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Sun Announces Linux Deal With Chinese Government

Posted by simoniker on from the one-million-users dept.

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'."

16 of 368 comments (clear)

  1. Linux or Java? by Audent · · Score: 3, Interesting

    According to InternetNews.com (http://www.internetnews.com/fina-news/article.php /3110131)
    it's going to be Java based...

    "Sun said the China Standard Software Co(CSSC) will use Sun's Java Desktop System as the foundation for standard desktop development and deployment in the People's Republic of China".

    Where does Linux fit into that? (Not being a smart-ass, just genuinely curious).

    --
    I am a leaf on the wind
    1. Re:Linux or Java? by CanadaDave · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Why did the Chinese go for this? They should know that it is just SuSe and they should know that OpenOffice is available for free from their website. Why now just make their own spin-off of Debian or something like that? Why buy some stupid thing from Sun which is improperly named "Java Desktop" and whose features can be found in any Linux distro. Whatever happened to Hancom linux? I thought that was popular in China?

    2. Re:Linux or Java? by BladeMelbourne · · Score: 5, Interesting

      I am really surprised by this move.

      I thought China had their own "officially sanctioned/goverment approved" distro, based off RedHat Linux, but called Red Flag Linux?
      http://www.redflag-linux.com/eindex.html

      If China spent money developing this distro, why would they change now?

      Nonetheless, 1 million Linux desktops is an impressive number, and should cause Billy boy to loose some sleep. And Sun isn't as fscked as SCO is it?

    3. Re:Linux or Java? by Mantorp · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Having visited the Santa Clara site the way things work at SUN with access to your desktop from any computer within the organization and the flexible office spaces etc. is just neat.
      It's not revolutionary, and you could do it using non SUN stuff but it just works. Your sales people should just invite decision makers from other large corporations to your offices and have potential buyers look around the place.
      However, the SUN people I deal with still use Excel and Word rather than the Star office equivalents.

    4. Re:Linux or Java? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

      Unfortunately it's licensing will kill KDE in the long run

      Whew. I'm glad it's not just me that's been thinking that. I've used KDE for about two years at home & for some small in-house tools at work. I'm now faced with the possiblity of porting one of our main commercial software products over to Linux - and I'm in the process of switching over to Gnome.

      Licensing has everything to do with it. KDE is nice, but not free enough for my use. The GPL binary linking thing is completely alien to the Windows world. Through association it's giving Linux a bad name and ammo to Microsoft. Most KDE evangelists that I've spoken to don't see the problem, but they're not the ones who might be taking it apon themselves to port some closed-source software. In my case there's absolutely no way my employer would allow the code to be released - and neither would we have a budget for commercial licencing of QT.

      Especially when there's a razor thin line between the Linux port happening or not. Yes, the QT license costs a lot. To a large company it would be nothing. But to many it is significant - especially when it costs less to develop for Windows.

    5. Re:Linux or Java? by AtomicBomb · · Score: 2, Interesting

      You may find that weird why the Chinese govt behaves in such a contradicting way: supporting its own linux company while signing another contract from Sun. The main reason is the economic autonomy is fairly high over there, especially for the few affluent regions (eg. Beijing, Shanghai and GougZhou province govts). It is not that diffrent from, say, California obtains winXP license from MS for every children and his/her dog while Ohio adopts a complete Mac option for secondary school right at the same time. No one thinks that is contradicting

      Also, the number of license does matter. Suppose their govt want to spend $50M for licensed software this year. They can either go for 1 million linux desktop support license from Sun, or, less than 100k licenses from MS. Here is the outcome.

      Think about that as if you are the guy in charge of the government IT policy.
      Option 1: transform the whole xyz dept to linux and free from the control of the evil MS, which matches the agenda of the central govt.
      Option 2: waste $50 million to replace 1/10 of the pirated MS copy while the outsiders still blame you for pirating (9/10 of the copies are not legal after spending all the budget).

      The answer should be clear.

    6. Re:Linux or Java? by danheskett · · Score: 5, Interesting

      WTF! What other ways of support do you suggest.
      I suggest that you call your support contact at your software vendor. Lots of software is sold this way. That person is an *expert* in the package you purchased. He or she knows the details of your setup, of your hardware, and of your network. They have remote access most likely. They are knowledgeable, well trained, and have sufficent time and energy to dedicate to you. This is very often how software is sold. I know you probably think "Free free free" is the best there is, was, and ever will be, but its not always! For commodity stuff yeah, chances are lots of people have the same problems as you. But in complex environments it is likely there won't be an analog to your environment. A support person will have to synthesize an answer from diverse information sources.

      Oh, geez I'm on hold, fuck this shit, I'll type in a few words in Google and find my answer
      See, here is what you miss. That $30 software package you buy at Staples has crap for support. 99% of people who call need to find the anykey. Now, if you buy a serious piece of hardware or software, from a serious vendor, your support contract is a little different. My wife works for a software company with 150 clients. They have direct line access to their support person. They have test setups to replicate client networks. They have remote access, and they are available within 10 minutes. You don't wait on hold, they call you.

      Or, I'll write to a mailing list, which is basically the same thing, since most Google hits will be from mailing list archives.
      Which is all great, if you have a few days or a week to wait. Again, comoddity stuff - "how I authenticate users against the same user list for two different Linux servers???" - fine. When the question is "I am experiencing unusally high latency between two of my servers and reduced bandwidth throughput. I've checked the obvious, but am thinking that my MTU settings are incorrectly configured. What do you think?" a mailing list probably isn't going to help.

      Jesus what do you think Windows users have been doing for years, even in the "enterprise" environment.
      Windows is hardly enterprise. And real enterprises that do use Windows have Premiere support contracts, which work as a I described with a real live person assigned to you and a real live support group who knows how your network operates.

      It is much more efficient to find someone else who had the same problem and documented the solution.
      Someday you will realize there is more to IT than dealing with a few lame x86 Windows boxes and a few toy Linux boxes. Someday you will realize that for commodity software and commodity hardware and simple problems Linux is a great way to go. Do-it yourself gung-ho kick-ass OSS attitude will get you far. But it won't get you a server room that goes 3 years without downtime - scheduled or otherwise. What places like Sun, IBM, and to a lesser degree MS can provide is a person, with a name, whose home phone number, cellphone number, and direct work line are written down in your rolodex. They can provide you assurance that the latest bleeding edge patch to come along isn't going to cut your performance by 50% or break backward compatability.

      I hope you can take a second and really think about what these places offer. I am not on the clock now. But rest assured. I could take an axe to my server room, and reps. from the various vendors would be here onsite in the middle of the night within 45 minutes. Our disaster recovery company would automatically fail over the broken equipment to their backups located offsite. And my users would be grousing that they lost 5 minutes of productivity.

      Stick to Google whne you can, and then get back to me when you discover what the rest of the IT world does.

  2. Re:So is "Sun" in Chinese phone books now? by Brandybuck · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I'm still trying to figure out why China needs a "nationwide standard desktop software system".

    --
    Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
  3. Re:I just hope... by Ezubaric · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I just hope that narrow-minded politicians or lobbyists don't use a large deployment in a communist country as propaganda against open source.

    "Mr. President! We cannot allow an open-source gap!"

    Uhh ... I don't think you get the point of the joke. We do want this. The "missle gap" or the "mineshaft gap" was our concern that Russia had more missles/mineshafts that we did and we couldn't maintain the balance of power. Politicians being concerned about a "open source gap" and then closing it would be good.

    Unless you don't want federal money and legal support for open source ...

    --

    ----------
    I am an expert in electricity. My father held the chair of applied electricity at the state prision.
  4. Re:Price wars by ldecours · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I can't believe China is actually going to pay for their software, to begin with. Historically, I think they've made more off of American I.P. than Americans have. It's kind of telling that they're moving to Linux shortly after they received the Windows source code from Microsoft (and launched major vulnerability-based attacks against Taiwan). They must have seen some really scary stuff in there. Anyone care to venture where all these newly- discovered Windows vulnerabilities are being unearthed?

  5. Good news for sun, but how good? by katarn · · Score: 5, Interesting

    This is good news for Sun and all, I'm sure. But I think it's more of a marketing win for them then a financial win. $50/license x 1,000,000 licenses is 50 million dollars. That's nothing to sneeze at but to put it in perspective, a little while ago Sun was hemorrhaging One *Billion* Dollars (finger in side of mouth) per *quarter*. So I don't think this deal by it's self is going to make a big impact on Sun's finances. But it's a good start, and certainly lends credibility to part of their business model.

  6. Re:On the streets of Canada... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I made $80 selling Knoppix CDs "on the street" in Vancouver, BC, Canada last saturday ($5 each). And I told them it was free and they could download it themselves if they wanted, and that to install Linux they'd need to download a complete distribution. People seemed to like the Idea.

  7. Re:Renewed profits? by SmallFurryCreature · · Score: 3, Interesting
    On the other hand, they already spend the money on the development of the software and I really doubt they are going to press 1 million cd's for this. So it could be seen as pretty much pure profit.

    Remember software != normal products. Just like MS can afford to cut the price of windows for certain countries when people hear about linux, Sun can afford this. It is for them either 50million dollars they get, or they don't get. The investment has already been made.

    Of course if this is going to work in the long run is anyones guess. Can you continue development when you only get $50 a seat? MS says no and charges more then tenfold. I hope sun is right. For 50 bucks an OS noone is going to bother with piracy in the west.

    --

    MMO Quests are like orgasms:

    You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.

  8. Oh So Sweeeeeeeet by thedbp · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I have to say, this could be one of the biggest boons for Linux on the desktop yet.

    And $50 a seat, including Office-type software? Fugedaboudit. No way in hell MS could EVER match a deal like that.

    Once the world's most populous nation starts using Linux as their day to day "this is just the way a computer works" OS will show the rest of the world that yes, Linux on the desktop is a perfectly viable solution, and just because there may be some migration pains in places where MS software has a stranglehold doesn't mean that the migration shouldn't occur.

    Every addiction has a painful withdrawl process ;) But the user is usually better off kicking the habit! The only problem I could see is a bunch of redneck Americans going around saying that Linux is a Communist operation system.

    oh, wait, they already do that. ;)

  9. Re:I just hope... by pavon · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Except that the US can't own open source and thus can't leverage it. The only thing that the success of open source can do is kill proprietary software companies that put alot of money into the economy and pay lots of taxes. These big American companies do not like open source, and I garrentee you that once open source gets widespread to where there is a real chance of them going out of business there will be huge lobbying and propoganda attacks against it. (Nevermind the millions of dollars that are saved by free software, and the thousands of jobs created in IT deploying and improving free software.) So if anything widespread use of open source software by the Chinese will influence the government to crack down on free software in support of current companies, not fund it.

  10. Re:So is "Sun" in Chinese phone books now? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Think about it. If you want your country to modernize (i.e. get smart on computers), then wouldn't it be quicker for the government to establish and distribute a system? It would be easier to establish and distribute only one system? It may not be the ideal system but it gets something in the hands of the people.

    They did it in the US with the electrical power grid. The government paid to have electricity run out to houses that would not have been profitable for a company to pursue. Once the grid was established and everybody was on the same system (60Hz, 110V, etc), then industry could then invest and market toasters, washing machines, and light bulbs.