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Sun Announces Linux Deal With Chinese Government
Infonaut writes "Scott McNealy announced today at Comdex that Sun Microsystems has made a deal with China for a million desktop Linux deployments under the new $50/seat licensing plan for Sun's desktop software, which includes its Star Office 7.0 productivity program. Whether this will translate into renewed profits for Sun remains to be seen, but according to McNealy, it represents 'the No. 1 Linux desktop play on the planet'."
It's Linux-based. It will ship with a JVM. It makes Sun happy to call it Java Desktop, why not.
Have you got your LWN subscription yet?
From the article:
100% of 1.3 BILLION PEOPLE. That's some hella marketshare right there. Ballmer must be scratching his big hairless monkey-head.
The java enterprise desktop is based on SuSe linux. It basically is SuSe with some value add-ons and support.
"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the the universe." --Albert Einstein
Seriously... I think it's good news for Sun, hopefully instead of spending millions chasing MS in court, they could put that money into R&D and kick some ass/arse/arslet/culo ..
MoFscker
Not to go over board with propaganda (I work for Sun).
The Simple reason is: its cheaper to buy this from us than the cost to develop an equivelant setup.
The more in depth reason is: because star office is better than openoffice (MOST of the code is the same, not all) they would have to license a JRE to include in their distro, and they wouldnt have the support structure that Sun has.
"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the the universe." --Albert Einstein
TROLL! Sun never said Linux isn't the future... just that Linux is not meant for the server. Not necessarily what I believe, but that's the whole Sun/Linux thing in a nutshell. And if they really never thought Linux was good for anything, why acquire Cobalt back in the day? Or go around supporting Redhat and Suse?
DOH! A moment's further reading would have found me:
s ys tem/index.html
.. based on SuSE 8.2 and not on Red Hat Linux as it was originally said about a year ago. Yast2 and other SuSE/administrative utilities are only accessible via the command line and not from the graphical menu system. The desktop is based on Gnome 2.2, though Sun's engineers have tweaked it quite a bit.
http://wwws.sun.com/software/learnabout/desktop
about the Java Desktop, which clearly says its a JVE on top of Linux. A poster at a GNOME Board said it was:
I guess Sun is taking their definition of innovation beyond the realms of technology. This is a good thing, certainly for Sun. I believe the focus is strongly shifting towards the markets in India and China with their increasing buying powers. The outsourced jobs, after all are creating business opportunities in those areas. Might be too early to call it good a move, but a little pointer to that. Here is another article with comments from Australia's Reserve Bank Governor on the Indian and Chinese economies
There are two kinds of egotists: 1) Those who admit it 2) The rest of us
They said Linux is fine for the desktop, they just believe Solaris is better for the server.
Upgrading a rpm based system is no more of a pain than upgrading a dpkg based one. Both will break horribly if you mix n' match packages, stuff you compile from scratch etc. Both will upgrade cleanly if you only use sane, tested packages from your distro vendor. (Yes, debian has a *lot* more packages than anybody else)
It doesn't. It uses Mozilla for the browser. There is no java component of the Java Desktop except for the JVM. Evolution is the email client. Gaim for IM. StarOffice is the office suite. Totem for A/V. And Gnome 2.4 w/ Nautilus for the Desktop.
I agree that them realizing that OOo was better than SO 6 was big, but most of the original SO wasnt even written by Sun.
Besides i dont think performance will be a very large issue since these systems are being geared towards "office use". Not to mention that most people preffer features as opposed to minor speed increases. this is evident simply by looking at the current desktop demographics.
I'm not much for getting into a holy war about things i dont use much. and i dont use office suites at all.
"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the the universe." --Albert Einstein
Not really they had a small profit from operations and substantial positive cash-flow.
The took a charge for loss on holdings like Cobalt and HighGround.
This is akin to you still keeping your salary (maybe a little reduced) but your house is worth less than you bought it for. That is a bummer alright but will not kill you.
Help fight continental drift.
I can tell you that you have have to get special authorization to use any MS products or you'll be fired. If the people you know are using it without permission and someone in management finds out, they'll be reprimanded severely or escorted to the door.
.doc or .xls (.ppt etc), files only.
:-)
Generally speaking, the only people who ever get authorization are those who deal with customers who insist on native
Hell, for a long time we weren't even permitted to VPN into the Sun network on a machine running XP. Now we can do it only if we run an in-house program called XP_Neuter.
Sun really is serious about "Sun runs on Sun", they talk the talk, but they also walk the walk.
I'm surprised they use Evolution, I think Mozilla is better, and does Evolution have spam-filtering?
They use Evolution because it interoperates with Microsoft Exchange Server and has an Outlook look and feel to it.
In my universe I'm perfectly normal, it's not my fault you don't live in my universe.
Sun (and most companies) prefer Gnome over KDE due to toolkit licensing. GTK is LGPL, but Qt is GPL. So you can release closed source apps for Gnome without buying any licenses, but you'd have to spend a few thousand on Qt licenses (remember, the Qt licensing is per developer) to make a closed source KDE app.
I personally consider KDE to be far better than Gnome, both from a user's standpoint and a developer's standpoint. I usually avoid C++ when possible, but I really like Qt. Unfortunately it's licensing will kill KDE in the long run.
According to Sun, they have sold 50 million star office licenses, I bet this thing is currently one of the few divisions of Sun which really makes money.