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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."
More and more Sun seems to becoming the thing they hate, despite the fact that they also seem to be trying harder and harder not to.
I really hope someone can prove me wrong about this.
And if they would hurry up and open source it, they'd get some of that back.
GETPKG - Package Management for Slackware
The way I see it, solaris is converging with linux. Sun plan to provide a consistent UI so that end users wont see any difference between Java Desktop on a dell system and Java Desktop on Sparc or Operton running solaris.
Solaris does have some features which are missing in linux and Sun have the advantage that solaris is designed to work with Sun hardware... much like MacOS is designed to work with Apple hardware.
"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.
He lists a bunch of programs, but none of them were developed by Sun. Can anyone correct me on this, or is he just Mr. Marketing?
Cuchullain
"If sharing a thing in no way diminishes it, it is not rightly owned if it is not shared." -St. Augustine
Sun specifically will not under any circumstance include GPL'd code in the Solaris kernel. Sun was recently somewhat screwed by Intel. Sun had been waiting for Intel to release wireless drivers (mainly for Solaris x86 laptop/wireless users). When Intel finally did release the code, they did it under GPL. Thus, completely screwing Sun's ability to include the drivers in their distribution. Technically, they could add the drivers, but they strictly adhere to the idea that NO GPL code will become part of the Solaris kernel.
I'm not suggesting Sun hasn't contributed anything to the tech-community, but to say they were "founded on open source" reminds me of Animal Farm.
Disclaimer: I'm not a Sun kernel guru, but I know some. Some of the "facts" above may be a little munged in translation.
This one gang kept wanting me to join cause I'm pretty good with a bo staff.
- they have given the community Java, Open Office, NFS, & RPC. While Java is not strictly open source it is widely used.
- Sun's John Bosak created XML.
- they still make most of their money from hardware and services
- just about all the machines they sell can run linux (and bsd)
Since they lost that patent suit to Kodak, w.r.t Java, does that mean any chance of Java being GPL'ed are null and void because it's now officially patent encumbered?
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
from my own experience at work:
:"You guys are sure you dont wanna go back to Solaris??!!"
We have several clusters from work from different vendors, Sun for starters, IBM, SGI, Dell.
The worst and the one with more downtime nodes and most incosistent is the Sun nodes. They were the first we bought, and their problems made us automatically switch to other vendors.
Their first reply was
So personally i was not impressed, and i assume they are only going with linux because if they didnt, they are gonna miss the train.
The lunatic is in my head
Red Hat. They've done a hell of alot more for Gnome in every regard including usability guidelines. Gnome 2.8 is an excellent product, its the first time I'm using gnome over kde. But don't go giving Sun too much credit, check the change log sometime, you'll see lots of red hat.
Regards,
Steve
Even though they had fantastic engineers DEC was run by morons. When the PCs (Z80 based CPM ones) were gaining popularity DEC had a PC with both a 8080 and a Z80. This machine could run DOS and CP/M. It had high resolution color, it had a 132 column screen with smooth scrolling, it had built in VT100 emulation. It was the best PC on the market and they could not sell it.
Very soon after that they shrunk the PDP-11 into a desktop machine. A sixteen bit PC with thousands of applications running on it. It had HUGE (for the time) storage both hard disks and floppies. Oh and get this it had a GUI straight out of Xerox Parc. With menus and resizable windows and everything!. They could not sell it.
Very soon after that they came out with the micro-vax. This was a minicomputer on your desk. Way more powerful then any PC on the market and it ran more software then DOS. They could not sell it.
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. I can only attribute to the incompetence of people like Ken Olsen and his top level staff.
By all rights Digital should have ruled the desktop.
evil is as evil does
So they've spent a ton of money to improve gnome....so that they don't use it?
FreeBSD for the impatient.
> ... It was the best PC on the market and they could not sell it.
Read this as: It was the most expensive, overfeatured PC on the market, and no one wanted to buy it compared to the alternatives.
> Very soon after that they came out with the micro-vax. This was a minicomputer on your desk. Way more powerful then any PC on the market and it ran more software then DOS. They could not sell it.
(Nods) Yep, I knew uVAXes, they were awesome little boxes - for business purposes. Much tooo expensive for desktops in offices or homes compared to PCs.
And "running more software than DOS" doesn't count if that software wasn't the MS Office suite, even back then.
Agreed about the Alpha; that was a genuine industry failure of DEC marketing.
A tad overpriced, but you could take one of these Netra 1280s I'm managing, tie it to a chain on the back of your truck, and drag it down the freeway for 10 miles without it being the worse for wear.
I'm sick of fooling around with cheap-ass Dell and ex-Compaq DL-series hardware. Of course developers are getting better at writing 100% cluster-capable applications and thus life with cheap hardware is getting better, but it always seems some boxes are mission-critical regardless.
We have a new toy, a rack-full of HP blades. They are running Linux. Seems like the best of both worlds - a high-end box, and Linux with drivers engineered specifically for the HW by the vendor. Sun is a little behind in this respect, but I don't see them gaining.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
"Read this as: It was the most expensive, overfeatured PC on the market, and no one wanted to buy it compared to the alternatives."
I was around back then and I can tell you that it did not cost more then a regular PC.
"(Nods) Yep, I knew uVAXes, they were awesome little boxes - for business purposes. Much tooo expensive for desktops in offices or homes compared to PCs."
It was a high profit machine. They could have cut the costs on it. Management blunder.
"And "running more software than DOS" doesn't count if that software wasn't the MS Office suite, even back then."
They had this thing called "all in one" which was out before office was even a thought in Bill Gates mind.
evil is as evil does
I once worked at a company where there were several whole floors filled with cubicles with QA people in them, all with Sun Ultrasparc Desktops.
Some of them were proud, even zealous about it. Not many. And they were in the process of replacing them all with cheap Clone PCs.
"What's the frequency Kenneth?"
I've worked at companies that had the same kind of innovator's dilemma experience that DEC had. It's not pretty.
DEC was a large, successful company finely tuned for doing business certain ways. They had a channel of highly trained resellers who were used to spending lots of time working out solutions with customers, and who expected >40% margins on hardware sales in return. To get to that point, DEC would have had armies of employees dedicated to keeping the channel happy, and to sabotaging any internal initiatives that might upset their resellers.
Then the industry started to change. I didn't work at DEC so I don't know exactly how it played out, but I assume they tried to sell PCs through their reseller channel. Here's what their resellers were thinking:
"Let's see, I normally spend a week or two closing each sale. I could try to sell a $200K Vax this month (I just made that up, I have no idea what Vaxen cost), or I could try to sell a bajillion PCs for the same profit. Hmmm, how should I spend my time?"
DEC initiatives to do an end run around the resellers and sell retail would have been constantly undermined by the DEC reseller police.
Disruptive technology changes are incredibly hard to survive when they require diverting resources from high-margin businesses to lower-margin businesses. I don't know how SUN is going to manage it, with their extremely confused-sounding strategy about "we invented open source but you should be buying expensive Solaris boxes and isn't Java cool?"
Whatever they may tell you - IMHO they are free-riders. At LinuxWorld in Frankfurt recently, when talking to a Sun employee about their V40z and blade server offerings, the man quickly switched over to how great Solaris x86 is. For about 10 minutes he talked about Solaris, and I let him talk to see what their real intentions are. But hey, this was a Linux event. Incredible.