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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'."
Microsoft is pricing itself right out of the developing world. Newsflash: 90% of the world can't afford to fork over $500 for office.
The China Standard Software Co., a consortium of government-funded companies, selected Sun as its preferred technology partner to deploy Linux-based desktops. The deal is part of China's deliberate policy to diversify away from Microsoft.
Hopefully there's more to it than just diversification. Don't get me wrong, heterogeneous computing is a wonderful thing, but I'd also hate to see governments, corporations, or anyone else making decisions based on computing philosophy instead of technical need and justification. (Some might argue that the first is the second, of course.)
The article doesn't mention other reasons why the Chinese government felt Linux was ready to deploy Linux on desktops, why the available software such as StarOffice was adequate, or why Sun was chosen as the "preferred technology partner." I'm very interested to know exactly what it is about the overall computing infrastructure of the Chinese government that made it choose all of the above. What technical differences exist between their situation and, say, that of the U.S.?
The coolest voice ever.
their research. If they did, I don't think they would be buying something from such a hypocritical company. We'll sell you Linux, but we don't think you should be buying it. That mentallity all in itself spells uncertianty for continued support. IBM who vowed to support Linux 100%(See here) seems like a better company to go through, though I think they are already helping the Chinese government with Linux. That's the last I heard anyway.
Mandrake is quasi-commerical and they've always favoured KDE over GNOME as well.
" the KDE Project, which is entirely aimed at pleasing the slashdot peanut gallery with pointless eye-candy. KDE features are thrown into the mix with little or no regard for usability, or even good taste. The end result is disasterous, as can be seen by anyone unforunate enough to be forced into using it."
I have no idea where you came up with this. There is no pointless eye-candy, and I don't have any of it enabled if it does in fact exist...and I find KDE to be extremely functional in all respects. GNOME on the other hand never seems to work for me, and as far as usability goes, whey the hell do they have that second menubar on the top of the screen and another on the bottom? Getting GNOME set up the way one would like out of the box is a nightmare.
So what would be an equivalent setup? I mean, if they wanted to use Mandrake (free edition) instead, for example. What does the Sun Desktop have which Mandrake doesn't (besides star office).
"they would have to license a JRE to include in their distro"
Not true. They can use Blackdown JRE.
I just knew that some idiot would start trolling about KDE vs Gnome.
The reason Gnome has commercial support is purely and simply due to there being a company producing a commercial version of Gnome back when Sun and HP etc were looking at Linux Desktops.
Yada Yada Trolltech, QPL/GPL, C++, yada yada.
Don't worry about what anyone says. The reason Gnome was chosen was because of Helixcode, pure and simple. Sun and the rest are businesses and as we all ought to know, business deals with business. If Trolltech were producing a commercial KDE, you would have seen something very different happening.
As for Ximian being the future of SuSE and KDE being "legacy" - be afraid, be very afraid. Novells only interest in Ximian was MONO, which happens to fit their new Linux story very well.
Go over to go-mono.org and read Miguels report on the recent Microsoft Professional Developer Conference. Look for references to XAML and other plans Microsoft have for Longhorn. Check Miguels assessment of what this means for non-Microsoft desktop Operating Systems. Then check his "solution" to this.
Once you've done that, come back here and tell me with a straight face that Ximian gnome as the standard Linux desktop is a Good Thing.
China has over a billion people. You sell a billion of _anything_ and it becomes the future.
Software is nothing in the enterprise without support.
I was about to delve in more detail, but that says it perfectly.
With Sun's sinking fortunes, I for one have been a bit worried whether they could continue to fund OOo development. They absolutely need to sell quite a few StarOffice 7 licenses, and it looks like that is happenning!
They have a good plan in place for OOo 2.0, probably released in the first half of 2005. Good luck to them!
don't get me wrong: i think mandrake make a fine product... but when you've got $50 million of yr boss' money to invest you don't put it on papa's moustache to win in the third. you buy a t-bill.
2 1337 4 u!
You're kidding right? You think a million Linux installs spells the end for M$'s multi billion dollar markets? Yes, that's plural. M$ is fucking huge and they will compete until the bitter bitter end.
Honestly, I think Linux will gain more and more desktop market share (and in other markets as well), but M$ will not be crushed any time soon. Besides, if M$ was really cornered, they could always kamakazi and GPL windows. Think about it. Scarry.
This is good for everyone. It's good for Sun, who will hopefully continue to stay afloat now that they seem to be scoring some new big customers. They also will be more strongly motivated to stick with the Linux game in earnest this time around instead of being schizophrenic about it. It's good for Linux, with yet another big name player now firmly in the open source camp. And it's good for all of us, who depend on OpenOffice in order for our Linux desktops to remain viable and interoperable in an office suite dominated world.
The only party for whom this is a bad thing is Microsoft. And that's exactly how it should be. While it is certainly way too early to declare the Great Satan of Redmond defeated, we can call this one more important step on that journey. I applaud Sun for this and hope they score more Linux wins.
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Also, had they used KDE they could have gone with kopete and konqueror which are far better apps than gaim and nautilus respectively IMHO.
I see how much you know about GNOME. Basically nothing.
Whats the phone number for thouse hundreds of thousands of experience users again?
What was it? Ohh, right, you are at their mercy for an answer. And god forbid if you don't format it right, or show deference, or put in a monty python reference you will end up flamed and banned from the list.
If you have a decent contract with Sun, IBM, or hell even Microsoft you have a person who you call with problems. A person. He liases with the appropriate people - inside and outside the company. People who know the code. People who wrote the code, or reveiwed the code, or modified the code. The people who packaged it or defined, or decided to include it.
"Hundreds of thousands of experienced users" will not be able to provide the same level of familiarity with a specific subset of code than 50 professionals working in three 8 hr shifts 24 hrs a day 365 days a year.
Asking a mailing list is fine for your typical small-business server running SAMBA, DNS, DHCP, and qmail.
For most everything else, its a really, really lame way to get support.
That is a "straw man" argument. For every less dollar spent by business on the products of a proprietary software company, a dollar will be saved by that business. That business will pay taxes on that additional dollar of profit.
Meanwhile, as the portion of the IT budget spent for "commodities" like OSes and Office Suites drops, companies will take that savings and reinvest it in custom software that promises real productivity gains for that business. developers will find fewer jobs at software companies, but more jobs at companies that use software.
Over the long run, the economy and the standard of living overall rise as the economy becomes more efficient. What is more efficient than free software?
The world is changing. IBM has their boat all ready. Sun is just starting to build theirs. Microsoft is still standing on the shore cursing the rising tide.
Hmmm, if it's all running Linux, won't the IT department at company X have just as much access to the person who wrote the code as IBM or Sun does? Most of the developers work for free right? so unless Sun or IBM hires them they don't really have any special access to these people who wrote the code.
My main point, which I tried to make long ago was that we don't NEED Sun's support for this. The China deal was for Desktops and it doesn't seem like they would need Sun's support much for that, just like you don't need to call Microsoft for problems with Win98 on the Desktop. What you need support for is the servers, which is a totally different ballgame (but which everyone who replied to my post seems to be referring to).
so unless Sun or IBM hires them they don't really have any special access to these people who wrote the code.
No, no. Sun and IBM have people - or would have people - on staff that know the code in and out, as if they wrote it. On top of that they likely will have modified it and keep daily track of changes, conversation, and the whole status of the package. IBM already has these people - people who contribute to the kernel, keep up on general development issues, etc. Sun did last I knew.
which I tried to make long ago was that we don't NEED Sun's support for this
No, you may not. But China the government may. I am sure Chineese end-users wont be calling SUN for help configuring printing under KDE. What a contract would do is give IT people, developers, integrators, planners, etc access to the experts at SUN that someone downloading an ISO from a website won't. When they have a new feature request they have will a process for getting that to SUN. When there are scalability problems, or bug reports, or memory leaks or whatever goes wrong with Linux desktop software (and there is a lot, trust me) they have a contact to help the IT and support people onsite to get a resolution worked out. When they need help getting a package to work with a local characterset, or a driver ported to the right language, or a patch put into wider distribution, they have direct, accountable, verifiable resouces.
The community based approach works good for most things and many cases. It is not the be end all, even for end-user support. Frankly, any organization planning for thousands and thousands of seats who does not standardize against a single platform, a single vendor, and a single point of responsibility is living in a dream world of unhearlded proportions. Managing thousnads of identical systems will be hard enough. Managing thousands of variations on the Linux distro managed by disparate IT staffs, with no central point of responsibility while still managing thousands and thousands (millions?) of active seats is untenable.
Large scale IT is about efficency, coherency, and policy. The people involved in this deal are seaking that. Posting a message on a public forum that amounts to "help me.. ?" isn't a efficent, it's not coherent, and its not good policy.
I suggest you re-think your position. If you want we can chat about whats involved in managing 2500 desktop systems. You will have a big appreciation for how IT works in a larger sense. I can also put you in touch with a friend who is on a team of planners who manage 45,000 desktop systems spread out over 15 nations. Finally, I have an acquaintance who can talk to you about whats involved in managing 8000 servers.
The bottom line is that, even if you DON'T believe me, I would wager that 90% or more of all non-tech companies (ie, not HP, IBM, etc) who have significant computer needs have a contract with a top-level vendor. Whether that vendor is Dell, HP, MS, IBM is besides the point. And the OS is besides the point.
In a large scale environment you must have true experts on your side to deal with systems issues. There is no other way. There are two ways to get them: hire them in house, or hire them through contract with another organization. China choose the latter. Hiring or building inhouse talent would likely have been way, way more expensive.
> Now, if you buy a serious piece of hardware or > software, from a serious vendor, your support
> contract is a little different.
Of course, we're talking generalities here, but I have to say that's just not my experience. We are Oracle and BEA partners, and have developed systems using OpenMarket (now "Divine Content Server") and MediaSurface.
Without exaggeration, I can say that *every single* time we have had a significant problem with those applications that cannot be solved by looking in a manual, the support lines have been at best marginally helpful and usually completely hopeless. We usually work the problem out ourselves, or get it a fix from somebody on usenet.
There is a HUGE gap between the theory of commercial software support, and the practice. The reason this isn't visible to most people is that the people who PAY for the support contract are hardly ever the people who have to USE it.
Why the gap? I can only think that the high complexity of modern software, combined with the high cost of licenses, ensures that most people who buy that software don't need to rely on support desks. If they did, well, our company for one would now be out of business.
"And the meaning of words; when they cease to function; when will it start worrying you?"