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

Interesting comment on Sun's payment to SCO

[SpammersAreScum]

I think this is a very interesting quote 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.

Indeed...

Specific words for /. readers

[djupedal]

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.

Re:Specific words for /. readers

[djupedal]

Let me get this straight.... I post this snippet an hour before someone else, and I'm tagged ' 1 redundant' while the actual redundant post is given a '+5 interesting' - you guys need to buy better crack :)

Re:Sun doesn't 'Get It'

[Anonymous Coward]

Linux in the enterprise? No.

Now, before you mod this down, realize that what a linux enthusiast calls "the enterprise" and what is really "enterprise" are two different things. You can use linux for small-to-mid companies just fine, if you pay for redundancies.

With Solaris, I can walk up to one of our StarFire servers, and rip out its beating heart, and the damn machine will still keep running. That's right, kids, I can hot swap CPUs, drives, RAM, power supplies, and ooooodles of other devices. Plus, I get dtrace, SAN, zfs, and military grade security.

And until Linux has support for that, it's not "enterprise", in my opinion. Now, I still use linux on the desktop and it's great fun to hack on at home. I've even contributed some patches to my favorite tools, and like the idea behind GPL--it works. But when downtime costs my company millions per hour (and me my job!), I damn sure am going to use Sun.

. I hate to get all "mystique" on you, but unless you've done enterprise computing before (and I mean real Fortune 50 computing), it's hard to explain. Sun means enterprise. Holy shit but I've NEVER had their OS die on me in like ten years. Seriously.

Re:What day of the week is it?

[SirTwitchALot]

not to feed the troll, and for that matter I think Sun really isn't the bad guy here... but that chart is comparing va to Sunoco, not sun. here's the correct one

http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?t=5y&s=LNUX&l=on&z=m &q=l&c=SUNw

Hint: sun's stock ticker is sunw, not sun