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

Sun's hardware does run linux well

[Clay Pigeon -TPF-VS-]

Sun does make some decent hardware. My friend bought one of their opteron 150 boxes off of ebay, and he loves it. I believe he has gentoo running on it iirc.

From the memory hole...

[kallisti777]

From the article:

Arguably the most important question I asked Scott McNealy was, "What proprietary code had to be taken out of Solaris in preparation for open sourcing it?" McNealy responded by saying that the process of open sourcing Solaris actually started five years ago. "There were hundreds of encumbrances to open sourcing Solaris. Some of them we had to buy out, others we had to eliminate. We had to pay SCO more money so we could open the code -- I couldn't say anything about that at the time, but now I can tell you that we paid them that license fee to expand our rights to the code," he said, referring to the February 2003 multi-million-dollar purchase of expanded Unix SVR4 license rights from the SCO Group. That was at the beginning of SCO's war on Linux, and the timing of Sun's license purchase was suspicious. At the time it was widely theorized in the online press that Sun had purchased the expanded Unix licenses to help fund SCO's lawsuit against Sun's lifelong nemesis IBM and public attacks on Sun's part-time rival, GNU/Linux; if what McNealy says is true, a lot of pundits owe him an apology.

Discuss.

Re:From the memory hole...

[MC Negro]

Something that's been puzzling me since I first heard about an open source Solaris is to what degree it will be actual "UNIX", in the OpenGroup sense of the word. How much SVR4 code was ripped out and replaced, and are these replacements going to break compliance with the UNIX 98 certification? Will they hinder compliance with the UNIX 03 standard? Will Sun even pursue certification after the source is opened?

It's not that I'm incredibly worried, I've just always affixed Solaris as "Sun Solaris UNIX" when speaking about it, to denote compliance and compatibility in the commercial UNIX community.

Dear Mr. McNealy

[Triumph The Insult C]

You say: "And we want developers back on our side. If there's more for us to do, we'll go do it,"

maybe then you can show some good faith and put some action behind those words? don't want to open up java any more? fine, then at least remove the ridiculous redistribtion limitations

since you're giving away the software, you're left to making $$ from hardware and services. try being a little more friendly with those seeking to buy your hardware, and maybe you'll see a resurgence in hardware sales

because of the tactics you've employed in the past, i chose to not buy an opteron system from you and instead opted for another vendor. change your tactics and perhaps you'll start seeing a resurgance of your customer base

Re:It's all about the hardware

[grahamsz]

Sun are still pushing the high end. They are working on massively multicore (maybe 16 or 32 core) sparc chips, which will then be put into massively multicpu machines. x86 is probably a ways off being able to provide thousands of cores in a single box with a single memory architecture.

However, having a unified OS and desktop across their entire product line will be a bonus.

Still can't see how Sun will survive

[darnok]

Sun still has to address the issue that their old market seems to have gone away to a large extent. While it made sense 5 years ago to drop ~$500k on an E10k box to get reliability and support, nowadays you can get that same reliability for much less by using piles of clustered Intel hardware and a fairly-competent Linux or BSD admin.

Outside of academia, the only reason people bought smaller Sun boxes is so they could develop for Sun's big iron with minimal migration issues at deployment or "scaling up" time. With the disappearance of Sun's big iron market, their low level market disappeared as well.

Open sourcing Solaris 10 is fine and dandy, but I think it's too little too late. There's brands of Linux and BSD (e.g. RHES, Debian, SE Linux, OpenBSD) that cover every one of Sun's old sweet spots (e.g. uptime, security, Oracle support, ...), so I just can't see why people would go with Solaris these days.

Bottom line: Where is their sweet spot for selling their product? Why would I buy Sun these days?

It's a pity - Sun had a terrific product line that no-one else could match, but they didn't see the tide turning.

Sun doesn't have Wall Street?

[mveloso]

"Sun does not have the operating system market on Wall Street -- they're not even close"

Yeah, like the author really knows what he's talking about. Wall Street is Sun's to lose. Everyone likes solaris, it's just slow and the hardware is expensive. Now that Sun's moving downmarket, it's faster and the hardware is cheaper.

Last I was in the space (over a year ago) Sun was losing share in the lower middle market, but the high-end was sticking in a wait-and-see mode. Their share on WS might have collapsed dramatically, but the numbers from IDC (unit shipment) don't bear that out.

So I guess the reporter was exaggerating to make a point? Does he actually have data to back this up?

my impressions

[j1bb3rj4bb3r]

So, I was there at the launch (being a Sun employee tasked with providing some technical support for one of the kiosks... I don't want to go into too much detail because I'd like to retain at least a little anonymity on /.). I haven't yet understood any message that the Cult of Personality(tm) has been putting forth, but one has to realize that Sun is a big company that has many competing interests vying for control within it. JDS sucks, and everyone there knows it, because we have to use it (that or Solaris, which in my group would be next to impossible... at least the current version). But JDS had a groundswell of support and when policies are made, they are often tough to kill, even in the obvious face of failure. Red Hat is the name that is used to fight against because they are the market leader, even though the Solaris people know damn well that Red Hat != GNU/Linux. Red Hat had a banner plane flying over the Tech Museum in a marketing gimick meant to draw attention away from the launch. Of course they will be the target of the CoP(tm) attacks. I can't say I like Sun corporate, and I think that the infighting there is ridiculous. There is some really cool technology that is being developed however, and some people with some good ideas. I just hope (for my stock's sake) that those people and projects manage to get the attention and funding from the talk-boxes who make the decisions. On a positive techie note, one of the cooler things I saw was the dtrace support in Solaris 10 for doing kernel tracing. As an engineer, I find that very fun.

Re:It's all about the hardware

[jokumuu]

well, the real problem for Sun in the spark line is the development money. Each time they design a new chip, they have to spend way more money for each chip they expect to sell than AMD/Intel as the numbers of x86 chips sold is so much higher. This pushes the price of their chips up in comparision, and this again makes their market smaller compared to the x86 chips that seem to be pushing hard towards the same goals. So.. while x86 might be ways off, there is much more development money available on that side.

Re:What day of the week is it?

[cduffy]

Yes, modern Solaris has lots of nifty goodies that Linux doesn't. It has those things because Sun developed them for it. If Sun had "embraced Linux", as the parent suggests, it presumably would have developed them there instead. Not that I'm entirely clear on why it would have been in their best interests to do that -- but I don't see how/why your post really refutes, or even at all conflits with, its parent.

*shrug*. Personally, I'd probably be investigating Solaris 10 as a platform for deploying my company's products, but I'm already too busy moving from RHEL3 to SLES9 -- and a good chunk of our security-related infrastructure is somewhat OS-dependant and would need to be rewritten. Only so many hours in a day, etc.

Re:What day of the week is it?

[SJS]

The vultures are circling, and I, for one, can't wait until *something* happens to Sun.

It's attitudes like this that make me want to see SCO sue the crap out of the Linux community, and win, one machine at a time. Mandatory $500 license fees, where advocacy constitutes as probable cause and results in automatic warrants for the cops to come in and search your residence and business.

And that's $500 per COPY, installed or installation media.

It's not that I don't like linux[1]-- it's just the user community has so many members who are down on *every* other operating system, even those that should be the natural allies, that it poisons the well, so to speak. (I saw this same sort of thing in the days of the Amiga -- there were people who wished _ill_ on the Atari ST and MacOS, and fostered nothing but ill-well towards themselves in return...)

Remember, monocultures suck. This applies even if All The World Runs Linux[2].

From where I'm sitting, there's more bull coming out of the Linux community than out of Sun.

[1] I actually like linux, and have been using it continuously since my first pre-1.0 slackware installation (I still have those floppy disks!) on a 5meg '386 (Egads, that was a crappy machine. Five times the RAM than my Amiga 1000, and the best thing going for it was that I could run a *nix-lookalike OS so I could write code at home and have a chance of it compiling at school.)

[2] Different distributions don't count as "different", just as different versions of Win32 API systems don't count as "different". What's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, folks.

Shoot your marketing department.

[Soko]

At the end of the launch event Jonathan Schwartz made an impromptu speech; I didn't hear most of it, as I was too far away, but he did end his comments with something about Slashdotters. I ambled over to Schwartz and said, "If anyone here is going to get an article onto Slashdot, it's probably going to be me (since NewsForge and Slashdot are both part of OSTG). Tell me what you'd like Slashdot readers to know."

"Tell them that we're returning to our roots," Schwartz said, referring to the company's renewed focus on the Solaris operating environment.

"And we want developers back on our side. If there's more for us to do, we'll go do it," McNealy added. It was the first time all day that I felt that the two had broken character and simply told me what was on their minds.

As a long time Slashdotter who has had to use and deploy Solaris on occasion, let me tell Mr. McNealy and Mr. Scwartz what's on my mind about Sun. I know they'll be reading, so here goes:

First, cut the marketing BS. No press wars with Redhat, IBM or HP. No trumped up, spin laden press releases about Solaris 10. I don't even want to see a comaprison paper. Give me a technical white paper about what the OS can do and STFU - I then can see for myself whether Solaris 10 is a good or great OS. I can also then decide for myself if it's a good fit in my architecture. Most on Slashdot are technically adept - that's why we can run and support Linux or *BSD without Redhat's help. It's the PHBs who require that kind of hand holding, not us. (Hey, I just invented a new comic book villian - Spin Laden, the Marketing Terrarist!)

Open your dev process, as well as your code. I don't (necessarily) mean provide CVS access, I mean accept and credit quality patches to the code base. Open code would mean we can fix our own damned stuff when things in Solaris break and get our jobs done, while benefiting anyone else who has the same bug - we tend to like to share the fact we're smart enough to repair someone else's broken code. For large contributions, pay the contributor and pay him well.

Stay away from the rest of my systems unless I ask you in. No embedded Java in the OS, no Sun only core stuff (think Microsoft and Kerberos 5), just a big box of properly impelmented tools that I can use to make systems work, work well and work reliably. Your products will be sharing my network with other vendors, so play nice whenever you can. If that means re-writing some Solaris code to put into linux so it interoperates properly and GPLing it, so be it. That way I know that you're concerned about me and not just "maximizing value".

Contriubute to the industry. Some of us think RMS is a real looney, but we have the utmost respect him and his contributions. Mr. Gates, IMHO, does not contribute to the general cause or making my life easier unless there's a price tag, be it in dollars or having to shut out one of his colleagues - he calls them compeditors - from my architecture. Real contributions move the whole industry forward, and provide new opportunities for everyone to make a little $_CURRENCY, not just a select few.

Censure that person who 'escorted' out the interviewer. We like plain talk. We know you have fiduciary responsibilities, and most of us try to take those into account, but trying to hide what you really want to say doesn't wash. If you hate linux or love it, say so, and say why - with no spin on the matter. Speaking of plain talk, you'll get some from us. We know you're the head of a big, powerful Corp., but you should be willing to learn from us. When it comes to putting the tech on the floor, we are your betters, not your underlings.

Lastly, put your engineering department off limits to marketing personnel. OFF-LIMITS. Spin Laden should be shot on sight (by a Nerf gun, of course) if he dares tread where something cool is being made. No "That's a killer system, and we can leverage it to sell..." baloney please. I'm still loathe to implement AD because it's actually proprietary technology, even though it would make administrating my network a little easier.

Thanks for tuning in to my little rant. HAND.

Soko

In the hope someone important at Sun reads this

[The OPTiCIAN]

There are several tools I consider to be very important to me when I'm using a remote environment. These include gnu/screen, less and (most importantly) vim.

I've done development work and sysadmin work on Sun boxes and on linux boxes. I have consistently found that linux boxes come set up in a way that is well-fitted to my usage, whereas operating under remote Solaris environments is a struggle (this comes from having worked on it as developer or user in three separate and very different organisations). In all cases I have had a struggle to get these three key tools installed in environments (and at times lost) where it's been perfectly obvious to anyone with a clue that they are important. (picture several-megabyte log files where the most advanced pager is more and the only editor is vi, which breaks in ugly ways with even moderately sized files and which can't read more than a certain number of characters per line)

The admins at these companies have even at times given me excuses against these tools such as "that's not compatible with our security policy", yet the same environments they have perl installed!! While I realise that that's not Sun's fault directly, linux admins are more open to the idea of using these tools. Thus, when I've been a Sun user I've been unhappy with the experience, and when I'm a linux user I tend to like the experience.

Just in case anyone's tempted to write my opinions off as those only of an utterly naive linux user who couldn't get by in a slightly-unusual world: I do know a bit about the Solaris environment - I'm familiar with ksh, use set -o vi, and am fluent with vi.

I'm under the impression that once upon a time Sun was at the cutting edge of trying to improve the environment - competing against other unix providers to put killer tools in that made it stand out as excellent. Now I realise there were downsides to this (unix wars mentality, etc) - but there was something in that. These were the days when somebody would write/find a great new tool and just ship it.

This unix geek see his linux experiences as the bar against which everything else is measured and I suspect many people are in my shoes because that's what we grow up with. It's possible my experiences have just been an unlucky coincidence, but unlikely.

Guys - you need to win me back by doing things to ensure the Sun user environments I get exposed to are up to scratch.

Here's what I'd recommend to Sun by way of improving the situation:
- move to the version of 'more' derived from the 'less' codebase (if you don't already use that) and ship both by standard in the operating system (if you don't already - can't justify looking this up right atm)
- terminal definitions need to standardise so that vim and less work 'out of the box', *including syntax highlighting in vim!!*
- I'd recommend that people who go to Solaris courses, education programs or read the official books get exposure to the tools that developers love to use so they don't get paranoid at the prospect of exposing them to users
- make sure your evangelists match the target audience. In the two experiences I've had of Sun marketing people, they have not been from a cultural background to allow them to appreciate the difficulties I'm describing here. They'd rather talk about Sun One, or Java or current buzzwords, and they look a lot more comfortable talking about them with managers than developers. If you're serious about evangelising to developers you're going to have to do it properly
- distribute some sort of security policy for high-level secure environments that validates versions of significant tools that are important to users. eg: maybe you could have a program of forking vim every now and then and having a 'Sun-endorsed' version.
- get ahead of the rest by distributing a pager that's specifically designed to make it easy to bounce around huge log files without loading the whole thing into RAM (there may be something like this already - I don't know of it)

Re:In the hope someone important at Sun reads this

[swordgeek]

Fascinating to see your comments.

I'm pretty much a dyed-in-the-wool Solaris admin, but I'm quite familiar with Linux (i.e. run it, support it, deal with it). In other words, I'm coming at the same point from the opposite side of the coin.

1) I agree with the comments on 'more,' although with a caveat that more requires fewer keystrokes than less. Also, realise that less is installed by default in Solaris, and can be set as the default pager fairly easily.

2) screen. I use it at home, I never need it at work. If I need screen, then it usually means that (a)telnet/ssh is broken, and (b)I shouldn't be switching between windows anyways.

3) vim. I HATE vim!!! I DESPISE WITH A GREAT PASSION the defaults in vim! It sucks, it sucks, and it sucks. That's all there is to say about it. :-)

Seriously, vim has two advantages over Sun's vi (window size and file size), but the defaults are so painful that I can't bear to use it. I hate it I hate it Ihateit!!!!! If you need the features of vim over vi, then use emacs! (waiting for that bolt of lightning...)

Also, there is a (non-Sun approved) way of installing this stuff VERY easily. pkg-get, which is an apt-like (yes, apt generallly rocks for package installs/upgrades) front end to pkgadd.

Honestly, I think that Sun has really only got two problems, and you've hit on the biggest one: make sure your evangelists match the target audience. Jonathan Schwartz is a first-class idiot from the marketing world, and has done more to hurt Sun than all of their other problems combined. Talk to the publicly available Sun engineers (Casper, Alan, et al) and you'll realise that there are some damned fine technical people creating some damned fine products behind all of the marketing fluff. IN fact, many of them spend time fighting with the marketing people.

Unfortunately, too many dollars are committed by the marketing/sales/management staff than the technical groups, on both buying and selling ends. That's how business works.

Ultimately, I think that a lot of it boils down to familiarity. You say, "This unix geek see his linux experiences as the bar against which everything else is measured." I say that my combined SGI/Solaris/HP-UX/AIX experiences are the bar against which Linux is measured. At the end of the day, Sun isn't particularly concerned with user-friendliness, whereas Linux is.

Re:In the hope someone important at Sun reads this

[The OPTiCIAN]

Your situation is a little different to my usage: I've always been a user on other people's solaris systems and not had sufficient access to install things. I've tried unpacking .pkg files and hacking them but haven't had any success and that's a far-from-trivial solution.

There are a lot of powerusers users in that situation: developers, deployment guys, etc who do not have sysadmin privileges. They never meet the sysadmins and fear the red tape involved in trying to get said admins to do anything.

Also, as though it's not hard enough to find vim in a standard Solaris environment, try finding emacs! :) (fine for me, I don't like it anyway :) )

On vim, there are a few more distinct advantages I like it for:
- Being able to highlight with 'v'. This is nice when reading log files with long lines because you can scroll down and follow it (it's also useful for plenty of other things :) )
- Syntax highlighting. This wouldn't mean much to you as a solaris admin (although.. it might for large shell scripts and the like?), but it's significant for me when I'm writing code. I've actually had jobs where I've had to ssh into a solaris box in another city and develop the code in that environment. Solaris terminal definitions are often unhelpful when trying to get highlighting working.
- being able to have many files open at once and rapidly switch forwards *and backwarsd* between them with :bn^M and :bp^M. vi isn't so great on this, I don't think going to previous file (eg: opposite of 'n') is even available
- if you want the two advantages you've identified without any of the vim settings, create a file ~/.vimrc and put... :set compatible .. in it, save, exit and fire up again.

I'm not thrilled by the defaults in vim (OT: particularly in the debian tree, where the maintainer defaults it in all sorts of braindead ways), but I have a .vimrc file I carry around with me (ahdore.com/~craig/geek.html, it's in the page source, you'll need to add endings for lines containing ':' with ctrl+v, ctrl+m (newline))

Could it be that the reason you dislike the defaults is because the package maintainer has set it up with stupid, intrusive defaults? If so, that's an issue Sun should investigate. Get rid of intrusive defaults, package maintainers!!

Also, just in terms of what Sun should consider, keep in mind that vim is the #1 text editor amongst linux geeks, and it's shipped with mac os x, and betwen them they make up the vast majority of people who run unix at home.

Your reply was interesting.

Consider the source of the article

[swordgeek]

Without getting into the Linux/Sun arguement (which could go on forever), don't forget this relation:

Newsforge::C|Net
Fox News::BBC World News
(And I'm not too fond of C|Net either)

NewsForge is news about Linux, for Linux, and related to Linux. It is so utterly biased and laughable (and amateur) that any 'expose'' it does is almost entirely suspect. This article certainly was.

Re:Sigh...

[darnok]

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

I'm absolutely working in that market - over the last several years I've worked for large banks, massive telcos, global car manufacturers, the Tax Office, ...

These companies DON'T pay for that level of service; they engage outsourcers to do it for them. The outsourcers, not Sun, are paid to provide the love.

The outsourcers are selected primarily on price, so they cut corners wherever possible. When it comes time to replace a Sun box, the outsourcer recommends that the customer replace it with MS or Linux; that way the outsourcer can reduce their payments to Sun for support by hiring MS and Linux expertise themselves. As they generally get paid at least partly on a box-by-box basis, replacing 1 Sun with 2-3 Intel boxes is very good business for the outsourcer.

If you think I'm wrong, why else is MS and Linux replacing Sun in these data centres? Why do e.g. reputable banks run their Internet Banking on Windows servers? It's not for the reliability... Sure, there's still Sun boxes around, but they're now called "legacy systems" and left running e.g. Solaris 2.6.

Is the outsourcer's Linux and MS expertise as good as Sun's support? No way, but it takes the customer some time to work this out; at that time, they renegotiate their contract with the outsourcer from a position of weakness (i.e. customer has no in-house expertise left). The brave ones churn to the next outsourcing company

Is the customer able to pass off broken gear and apps to someone else to fix? Absolutely

Does the customer still get their lovin' from someone when things break? Yes; if not from the call centre person, then the call centre supervisor. If not the supervisor, then the account manager. And so on, up the tree. Meanwhile, behind the scenes, the outsourcer (generally a big company in its own right) is engaging Sun or whoever on a one-off basis, and the problem will get fixed. What the hell; maybe they'll even get a Sun engineer onsite(!!) to get things sorted, and thus the customer feels loved even more (note: by the outsourcer, not Sun)

Am I cynical about all this? You bet

You make a confusion: Sun!=Solaris

[Moraelin]

I think you'll find most of us don't have anything against Solaris as such, but a lot of us have had enough of Sun's bullshit and FUD.

At least SCO, since you mentioned it, is consistent. It keeps saying the same thing. "All your base are belong to us." Err... I mean, "We own Unix, Linux is evil pink commie stuff, everyone copied our code." I can deal with that.

Sun's upper management is plain old multiple-personality schizophrenic, taken as a whole. You never know with which personality you'll deal today. Or even at different hours in the same day. Will it be McNealy 1 who loves Linux and OSS more than he loves his mother? Or maybe McNealy 2 who doesn't even have any strategy, and just foams at the mouth worse than any zealot? Or McNealy 3 who's as convinced that Linux sucks as Darl from SCO is, and spreads FUD about Linux? Or who?

I wish Sun just made up its mind already. These fits and hourly changes of mind are getting tiresome.

Linux isn't the greatest

[inflex]

I'm probably going to get my first negative karma from this one but here goes.

I'm a linux developer... and a FreeBSD, Solaris developer. The only 'major' OS I don't code for is Windows (intentionally).

Anyhow, to my point now, I must say the "Elitism" of Linux supporters is sometimes overwhelmingly sick. I've encountered people who refuse to believe that there's anything at all better than Linux, "Linux is great". I'm personally sick of it.

Sun has some great tools and some great developer networks. I don't use them much myself as I simply don't write programs which get down to the levels where OS differences become a major factor.

I for one am greatly looking forward to ZFS and DTRACE. For years I've been asking around in the linux community for something like dtrace, best responses I got was "Why would you want that? Use top" or "Profile your application" (like wtf??). I'm willing to bet that now that Sun as released DTRACE there's going to be a clambering to release a similar thing in linux.

To be fair, linux has also some lovely tools, valgrind is the one major tool which keeps me holding onto linux.... for now.

PLD.

Military grade security

[SpaghettiPattern]

How many of us need military grade security (MGS)? Sure MGS gets Sun bonus points with intelligence and defense but the rest of the market looks at it very differently.

I'm about to finish a report that compares a Linux i686 and a Solaris SPARC III/IV solution. CPU power is the issue here (not I/O or FS quality) and the costs for the Linux solution (in my specific case) are almost negligible compared to the Solaris solution.

Don't get me wrong, I have a long history with Solaris (started with SunOS 4.1.3 and even developed for and administered SunOS 4.0.x) and I think they were great to universities in late 80s and begin 90s. But they lost the commodity hardware race. Or did they actually compete there?

So intelligence and defense will support Sun the current and next decade. Does that mean Jeb Bush should be the next president? Lucky for me I'm not a US citizen :)

Re:What day of the week is it?

[Alioth]

It's attitudes like this that make me want to see SCO sue the crap out of the Linux community, and win, one machine at a time. Mandatory $500 license fees, where advocacy constitutes as probable cause and results in automatic warrants for the cops to come in and search your residence and business.

I think you're wrong - I think the original poster was just voicing his frustration with Sun.

I started my long love of all things Unix with IBM's AIX and Sun's SunOS 4. I even *own* a Sun machine at home. I also started with Linux when there were no distros - just the 0.12 kernel and a root floppy image which you used 'cp' to install on the hard drive.

But Sun is an incredibly frustrating company. Unlike Apple or IBM, they just don't seem to have any kind of strategy - they thrash and twist - one day they love RedHat, the next day they are telling us that RedHat are the spawn of Satan. One day they love Linux, the next day they hate it (despite it being a component of their Java desktop). Sun just seems to lack direction - and it's hardly surprising that Apple, despite competing directly with the commodity PC - now has a larger market cap than Sun.

I hate watching Sun destroy itself like it's doing. At least it looks like McNealy is coming out of his period of denial - his last statement in the article indicating that perhaps he realises that they have been alienating their developers.

The trouble is at the moment, with regards to a strategy: IBM gets it, Apple gets it, the Linux distro makers get it - but Sun doesn't get it (and neither does Microsoft). But unlike Microsoft which can continue through sheer inertia, Sun can't and they have to formulate some kind of useful strategy and stick to it - or they are gonna be toast. If they continue as they are, in 10 years time there will be no more Sun.

Sun's strategy makes perfect sense..

[guacamole]

RedHat is the most visible enterprise Linux vendor. Most software and hardware vendors that I have dealt with automatically mention RHEL when I ask them about Linux support. Most of my sysadmin friends who use Linux in enterprise seem to be using RHEL too. At the same time, RHEL users are exactly the type of users Sun wants to be their customers (e.g. who care about using an OS that has received a huge number of software and hardware certifications and has vendor's support for piece of mind). I don't think that there are too many other Linux vendors who can claim this level of acceptance in the enterprise market. SuSE might have a good enterprise product but they probably aren't on Sun's radar yet due to their small market share. So, I think it makes a perfect economic sense for Sun marketing to target (and bash) RedHat. RedHat has made it specially easy for them to do that with RHEL pricing. But RedHat is not Linux you might say? Yes. But Sun doesn't care. RedHat customer base is what their target is. So, I don't cosider it to be FUD when Sun implies that RedHat == Linux. RedHat IS Linux as far as enterprise customers are concerned. Sun doesn't care about others much.

Yawn -- don't bother with this

[MrOrn]

This is the same guy who wrote a pathetic review of a Sun Blade that the eds for some unknown reason thought was worthy of mention here some months ago. The guy is ill-informed and is not a Solaris user. Both his Sun-related articles mention his inability to get Solaris to perform and yet he blames it on Solaris; of course it would have nothing to do with his inexperience -- after all he is the author of the world-famous The Jem Report , The Internet's Best Computer Review Site (!!!), so he's obviously a guru.

And the ad for the "critically acclaimed" novel was cringe-worthy -- for some fun, read some of the comments from those that bought the novel.

I just hope the eds remember not to run stories from this site again.

Open Source vs Open Systems

[argent]

McNealy equates "proprietary" with "interoperable only with the same brand." While that may be true from a narrow frame of reference, the free software world tends to use a different definition; when we say "proprietary," we mean that all of the rights to that software are locked away from us.

Back in the old days, before RMS and ESR got into a fight over what free meant, and we just gave away our code because we thought it was cool what other people did with it, proprietary meant "you buy this, you're stuck with it". Open systems, whatever the status of their code base, were a response to that.

Write your code to an open API and it'll run, with some effort, anywhere that API was implemented. If you used a proprietary API, you had to either rewrite a lot of your code when you wanted to transport it, or create your own transportable API and port it to each platform. One of the reasons UNIX was so popular is that the API was abstract, distant from the implementation, so it served BOTH purposes well enough that everyone, Microsoft included, ended up with UNIX emulation of some kind or another.

But benefiting from an open system requires remaining aware of the open API and what's not open. And this gives a back door for proprietary interfaces to sneak in again. You can get yourself locked in to an API without intending to. It takes effort to fight that, and a lot of the open source community doesn't seem interested in spending that effort. Apart from the unnecessarily complex X11 toolkit situation, there's just too much code that depends on proprietary GCC features, or on specific extensions to open-source versions of open-systems tools.

So McNealy is quite justified in using proprietary in terms of interfaces and protocols, and there's a lot of open-source developers out there who ought to pay attention. The source isn't enough. If we have to pull things like "a ?: b" out of your code to get it running on other implementations of open systems, then your software isn't as "open" as you think it is.

Whether Solaris is actually as open, in this older sense, as Scott would like you to think it is... possibly not. Sun's played the 'stealth extensions' game themselves in the past. But that's a different matter. I'm only talking about the meaning of the word here.

Re:What day of the week is it?

[CrudPuppy]

I think maybe some people are missing the point here.

74K shouldn't *get* you anything. I make well over that but when I was dating I never let on that I made that kind of money. I dress like a typical guy, drive a typical car, live in a typical place. Hell, I got flat ignored at a Honda dealer when I was trying to buy a car, and I wasn't going to be financing--blank check was in pocket ready to pay.

If you're smart, you date 10's, and you marry 7-8's with great personalities and intellect. All the hot in the world doesn't mean a damn thing if you can't have an intelligent conversation with her. This, of course, is assuming that you yourself are able to carry on an intelligent conversation, but given the audience here, the vast majority of us are.