Slashdot Mirror
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?"
This is definitely true, I'm not sure why this would surprise anyone. The first I saw of it was on News.com.com.com on the 20th, two days before the ZDNet UK article. It was based on a telephone conversation with Jonathan Schwartz. Sun wants to find a way to avoid commoditization of software, and to make their HW/SW bundle inseparable. That HW/SW bundle doesn't include Linux, at least any moreso than they have to pay lip service to Linux support.
I'm sorry, did you actually think Sun was an ally? I guess it was their $2 billion deal with Microsoft to try to face IBM head-on (the only company whose Linux support has actually lived up to their promises) that convinced you Sun was completely benign.
Sun has just nailed Red Hat and Linux with a steel chair! Oh no! It's SCO... and SCO is raising Sun's hand! What does this mean?! This can only be settled at Linuxmania!
> As I write this, there's no mention of this on Sun's website -- neither confirmation nor denial. What's going on?
Slashdot is reporting that Groklaw is reporting that the ZD FUD machine is reporting that...
OK, maybe it's true, but I wouldn't take it to the bank yet.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
I think they missed the point.
/.ers never really needed sun anyway. Its all indoors and its nice here. Wait. Which sun are we talking about here?
...they are the MS of the linux world.
Could you elaborate on that?
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). They have not bought out or killed off other distributions or done anything else that would be unconcionable. So how, exactly, do they become "the MS of the linux world"?
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
Redhat is not linux!
Newsflash: Slashdot geeks aren't the types of people Sun is trying to convince. It's the PHBs that matter, and most of them don't know this.
I personally can't stand redhat they are the MS of the linux world.
In what sense? Last time I checked they were giving away all of their code under the GPL, funding kernel development, GNOME development, GCC development... too many to name.
I'm surprised to hear that Novell is being discounted and ignored. Sure, you might laugh, but don't forget that they now own SuSe (which is still the most popular distro in Europe), and Ximian, which owns Evolution and has a stronger influence over the direction of GNOME and Mono.
The job of the CEO is to steer the company. I hope the worlds shareholders are watching and understand that just because someone gets to be a CEO does not mean they know what the hell they are doing.
Where is the innovation? No, not the scientific innovation, the managerial innovation.
Find another distro that beats fedoras boot time without a hack that loads X straight away.. you wont. Its a full minute faster than debian installs.
Disclaimer: I work for a company, but I don't speak for them.
I personally can't stand redhat they are the MS of the linux world.
Oh I wasn't aware they had a Linux monopoly and were guilty of abusing that monopoly. Oh wait, they're not. This is just a typical Slashdot troll who doesn't like Red Hat, and because he doesn't like Red Hat and he doesn't like Microsoft they must be very similar within their own fields.
Don't blame him for posting this garbage. It's rewarded around here. After all, he has a +3 Insightful.
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.
RedHat might be Linux's Microsoft, but you really can't deny they really pushed Linux in the early days. Without RedHat, I seriously doubt our favorite OS would be the same today without them.
I don't like it much as a distribution neither (it's not bad but I've seen better), but I still show some respect for them.
As for Sun, well, I can hardly get a point of view on those guys. As a developper, I really like Java and like the fact that they let everyone use it freely (as in free beer). On the other hand, their marketting strategies on everything that is OS or hardware are quite unacceptable. They seem to be very opportunist, but forget everything about the long run and making friends.
I can't accept the fact that they are totally evil, but they sure have no feather wings.
Qui ne va pas à la chasse n'a pas de gibier
PHP Queb
Type 'cat /dev/core' at a shell. Then see what you have to say about Red Hat.
:wq
This is *news*? Geez.
Sun can't compete against Linux, because it's not a company. They can compete against Red Hat, SuSE, etc. These are companies. They make and sell stuff, including support contracts, etc.
Schwartz also states that he thinks Linux is a good proving ground, but Solaris is better, even at running Linux applications. Sounds like a good strategy, if people buy it. Now that Sun sells AMD boxes, as well as SPARC, it's a lot less of a hassle for their customers to try exactly that.
There exists no way of exchanging information without making judgments. --Bene Gesserit Axiom
Companys that begin to struggle and can see their future dying are apt to do all sorts of vile things. Partnering with Microsoft is not a good sign, for we all know how Microsoft view Linux. Now we may have another sign from Sun about how they view it. Thanks to Groklaw, despite all the naysayers, I've seen Sun's schizo "we love Linux / we are going to destroy Linux" behavior for what it is: No real friend to the FOSS community.
As for Groklaw not being objective, I'm so glad. I've had enough of objective news coverage that refuses to call people on their statements. Politician X tells his lie, then Politician Y tells his opposite lie, the story ends right there, and that's considered good journalism?! No thanks. Give me the Groklaw approach every day of the week. You do wrong, you get called out. You do right, you get praised. If you don't like it, start your own advocacy site where you can call it as you see it. But don't put down Groklaw just because it's on the side of FOSS.
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?
You guys are going nuts on trying to figure out if Sun is Pro-Linux or against it. The truth the both and neither. If sun can make money off of Linux then they will support Linux in areas. If other Linux companies are cutting into their market share then they will play the Solaris Card and down the disadvantages of Linux. Suns stance on Linux was always this. Linux is good, but Solaris is better. So if people complain that Sun hardware w. Solaris is to big then hey lets use Linux and see if you want Solaris later. But if they want Solaris then they will go lets see if we can get rid of all those nasty Linux systems. Solaris Does have advantages over Linux and some really good scailing features. But for most companies and people linux does the trick. So Sun is Linux if you want but we rather you go with Solaris.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
As I write this, there's no mention of this on Sun's website -- neither confirmation nor denial. What's going on?"
Are you serious?! Sun isn't posting their future strategies on a publicly accessible website?!?!? THAT'S INSANE!!
It's not all bad that they're advertising Linux as Red Hat. A lot of my non-tech friends have no idea what Linux is, but they do know what Red Hat is- they heard that name over and over when Red Hat made a strong IPO.
If those same guys even knew that Red Hat was an alternative operating system, that would be a huge step forward. Heck, even if one of them tries it out, they'd learn soon enough what Linux really was. Until then, let's take all the advertisement we can get. Just get Linux, Red Hat, whatever out there as well-known terms.
--
Using GNU/Linux - Windows-free zone!
Okay, so let's assume here, that Sun is successful in "merging" Red Hat and Linux into one. First off, Microsoft has basically already done so, as any benchmark of windows vs. "linux" is Red Hat. Keep this point in mind.
/. linux users gone down as a result?
Have any of you switched your Red Hat (read: any linux distro) systems to windows server?
So, we've had Microsoft preaching that linux IS Red Hat, for a while now.
Have the
I know I know, businesses may have. But have YOU?
Apply the same to Sun, and take note of their respective sizes. Assuming that Sun pulls the "merge" off, just what exactly will it affect, compred to microsoft? MS isn't making any big dents (yet, time will tell), so how could Sun? (In a completly closed-mind view.)
I know, I know, in two years, MS might be a thing of the past, and then in 4 years, if it's not a SCO server then it's not worth anything. I won't debate how the future works, as it really is pointless.
If I may remind you all of a quote of Linus, which goes something to the point of, "My goals were never to destroy Microsoft. That will be a completly unintentional side effect." (Yeah, that's probably a horrible 'quote', but live with it, you get the point.)
So, why should you care if Sun does this? Sun can spout all the FUD they want, as can Microsoft, as can 'Red Hat' (read: any linux distro), but that doesn't change the fact that some PR FUD changed actual benchmarks, it doesn't change the prices, and it doesn't change what really works. If Sun does the job better than linux, go for Sun I say. If linux does it better, go with linux.
Just take note: using the 'PR' view, we should ALL be using Microsoft Server, linux it's worth 2 cents, and Sun is some upstart with millions, who's preaching against a 2 cent OS.
Form your own opinions, people. Chill.
If SUN really wanted to do this it could happen... But let's first face facts SUN's java desktop is ass. When they finish the 3D desktop enviornment "Looking glass" you'll finally have somthing on the x86 side that looks as good as OS X. then next is their new filesyatem ZFS... which sounds awsome. All this openedsourced and where would you go? I know I'll be downloading it! Solaris's backend is probably the best in the system and then have a desktop that's beautiful too? What more could you possibly want in an OS?
||| I still can't believe Parkay's not butter.
What's happening is that Sun is being run by chaos theory. How many different strategies has Sun had toward Linux over the past few years? How many different "philosophies" regarding open source? How many different strategies regarding x86 support? Maybe somebody who follows Sun more closely than I can answer some of these questions. I know it seems to me as if Sun changes direction more often than the wind. Name any important issue in the past few years and Sun will have had two or three positions on the issue - even more if you count the "unofficial" positions. They need a strong leader and sense of direction more desperately than any group except, maybe, the Democratic Party.
If I'm wrong, PLEASE let me know. I'm a Sun user and I like Sun, I really do... I just never know where they're going from one day to the next.
No problem. Let MS and Sun go right on believing that Linux == Red Hat. Let them even try to kill Red Hat if they can. We'll just keep doing what we've always done: building better software in and for the open source community. To use "their" terminology -- our Value Proposition continues to improve, year after year, relentlessly marching on, happily coexisting with (but not depending on) the corporations who operate within our space.
Seriously, if MS and Sun think they can beat Linux by beating Red Hat, let them believe that. It'll keep them off our backs while we build the next generation of superior software.
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
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.
And a good rebuttal from a linux kernel hacker.
My photolog
RH has nothing to worry about.
I doubt Sun hates Linux, but it is clear why they would dislike Red Hat. Red Hat is a true competitor against Solaris and Sun's own Linux distributions. Sun would play along with Red Hat as a reseller only as long as it takes to replace any Red Hat-branded software with Sun-branded software.
I still don't understand why the common culture at Slashdot is to bash Sun at all costs, even if it requires misinformation to do so. It's almost as bad as some of the rants for and against Microsoft, HP, Intel, etc. (not IBM, of course, because IBM paints penguins on sidewalks--that makes them all nice sugar and spice).
-- "Makes Little Debbie look like a pile of puke!" - Moe Szyslak
Keep in mind that the first and central mission of the "FOSS community" is to destroy proprietary UNIX, which in this day an age effectively means Solaris.
Bollocks. I use FOSS because it is usually the fastest, cheapest, and most effective way to get a job done. I also don't become a vendor's bitch in the process. I could care less about Sun unless their mission is to find a way to make doing my job more expensive. If the destruction of Sun and MS happens it will strictly be a side effect. Now faced with direct attacks you can be indifferent or fight back but "destroying" anything was never the mission.
big deal do you think any linux zealot whether corporate admin/tech officer or home user could
care less about sun beating on Red Hat if they have adopted Red Hat over Sun Or Microsoft its
probably because they have weighed the options
and found that Linux, in this case RedHat is the best solution to their needs, and if Sun succeeded in this gambit then a distro change probably is not the hardest fix, but a change of OS/OS,Platform would probably be a bitch to implement. Sun might succeed in hurting or Killing RedHat but then they would need to switch over to attacking SUSE, then Mandrake, then oh dear I hope they have deep pockets, and forgiving investors
They make a profit and they support GNOME, that is enought for some of the kids on /. to hate RHAT.
But, if Sun attacks redhat like this perhaps redhat will join SUSE in supporting MONO.
The demise of Sun Microsystems would be a big loss to the IT field. Sun does make good stuff, that has a lot of features on the large scale systems, some of their high end stuff IBM doesn't come close in terms of scalability. Solaris as well is a Solid Proven OS with a lot of nice features. From 2001 or so Sun Stock has dropped and so has their business not because of lack of quality in hardware and software or even its "high" prices. It is because a few years earlier during the .COM boom they decided to screw over most of their resellers and take the deals away from them to gain more profit. What this did was piss of the resellers and caused them to drop reselling Sun because after all their work getting a clint they don't want the deal to slip away to their partner without even a finders fee. So all the resellers did dropped out and now all the consultants except for pushing Sun gear started pushing Linux solutions, because they wont get ripped of like with Sun. Most of these companies buying from the resellers didn't care about the gear or the OS as much but more in terms of the quality of service they offered. So when Sun bypassed their resellers to get more profit they also decided to stop a cheap method of marketing their products which was word of mouth from the resellers. The company I work for was once a Sun Reseller we would push the gear left and right. Now we push Linux solutions a lot more (Sometimes we still choose sun because it is the right tool for the right job) because we no longer have the Sun Reseller advantage because we dropped it because for every big deal we start Sun steals it from us. Sun is starting to realize the error in its way but and it is improving their status. And I hope Sun becomes strong again with a more Reseller program with more integeraty. Because it will be a waist to loose the right tool for the right job
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Mostly because I didn't believe Sun to be that incredibly stupid.
I mean, it's not surprising that Sun isn't real happy about Linux. There are only three enterprise Unixes left: Irix, AIX, and Solaris. Only one hasn't been phased out by it's parent company for Linux. Sun's betting on being THE enterprise Unix vendor. Fighting Linux is a reasonable strategy.
But the Redhat == Linux == No Enterprise Power strategy is so dumb even MS figured out it was wrong. Fight Redhat, cool, Redhat is a competitor. But trying to fight Linux by pigeonholing it will never work. Linux is a technology. It's like AOL trying to fight the open Web by saying the Web == Earthlink == None of our wonderful proprietary content. It doesn't make any sense.
Sun will loose because the quality of their products doesn't matter because that quality only means anything in an IT world that is slowing ceasing to exist, and Sun can't figure out how to deal with it. Linus Torvalds is not your competitor! Your competitors are still IBM and SGI for the high end, custom hardware market (with Apple scooting in), and Redhat and Novell for the midrange commodity hardware market, even if they are all running Linux. IBM still has the resources to support Linux richly, so you can't win this battle this way, you'll just loose to IBM with Linux instead of Redhat.
I'd like to see Sun get this right. Linux needs someone to keep it honest, and the BSD's are becoming less and less general purpose, loosing their ability to compete in the exact same area's as the distros. Linux needs a competeing strong Unix kernel, and a competeing strong desktop kernel. We've got OS X and Windows - where is our enterprise server OS?
The site isn't about facts anymore, apparently. It's mostly about anti-this or that propaganda.
Just look at the banner - it no longer says 'run by a paralegal' but 'run by a journalist with a paralegal background'. This implies objectivity that just doesn't exist. I couldn't send my management there to read stuff, they'd think I was an OSS nutjob. So how is it helping, then?
Professionalism and evenhanded analysis was the hallmark of the initial articles on Groklaw, and what made it very popular. It was a much better site when it seemed run by an amateur and concentrated on the facts instead of spewing pro-OSS FUD, for that's what it is doing in many cases.
I thought FUD was bad.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
Well, if Sun turns on Redhat, it will allow Novell and the rest to profit. Basically, the others will be out in the field to tell companies that Redhat is not Linux. This shows that Linux easily survives a company.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Well, maybe eventually proprietary systems.
First, the goal is / ought to be the widespread use of open standards. If everyone talks the same language - if we can all read and write the same office documents (wether MSOffice, Koffice, OpenOffice, or Appleworks, to name a few), view the web the same (standards compliant rendering) and so on, then we will be somewhere.
At that point, the virtues of each system - Linux, Windows, MacOS, UNIX - are separated from the end useage and FOSS can compete on a level playing ground.
I think I need a new sig here.
I fail to see where the problem is, or how this exactly equates to Sun being anti-Linux.
Red Hat sells Linux. Sun sells Linux in the form of JDS. Sun is coming up with a strategy to encourage potential buyers to purchase from them by claiming that Red Hat isn't up to handling large enterprise accounts.
This is what competition is all about, folks. One of the great things about Open Source is that we can have multiple competing distributions. Mandrake and SuSe aren't buddy-buddy with Red Hat -- they compete with them as well. Do you somehow think that when they're competing with Red Hat for an account that they don't go in and try to show the potential buyer how they are better that Red Hat, or where Red Hat's weaknesses (perceived or otherwise) are?
This is the nature of competition. It doesn't mean that Sun is anti-Linux (although I don't believe that Sun is a great friend to Linux either). It's simple competition. This is news to anyone? Would anyone expect anything different between two competing companies? This is a complete non-story if I ever saw one.
Yaz.
Sun had alot of interesting technology that could of kept them on top. Only if they weren't profit minded with certain parts of it. Their management doesn't seem to see things longterm but who could truly blame them. Who would of thought opensource would of been viable.
A while ago I read a paper by Larry McVoy which essentially detailed the current threats to Sun at the time. One of those threats was NT (well no one who actually knew anything about Unix at the time saw it as a threat but those were geeks not business minded people) and the other was Linux and what he termed Sourceware at the time.
The paper is still available http://www.bitmover.com/lm/papers/srcos.html to read.
I had the good fortune of speaking with LM about what happened to the Spring OS which is mentioned in the paper. His response was that nothing happened, it essentially died. Some of the interesting and functional bits made it into Solaris but thats about it.
From the paper A royalty free operating system. Sun wants this so badly that they are currently spending roughly the same amount as the Unix royalty stream to fund development of a royalty free operating system called Spring.
Obviously Sun didn't want it so badly and instead of seeing Linux as a moving target gaining speed many just shrugged it off. This, again, a mistake. I like Sun, they have extremely good hardware, documentation and support. They need to find a viable business plan and it would start by maybe re-reading this paper and compiling a new one assessing their current and future threats.
If Sun genuinely wanted to they could be a dominant player in the linux market, ahead of Redhat and Novell. No one does support like Sun; period. However, they just let the ball drop way too many times. If you read the paper carefully you'll see that Novell even though they are late to the game are pushing through with what they want. I wish them the best of luck.
Sun still has enough money to make a change but sometimes it's hard to let go of certain things. The reality is that Sun doesn't have to let go of it's main babies such as the Sparc or Solaris. If they truly want to keep them they could recommend them for high end usage in certain critical performance server areas. There's a whole host of different configurations they could keep those things specialized for but they just aren't serious.
Still, I wish Sun the best of luck. If this rumor is true, they are going to fumble the ball one last time.
>
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.
Scan through it for a while and you get a bit of an idea of the direction he thinks in, publicly at least.
For example:
Or:
Sun definitely seems to think they have a strong competitor to Linux with Solaris 10, especially with adding support for running Linux applications. Their pricing for Solaris x86 is ballpark with suse or red hat enterprise.
Sun realizes that Linux is making certain layers of the stack a commodity, and is fighting strongly both on the front of bringing Solaris into the market while providing some added value (what a change from when they were killing Solaris x86 just a short while ago...) and moving up the stack (java desktop, application servers, etc.) while at the same time trying to expand their offerings of commodity servers that can run any platform... and using that as an entry point to get Solaris in the door.
I mean, "duh" Sun competes with Red Hat, and makes a big deal about being able to be a vendor that has a full hardware and software stack of their own. I don't, however, see any signs that Sun is betting the farm on Solaris.
By collapsing Linux into Red Hat, Sun now has a clear target. It can hammer away at a company, as opposed to waging the impossible task of fighting a social movement.
Dear Red Hat,
I bet the decision to abandon the social movement (Bluecurve, Fedora) and become a "clear target" looks a little different from where you stand now, doesn't it?
Y'know, sometimes I think that all the /. crowd wants to see is All Linux, All The Time. God, how boring. Despite what most of you have experienced, there are actual other OS's that are very good. Some *gasp* might even be better than Linux. And I think the day when Linux is the only OS in the datacenter would be a terrible day. Variety is what made Linux so powerful. It was a good/cheap alternative to Solaris/Windows/AIX/HP-UX.
Sun is trying to be competitive. They can't say "Linux sucks, go with Solaris" because it impossible to compete with an ideology. And besides, they sell Linux for the desktop. BUT they CAN say "Redhat sucks, go with Sun" which is what they ARE doing. Seems fair, right? I mean, for years, Linux advocates have been saying "Windows/Solaris/'All other OS's' suck, go with Linux"
Bah, who cares. Ill still recommend Linux for 1-4 way, and Solaris for anything heavier.
"The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding."
Red Hat's main product is Enterprise Linux, designed for the server market -- Sun's bread and butter. Java Desktop System is targeted (obviously) as a replacement for Windows desktops. This is still a relatively small market, mainly consisting of companies with a need for volume lightweight deskop installs (e.g. call centers and the like). So there's not really a contradiction here. Sun's position is that Red Hat can't support mission-critical enterprise infrastructure to the extent to which Sun's products and its service organization is able. It's not like they're trying to destroy Linux. They're just trying to discredit their competition. They're well aware that Linux will go on as always, supported by the OSS community, no matter what they say -- and the JDS will continue to benefit from that.
It'll be more interesting to see how they go after Novell.
Breakfast served all day!
It does not help Sun's case that they ship Linux, that they've been forced into shipping Solaris as Open Source (or some derivative thereof) and that Java has been pushed from being utterly closed into being semi-open. Customers have already accepted the fact that Sun believes that it cannot compete with Linux.
It is irrelevent as to whether this is true or not. What is important is that it is generally accepted.
Sun can quite easily survive in the mid-to-high end of the market, where Microsoft dare not go. SGI, for all its stupidities of the past, has done very nicely from focussing itself on a market that - by nature - tends to be picky and has very specialised needs. Likewise, IBM has long-since abandoned the low-end market. There's not enough money per seat, there. The market can't handle the costs of heavy R&D, it barely copes with the costs of minimum-wage labor (or sometimes prison gangs) assembling mass-produced junk parts.
By targetting Red Hat, Sun is also missing a far more serious threat - SuSE/Novell. Novell has a very substantial image in the server market, and SuSE has grabbed the attention of a great many European Governments. SuSE is also the only DoD-certified distribution, making it the only (legal) player in the US military markets - and they're the ones with the serious money.
Sun's tactics are about as suicidal as SCO's and I honestly doubt either company will survive the use of scare-tactics in the end. Think about it for a moment. You're a customer. You're scared that the wrong choice will cost you a lot of money. Your existing system - whilst no great - does at least work. What do you do? Probably nothing. Doing nothing is cheap, predictable and doesn't tie your hands. It's also politically safe, as it means you can blame the last guy in charge.
Doing nothing, however, would also put Sun out of business.
For Sun to survive, it has to induce customers to spend more, not dig in for survival. Survivalists are misers. They don't buy big iron. Sun sells big iron. Survivalists don't buy leading-edge technology. Sun sells leading-edge technology. (They were an early adopter of IPv6, for example.)
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)
I think it's far too late in the game for what will simply be perceived as more FUD.
I was at the Sybase Tech Wave conference that was held near Orlando Florida in August. The conference was buzzing with Linux talk. A Sybase engineer told me that last year people were just talking about Linux but this year they are switching to it.
I was talking to one employee from Boeing who told me that they had switched a 32 processor box running UNIX with an 8 processor box running Linux. They saved a fortune and the Linux box out performed the older Unix box.
Groklaw's article quotes George Coloney as saying:
"The operating system is not about world peace and the charitable work of the world's great programmers. It's like every other operating system ever created: It's about the foibles, greed, mistakes and engineering prowess (or lack thereof) of one vendor -- in this case, Red Hat."
He clearly does not understand the nature of Linux and off handidy admits that SUN is about "greed."
It's too late for FUD which means we should brace ourselves for more SCO like actions. Let's not forget that the SCO thing got started with the help of Microsoft and now SUN is in the same bed.
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
I can put Sun's problem with it's Red Hat strategy in one word:
Novell
Ok, two words:
Novell->SuSE
Ok, ok, three words:
Novell->SuSE->IBM
They had better watch their asses or else in some years time you will be able to hear this when discussing Sun: "Wasn't Sun that company that used to make purple servers?"
Tried it out 9/21 on a Dell 2xP3500 512M, and an AMD xp2400 512M, after listening to their web event on friday. Next I want to install it on a 2x2.8 Xeon, 2G.
s 10x86.html solaris looks great, if it was 1990s, but I don't think Sun realizes how advanced (at least in terms of eye candy, user-friendliness, and gui tools, but not necessarily system stability) some of the linux distros are.
-Installation time: 1hr-2hr
-Drivers: what drivers!
-Gnome 2: Crashed first time on, but stable after.
-Couldn't mount floppy to install 3rd party net driver - need to read docs.
-Docs... what docs... Docs iso does not exist, docs available on line.
-couldn't start scm? (manager tool) because it couldn't find the server - net problem I believe - see above.
I'm not saying most of the problems are Sun's fault, and with Gnome's crash exception, I should be able to fix most problems after browsing the docs, but not having a manageable system (for whatever reason) after a clean install is not good for business.
I really want to give Sun a chance on x86, but history is not in their favor, especially after they almost pulled the rug from under x86 users.
On paper http://wwws.sun.com/software/solaris/10/ds/solari
I read this, on Johnathan Scwhartz's weblog posted on July 21, 2004. He explicitly talks about Linux == Red Hat.
I then posted on my own weblog about it on July 26th.
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 ...
Contrary to popular belief, Sun has done more for FOSS than any other company out there. Integrated over time, Sun's overall contribution has been unmatched. Let's look at a few key points:
1) Sun workstations were the primary development environment for FOSS from about 1987 till the early 1990's.
2) How many copies of Linux and related software were dowdloaded from a "sunsite"?
3) TCL came from where?
4) Java came from where?
5) NFS, as we know it, came from where?
6) RPC's, as we know them, came from where?
I'm sure I could find many more, if I went digging.
Sun has been a less then perfect partner in FOSS, but they have been there longer than anyone else, and have made many significant contributions.
I truly hope, and expect, this trend to continue. No commercial partner of FOSS will be perfect, but Sun's record, to date, is really quite good.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
Let's start with "out-engineer everybody in the x86 space". Now THAT is funny. Sun has very little talent in the x86 space. Their x86 work comes from SunSoft South, which used to be the old Interactive Systems Corporation. I'm told these guys lost the race to deliver the first ATT UNIX port to the IBM 386 PC back in the 80's to Microport; even though Intel paid ISC to port System V to a similar platform first. And not too long ago they were quoting 9 months to write a device driver for any new hardware. Heck, you could port Linux to a new CPU in less time than that.
Oh yes - and let's not forget how well Solaris NFS works with Linux. There are definite problems there. And NetApp has put Trond on a basic retainer. Hmmm. Where does that leave Sun?
Secondly, the folks at SunSoft South have always been looked down upon from within Sun as second-rate by the Solaris kernel engineers. In good part, with good reason.
Perhaps Schwartz is going to put the Sparc kernel hacks on x86? That will go over real well. But it's kind of irrelevant, as almost all of the best Solaris kernel people are gone.
So where's the talent, Jonathan? Perhaps he's going to hire Linus? Oh - let's not forget that Sun doesn't pay well enough to attract and keep good people anyway.
Let's see, what else? Ah! "Sun's view is that Linux is nothing more than Red Hat". Ahem. Maybe at the IT level he might persuade a few customers with this. But let's not forget that the reason RedHat got where it is is in large part based upon the goodwill of the Linux community.
I guess he doesn't understand the concept of "goodwill", and hasn't learned anything from the SCO fiasco (which Sun has helped finance, as we all know).
No, I'll place my bets on RedHat over Sun anyday. And let's not forget SuSE/Novell. These folks are making some impressive moves. If they do them right, I'll put my money on SuSE in the corporate IT world.
But Sun? They're a zombie, IMHO. They're still walking; they just haven't realized that they are dead yet.
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
I don't want them to disappear - they make great gear - but I know so many ex-Sun people and they all have the same grim view: stick a fork in it.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Actually Red Hat's policy on bundled software has more to do with the software being compatible with community redistribution of the CD's than with the material being released under a GPL friendly license. Open source helps, of course, but I remember when Netscape was standard....
Red Hat is the MS of the Linux world in one very important and strangely positive way. Microsoft unleashed a all-consuming trend of commoditization when they licensed PC DOS to IBM and MS DOS to Compaq. Red Hat has similarly, with their attitude towards freely redistributable software and open source created a similar trend among Linux distros. This has allowed them to corner a large piece of the market share. Unlike MS, however, they could easily loose it if they betray the policies which have made them successful.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Yes, but it's not Linux alone, I believe might be the fact that Linux runs on Intel PC commodity hardware that kills commercial unices more than anything else.
And that they go is actually a shame, because they are very stable and highly standard compliant, exactly what a developer expects from his or her box [there's a HP 715-100XC sitting here under my desk]...
--
Try Nuggets , the mobile search engine. We answer your questions via SMS, across the UK.
Sun have about as much chance of impacting Linux's momentum as SCO do.
I mean, what are they gonna do, refuse to release the specs for their new CPUs so Linux can't run on them?
I bet the managment at Redhat are losing lots of sleep over that.
I gots ta ding a ding dang my dang a long ling long
The truth of the matter is, Enterprise installations of Linux are no more free then any other Intel OS competitor, and I think there is a little fear and FUD because Sun is eyeing that market -- albeit later then what some wanted, and there are people with sufficient monatary interests in Linux who like to spread that FUD about Sun.
I read Groklaw for legal machinations between high tech companies -- not for PJ's opinion on he state of the industry. I've written off PJ's opinion as just somebody who has some sort of financial interest in Linux. PJ has shown nothing but hostility towards Sun. Even in PJ's area of expertise (legal) PJ doesn't report objectively on Sun ... I.E Sun's 2 billion dollar settlement with Microsoft. It's contantly portrayed as something evil, rather then what it was. Expedient, neccessary and a win for Sun.
Sun is driving towards Open source code Solaris, but they still want to (and deserve to be) the gatekeeper and ultimate authority on Solaris.
I repeat again, PJ's and Groklaws opinions on the state of the industry regarding *any* company are just that ... opinions, and not even expert ones at that. They are however the premier source of the legal wranglings that are going on in the industry.
The real enemy is/are software patents and software IP. Fight that, not a company like Sun that helped nourish the industry, and even blazed the trail and created the market (need) for Linux.
I survived 4 layoffs at Sun, I've seen many fine Engineers and innovators leave. Management has never been more open to us and forthright with us on what we have to do to survive and none of it involves cheating or fuddling the Industry. It's all quality, innovation and execution.
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.
With the release of Solaris 10, things will really get interesting. Assuming Solaris 10 can live up to the promise of running Linux apps natively without any porting then they have a big OS contender. Couple that with DTrace & a beautiful GUI like Project Looking Glass and Sun has a really nice package on its hands. Right now they're selling Red Hat to compliment their new AMD merger (and might I add the V20z is a sweet machine), but Solaris 10 is also being developed for the x86 (and it's suppose to have decent performance unlike previous x86 Solaris). With regard to their Sun Java Desktop, I don't believe that will have a major affect on Red Hat as it seems to be targeted at coporate desktops as opposed to servers. The permission levels and security changes over the next couple of releases sound interesting, and the lead engineer (nice fellow, met him at LinuxWorld) mentioned he hopes to have it running Looking Glass by version 4. I wouldn't be surprised if Sun cuts ties with Red Hat after the release of Solaris 10, but I don't know how much this will affect RH. They still have strong ties, especially with companies pushing blade technology like HP (who has their own plan to bring people away from Solaris).
Sadly, PS/2 was yet another victim of USB, which doesn't care what you plug into it, the electrical slut.
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.
My prediction is that if Bush wins again in November, Microsoft will tell the DOJ to get bent, acquire SCO and Sun and mount a huge legal attack on IBM which, while doomed to eventual failure, will keep the business community out of the UNIX/Linux market until they can get Longhorn on the shelves.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Debian? Of course, there's no such thing as national boundaries in free software. It's commercially viable the same way all free software is. IBM is demonstrating that you don't have to have software secrets to make money. Consulting and hardware sales pay manyfold what you might put into software development.
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.
IBM realizes that their hardware has to do useful things if they want to sell it. Bill Gates taught them a big lesson about non free software. When your software has owners, so does your hardware.
Sun, on the other hand, seems to have gone insane. Without community involvement, Solaris will continue to fall behind free tools. No one company can compete against the free software world. If they start spewing M$ FUD, the community will desert them. That will leave them with nothing.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Red Hat sells service contracts on top of 100% Free Software.
Microsoft sells snake oil.
As for free tools, the performance of code compiled by GCC is usually below the performance of code compiled with commercial compilers. OTOH, GCC is much more portable than any commercial compiler.
A Shadeless room is a brighter room.
Their secret plan is to license and/or sell some future version of Java Desktop System on Solaris only, forcing all established customers to migrate away from Linux. Silly idea. Microsoft money, of course. Maybe, two or three years?
My clean solution: make mental note to ignore java now. It's too slow for me, nor open either. Why the hell the j2re1.4.2.05 is missing SSL support in non american downloads, while j2re1.4.2.04 had it?
There you are, staring at me again.
Not the first time Sun has taken a stance that if not carefully balanced was self-damning. Sun hasn't made one of these work yet. One of these days they'll get a cohesive corporate strategy because they'll either get it right or get left behind in such a small niche there'll be no self-damning stances to take.
IE:
*) If the goal of Java was to make lots of money, then they failed. If the goal was to be really "cool" and sell books and classes then they succeeded.
*) If the goal of selling Linux was to take the Linux marked... fail. If the goal of selling Linux was to have a cheaper to maintain 'nix to sell... success.
Sabotaging the Linux market may be in the best short-term intrest of Sun because they win more dollars than if the Linux market was thriving. But, it's not a good long-term strategy because they'l have to work against their own press.
It's like demanding a handi-cap for your team because it's your ball and if you don't get it you're going home. Then when you get beat bad enough getting mad and asking for the rules to be changed. It won't make you many friends. But, then you may not care about friends... you may just care about winning.
Now, if you were playing a ball game for you life wouldn't you think about cheating too?
[signature]
Good rebuttal? Uh, he's reading the original blog article like the devil reading bible... and then doing plenty of strawman attacks.
Original article didn't say anything about "Sun not wanting to help with Linux kernel development". It is only saying it wouldn't make sense to (try to) dump Open Sourced Solaris code in Linux, to port Solaris features. Neither does the article claim that Linux developers do not value good engineering principles -- just that highest priorities are different from those of Solaris kernel development team. What's wrong with such a statement? Quite obviously priorities are different; what else would you expect between a "traditional" engineering effort of a big corporation, and a leading-edge open-source development effort?
What a crappy rebuttal. Wonder why the linux kernel hacker even bother with such a knee-jerk writing I have no idea. I'm not sure if he even read the writing he was replying to; and certainly didn't try to understand it even if he did.
I like paying taxes. With them I buy civilization -- Oliver Wendell Holmes
All this would just be mildly amusing if it weren't for two things. First, Schwartz has been busy trying to redefine the meaning of "open" (which cleverly starts with "I can't define terms, but here is what the term 'open' should mean"), both in "open standards" and in "open source". In his definition of "open", apparently, proprietary software can be "open").
The second, more dangerous effort is to misrepresent Java as an "open standard", as something that the industry should standardize on. Everybody should carefully read the legal verbiage at the beginning of Sun's Java specifications and search for Sun's patents at the USPTO; Sun's efforts are subtle, but they own and control the Java platform, specification, technology, patents. This is particularly worrisome given that Sun is having increasing problems staying afloat--dying companies can do real damage if they own widely used standards.
Here is another choice comment from Johnathan's Blog: This claim is disingenuous; yes, Sun was started with open source, but Sun made a business out of making open source software proprietary and then adding more proprietary extensions. Sun tried to control window systems with proprietary systems (NeWS) and failed. They generally released software only when it looked like a business failure (Tcl/Tk) and created open standards only when competition forced them to.
Overall, the message is: don't trust Sun. When they release open source software, thank them for it, after checking the license carefully. A open source release like OpenOffice may have been self-serving, but it is still useful. But just because a company releases some open source software doesn't mean that their goals and interests are aligned with open source efforts. Ultimately, Sun is on a collision course with open source, they know it, and sooner or later, there will be a showdown.
Well if you're going to be pedantic about it, the "Free Software" movement, led by RMS and the FSF, set out to create a free alternative to proprietary software, which at the time was specifically Unix. However, the Open Source Initiative was created to promote Linux and open source applications on their own merits, showing them to be more cost effective and technologically superior to the proprietary alternative.
You can't really say that the FOSS movement is primarily to destroy proprietary Unix, because RMS does not like nor use the term "Open Source". Free Software focuses *primarily* on freedom, OS focuses *primarily* on technological superiority. They are two different movements, fighting for a common goal in two very different ways.
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
http://blogs.sun.com/roller/trackback/eschrock/Web log/analysts_on_opensolaris
This guy's blog puts things nicely in perspective. Some excellent points.
>>How many commercial linux systems out there scale to above 64 processors
And how many companies really need that? That is nothing but a tiny niche market. Even in that that tiny niche market sunw pust must compete with IBM, HPQ, and SGI. And it won't be long before Linux catches up.
Sunw just thinks that Linux should know it's place. Which - according to sunw - is on the desktop, competing with msft. Sunw has specifically stated this.
Notice the name of Sunw's Linux? "Java Desktop" ? It has nothing to do with Java, but sunw thinks Java = Sunw. And notice it's only "desktop" there is no "Java Server".
Sun would be in a better position if they were just honest. Their hardware has really been sucking - memory problems, system board problems, we have systems that are brand new and the system boards need replacement. go figure I have a sun blade 100 at my desk that has solaris 8 and their piece of shit gnome desktop. Tried to put linux on there but since I upgraded to their newest firmware on the eeprom it will only boot off of the cdrom solaris 8 cd's - what a crock of shit - it is basically a pc why can't it boot off a fricken cdrom that isn't solaris. glad I upgraded the eeprom. just shit like that is what makes me hate sun - they think they are these engineering marvels when all we want is the stuff to work. this is why linux on amd64 and xeons are replacing them in the data center - it is cheaper and just works. plain and simple - I get less calls about hardware at night - okay I am done - I just hope openoffice doesn't get hosed somehow with the "partnership" with Microsoft. Why was it mentioned in that agreement anyway - has anybody from sun mentioned that like their CEO McNealy who is best buddies with Steve Ballmer and not just so PR drone. They sure are keeping quite about that subject.