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'."

Comments

Linux or Java?

[Audent]

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).

Re:Linux or Java?

[CanadaDave]

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?

Re:Linux or Java?

[BladeMelbourne]

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?

Re:Linux or Java?

[danheskett]

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.

Re:So is "Sun" in Chinese phone books now?

[Brandybuck]

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

Re:I just hope...

[Ezubaric]

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 ...

Good news for sun, but how good?

[katarn]

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.

Re:On the streets of Canada...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Renewed profits?

[SmallFurryCreature]

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.