 95. I have loved seeing it go from a hobby OS to something serious. Score a huge one for the underdog! On a high-end server though, it still has a long way to go to compare to solaris. For an easy dividing-line, I find anything from Sun that isn't a v880 or better to be pointless. Solaris for x86 sucks terribly, and once you're below the v880 line you should just be using an intel or amd (depending, again, on function) system, and running linux as its OS.
At least, that's my opinion...as someone with actual experiencerunning both.
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.
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
According to "IBM steals server sales from Sun", IBM has been handily defeating Sun in its bread-and-butter market. As Sun's share of the UNIX server market shrinks, Sun itself shrinks. The worst is yet to come.