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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."
Discuss.
Vanya's Law: "In any culture without irony, fart jokes will be the highest form of humor."
Well since Schwartz was chanting "Developers, Developers, Developers" while having the OSTG reporter escorted out by security, things are looking up. To be succesful you first must act as if you are successful.
"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*
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.
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)
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.
Pick One: http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/~stremler/sigs/sigs.html (Note - disable Javascript first!)
I'm tired of the bullshit.
Bullshit? Sun's stock has steadily gone up over 60% since August, all in anticipation of Solaris 10, Niagara, fighting off losers like Kodak, etc. Sun is going through another one of its re-invention cycles, and will have massively-multi-threaded systems in the next two years with Solaris 10, complete with super-fast TCP/IP and through-and-through checksums on ZFS (among other things).
-- "Makes Little Debbie look like a pile of puke!" - Moe Szyslak
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
I don't think you correctly perceive the sentiment regarding Sun.
I think a lot of long-time Linux users want to like the company. They've always fought for Unix, even when NT was supposed to be the up and coming thing. They've provided all kinds of interesting technology and research, and even open sourced it occasionally. Most of us would certainly rather work on Solaris than on Windows when forced to use a proprietary system. We realize what an enourmous gift the openoffice codebase was. Before Linux really emerged, maybe we could still get away with using it at work, saying that we could always move things over to a "real Unix" like Solaris... they were sort of like a benevolent older brother who would could call if the situation got really scary. So they're in a position to be well regarded.
But they've frittered away a lot of this good will. Between the money to SCO, the digs at Linux as marketing strategy, and this on again off again view of open source, I don't feel that comfortable with them any more. It's like Linux grew up, and the girls have started to be more interested in it, and the formerly looked-up-to older brother is now going around saying nasty things about it.
So it's not about disliking Solaris, which looks to be a nice system, it's about having doubts about Sun and their corporate strategy. They need to make up their mind about being our friends or not, instead of smiling and trying to stab us in the back.
http://www.welton.it/davidw/
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.
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...
Let the community massage your improvements to Linux instead of having to rework, test, and maintain your own codebase.
.
This sounds like hand-waving. It's been pointed out before that submitting lots of code "into the community" is no guarantee it'll be vetted properly. The pool of genuinely talented linux hackers is large, but not infinite. And the subset of this that is likely to decide "hell this is a cool project i'm gonna go work on it" is often zero for many projects (go look at the effectively abandoned projects all over).
Sun has their own pool of engineers, and plenty of them are *very* good. If they have their own resources in terms of engineering talent, you can't possibly blame them for wanting to use it on their 'own' product? it guarantees x number of eyeballs looking at it in a directed way and with it being literally their "day job".
"Opening it to the community" only means that the ones who are interested in it and are capable of doing it (both in terms of talent and time) will work on it. there's plenty of things that ought to be done in linux that have not yet been done...
Less legal hastle and licensing costs, as mentioned, than opening up all of Solaris. Evidently Sun didn't have full rights to all the code, so they had to buy them up first
The battle against SCO may well have given the wrong impression considering their sheer incompetence and general rubbish-osity, but if you don't think things are being cooked up in Redmond right now, a cluestick awaits your head.
The warning shots have already been fired - Ballmer's running around telling Asian governments there's patent issues with Linux - and the *real* battles (MS patent infringement claims against Linux) have yet to be fought. Software patents are the key battle to be fought - if Europe adopts US-style software patents, if the global system evolves even more towards a system that favours large corporations vs individual groups/community hackers, well, you know who the biggest software company out there is?
PR. Switching entirely to Linux would have given Sun an enormous boost in respect and confidence -- especially among geeks but also among investors concerned about Sun's bottom line. All that independent R&D costs big bucks. And, after all, Linux is now a media / wall street darling.
I'm sure Sun has their reasons, but I'd imagine they are fairly short term.
I can't believe you mention wall street and then complain about "short term". The purported boost would be quite worthless for Sun. The minute they announce anything remotely close to sounding like they're abandoning Solaris, they will haemorrhage customers as fast as... HP losing VMS/Alpha customers. Sun's apparently picking up quite a lot of business from this group, they're perfectly aware of what happens when your installed base sees you jumping ship.
If they did it, there'd be a major splash of publicity, sure. That's definitely gonna pay the bills. (it's not even clear it'd be *positive* publicity. "Sun Surrenders" is probably what plenty of analysts etc. will plunk on their front pages).
There might be a tiny spike in the share price that would be wiped out by the downward spiral pretty quickly.
Independent R&D costs big bucks? Hell yeah. Should I presume you're a big "oh-we-used-to-say-we-don't-do-ANY-R&D-which-is-wh y-we're-gonna-kill-all-those-who-do" Dell fanboy? IBM's often quoted as a major friend-of-OSS, but any real-$$ investments they have made are targeted towards things that are beneficial to themselves and/or hurtful to enemies (e.g. Eclipse). I don't see them contributing to improve linux performance on Itaniums, for example.
There's no fundamental difference between that and Sun coughing up the $$ into their own targets on their own platform.
You'll note IBM hasn't GPL-ed AIX either and decided to support linux exclusively.
There IS a good thing coming out
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.
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.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
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.
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.
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.
A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe in God.
DTrace, and other kernel related goodies, would be extremely hard to fit into the overall scheme of how the Linux kernel currently works. In other words, the investment to make it work in Linux would be significantly higher.
The parent claimed that Sun should have dropped a more mature, more cohesive, more scalable kernel and turned their attention to the Linux kernel. That's flat ludicrous from an investement standpoint. "Hey, we've done all the work in our kernel, let's just do it all over again with a new kernel that doesn't work even remotely the same way as ours, so we have to do pretty much the same amount of work all over again."
If your argument is that Linux is easier to use because of GNU stuff....guess what? You can add all that stuff to Solaris and it works great. You don't even have to compile the majority of it, you can pull it off the Solaris companion CD or (gasp) out of the several GNU tools that are now officially part of the supported OS.
a good chunk of our security-related infrastructure is somewhat OS-dependant
I sympathize, and I wouldn't try to get you to change. But I'd like to point out that this problem effectively makes Linux just as proprietary in a "lock in" sense as Solaris. You're locked in. If it does the job you need it to do, that's not necessarily a problem, but I hope the hard core zealots reading this recognize the spurious nature of arguing "but Linux is OPEN". Once Solaris 10 is open source, even the argument of being able to continue on without Sun in the marketplace goes belly up.
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001