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."
Just because you hear something from Schwarz today doesn't mean he'll say the same thing tomorrow. Today: we're going to give the hardware away and charge for support! Tomorrow: we're going to "open source" the OS, give it away, and charge for hardware.
The vultures are circling, and I, for one, can't wait until *something* happens to Sun. Get bought, go bankrupt, develop a *real* open source strategy, just something. I'm tired of the bullshit.
Before I could thank them for their time, I was interrupted by a Sun PR flack, who informed me that I was not supposed to be there and that she was going to escort me to the door. It turns out that the press was supposed to leave a half hour before that, and that the end of the party was for Sun employees only. Somehow my colleague Chris Preimesberger and I were overlooked during the press and analyst roundup. So like the cops arresting the Monty Python cast at the end of "The Holy Grail," my colleague and I were ever so gently forced to leave the building. If only we'd been developers instead.
Then they would have given you a cheeseburger and a coke on your way out?
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.
Viral software licensing is not freedom, it is in fact GNU/Socialism.
Discuss.
Vanya's Law: "In any culture without irony, fart jokes will be the highest form of humor."
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.
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
vodka, straight up, thank you!
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.
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.
...), so I just can't see why people would go with Solaris these days.
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,
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.
look at linux but have a hard time switching from solaris because once you realize the cost of, for example, RHE3 support and it's about the same and solaris is a much more mature OS. The linux kernel has some things to iron out still. Plus with solaris you have one vendor to deal with for hardware and software. There are very valid reasons why solaris is still alive.
http://tinyurl.com/3t236
"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?
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.
*yawn*
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)
" ... we want developers back on our side. If there's more for us to do, we'll go do it," McNealy added.
... followed by ...
... my colleague and I were ever so gently forced to leave the building.
Sun is just that friendly! Hey, we want you on our side, now get out of here!
[signature]
We're all aware of the hole-ridden arguments that Sun executives Scott McNealy and Jonathan Schwartz use to attack Linux.
Sun is not anti-Linux, Sun sells Linux, Sun will even sell you a full rack of x86 servers all running Linux. Get over it, Slashdot!
-- "Makes Little Debbie look like a pile of puke!" - Moe Szyslak
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)
Well, IBM did it (with IBM Global Services) at a time when everyone said they were arrogant, inwardly-focused and too tied to their glory days.
*yawn*
Granted. Speaking as the fellow transitioning his company's deployment environment from RHEL3 to SLES9, though, RHEL has plenty of other things going against it.
I was very pleasently suprised on moving to SLES to find that it already had packages that formerly I'd been doing myself (Tomcat, JBoss); useful Oracle startup scripts; a considerably more featureful autoinstall systems (AutoYAST, as opposed to Kickstart); and a generally higher level of polish -- not to mention that Novell has local representatives who give us actual useful support. (Perhaps Red Hat would, too, if we paid them enough; I don't know. Novell has made aforementioned support available based just on the promise of future business -- the kind of customer-centric action that's left me very impressed).
All that said -- I've had bad experiences w/ ReiserFS myself, and your other specific objections are likewise valid. Even so, the author's arguably spot on in his preference among enterprise Linux distributions.
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
"Depression is merely anger without enthusiasm." - Anonymous
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.
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)
Believe with me, my saplings.
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.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
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
Blogging because I can...
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.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
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.
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.
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
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
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.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
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.
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.
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
Despite all that sun's done for the community, most linux-obsessed slash dotters (who see themselves as the archetypes) fall for the HP/IBM rhetoric against sun. sun started from bsd (tell me that's not "open"). You guys just don't get it, do you?Show me half a line of code that HP's contributed to the community. Ask ibm to open up it's crown jewel- DB2 for starts. And yes, open source solaris might draw some linux developers towards it, but, they(the developers) don't turn into hideous,thieving villians;they're still contributing to open source, still fuelling innovation, still strengthening the original bsd tribe (is that anti-linux now?) and still workin against M$. The 2 (solaris & linux) are under the same umbrella.They're siblings in the *nix family. Yes, running a uname -s on the 2 systems will yield a different name- if that's something you want to hold against solaris (you can laugh, but slashdotters are getting that gullible these days)- but that doesn't mean "Solaris's gonna kill Linux". What crap. The 2 are now part of the same moment. If you still want to "boycott" the new kid in town & shoot yourself in the foot (by selling your soul to HP,IBM & hence M$), no one's stopping you.
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.
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.
You're new here, aren't you?
"Danke daß Du mich gemolken hast" said the German cow.