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Is Sun Turning against Linux and Red Hat?

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the embrace-and-excommunicate dept.

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?"

20 of 542 comments (clear)

  1. Sounds like they are looking for the competition by john_chr · · Score: 5, Informative
    The Linux "movement" is too nebulous to compete against so in order for Sun to be able to work out what to do they must feel a need to reduce the problem down to a traditional competitor and then go after that hoping to squash the problem that way.

    I think they missed the point.

  2. Re:SUN, yawn by mantera · · Score: 4, Informative


    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.

  3. Re:No surprise here... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

  4. Re:No surprise here... by AKAImBatman · · Score: 5, Informative

    Sun?

    NFS, OpenOffice, GNOME?

    --
    Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
  5. Re:No surprise here... by los+furtive · · Score: 3, Informative
    You forgot Novell. I'm sure there are others as well.

    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.

  6. Re:No surprise here... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  7. Not Entirely True by jd · · Score: 3, Informative
    The HP/Compaq/DEC gestalt provides the Compaq One-Stop Linux patches for clustering. They also wrote a very nice kernel scheduler plug-in system, whereby you could install your own scheduler whilst the machine was running.

    >
    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)
  8. Novell's doing alright by OSS/GPL too... by IANAAC · · Score: 3, Informative

    They've open-sourced AND GPL'ed a couple of things that SUSE had previously kept to themselves, YaST being one of them.

    1. Re:Novell's doing alright by OSS/GPL too... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

      As a former SUSE employee I'd like to nitpick that YaST becoming GPL had nothing to do with Novell. In fact originally the plan was that YaST would have become GPL by SUSE 9.0. It was just due to some tiny issues which weren't fixed right in time that this step had to be delayed for 9.1.
      GPLing YaST was an often discussed topic for years at SUSE.
      If you want to credit Novell for something then better tell that it's Novell's "fault" that SUSE offers ISO's of the SUSE Linux Personal Edition. Because that likely wouldn't have happened without Novell's influence.
      Of course in the end it doesn't matter how the current state was reached as long as everyone is happy now.

  9. ALERT: Karma Whore! by beacher · · Score: 4, Informative

    http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1592544,00.as p

    From May 14, 2004 nonetheless.

  10. Re:No surprise here... by tomhudson · · Score: 4, Informative
    If Sun were a real ally, Java would be open source.
    Why? As you point out:
    a language that it freely distributes
    That's a pretty big contribution, in my book. On top of OpenOffice, etc. And they've been pretty good stewards of Java. Or would you rather live in a alternate dimension, where Microsoft successfully forked Java, and we have 2 incompatible Javas?
  11. This is a true story about sun by SlashingComments · · Score: 5, Informative
    Sun is setting.

    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 ...

    1. Re:This is a true story about sun by EvilAlphonso · · Score: 3, Informative
      • J3200 in 97-98
      • Ecache fiasco in 00-01-02
      • Piss-poor performance of early US3 chips in '02 (and still now)
      • Hardware quality issues in '03-04
      The common point between all those problems? They lied to the customers each time "We've never seen that before"/"There is no known issue"/"We can't tell you until you sign that NDA"
      I have seen more Sun parts failing in a month last year than I had in the previous seven years with Sun, HP, IBM, EMC and Compaq cumulated.
      Luckily, I no longer have to deal with that crap anymore.
  12. Another problem: Microsoft by theolein · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

  13. Re:What about Novell? by T-Ranger · · Score: 3, Informative
    It may very well be true that Netware is dead, and even that it has no place in the 21st century. Netware is an operating system. Netware is usefull only to netware administrators. File and print sharing is the core service it provides. Just about everything else can be had on systems other then Netware, eDir/NDS runs on Windows and Linux. Groupwise, Zenworks, ditto. Since NDS can quite happly provide a usefull security framework for Windows NT boxen, you can run a "Novell" file and print sharing network sans-Netware.

    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

  14. Re:No surprise here... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    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)

  15. NFS by he+who+meows · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  16. Sun vs. Everybody by solprovider · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.
  17. A Solaris kernel engineer's perspective by christophersaul · · Score: 3, Informative

    http://blogs.sun.com/roller/trackback/eschrock/Web log/analysts_on_opensolaris

    This guy's blog puts things nicely in perspective. Some excellent points.

  18. Re:Some interesting weblog posts by igb · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.