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?"

Comments

Sounds like they are looking for the competition

[john_chr]

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.

Re:No surprise here...

[AKAImBatman]

Sun?

NFS, OpenOffice, GNOME?

Re:No surprise here...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

This is a true story about sun

[SlashingComments]

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.

Sun vs. Everybody

[solprovider]

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.