Slashdot Mirror
Sun-isms Debunked
Newman writes "We're all aware of the hole-ridden arguments that Sun executives Scott McNealy and Jonathan Schwartz use to attack Linux. This guy at NewsForge really grilled them at the Solaris launch party last Monday, and actually got some straight answers out of them. At the end of the article, both execs have some specific words for Slashdot readers."
Using software that infringes a patent violates system and probably method claims. Unless you have a contract agreement with the software company that says they'll protect you against patent infringement lawsuits then you're screwed. And if you know the software you're using infringes a patent then you're screwed x3.
The reason you rarely see companies going after users is because they tend not to have as much money as the company making the software.
Nerd: Derogatory term typically directed at anybody with a lower Slashdot ID than you.
Right now the only thing that differentiates Sun from the rest of their market place is their expensive high end hardware. They need to squeese as much out of it as possible till it caves into the x86 - 64 commodity CPU market. Then their ability to gain high profit margins will be gone, as well as their position to compete in the computer space. Part of that differentation is solaris, that's way they need to squeese as much out of it as they can even if Linux is the one taking over the server-space industry.
It's a bit more complicated than that. If you read the SELinux FAQ:
The NSA itself says that it's NOT one, so on its own SELinux is not good enough for secure US government work, despite its being developed by the NSA.
Qu'on me donne six lignes écrites de la main du plus honnête homme, j'y trouverai de quoi le faire pendre.
Red Hat does a lot of work with SELinux, thank you very much, including employing its author Russel Coker. EL4 will be, AFAIK, the first distro to ship with it turned on by default.
ReiserFS isn't supported (although it is there, start the installer with the 'reiserfs' parameter)
as it requires reinstalls, has had stability issues (in particular, it used to have arguments with the NFS driver, even when Suse were shipping it). But Red Hat have GFS for use as a SAN filesystem and underlying on disk filesystem.
In consequence, Netscape's SSL is considered acceptable for Government use (and DES has only just had its permission revoked), but the DoD's own implementation of IPSec and the NSA's work on SELinux are not. Rijndael-128 is OK, but Rijndael-256 is not. Even though all the evidence so far is that both versions of Rijndael are perfectly good.
A version of SuSE Linux (with help and funding from IBM) has been certified by the NSA as secure under the "Common Criteria" at about the same sort of level as Windows NT. This was on a PC I believe. No other platform for Linux, and no other distribution of Linux, has been certified.
So, you CAN run that specific version of SuSE on the specific PC platform it was tested on on military unclassified or confidential networks. Because so few OS' have been certified (only a tiny number of Unix manufacturers have the money for the approval process, never mind the development!!!) it's common practice to run any "approved" OS on Secret and Top Secret networks, even though they're not supposed to.
(Having worked as a contractor for the DoD, I can tell you that it is also not uncommon for software companies to request and receive waivers exempting them from NSA security auditing. The main appeal of COTS solutions, such as Microsoft, is that it's a lot cheaper than most GOTS solutions and the quality is about the same.)
For real "military grade" security (the stuff the military would like, if they weren't spending all their money in strip clubs) you'd need to take one of the existing security patches and add the following:
All that would give Linux a clearance comparable to the old B2 or B1 levels, which would be more than adequate for most classified networks. Relative to the work already put into Linux, it's really not that much. If IBM and SGI wanted to pool resources to make a B2/B1 version of Linux, I see absolutely no reason why they couldn't.
Now comes the fun part! What if you were to do all the above, and then do a line-by-line full coding audit with formal validation? IBM has something like 10,000 Linux coders. There are 50,000,000 lines of code. Assuming you could do the audit at no more than 10 lines a day, it would take 100 days to audit the kernel to this degree. For a real bare-bones box, it would probably take about the same to do the user-space stuff.
What would this give you? Well, the ONLY COTS Operating System to be A1-certifiable. There simply aren't any other. Nobody makes software to the A1 standard. At least, not that
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)
UML has substantially low performance compared to N1 Grid Containers. If you're going to compare a server virtualization feature, compare to something like the Xen Virtual Machine, in this performance comparison, you can see the performance of UML is rather appalling, especially compared to Xen.
The performance of Solaris Grid Containers is more akin to Xen or FreeBSD jails. However, the advantage N1 Grid Containers have over Xen is that they are portable to every platform Solaris runs on (SPARC, IA32, AMD64) whereas Xen only emulates one platform (IA32). Also, other Solaris features to which there are currently no Linux counterparts such as the Fair Share Scheduler, which allows a N1 Grid Container to be bound to certain processors, and given a dedicated percentage (or share) of available processor resources. This provides an advantage over Xen and UML which can't even use multiple CPUs. It has an advantage over FreeBSD jails where monopolization of system resources by a single jail cannot be easily avoided.
While Linux may have counterparts to various Solaris features, in terms of maturity, feature set, and performance of these features Solaris has Linux trumped.
http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/features/articles/sola ris_zones.html
It's interesting that FreeBSD influence is getting
recognition at SUN... Maybe now they will be persuaded
to support some of their products on FreeBSD.(aka Java, and yes, i know about the FreeBSD java group
and their agreement on the 1.3.X jdk with sun)
I'm tired of the bullshit.
Bullshit? Sun's stock has steadily gone up over 60% since August, all in anticipation of Solaris 10, Niagara, fighting off losers like Kodak, etc. Sun is going through another one of its re-invention cycles, and will have massively-multi-threaded systems in the next two years with Solaris 10, complete with super-fast TCP/IP and through-and-through checksums on ZFS (among other things).
-- "Makes Little Debbie look like a pile of puke!" - Moe Szyslak
Yep, you're right on both counts. However...
Every Sun purchase I've seen has been ultimately driven by support and reliability/uptime. Sun recognised this, and focused on building hardware and software to address reliability/uptime in particular. What's changed is that, while Solaris has more features than Linux in some ways, those features are primarily related to uptime which isn't that big a deal any more.
Why not?
- for every useful feature that Sun adds in, someone in Linux-land will eventually see that feature as a good thing and work will be done to port that feature to Linux. The porting to Linux of an existing Sun feature can be done faster than Sun can think up and build new features, and as Linux pushes more and more into the enterprise, the focus will become more and more on replicating Sun's advantages in Linux. The numbers are simply against Sun managing to stay ahead
- to a very large extent, you can achieve uptime by scaling "wide" i.e. throwing more boxes at the problem. It's absolutely not a panacea to all uptime issues, but it's an approach that fits particularly well with Linux/Intel due to the low incremental cost of the hardware. Whatever "uptime smarts" Sun can add to their OS, I and many others can achieve the same results (in pure uptime terms) by bolting a bunch of new Intel boxes into a rack
Well, then there is the groupof use who grew up on Unix (and Sun-Os in mycase) and switched to Linux because of cost. Most of us (though few), while Linux users still have fond memories.
I agree with you.
If I call Sun for support, the issue is usually resolved with 1-2 phone calls.
A typical ticket with RH support takes several phone calls.
I recently had a support issues with Redhat that took 15 emails and 3 phone calls to fix. The problem? They were sending all support email to my boss (who had the address associated with the Credit Card) instead of to me. It took them 10 tries to change the address in the DB... oddly you can't change it in the RedHat support web interface. For $400 bucks per workstation I expect better quality...
I'm scared to think what would happen if I had a serious problem with them...
94% of Repubs and 21% of Dems voted to renew the Patriot Act
I don't look at processor as the main bottleneck in a computer, I look at memory. I had a 350MHz processor when most of my friends had a Gigahertz or better, and I still ended up with better overall performance because I had 768MB RAM and most of them had 128MB.
At work we're still replacing Pentium 75 - 133 era machines, and when the user's department doesn't have the money to do it right they end up with a Pentium 233MMX with 384MB RAM running Windows 98SE. The computer boots and runs fairly well in that configuration, and as long as we keep their software down to versions that were modern or semi-modern with the machine (Office 2000, Novell 3.32sp2 client, IE 6.0 or Mozilla, etc) the computer responds pretty well, and the users don't realise how old their machine is.
My laptop is a Celeron-700MHz with 192MB RAM, which is maxing the machine out. I'd take a lappy with a processor as slow as 500MHz so long as I can get up to 512MB RAM or more, it would beat the pants off of this current one when a lot of stuff is running simultaneously.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
So, just how many billions of dollars is your company going to bring in this year?
Out of the box usability means NOTHING in a large environment, because everything has been custom configured, developed, tested, and rolled out in a formal process.
"Eat your heart out SUN. Linux and free BSDs are for people that love to hack this stuff out and have some idea or someone that knows what they are doing."
That statement is moderately true. Sun shines in server farms that need REAL 24x7 guaranteed uptime/availability. I maintain roughly 300 servers (average probably about 5 CPU each), and Linux isn't yet at the point where it could replace Sun in that environment.
My filesystem is journalled, and has been for about a decade longer than Linux. My hardware emails me when it's having problems, and usually detects problems before things break! I don't want quick ship-->deploy time, I want long boot/upgrade cycles and protection from problems.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
Read this article from motley fool. Everybody is wondering how sun is going to make money. Before you say "service" keep in mind the most expensive support plan from SUN is less then the least expensive support plan from RedHat. They can't possibly make up the difference from support if they are practically giving that away too.
So what's left to sell? Intel boxes? AMD64 Boxes? Sparc workstations?
Do you really see Sun sustaining itself with those products? I don't.
There is only one thing that sun has that could make it money and that's patents.
evil is as evil does
From TFA:
``I asked Scott McNealy if he ever considered Java's closed licensing from a user's perspective, and I gave him the example of FreeBSD/AMD64, which has no native 64-bit JRE because Sun has not yet provided one.''
How about Sun Community Source Licensing? Sure, you cannot distribute modified versions, but the typical operation of BSD ports is to download original + patches anyway (so the modified version is created locally). I don't see how this can't be used to make a native port for FreeBSD/AMD64, or any system at all.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
But there's a big difference between:
there is no legal basis for Kodak to sue end users over their use of the JRE or JDK. End users did not infringe upon Kodak's patents
which is a direct quote from the article and:
As an end-user you are fully liable, but unless you have very deep pockets, are disliked by the patent-holder, are a very high-profile user, or the patent-holder is having a particularily bad day, they are probably not going to choose to sue you.
which, as you point out is the reality.
The first claim, the one in the article, that no legal basis exists to sue end users is simply wrong. When an author displays such ignorance of patent-law it weakens his credibility overall.
But Sun's stock also steadily fell by nearly that amount from June to August. It's hardly a long term trend. They haven't even got back to the level they were at 6 months ago.
Compare Sun (a company with an open source strategy that changes every week, it seems) with Apple (a company with a strategy and sticking to it) and the picture is far more telling.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
I think this graph probably sums up your meaning even more clearly :-)
People should not be afraid of their governments - Governments should be afraid of their people.
a) x86 servers are getting more powerful
But nowhere near the processing throughput of a high end Sun box. Even though the processors in an x86 machine may run at a higher clock rate than the fastest SPARC, they still have limited I/O bandwidth. You could buy one of the recent SGI systems, but then you lose the apparent price advantage of x86.
b) x86 server-class machines can be pretty damn stable too, given the right hardware
Which vendor? My last company used DEC, Compaq and then HP servers - switching as the companies got bought out. With DEC we had Alphas which were incerdibly reliable, but the x86 based successors from Compaq and HP were very unreliable. RAID failures and mysterious lockups were a weekly occurence.
c) clusters are eating away at high-end segments
But the clustering software that I've seen for x86 systems requires the software I write to be distributed in a much more complex way than if I write it threaded for a single Sun box.
Chris
Yeah, linux is so much easier to use than Solaris
Well once you've got around to installing the GNU tools onto Solaris, it's every bit as usuable as Linux.
-- Nick "Hallo this is Beel Gates, und I pronounce weendows as
Sun Microsystems is SUNW not SUN
Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana.
What the hell does Big Oil (Sunoco) have to do with Linux (let alone VA Software)?
That's like comparing dead dinosaurs and algorithms.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
2) Sun DOES provide very easy to use and install packages with the vast majority of the GNU tools. Some of them are part of the core OS now, and the rest of them are on the Companion CD. "They should be standard!! It's too haaaard to install extra packages that take about 5 minutes to load!" Well, I think the same thing about telnet, but guess what? Every distro under the sun makes me go add telnet manually. Thems the breaks.
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
This is funny because I work for the military and I see RedHat being used extensively. Talk to a fellow named Brian Mikkelsen the federal sales director (DoD too) for RedHat and tell him that he has no military clients.
0 00072
H at_Cert ificate.jpg
Here's just one example with a quick search on google: http://afmsrr.afams.af.mil/index.cfm?RID=MDL_AF_1
The US Defense Information Systems Agency
Here's a link to RedHat's DII COE compliance cert:
http://diicoe.disa.mil/coe/kpc/RHLinux/Red
Now Sun does have a mucher larger market share as does AIX but thats only because they have been players in the DoD world longer and run the OS on their own hardware. As time goes on SuSE and RedHat will get a stronger foothold into this market. All that said about RedHat, SuSE rocks!
If you would have read the article completely, you would have known that they requested that FreeBSD contact them to do redistribution (which wouldn't be enough for the amd64 port anyway)
But this isn't an issue anymore. Java is redistributable. Yes it is, if you don't believe me, download Slackware 10, it will come with java preinstalled
Open Source Java Web Forum with LDAP authentication
2.5.1 - UNIX(r) System V Release 4.0 (polaris)
:)
7/x86 - SunOS 5.7
8 - SunOS 5.8
9 - SunOS 5.9
I don't have any 2.6 boxes around any more, and don't remember which way it was.
Like it really matters.
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
There is plenty of information at BigAdmin, including technical whitepapers and tutorials. I can't imagine you looked very hard if you couldn't find this information.
I'll give you the 60 second summary. Containers are zones plus resource managers. Zones are very similar to BSD jails. A single kernel is shared by all zones. There are potentially 1000s of zones per server. Each zone has its own copy of Solaris userspace including applications. All zones sit inside the "global zone"; the Solaris running on the hardware. Upgrading the global zone (eg, with patches) will automatically upgrade all the other zones. Resource managers can limit the resources used by a zone; think CPU and memory quotas for zones. Zones can use multiple CPUs, or part of a single CPU, or whatever.
UML isn't nearly as good; UML runs a whole new kernel per instance. Completely unlike VMware; VMware runs a whole new virtual PC per instance! Jails are the closest equivalent but still not exactly.