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Where Is Sun Going With Linux?
jg21 writes "LinuxWorld has an interview with Sun's head software honcho John Loiacono which provides an opportunity to gauge Sun's intentions with regard to Linux in particular, open source in general, and where Solaris fits in. In spite of the assertion "Sun was founded on the principle of open source. We have contributed more lines of open source code than any other entity on the planet except for Cal Berkeley," Sun seems to view Linux somewhat grudgingly, judging from Loiacono's tone: "Linux is something that we'll have to interoperate with because it may exist far beyond whatever Solaris turns out to be." An important read, if only because a Windows-free Loiacono notes that he's been using the Linux-based Java Desktop System for a year. "It is not perfect by any means," he concedes though. Refreshing honesty from Sun's top software exec."
With all the support sun has put into Solaris I can understand why they would look upon Linux with some aprehension.
... the enemy. They did to OPENSTEP the same that is in store for Linux. Obsolescence!
Sun seems to view Linux somewhat grudgingly,
Somehow I'm reminded of the imperious Ken Olsen of DEC dismissing UNIX in the late 1970's despite the popularity of his company's computers being used in all kinds of UNIX niches. A very different alternate reality might have developed if (a) Ken Olsen had jumped onto UNIX and (b) successfully put it onto desktop PCs early on.
I owe a debt to Sun; my Linux experience isn't where it would be if Sun hadn't contributed so much to UNIX standards.
They could do it again, or sit back while Novell does it instead of them.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
He sounds like he has his head screwed on right from what I read of TFA. He concedes the in certain markets Solaris won't reach the status that Linux has. True. And he also states how that Linux disto branches are more disparate than has been the case in the past. Red Hat does seem to hold a tremendous market share. Whether this is a good or a bad thing is up to the reader.
As for the posters who are claiming that Sun is just another Microsoft and whatnot, just because a company is large and competitive doesn't mean that it's always patently evil. To me I believe that Sun is trying to adapt to a changing environment to keep their collective heads above water. Much akin to Novell's migration toward SUSE and all of the Linux inclusions in their new services.
If most **experts** view Linux as the most serious threat to Microsoft these former big players are trying to grab a life preserver. Hopefully they can help elevate and improve what they are latching onto, however. If not then things will get more fragmented and more financially endangered in the end.
Well, it's != GPL, anyway. And everyone seems to think of Open Source as the GPL. So. :P
:P
Vast chunks of early commercial unices integrated large amounts of BSD Unix, which used the BSD License. This license, summed up, is essentially "do whatever the hell you want with this code just so long as we're credited for writing it."
So yeah, Sun - SunOS/Solaris- is built on "Open Source". Open Source they don't have to give back.
I just bought a Sun Opteron workstation on eBay for a great price. It comes with Solaris installed. Though, I have extensive experience (and liking for) Sparc Solaris, I'm going to wipe it when it arrives and install Linux or FreeBSD. Not for religious reasons, but because the software is there. Who even bothers porting to Sparc Solaris any more much less Solaris x86? For example, none of the commercial Lisps or the best open source ones run on x86.
"Sun was founded on the principle of open source."
This seems patently false. I could be wrong about this, but his claims that Solaris contains huge amounts of open source seems like a purposefully misleading comment.
Maybe he was referring to the fact that SunOS was BSD based? The key developers when Sun was founded, also did a lot of work on the original BSD codebase.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Sun developed NFS & RPC, and the specs were open sourced in the 1980s when you were in daipers.
As for where Sun is going - I get the distinct feeling that they don't know. They say that interoperability with Linux is important, but since Linux cannot be tightly defined, how do you define interoperable? At the IETF protocol spec level? At the POSIX level? These have nothing to do with Linux, and most OS' do all that already.
If we're talking IBCS-style binary compatibility between Linux and Solaris, that could be interesting. Linux developers have largely dropped that path, though, preferring to build a structure for native apps (and pressuring companies to provide them) than translating between system calls and system quirks.
I don't see why Sun would chase that path, unless they see Linux evolving from being "just" a kernel and/or OS and into a Unix-like standard in its own right. POSIX and Unix98 certifications are much rarer than 'compliance', because the certification requirements are so obnoxious. A truly open/free specification that ANY company can "certify" would be vastly superior.
The idea that a "Linux Stanard" could appear, against which Solaris could be compliant or certified, would strengthen Sun's hand. It would also fit with the anti-Linux hostility from Sun's head honcho, as Linux as a kernel doesn't need to exist for a Linux specification to be around. Indeed, a surviving Linux kernel would mean a moving target, which would be harder to meet.
The idea Linux would out-last Solaris is interesting, as this implies Sun are developing a replacement in the same way Solaris replaced SunOS. It also implies Sun expect to ditch Solaris relatively soon, as what is understood by "Linux" today is NOT what will be understood by "Linux" by version 3 and certainly not by version 4.
I don't feel any beter for knowing more of Sun's plans - it feels too much like a hostile take-over bid designed to enable Sun to ship an OS that can "steal" Linux' market share rather than fight fair over it.
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)
Sun has given away more (important) source code than any other company. They contributed to BSD Unix, defined many of the later UNIX sysv standards and gave them away. They created RPC's, NIS, NFS, xview. All of it was given away under a very liberal licence. UNIX and thus Linux would have been dead without Sun. Many Linux users are scandalously ungrateful and have no sense for UNIX tradition and history.
Also, Solaris is a pure and clean UNIX. I can imagine that it must hurt the engineers of such a beauty that they are surpassed by a "bastard" UNIX. However that is a reality they shall have to live with. But I can understand their hesitance.
Today, Solaris is far less expensive than Red Hat or SUSE. The list price on a two-way Red Hat is about $799 per year. My first year price for Solaris with service and support and the right-to-use license is about the same as Red Hat.
Of course, you CAN find expensive versions of Linux - how much do you want to spend? I'm sure we can find a way to accomodate you. Big corporations tend to go for the expensive options when it comes to OSes and software.
But what the man doesn't want to mention, is that you can get suse professional for $59 and set up a desktop, server, or whatever. updates for 2 years via suse/yast, or install apt, and get upgrades & legacy support that way. Many small businesses are quite happy with that arrangement.
Suse Linux runs just fine on my laptop, or on my 4-way opteron server, or on the mainframe, if I want it, and the Suse tradition of reliability and solid engineering continues under Novell's leadership.
That is not true! Their business model was mainly based on selling hardware. The operating system (in those days common) was seen as naturally belonging to the hardware, not as a product that could be marketed on itself. That is also the reason that so many of Suns contributions to UNIX were freely given away.
For the record I was once a Sun fanboy and I maintain several hundred sparc boxes for a largish ISP.
I think they are mixing up FOSS and Linux. I would guess that 95% of Sun's customers don't care about a kernel. Solaris as good as it is would be much more appealing if I didn't have to install a few dozen OSS packages in order to get the system usable. Give me Apache, Tomcat and all the good GNU stuff that comes with any standard Linux distro.
I believe it was Bruce Perens (maybe ESR?) in Revolution OS that said before Linux was around, he would spend days GNUifying Sun machines. It's the same damn thing 20 years later!
Oh and ditch sparc already. Give me a quad Opteron on a board that uses OpenBoot.
I don't think they're trying to be Microsoft, as they offer hardware, too. And they're not trying to be Apple, either, because they're small potatoes on the home user front and have hardly anything in the corporate environment. No, I think Sun is trying to be the Sun that someone envisioned many years ago; the provider of stem-to-stern computing environments for an enterprise, from the server hardware to the IM client and everything in between. They won't succeed, though, without addressing the home user. You can't get mindshare without it.
The Spoon
Updated 6/28/2011
They are not smart enough to be Microsoft.
They are too small to be an HP or IBM.
They are too big and slow to be a Redhat.
They are not unique and creative enough to be Apple.
However, despite all the stock prices and layoffs, they are doing far better than SGI, SCO and Novell.
Considering SunOS is a BSD derived operating system, and that Sun has developed and given a massive amount of opensource sourcecode to the community, I would think that the statement "Sun is founded on opensource" is correct. Opensource is a LOT more than the GPL, but sometimes I think people only see what they want to see. Theres a whole nother world out there, and it isnt GPLed, its BSDLed.
They didnt, of course, get involved with X11; pushing NeWS instead; shame that little beast died.
To an extent, Solaris is a better kernel than Linux, at least from an enterprise perspective. Hey, even AIX has some better features there. Too often in Linux we cheat and take the "recompile everything" tactic of backwards binary compatibility.
But: where is the ACPI support in Solaris? The power management needed to make it work on a laptop, or the dynamic WLAN binding? And the Java APIs to go with them? Missing, that is where they are.
And that is the problem with Solaris: too server side, and even today, too enterprise centric.
Linux: it may be a lot less technically elegant, but it works on almost every random PC or laptop that Taiwan have ever made.
That's like saying that in order for IBM to sell mainframes to large and medium-sized corporate customers, they have to gain the mindshare of home users. There are two different markets here, and the one of interest is business-to-business. While I might agree that getting mindshare of the home user might be important in some cases, I don't think an enterprise information system is one of them.
No. Because selling mainframes alone is not what sun is trying to do. I still think the parent post is wrong since he thinks in order to sell to bussiness's you need to sell to home users. Its the other way around. Once you start effectivly selling your desktops to bussiness's people will want the same thing at home. This is EXACTLY how MS came into power, and why it has stayed there. Schools and shops run MS so people run it at home.
.com boom is over. Most companies buy cheap ass machines that they get sweet deals on because they also buy the back end machines from the same company (ie IBM, Compaq etc etc).
Sun has not had a cost effective end user desktop. Ever. I know because I used to work for them. They have had plenty of high end machines. No company is going to buy a 2k computer for a secretary to play solitare on, the
Their weakness was never competing against MS, it was competing against Intel.
"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the the universe." --Albert Einstein
"My intent is that we need to bring Linux and Solaris together more rather than bash or trash one or the other."
Very true. Especially now.
I am a big fan of Solaris and RedHat. In fact I like RedHat (vs. SuSE, Slackware, Gentoo, Debian) because it is build with the same ideas I came to appreciate in Solaris distribution. Until RedHat Linux renamed into RHEL it was marriage in heaven. I was getting solid, feature-full, tested, distribution for $0. Now with Fedora's fast development cycle wide deployment is very questionable. By the time I am done planning and testing FC1 deployment it gets moved into Fedora-Legacy state i.e. unsupported. I don't feel comfortable with that at all and deployment of RHEL promises to be costly...
In the mean time Sun went far with Solaris 10 incorporating all the nice features down the road providing supported, stable and tested environment. I think it has its place at least in my strategy.
Friendly competition is good for the industry, for both RedHat and Sun. There is always room for two and in the end we, UNIX followers will benefit.
You are referring to the SunOfOld. That sun does not exist anymore. That Sun was also a dominant force in the world of computing. It was also a very successful and respected company.
that sun does not exist anymore. Now you have sun run by jokers (some of whom were with the old sun) who are flailing around trying to grab on to something that might make them money while watching MS and Linux eath their lunch. This sun has executives who write the most assinine things imaginable on their blogs and give press conferences where they display their reality distortion field to the public.
May god have mercy on their souls.
evil is as evil does
- Sun was co-founded by Bill Joy, the original author of BSD
Sun today is a completely different company than the one Bill Joy once started. With a different culture and mentality and all that goes with it. You can't rest on old merits forever.
- they have given the community Java, Open Office, NFS, & RPC. While Java is not strictly open source it is widely used.
I like Java. But it's not open source by any measure, not just by a 'strict one'. It's barely better than Microsofts' 'shared source'.
NFS, well that's a different company, see above.
Open office I give them full credit for. They did a good thing there.
- Sun's John Bosak created XML.
Did Sun create XML? No. So that's not very relevant, is it?
- they still make most of their money from hardware and services
I don't feel this is, either.
-just about all the machines they sell can run linux (and bsd)
Or this.. You can run Linux and BSD on every kind machine that has the popularity of Sun's.
That said, I don't believe Sun is evil. But they're not friendly towards OSS either. They're highly ambivalent about open source. They're just confused.
With one hand they work with the community and with the other they fight it.
They like Gnome. They don't like Linux.
They open-sourced Star Office, but they sponsor SCO.
They have an 'open source diva' on staff, but they won't make their Java Compatibility Kit available on terms acceptable for open-source projects, while citing concerns about incompatible forks at the same time.
Although, it's probably a GPL violation for them to do this, unless the kernel and system libraries are GPL'd, because the system library clause of the GPL explicitly doesn't apply to bundled software.
I'm just sayin'.
Then they came out with the alpha chip. A screamingly fast 64 bit machine in a tower case that destroyed any PC in terms of performance. They could not sell it.
How a company can create one fantastic product after another and still get it's ass kicked like a 90 pound weakling is beyond me.
"Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes."
- E.W. Dijkstra
For the sake of their employees.
It takes time to fit into the Linux community, work out the legal bits, work our internal processes. If I'm not mistaken SGI had a terrible time with all of this but are now in the process.
But its not about making Linux better. Linux is going to walk all over Solaris. It has the momo and brick walls wont be stopping this freight train.
If Sun employees want to be marketable in a Linux world, working on a Linux like OS wont cut it. They need to get into the process. Stake out some respect and a niche of expertise in the community. Otherwise someone else will be there and Sun engineers will be filing bugs with the rest of the end users out there.
It would be sad to see a bunch of kernel developers become evolutionary dead ends and then have the company go belly up.
Taking a bullet for inflated dot com egos is not what Sun engineers should be put up to. Sun should enable their engineers and join the rest of the world. Sun isnt big enough to keep a disneyland in the backyard to live in.