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."

Comments

Re:What day of the week is it?

[DavidNWelton]

I don't think you correctly perceive the sentiment regarding Sun.

I think a lot of long-time Linux users want to like the company. They've always fought for Unix, even when NT was supposed to be the up and coming thing. They've provided all kinds of interesting technology and research, and even open sourced it occasionally. Most of us would certainly rather work on Solaris than on Windows when forced to use a proprietary system. We realize what an enourmous gift the openoffice codebase was. Before Linux really emerged, maybe we could still get away with using it at work, saying that we could always move things over to a "real Unix" like Solaris... they were sort of like a benevolent older brother who would could call if the situation got really scary. So they're in a position to be well regarded.

But they've frittered away a lot of this good will. Between the money to SCO, the digs at Linux as marketing strategy, and this on again off again view of open source, I don't feel that comfortable with them any more. It's like Linux grew up, and the girls have started to be more interested in it, and the formerly looked-up-to older brother is now going around saying nasty things about it.

So it's not about disliking Solaris, which looks to be a nice system, it's about having doubts about Sun and their corporate strategy. They need to make up their mind about being our friends or not, instead of smiling and trying to stab us in the back.

Sigh...

[solios]

SUPPORT.

BLAM. That's IT.

You pay half a million for your box breaking to be SOMEBODY ELSE'S PROBLEM.

That money makes your box Sun's priority. Period. They'll FIX IT. Software or hardware. They'll roll you custom Solaris patches, because you're paying for it.

You're paying for a COMPANY to give you some LOVE. Not some snotnosed Admin whose first-line defense is an O'Reilly bookshelf.

There's a definite market for this kind of service. Just because you're not in it doesn't mean it isn't there.

About getting back to their [Sun's] roots...

[PotatoHead]

A few years ago, I attened an SGI conference in Las Vegas. Didn't lose too much that time either... Anyway, the point of this conference was to communicate the SGI vision going forward. This was right about the time SGI got done getting their ass kicked in the win32 / Intel space.

Sgi said they needed to return to their roots too, just like Sun is saying now. For SGI this meant, taking their best tech forward while cutting costs on everything else. Good message, seemed the right thing to do.

Well, how are they going to cut costs? Enter the chief scientist, an Asian GUY Goh, I believe. Very personable, very smart, very excited about --- Linux and OSS.

The SGI plan was very simple. Keep IRIX doing what it does best. At the same time, begin working on Linux. SGI learned they had to accept the community as a partner. This means if they submit something and it gets rejected, they either don't do it that way, or submit again, or maintain it as an add on, until the community catches up with them in that particular area. The idea being that either their solution would be accepted, or the community would evolve one that SGI could use.

(This does have to do with SUN, bear with me!)

So, SGI did go back to their roots, worked with the OSS community, and ended up once again able to do what they do best; namely, low latency, NUMA supercomputing. They are 2nd on the top 500 again, for now, and their flagship machine runs Linux!

At the time, I thought: "uh Oh, there goes SGI..." You can say what you want about IRIX, but it does what it does very very well. Linux looked impossible at the time. But it worked, and worked very well for them. SGI lost a lot of smart people, but obviously kept the ones that mattered. There was one other significant thing: After the banquet, I got a chance to talk with Bishop. Very interesting fellow in that he is totally geeky, but has solid business sense, and a direct line to NASA... He told me SGI was going to commit to this new course no matter what. Half way was not going to cut it. SGI makes the lions share of its money making powerful systems that do things that are near-impossible to do. Anything else would only prolong the death spiral. That meant getting rid of the baggage in measured steps, then build again lean 'n mean.

So, now we look at Sun.

All of SGI was committed to doing one thing, well actually two: Building their Linux / Itanium platform while doing everything they can for IRIX / Mips. To this day, they have not deviated from this vision at all and it is now paying off, just like Bishop said it would.

Sun? Lots of infighting, no core vision to drive forward. Until they fix that, they are doomed to fail because nobody is going to pay for 'almost the greatest' solutions, which is what Sun is selling right now.**

**Please don't flame for that. Sun makes good stuff, but they don't have clear niches where they are the absolute best and where there are few to no alternative solutions.) Massive SGI NUMA, mixed with graphics, insane I/O, and big low latency memory machines solve a class of problems that nothing else solves. There are only a few players, none as mature as SGI is. Ok, back to my points...

Sun needs to cut the baggage. Carrying Solaris forward is not going to be the answer. The cool hardware features, redundancy, hot swap, etc... can be solved in other ways. That means Solaris really does not have anything the market must have and that's the key to this whole thing.

SGI realized this with IRIX. However, some bits were needed on the Linux side, such as their XFS filesystem. The few bits we are clamoring for, Sun wants to keep tight hold of and this is a mistake. The market is not going to rebuild onto Solaris, all the work done with Linux, just to get Java, or redundancy, for example. Instead, they are going to just figure out how to do it with Linux, just as they have everything else.

The SGI approach at least got their technology in wide us

Re:What day of the week is it?

[weileong]

Let the community massage your improvements to Linux instead of having to rework, test, and maintain your own codebase.

This sounds like hand-waving. It's been pointed out before that submitting lots of code "into the community" is no guarantee it'll be vetted properly. The pool of genuinely talented linux hackers is large, but not infinite. And the subset of this that is likely to decide "hell this is a cool project i'm gonna go work on it" is often zero for many projects (go look at the effectively abandoned projects all over).

Sun has their own pool of engineers, and plenty of them are *very* good. If they have their own resources in terms of engineering talent, you can't possibly blame them for wanting to use it on their 'own' product? it guarantees x number of eyeballs looking at it in a directed way and with it being literally their "day job".

"Opening it to the community" only means that the ones who are interested in it and are capable of doing it (both in terms of talent and time) will work on it. there's plenty of things that ought to be done in linux that have not yet been done... .

Less legal hastle and licensing costs, as mentioned, than opening up all of Solaris. Evidently Sun didn't have full rights to all the code, so they had to buy them up first

The battle against SCO may well have given the wrong impression considering their sheer incompetence and general rubbish-osity, but if you don't think things are being cooked up in Redmond right now, a cluestick awaits your head.

The warning shots have already been fired - Ballmer's running around telling Asian governments there's patent issues with Linux - and the *real* battles (MS patent infringement claims against Linux) have yet to be fought. Software patents are the key battle to be fought - if Europe adopts US-style software patents, if the global system evolves even more towards a system that favours large corporations vs individual groups/community hackers, well, you know who the biggest software company out there is?

PR. Switching entirely to Linux would have given Sun an enormous boost in respect and confidence -- especially among geeks but also among investors concerned about Sun's bottom line. All that independent R&D costs big bucks. And, after all, Linux is now a media / wall street darling.

I'm sure Sun has their reasons, but I'd imagine they are fairly short term.

I can't believe you mention wall street and then complain about "short term". The purported boost would be quite worthless for Sun. The minute they announce anything remotely close to sounding like they're abandoning Solaris, they will haemorrhage customers as fast as... HP losing VMS/Alpha customers. Sun's apparently picking up quite a lot of business from this group, they're perfectly aware of what happens when your installed base sees you jumping ship.

If they did it, there'd be a major splash of publicity, sure. That's definitely gonna pay the bills. (it's not even clear it'd be *positive* publicity. "Sun Surrenders" is probably what plenty of analysts etc. will plunk on their front pages).

There might be a tiny spike in the share price that would be wiped out by the downward spiral pretty quickly.

Independent R&D costs big bucks? Hell yeah. Should I presume you're a big "oh-we-used-to-say-we-don't-do-ANY-R&D-which-is-wh y-we're-gonna-kill-all-those-who-do" Dell fanboy? IBM's often quoted as a major friend-of-OSS, but any real-$$ investments they have made are targeted towards things that are beneficial to themselves and/or hurtful to enemies (e.g. Eclipse). I don't see them contributing to improve linux performance on Itaniums, for example.

There's no fundamental difference between that and Sun coughing up the $$ into their own targets on their own platform.

You'll note IBM hasn't GPL-ed AIX either and decided to support linux exclusively.

There IS a good thing coming out

Go back to sleep. You have no "natural allies"

[Moraelin]

In the corporate world there is no such thing as "natural allies". Especially not with competing products. But generally, when a business man/woman shakes your hand, you can bet his/her other hand is behind his/her back, holding a dagger.

People, this is not Tolkien, where the elves are your natural allies for eternity, and the orcs are your natural enemies. In Tolkien's world you know where you stand. It's a simplified world. That's why we like to escape to phantasy worlds: they're a refuge from the madness of the real world.

Real world is nowhere near that simple.

In the corporate world, there are no heroes in shiny spandex, and no villain cackling over death ray blueprints. There's only a bunch of greedy people trying to make a buck. Your buck.

Throughout the history of computing, as little of it as we have, one thing stayed a constant: whoever is in the lead wants proprietary stuff and tries to lock you into their incompatible formats. Whoever is losing badly wants open standards and generally a fair chance to have a go at the big guys' locked-in customers.

Then the wheel turns, companies go from top to bottom and viceversa, and they switch the tune without missing a beat. And things stay the same. The ones who are now winning, try to lock you in, the ones at the bottom suddenly become open-standards evangelists.

That's why IBM and the rest are supporting Linux nowadays, for example. That's why Sun would even give away OpenOffice, even with sources, to try to break MS's file format lock-in.

There are a lot of has-beens in this industry. People who once owned the market, but were too stupid to keep it.

E.g., PCs once had to be "IBM Compatible", then it was "Intel Compatible", while nowadays it's "MS Windows Compatible". Intel doesn't single-handedly decide new architectures any more, but has to beg MS for support in Windows. (And just got refused recently!) IBM had its ass handed to it a longer time ago, when the PS/2 microchannel architecture was basically rejected by everyone else. The company that created the PC was no longer in control of its architecture. Novell once owned the network server market, but thought it could ignore NT and stick to charging outrageous prices. Prices for which you could buy not only 2 NT server licenses, but also 2 high end PCs to run them on. Etc.

And when they still were at the top, neither of them has acted any better than MS does. E.g., although nowadays "FUD" is synonimous with Microsoft, once it was synonimous with IBM: In fact, it was _invented_ by IBM.

Now all those has-beens are suddenly pro-Linux and pro-open-standards, to get their righteous vengeance against MS. But if either got back on top, they'd start doing the same shit all over again.

And Sun is the prime example. Sun is somewhere in the middle, and can't decide if it's losing, or still has a chance of being king. As soon as it thinks it's losing, it starts being a Linux zealot. As soon as it thinks "hey, maybe everyone will convert to Solaris if we port it to the Opteron", it starts openly trying to kill Linux.

And as management perceptions and sales figures fluctuate, pushing them a little up or a little down from that middle position, Sun flip-flops between the two extremes several times a month. Or sometimes even within the same day.

Sad.

Re:What day of the week is it?

[elmegil]

it presumably would have developed them there instead.

DTrace, and other kernel related goodies, would be extremely hard to fit into the overall scheme of how the Linux kernel currently works. In other words, the investment to make it work in Linux would be significantly higher.

The parent claimed that Sun should have dropped a more mature, more cohesive, more scalable kernel and turned their attention to the Linux kernel. That's flat ludicrous from an investement standpoint. "Hey, we've done all the work in our kernel, let's just do it all over again with a new kernel that doesn't work even remotely the same way as ours, so we have to do pretty much the same amount of work all over again."

If your argument is that Linux is easier to use because of GNU stuff....guess what? You can add all that stuff to Solaris and it works great. You don't even have to compile the majority of it, you can pull it off the Solaris companion CD or (gasp) out of the several GNU tools that are now officially part of the supported OS.

a good chunk of our security-related infrastructure is somewhat OS-dependant

I sympathize, and I wouldn't try to get you to change. But I'd like to point out that this problem effectively makes Linux just as proprietary in a "lock in" sense as Solaris. You're locked in. If it does the job you need it to do, that's not necessarily a problem, but I hope the hard core zealots reading this recognize the spurious nature of arguing "but Linux is OPEN". Once Solaris 10 is open source, even the argument of being able to continue on without Sun in the marketplace goes belly up.