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

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.

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?

[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

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.

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.