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Is Sun Turning against Linux and Red Hat?
An Elephant writes "Groklaw is reporting,
based on a ZDNet UK story, that Sun's strategy for survival in the near future is based on trying to equate Linux with Red Hat, and then attack Red Hat as too small to support enterprises. This seems strange -- Sun is selling a Linux distro itself (the Java Desktop System). As I write this, there's no mention of this on Sun's website -- neither confirmation nor denial. What's going on?"
I think they missed the point.
Sun sells unix. Linux is a free clone of Unix. Why would anyone expect Sun likes Linux.
They tried to make their own distro of Linux and that doesn't seem to be going anywhere. I guess Sun just has to be more competitive and work harder to get support contracts away from redhat.
Sun is a company, and will do whatever is most advantageous in the current market. It will never follow any ideology, it will only do what is going to make money... who thought any of theses companies really believe in free software as the FSF does?
McNealy is known to keep a "decapitated penguin" on his desk...
Don't be sensationally unfair; it's the head from the penguin costume that he WORE the year before to declare his company's embrace of Linux.
I don't know if SGI qualifies as large and powerful anymore. But I do think they've made some significant contributions and have been friendly players. XFS is pretty nice.
HP and Intel are behind OSDL, which employs Torvolds and a bunch of other kernel hackers. Not to mention that RedHat was venture funded by Intel cash. That doesn't even get into the device support those companies are responsible for.
IBM runs "Linux" advertisments on TV though.
Sun?
NFS, OpenOffice, GNOME?
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
I don't buy it, I grow it.
I'm a writer, a poet, a genius, I know it. I don't buy software, I grow it.
how many companies ... actually contribute to it? Sun? HP? Dell? Intel? AMD?
Yes, Intel. Read the 2.6.9-2 changelog. Tony Luck contributes, as does Ken Chen. You didn't mention SGI, but I'll mention them. sgi.com email addresses submit patches. HP? Sure, Bjorn Helgaas submits patches. Dell? Oh yeah, Dell hosts the MegaRaid development mailing list, and a few people from dell.com also submit patches. AMD? Take a look at the 2.4.27 chagelog. An AMD employee submitted a patch for an AMD network driver.
IBM is not the only corporation to submit patches to the Linux kernel.
>
SGI have contributed to numerous projects, and are only narrowly behind IBM in terms of how much they've put in. They'd be contributing more, but their Apache accelerator unit was shut down because the Apache group wouldn't take their patches. Fools that they are. (Apache, that is. Those were some damn good patches.)
SGI also ships the Altix platdorm and contributes to Linux' NUMA development, SMP development and numerous other projects. (You don't build 1024-way systems unless you're going to make it run a 1024-way OS.)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
They've open-sourced AND GPL'ed a couple of things that SUSE had previously kept to themselves, YaST being one of them.
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1592544,00.as p
From May 14, 2004 nonetheless.
They support community standards, have a better-safe-than-sorry policy on patent-encumbered stuff, fully support a Free, rapid-release cycle distro with no GPL incompatible components at all (unlike some other large distros have done).
Really? This is news. I was not aware that Red Hat had quit shipping:
Apache
OpenSSL
PHP
Mozilla
Because all of these use licenses which the FSF says on its web site are not compatible with the GPL.
Have you checked the changelog for Red Hat contributions? Or ever read their blogs? Every day they fix, implement or try to perfect many many features. Alot of the things that you take for granted is a result of them. Red Hat does a ton of work on not just the kernel, but in every aspect of linux. They just don't try to hog the spotlight like some other companies. I mean seriously, at least once a day check out what these guys are working on.
Regards,
Steve
No matter whatever you say they are going down. If they don't go I will put my effort to see that Sun is out of business.
That being said--why I am so pissed ?
There is one thing you can never do and get away in Enterprise computing--lie to your customer.
This is back in 1997/1998 when MSFT was not considered a enterprise level system. So we were happy running the latest E3500 and 4500 systems. Then one day the Memory problem started taking place. If there is any Sun hardware admins there they will probly remember the "J3200" error in the syslog just before the system crash.
Sun did not tell us that was a memory problem and took us through painful route of upgrading/patching/replacing components etc. . We trusted Sun and went with that.
Then I have found out they were going to major customers and signing out some kind of NDA where they will fix their server only at a condition the customer can not tell that to anyone.
So, I guess the 1.5M budget we had for Sun gear was not enough for Sun. After we found out ( BTW the sales guy's name was "Steve Introcaso" -- normally works in North East Division--one smooth talker, just hope that he is not in your account ) what was going on we called Sun and they again denied about it.
My job was on the line since I was the architect of the Stock Market Data Processing System. I have finally convinced our management with proper value proposition to start the migration from Sun to Linux since it was not possible for me to "trust" Sun anymore and IBM/HP was too much effor to port the systems.
It took over 5 years to get rid of Sun--but I am glad I did it.
Whatever you do--don't lie when you are dealing with a company's lifeline systems and who buys >1M worth of gears from you every year.
And not to mention about the Java BS they did ... but that's for another day.
- People who believe other people have no right to live, got no right to live ...
The guy in the ZDNet article makes a good point about how Microsoft is not above betraying partners. Sun is a competitor for Microsoft in the small to medium server arena, and Microsoft will in all likelyhood make sure that Sun doesn't get one little bit of marketshare that Microsoft would want. If Sun offers Windows on its low end x86 machines, then Microsoft would be in the position to use that against Sun's Sparc machines. (The usual paid for FUD "analyst studies"), and Sun wouldn't be able to do anything about because it would lose revenue otherwise.
He's extremely tempted to type 'cat /dev/core' at the CLI...
I gotta say I felt the same way, but after quickly checking the size of that file, I decided that having a 256M avalanche of binary data inundate my monitor wouldn't be all that exciting
5468652047616D65
Not that Im disagreing with your basic point... Novell was its worst enemy in the 90s. Its stuff worked too well, was ignored and forgotten about. 3.11, NT 3.5, and 95 with their half assed networking abilities appeared better, and in many cases was good enough. But there back. Hopefully
OpenOffice is worth it: they can just take NFS back until they get it right, though.
Sun has had weird relationships with lots of open source projects that cut into their planned markets, ranging from X-windows to gcc, from their embracing of AT&T style UNIX over BSD style UNIX with the release of Solaris, to their on-again/off-again friendliness to open source work with Java that might remove their leadership in its planned development.
It certainly wouldn't shock me if they once again try to push new products and tools that allegedly run only on their proprietary hardware, only to find that basic services run much faster on the same hardware using one of the Linux distributions.
I've seen Sun's schizo "we love Linux / we are going to destroy Linux" behavior for what it is
I think you're referring to disassociative identity disorder. Multiple personalities is not a symptom of schizophrenia.
Just a FWIW, but having worked for one of the companies mentioned these guys are most certainly sanctioned or in some deep shite, most employers specify that you cannot use a company provided email address for anything non-business related. Especially if it could lead to legal issues. (such as tracking where specific code came from)
NFS works pretty damn well on every FreeBSD and NetBSD box I've used. Sometimes I forget its not a local filesystem. Maybe linux/whatever you're using just has a crappy implementation? Sun can't control that.
I have written before that most of IBM's actions over many years seem to attacks against Sun. IBM is killing its own software offerings to try to control Java. IBM even partnered with MS to take standards away from Sun.
Now Sun is partnered with MS. That alone could kill Sun if it is not very careful. But MS is running scared, and could die before leveraging their partnership to destroy Sun.
Sun wants to equate Linux with Redhat. That might have worked a few years ago. Redhat is American; SuSE was German; Mandrake is French; TurboLinux is Asian; Lindows is playing a different game. Now SuSE is American, owned by Novell, and IBM is investing in it. Does Sun not realize that SuSE moved into the neighborhood? Redhat is attempting to emulate MS, and earning MS-like badwill, but there is an American alternative. Of course, SuSE has the similar problems in putting proprietary programs into its distribution. It is difficult to find a totally-free but commercially-viable American distribution, but that does not affect Sun's market.
IBM and Sun are still focused on powerful hardware. Google has demonstrated that many applications work well with a large server farm of low-power computers. IBM realizes that the only way to keep the hardware prices high is to commoditize software. Sun has great engineers, but their business strategies do not reflect today's market.
I like Sun, and wish them well. Dell is winning on hardware, MS is struggling to stay viable in software, and everybody else is wondering how to stay competitive. Sun does not have a good answer yet.
I spend my life entertaining my brain.
I love the use of the plural "unices" in that quote. It caused me to look up on google for the plural of unix, and sure enough, it's correct.
SGI - XFS, bits related to Altix
Intel - ACPI, hot pluggable memory
AMD - CPU specific bits
Sun - autofs (?)
RedHat and Novell/Suse - duh
OSDL - coupla old geezers
Make no mistake, the kernel is going commercial big time.
I can easily recall E-Caché errors in some US2 chips with 4MB/8MB (333 Mhz - 400 MHz), and also receiving the most obscure information possible from Sun.
Patches and more patches, temperature and humidity control, and finally, an engineer from support services told us off-the-record that it was a hardware design mistake that made single bit flips in one of the two chips from the L2 caché. That flip were causing kernel panics, and obligated Sun to replace large amount of chips in some preferent clients. We replaced too, but it made me think.
Of course, we decided not to buy big Sun iron any more.
cheers
You do NOT have Solaris 10, the final build is not even available within Sun.
You have Solaris 10 Express. Maybe it should have called S10 Beta. But that certainly wouldn't stop the mad conspiracy theories from arising here. Johnathon Schwartz's and other Sun blogs completely contradict this Zdnet article.
http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/bnitz/20040709
GNU/Linux != Red Hat
It's got all of the hallmarks:
:)
:)
1) Getting paid by MS...
2) Betraying it's own open source/free software product.
3) Turning against Linux.
The only thing they haven't done is filed changes against Linux users.
Ah well.. we knew that Sun would turn out to be a bunch of assholes anyway. We've beat them for years and we'll just have to continue to do so.
GJC
Gregory Casamento
## Chief Maintainer for GNUstep
It has been some time since Sun's technology has been equated as 'best of breed', probably going back to the Sparc III series. Most of their install base at this point is in a renewal cycle, or due to 3rd party support dependencies.
HP is betting the shop on commodity based 64 bit computing in Itanium, Itanium II, etc.
IBM has Power5, Power6, etc. A very solid roadmap after years of unix neglect in the 90s. Although Power4 was a bit weak, Power5 looks great and Power6 will definitely be on schedule. What is Sun's latest roadmap schedule? I can't remember, they keep changing the roadmap...
Finally, Sun = Solaris. HP is "Itanium = Linux, HP-UX, or MS products". IBM is "AIX, or Linux, or whatever you want to run on our hardware...we won't stop you."
Itanium = Intel manufacturing. I prefer AMD, but either way both manufacturers have huge investments in numerous tiers of chip manufacture...they can get economies of scale. IBM saw this deficiency, and got new partners. X-Box, PS2, Ninentdo = PowerPC series. Same with Apple. THey've diversified their manufacturing lines.
Sun, on the other hand, now has to consolidate its own market share through a dependence upon Fujitsu now.
Make no mistake -- everything Sun does is about their hardware. And the market is commoditising itself, whether Sun wants to or not. Solaris is a good OS, but I wouldn't pick my hardware based on it. And the best thing is that whatever Solaris can do, the Open Source community can mimick (better) 2-4 years down the line. There is no compelling reason to be bleeding edge all the time, especially in corporate environments...
In short: I haven't seen Sun win an RFI with any company based on technical merits alone in a very very long time. Pricing discounts and enticements yes, but that eats into their bottom line ~alot~, and they can't afford it.
John Maynard Keynes: "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do?"
http://blogs.sun.com/roller/trackback/eschrock/Web log/analysts_on_opensolaris
This guy's blog puts things nicely in perspective. Some excellent points.
Indeed. I've got a complete joint venture my employer is involved in running on Solaris 10
build 63, and binary compatibility for drivers
is key to it: it allowed us to install a jukebox
controlled by Legato, even though Legato don't
support 10. They provide a user-space SCSI
driver for Solaris, and it just dropped into 10
and worked, even though it was from a CD that was
cut eighteen months ago.
The server/client problem with losing track of the state of disconnected partners and never clearing the mount from the client or the server dates right back to early SunOS, and remained in place in Solaris 2.8 to my certain knowledge. It can be intriguingly worse in cross-platform Linux environments because some idiots don't know enough not to write constantly updating log files to an NFS mounted directory, even an auto-mounted one and thus prevent it from ever expiring and unmounting, and that makes the problem even tougher to clear up. From my limited experience with them, the BSD's and MacOS are no better at this: they also become quite confused by disconnected servers. And don't even *think* about using a Windows implementation of NFS, or you'll spend more of your life than you want trying to clean up this kind of issue. The point about no security is that in most mixed environments, it's far too painful to implement a secure NIS, in particular due to failures of other OS's to stay caught up. Linux is actually quite good about this, but try mixing in MacOS, IRIX, and weird-ass Windows NFS clients, and forget it. It can't be done, especially since all of them have wildly different code bases and most of them are closed source. However, you can install AFS or OpenAFS on all or almost all of these, and even integrate Kerberos with a reasonable amount of work to get a much more secured and robust cross-platform file access system.